Thursday, October 20:
R. had a good night, and since it is a very fine day, I suggest a drive to the Fantaisie around one o'clock. This we do, but unfortunately he finds the short walk from the restaurant to the Schweizerei onerous, the autumn air cold; he laughs at the "beauty" of the sky and repeats how boring it is. He had already said to me in the carriage that he was curious to see which of the children would be the first to climb a pyramid! ... Home again, he is overtaken by a chest spasm, and it is some time before he appears at table. However, he soon recovers his spirits, and the Nile journey usurps everything. Encyclopedias and maps are consulted; to Fidi he says, "You'll see nothing there but mummies, and cousins both male and female," and to us that he must get as far as the fifth cataract at least. He sees himself and us in turbans, will have himself fanned all day long. In short, the plan serves at least to distract him thoroughly from other thoughts.
In the morning he read Stein's new dialogue. When he saw the dialogue mentioned for the third time, he said, "C'est une mauvaise plaisanterie." "Still on Plutarch," he said. But he reads it and finds one speech in particular, Solon on the Egyptians and their attitude toward life and toward Atlantis, quite distinguished; he praises Stein and in the evening reads to us the passage he means. Mention of Gobineau's book brings our conversation back to the Greeks and the mixture from which art emerged. What I find most remarkable in this connection is the way R. gets inside the ideas of others and reshapes them so that one comes to know the authors, and yet at the same time feels less satisfied by them, since, through his supplementary remarks, one has come to understand them so much more clearly.
At supper R. tells us that Herr Neumann has sent a telegram saying that he regards the contract as having been broken by the management committee, and he does not intend to buy the scenery. R. is very little affected by this. A letter from Countess La Tour tells of the pleasure R.'s article has given Gobineau.
The evening, which was spent in such quiet harmony, ends with diatribes against the portrait by Lenbach in my salon and against what R. imagines to be my good opinion of L. Since I say nothing, he says, "And thus do the bats fly up, thus do we torture each other - that is to say, not we; it is I who do the torturing." We laugh, but in his room, talking to himself, he comes back to it. He cannot understand why I have put the sketch on display! I shall certainly remove it tomorrow.