Sunday, January 2:
R. slept well; the weather is cold and fine. In the morning we go for a walk in the palace gardens; as we go out, he says he always tends to the left, and he dislikes it if someone he loves sits to the right of him.
In the evening he orchestrates, but he looks worn out and fears that he might have caught cold. We start Cervantes’s Española inglessa and are astonished over its conventional charm; it reminds one of the pictures of Veronese, dating from the same time, of the later ones by Tiepolo, of the treatment of subjects from the ancient world in opera, in which everything ends in a dance.
R. points out to me how trivial all the aristocrats are, always the same, no figures of note. R. sums all this up with a single word, “Renaissance.”