Tuesday, April 18:
R. did not have a good night, and since the weather is wet, he does not go out; he passes his time with Homer, talks to me about it, and says that in spite of all its great qualities it seems to him, with so much talk and the sham battles, frivolous in comparison with certain succinct German sagas, particularly the conclusion of the Nibelungenlied. Delayed by my house hunting, I keep him waiting for half an hour and find his remarks on “Hunger” and also the melody [see notes] on my desk. The latter touches me all the more in that I had just been thinking of using it for his birthday!
After lunch we visit the Palazzo Desdemona with Hebrew occupants! Perhaps! Then Santa Maria della Salute, whose cold interior utterly disgusts R. He cannot understand how the warm style of Byzantine churches could ever have been abandoned in favor of this imitation classical whiteness. We return home, and I write to M. Meysenbug, giving her my reasons for accepting Gravina as a son-in-law.
R. feels that my confiding in her goes too far; he says she is not so loyal to us as she should be, has other interests besides, is not permeated with our ideas! He thinks she is somewhat like Bakunin, whose biography he has just been reading in a newspaper, astonished by all the things he did as a conspirator and the people with whom he had dealings. R. also talks about the dominance of Jews in this country as well, and he is astonished that nobody is apprehensive about it - but of course all the rest are already Israelized. Recalling these two curious people, he said: “No real life of their own - ghosts! Nothing there but profit-seeking and a pinch of voluptuousness!”