Tuesday, December 20:
A wretched night for R. He gets up, spends a long time in his room, does some reading, and in the morning is very tired. He works all the same.
In the afternoon we drive with Count Tasca to see Princess Butera, whose palazzo shows great splendor and opulence. The Princess herself is a curious, cheerfully abrupt person who keeps us much amused. But R. soon tires, and we return home. He works again in the evening.
The second part of the first act in the piano score - Rub. plays it, and it seems satisfactory to R. except for the triplets, at which he exclaims, “Only Liszt and I know how to play triplets!” But the whole thing bores and vexes him; he says it seems to him so stale. A game of whist concludes our social evening.
When we are alone, R. says again that the problem of orchestrating the ending of his work is exercising him greatly - he would have to use a lot more instruments; he had the English horn made, he says, and now it is necessary to enrich all the wind categories in the same way, since he needs various groups. “I cannot imagine how much this torments him,” he adds.
A bit of nonsense, Gambetta’s coup d’état, described in the newspaper Figaro in the fullest detail, down to a poem by Hugo attacking it, amuses him greatly.