Monday, August 29:
R. slept well, but complaints about the weather are now part of our daily bread. He works on his article and tells me that he has had a sudden inspiration, but he does not want to tell it to me just like that, since it would look like a joke, and it is meant seriously. Working on the rose portière. Since Marianne Brandt has a cold, there are no rehearsals, and we are by ourselves. Seidl’s personality is discussed, and R. points out how he makes up for his lack of education with a silent manner.
Fine weather, though very autumnal. R. orders coffee in the turret, I read passages from a pamphlet, Germany and Its Professors, by the spiritualistic Prof. Zöllner. Among other things, a note to Empress Eugénie from the Jesuits, very confused and far-fetched stuff. R. arranges a drive via the Fantaisie as far as the redoubt, and the fine weather permits a glorious view; the short stop at Dommayer’s does not fail to have its usual beneficial effect on R., and he talks gaily to the host, saying he enjoys speaking to such people, and continues, “One notices how isolated from the people one feels when, going through the fields and arriving in remote villages, one talks to the countryfolk.”
As we set off on the drive home, he exclaims, “Oh, this blissful day not to have to wrestle with impossibilities!”
[Added later: “During the walk he thought of the line ‘Let the phantom do what it will,’ in connection with the freedom we allow friends and children, and this led him to a panegyric on Faust and inspirations of this kind: ‘This is Goethe. If someone vaunts Iphigenie or Hermann und Dorothea to me, I should say, “Well and good, those were experiments, but Faust and also Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre those are the man himself!”’”]
In the evening much chat in the gayest of spirits; the air was invigorating and certainly did R. good. He looks at the family picture and asks Jouk to do it in oils, never mind the “mistaken attempts at deception,” as he merrily expresses it.