Sunday, January 9:
R. did not have a good night, but he cheers up during our breakfast together, and we start a long discussion about patience. I have often spoken in praise of it; R. says I am right and praises it as the true form of courage. He quotes as examples Frederick the Great, Marius, and Morosini, and the Christians who refused military service and submitted to torture.
“Spring is here,” he cries when he hears me opening my egg, and declares that it sounded like a woodpecker tapping on a tree. He also appears to be cheerful around lunchtime, when he shows me his dress suit and says he wants to look formal for our guests.
But when the meal arrives he looks ill, is out of humor, and so unwell that he leaves the table. He soon returns and gradually regains his spirits. The conclusions of the conference are discussed, as well as the present relationship of the Society of Patrons to the performances, seats for which are now after all to be put on sale.
We then go for a walk in the palace gardens, since R. is feeling better. In the evening, before our friends arrive, he comes to sit beside me with a serious face: “My reverence for you grows and grows,” he says, “but everything else leaves me increasingly indifferent.”
Evening comes, and with it our guests, and R. is told what was decided at the conference. He is satisfied, and he tells me that a social gathering of this kind, at which matters of common interest are discussed, is by no means the worst. He is cheerful, exceedingly friendly and kind toward everybody.
When we are alone together, he reads me several things from Count Gobineau’s stories, after I have told him what I have written to Stein about patience and about happiness, which I regard as a treasure to be unearthed, hence the verb “to treasure”; such happiness is perhaps all the harder to snatch for oneself when an apparent fulfillment, our festivals, has already been achieved. R. observes that feelings of this kind would not be easily understood.