Tuesday, September 27:
Saint Cosmas! Yesterday I desisted from responding to R.’s remarks about Judith’s character, which he finds embarrassing; instead, I kept bringing the conversation back to the children. He is sad today about that, weeps, and says that, if anything were to come between us, it would be all over with him; I seek to explain to him in all mildness the feeling which makes me so intensely aware of this strange woman in our house that yesterday I had to leave the room for a moment.
We part in good spirits, I, blissful that I have been able to account for something that could so easily have been presented in the wrong way. Even before I went to my bath, he appeared in my room: “What shall we make our coffin of? Which do you want - lead or wood? For until death comes this nonsense will never cease - death is all that remains to us.”
I arrange my little gifts and lay them in his room while he is dressing. He then comes to me: “Again I have forgotten your name day! Oh, yes, you live for me more than I do for you, and that explains why I get so little joy from my work.” Then he comes in with the atlas and shows me the journey Gobineau made in two months.
When I go to greet him as he is working on his score, he observes, “Art and love don’t go together,” but he is using the new snuffbox with much pleasure. At lunch he praises my father for having given me Cosmas, the healer, as my guardian angel. But then he comes to Faust and the thousand antics which disfigure life - how well Goethe expressed that! - and he tells Stein about the coffin, whereupon Stein reminds him that in Naples he wished to be lying on his deathbed.
Mention is made of cuttlefish and the way they save their lives by disappearing, and R. says, “That’s what God did after creating the world - He disappeared.” Previously he said to my father, “You invented me, and then you were obliged to push your wares.”
We drive with Loldi along the avenue from the Hermitage to the theater and then home, much contented. Then he works and pastes over two bars in Parsifal’s reply to Kundry which he felt to be Meyerbeerish - one works toward something like grace and then does not know how to handle it.
At supper he comes to the subject of vivisection and says, “Our attitude toward animals is so simple, we find it so easy to be kind to them, whereas toward other human beings it is so complicated and difficult; that would be a way of finding it.” When I come downstairs, I discover R. at the piano and our friend Judith in rich, rather revealing finery: “I was taken by surprise,” he tells me; he plays the Prelude and later some other things. Much amazement among the children and demonstrations verging on the comical from our friends!