Thursday, November 9:
This morning R. had his spasm while still in bed; but he soon recovers, and at breakfast we chat about Ada P., whose appearance pleases R.; he says we have not come to know any man of this pleasant nature. Then “the witch” again. How can people, like Gobineau for instance, go on visiting her? R. asks. I reply: Probably on account of Countess La Tour. And when we agree that it never occurs to anybody to show consideration toward such chivalrous characters as himself and my father, R. says they cut a sad figure in life, a man must demand obedience from a woman and allow her to influence him only within limits. He looks through my work, laughingly crosses out the “too much” said about himself. Then I suggest a visit to Madonna dell’Orto, and the little walk pleases him greatly, despite the rain and our losing our way slightly, thereby reaching the corner from which the open sea and Murano can be seen. The decorative church also surprises him greatly, and later he reproaches me for not allowing him to look longer at the Cima! At lunch he relates all the encounters we made as far as M. dell’Orto and says he always wishes he could give some practical help, first a pale-faced retired official, who showed us the way and was very grateful for a lira; then the beggar at the door, who went barefoot laboriously to summon the custodian and, when asked by R. why he had taken off his shoes, showed us that they were worn through. R. says, “It would be no use giving him money for new shoes, he wouldn’t buy any, and to summon him and the shoemaker to Vendramin would be impossible, as Mama saw immediately, so we gave him something toward them.”
“But then we were accompanied by a man who was carrying a kind of cheese in a bowl and offering it for sale so loudly that it cut through one like lightning. When I told Mama that we should let him get ahead, he also stopped on the bridge and cried his wares. We should have bought his cheese and asked him to wait a little; but to do that one would have had to master the language.” In the afternoon we ride to St. M.’s Sq. The view to the right from our palazzo delights R.; later he points out to me the Salute, looking in the mist “like a ghostly dream,” also S. Giorgio [Maggiore], everything, and a walk through the arcades gives him much pleasure. On our journey home he tells me he feels a great longing to read something by Edgar Allan Poe again, and he recalls the story of the Flying Dutchman. He visualizes the American imagination, stimulated by the worlds through which they have to wander and destined to perform great deeds, “if everything is not already spoiled.” Fidi’s gondolier calls provide us with a pleasant distraction on the journey.
In the evening R. sits down at the piano, plays Preciosa, recalls youthful impressions, above all of Der Freischütz, its “harmonic thrills, which are also a feature of my own music,” its daemonism, without which he would have found the music abhorrent: “Nothing but fine form, that didn’t appeal to me at all.” And he adds, “For me everything else was hard put to it to stand up against the opening of the Freischütz Overture.” Earlier, at supper, he talked about Riga and Holtei’s Fenore. Later he reads out the Venezianische Epigramme to me, and the evening ends with irrepressible laughter from him and the children, particularly Isolde, when he told them that his mother received from her husband Geyer a cake on which a little man stood passing a ducat. In bed he expresses his disgust with the Epigrams. “I don’t in fact believe he lived quite such a wicked life: rather, it is an imitation of Propertius, Catullus, and Tibullus, which makes it all the more repulsive.” During the reading I had the impression he was enjoying them.