Wednesday, December 21:
Again a very, very restless night for R., and it is as if his digestion were completely blocked. He does not work. To distract him, I suggest Mme de Rémusat’s portrait of Napoleon, and that keeps him entertained; he particularly mentions the anecdotes about Talleyrand. He attempts to go out but has a chest spasm in the street and returns home in a state of violent agitation. He continues reading Mme de Rémusat, and in the evening we play whist after I have tried to keep the conversation as light as possible.
Gobineau’s denial to Ollivier of being the author of La Renaissance, about which Lusch has told us, pleases R. immensely as evidence of his great originality, and he tells us all sorts of anecdotes about the Count.
He still has 22 pages to write. He believes he now knows how to deal with the problem of orchestrating the ending - he will give everything to the wind instruments first, then bring in the string instruments. But he says he needs three sections of wind instruments and has only one. He complains of the strain this work is putting on him, and as he looks back over the past years, he says what a strain they were: setting up the production of the Ring, then the rehearsals, finally the sorrowful times following the performances, and how, to help and to rescue himself, he wrote Parsifal.
In the morning he once more confided to me how unreal the whole world, all relationships, are to him, how everything had gone from his mind, become strange to him - “and I mean everything.” Nevertheless, his cheerfulness still continues to break through.