Monday, January 29:
No morning conversation today, since I have to remain in bed with a cold, but instead, at lunchtime, a reading of the fine preface to Stein's dialogues! R. goes out, meets the children in Saint Mark's Square, and returns in good spirits with Lusch. Much joking at lunch about a letter to me from Herr Levi, and it comes out that, whereas I dictated my letter to him, I wrote to Lenbach in my own hand.
In the afternoon R. has a massage, and it seems to me that this treatment is certainly doing him good. At supper we talked a lot about Raimund's plays, which R. praised highly. In the evening we read the fourth act and the first scene of the fifth act of Don Carlos, with warm inner feelings over the power of ideality revealed in it, something which is completely Schiller's own. Before that we found pleasure in some melodies discovered by friend Tappert (among them one by the singer Riziol). And R. takes delight in the children, particularly Fidi, who is writing poetry in the lobby in a very neat handwriting — not because he feels inspired, just as a routine! (Of Loldi he said yesterday, "She lands in one's soul with a thud.")
A subject to which he frequently returns is the way women dress nowadays; recently, looking at a photograph under the arcades, he exclaimed, "If I were in charge of the state, you would all run around like that!" He says, "Women dressed like that belong in a harem at best." He talks about it again in the evening and mentions a print in the Cappello Nero showing women's clothes of the Directoire period, which he thinks very pretty.