Monday, September 25:
R. had a very bad night. “Why,” he says as he gets up, “hold on to a life in which I show nothing but grimaces to the people I love?” At breakfast he tells me of an article in the J. Z. for the 16th, in which we and the children are talked about; he finds it on the whole quite pleasing. In another issue he is amused by the heroes of the Thirty Years’ War, though he speaks admiringly of Bernhard von Weimar as a true German, and powerful. His delight in Venice and our dwelling grows daily. The palazzo opposite, single-storied, as he likes it, pleases him intensely, and to watch the gondolas across the garden, flitting past like elves, is for him the ultimate charm. In the afternoon he goes out with Lusch and Fidchen; the smoking men at the confectioner’s, the familiar way in which a Prince Biron greets Daniela, these things make him indignant. Over supper he talks about the nature of Venice’s history. Then he goes off for a rest and afterward comes back to us, saying that he will live for another 24 years. He talks about Buddha, the portrayal of whom he is now reading with great attention. Then we come to the common people in Shakespeare, who do not emerge very creditably, even in Coriolanus, and he reads to us Warwick’s speech in H. VI, following the battle that was lost.
[The nineteenth book of the Diaries ends with the words “reads to us from”; the twentieth book begins: “Sept. 25, 1882, continued: written on Saint Cosmas’s Day [i.e., September 27].”] We are glad to be quite alone at the end of it. (News of the flooding sounds terrible.) (Good-natured letter from Frau Lucca.)