Tuesday, March 21:
R. slept well, and we have an enjoyable breakfast in the large salon while Schnapp. is arranging his bits and pieces. Since all other books are still packed, he reads Moliere’s Les Femmes savantes, which the children brought with them. He finds the play actually vulgar, and he considers Moliere to be much overrated, but a few things in it amuse him.
He then talks about its subject, that is to say, courtship, the eternal theme of the mating instinct, to which social conditions have given such peculiar forms; he says jokingly that we, too, are now caught up in them. We drive to Belvedere and delight in the view from there. R. ascribes the curiously ugly, broad faces to the original population, and he remarks on how the civilized tribes, thinking in fact entirely of trade, settled only on the coasts and ruled as robbers, then, as the least numerous, died out and left the inland folk behind.
In the evening we finish the Turgenev novel, much affected by it; R. enlarges upon this kind of tragedy’s arising out of social laws; if Lavretski had divorced his wife, everything would have been all right; I observe that with Lise’s tendency toward sainthood, her sense of the need to atone, this possibility would not be of much account. R. says I am right: in which case it all goes very deep.