Monday, December 13:
The night is bad and long; the gray light of dawn persists a full twelve hours. R. declares that he has all the rivers of Hell in his eyes and nose, Styx, Acheron, etc. Quite clearly, he says, the gods are telling him to get on with it, if he still wants to stay alive and do something. The children tell us it is Lenbach’s birthday, and R. edits a telegram to him. He works, and in the evening cheerfulness breaks through, and we have to laugh when, speaking of Spain, of the town Xeres, he says: “How Xeres lost an X, an unknown quantity.” Yesterday he got Stein to explain to him how to calculate with unknown quantities.
We finish Cervantes’s story; in the morning R. had already remarked on Cervantes’s preference for gypsies; he says: “Everyone has felt the longing to create for himself some refuge outside this world, as it were. In the case of the mule, the gypsy stands up for the animal, which the nobleman sacrifices in order to save himself. It is all observed and shown, but none of it is stated directly.”
In the evening he says to me what a significant step it would be if Stein really worked out a plan for educating our boy. Our evening conversation led us to N. III, and R. said, “People who bring about such things as December 2 subsequently become wise rulers, their country’s benefactors.” Regarding the German Emperor, he says he cannot join in the enthusiasm for his well-being, if only because he knows him to have been among the most relentless opponents of the revolutionaries.