Wednesday, February 23:
When, reunited with R., I asked him last night how he felt, he said, “Don’t talk—I feel like a plant.” And in the morning he is feeling better.
Herr Neumann writes to me to say that there is a growing danger of the Jews’ staying away from the King in Berlin; R. is advising him to abandon Berlin and go straight to London; the ordinary citizens have no money, the aristocracy and the Court will stay away on account of Hülsen, and the Jews on account of the agitation. But all of this is unpleasant to a high degree, like everything else outside!
Although R. is feeling run down, we go for a walk in the palace gardens; he tells me about Pott’s book and Gobineau’s very bold, very aristocratic assertions. His article “Herodom and Christianity” is ripening inside him. But in the evening he feels run down, and it requires Cervantes’s genius to restore us to our usual path. We finish the splendid conversation; try then to read Hoffmann’s continuation of it, but find it impossible. “It is like Kladderadatsch,” he says.