Saturday, October 28:
R. is melancholy in his sleep, I hear him call out something I sense rather than understand, then finally, 'Poor dear wife!' Then he talks about some boats which Biagino is taking out of Genoa. He wakes up and tells me that in his dream B. had been engaged in smuggling. At last Georg comes in and tells him that people are riding in gondolas over Saint Mark's Square.
During the night there was heavy thunder, and as we are sitting over breakfast, lightning strikes in La Giudecca, and all day long there is a downpour of warm rain. Before lunch he attended S.'s music lesson, and at lunch he talks to Herr Hausburg about the utter uselessness of the conservatoires: 'What one is unable to teach oneself can certainly never be learned, least of all there!' He recalls the swimming lessons and how Fidi tried in vain in Bayreuth, whereas in Naples he succeeded right away, because the teacher was standing in the water. 'But to teach it from outside with a rope - that is like grammar books for languages, methods in music.'
In the afternoon he is delighted by the shrill, folk-like singing of a boy rowing a gondola through storm and rain, and, hearing the dismal news of the bad weather in the surrounding countryside, he says, 'One feels justly punished for having sought something better in this world than one was allotted.' Our very charming friends (Frau Hatzfeldt and Countess Schleinitz) visit us, the pleasantest of diversions.
Before supper R. improvises for a while, then, to amuse me, plays something a la Verdi and a la Chopin. At table he tells me that Minna once threatened to take to drink. 'To be united with those one hates, separated from those one loves - that is in fact what the world means, and all these palaces and this pomp have been provided just as a means of deceiving ourselves.'
He organizes a game of faro; late in the evening we are at last alone, and glad of it; we discuss a matter with Eva, wholly in her favor, and go to bed in a peaceable mood.