Friday, March 10:
During the night I hear R. cry out very loudly: “You say to me ‘yom’ Ottilie! Fellow, are you mad?” It appears that he was dreaming of Georg, who had taken an improper liberty. R. takes a bath, gets his usual chest attack, and comes upstairs extremely agitated and annoyed.
But after a while on the terrace he recovers his cheerful spirits; when I greet his improvised word “Gulliververständnis” with a laugh, understanding it as “Missverständnis,” he says I am now like my sister Blandine, who always completed his witticisms for him. I admit to him that I often understand him without revealing it, and our conversation then goes on to the source of the comical, when dignity and convention are suddenly upset by a natural law, for instance, a pompous statesman carrying out his office who suddenly has to let out a terrible sneeze, and other such examples. I tell him that this in itself might be considered a sort of convention: one could go one step further, to the point where the natural functions would not be regarded as ridiculous. He says, “Yes, for Nature is always serious.”
It is then that he unfortunately goes downstairs and encounters Rub. (The vexation about the shooting practice was yesterday.) Sitting on the bench after our lunch at Camastra, we hear no birds as at home. “The world of sound has fled to Germany,” he says. A letter from Herr Neumann brings no pleasure, since it contains a somewhat impertinent, headstrong invitation to attend the performances. Then he takes a long rest in the house at Camastra, until I wake him. Then our friends arrive, and the outing he suggested is discussed for tomorrow, and it is decided that, since it cannot be canceled, I shall accompany the children without him!
In the evening we read Turgenev’s A House of Gentlefolk with much enjoyment.