Thursday, February 3:
R. looks worn out; but he goes to his work, and around lunchtime, when he fetches me from my room, he is satisfied with the result. After lunch there is much talk about monasteries, the Trappists, and R. jokes that one is obliged to choose between Tattrape, meaning the world, and La Trappe.
We go for a walk and have to laugh heartily over the nature observations in the newspapers, which report, on the one hand, that the hares have acquired a second fur, and a week later that the starlings have arrived. We attend a drill parade, “Epaminondas on horseback,” as R. says, and think of Fidi. R. reports that Bismarck is said to have his pockets full of proposals for new laws, including one against drunkenness: “What is the cause of the evil no one inquires about.”
In the evening we read a short story by Cervantes, La fuerza de la sangre, and find it not at all edifying; indeed, we are much repelled by its coarseness of feeling. “That is the Renaissance,” says R., “all this fine talk even in the most terrible of situations.” “Even Shakespeare is not totally free of it, though only in the comedies.” “Cervantes never got beyond the antechambers of the great, he learned nothing from them; the common people he knew, and that is why I enjoy only the stories set among the people.” As the evening ends, he looks at the globe and is amused by the thought that, if the Gulf Stream were not forced back by Panama, our Europe would be a mass of ice.
In the palace gardens, when he sees a soldier, green with red facings, he is reminded of a dream, and he tells me that in this dream the red facings were turned into bleeding wounds as a punishment.