Thursday, April 27:
R. slept well; he continues reading Hoffmann. He no longer feels like reading Turgenev; a passage in Prosper Mérimée’s preface to his novel Smoke shows that the famous Rachel possessed all the Jewish bad habits of declamation in her French.
In the morning we come to the subject of Marie Hohenlohe; R. says he can understand her utter hatred of her mother, but not her sudden hostile silence toward him. We talk of the King’s entrance into his life; before that his (R.’s) life had been an utterly rootless existence, he says. The weather today is stormy. R. returns from the Belle Arti with photographs of the drawings there, and these truly delight us, many by Leonardo and a splendid one by Carracci (R. calls the latter “a drama”). Later we give it to Jouk.