Monday, November 6:
In the morning, when we hear Siegfried and Herr Hausburg chatting in the next room, R. says: “Fidi is with his court jester,” a statement which makes us laugh heartily. At breakfast he reads to me a letter by Schop. printed in the newspaper [enclosed; see notes]. It entertains us greatly with its precision and the introductory response to stupid objections. Then we come to Carlyle’s memorial; I ask R. whom he considers the more significant, Carlyle or Gobineau; he replies at once, Gobineau, since in Carlyle, even in his Frederick the Great, there are so many things which one can regard only as eccentricities. In the morning he revises my article.
Recently he remarked to me in connection with style how much time one would need for even the most trivial piece of work if one were to try to select and pin down the images exactly; but these pieces would then lack life. Around 10 o’clock I suggest to R. a visit to S. Maria Formosa; both church and picture rouse his interest, the former on account of its intimacy, the latter its magnificence. He also feels very strongly the beauty of the coloring. But he will not admit the terror of martyrdom, which I detect in the eyes; he says it could just as well be a queen of Palmyra as a martyr. We walk to the Rialto and then take a gondola home. On the journey, laughing about my nose being blocked by my veil, he tells me about his mother, how she had gone to put on her bonnet and this got caught on her nose; everybody laughed, which at first vexed her, but then she was amused. This reminds me that recently at lunch he told us about the Klepperbeins, how they took him to the Grosser Garten, how he again told them that his father said their name meant death, and how he once screamed in order to get them to take him home in their carriage, and how he ran after the carriage. Then he also told us of a parcel from his godfather with the inscription “Fresh magpies’ eggs for little Richard Geyer” (R. had a collection of eggs).
But I have to wait a long time in Saint Mark’s Square for him, and when he arrives with the children, he tells me he had a very severe spasm. But he quickly recovers. He is particularly pleased by Fidi’s rowing, amused by the gondolier’s cries he hears from him. In the evening we read various things in the I. Zeitung. R. says that Italian newspapers always have the effect on him of bad chocolate. R. walks up and down a lot.