Friday, November 17:
R. got up once but otherwise had a good night. In the morning he talks about male and female and is decidedly in favor of the latter: “For example, your introductory words to the reminiscence - coming from a man, they would sound affected and sentimental; a man must always behave as if he has no feeling, must avoid warmth, and then it is not worth having.” At the end of the evening yesterday he was talking about women, the thoughtlessness of various ladies and my father’s courtesy; he recalled the impossible situations they got themselves into, which made them arrogant; I remark how beautifully Goethe portrayed humble subservience as a part of idealism, right up to the figure of Ottilie, and he says I am right. I went out with Lusch to see about the little rabbit. On our way home we meet R. on the canal with Evi and get into his gondola. He talks first about the King, to whom he has just been writing; he mentions that the latter did not behave well toward Ponsch [Blandine], expresses his dislike of the aping of Versailles, and concludes, “In all this one must acknowledge Fate, as Mary Stuart acknowledged divinity with regard to Elizabeth.” We get out at the Piazza Manin and walk home. R. tells me about Persian history, saying how curious it is that a tragic fate was always assigned to the father of the chosen hero. He then talks about civilization and says its greatness can be measured by the immediacy of the ensuing decline. How swiftly Greek tragedy met its end - Spanish, too (Calderón)! How soon Shakespeare was forgotten, and even though the impression Shakespeare makes - on him, for example - is greater than on the public of his own time, it is nevertheless no longer a living thing. “But with you one thing always seems to lead to another,” he says, after telling me he is sure the same thing will happen with him. He then talks of Wolz. [the name erased by an unknown hand] and says, “We will have difficulty in raising him off the ground floor,” using an expression of Baron Hofmann’s in Vienna in relation to Jauner, and thus astonishing me with his memory! At lunch Fidi tells us about the play he saw yesterday. [A sentence based on untranslatable word play omitted.] R. goes to Saint Mark’s Square with the children, returns home, and talks of the northern lights they saw from there. News about Lohengrin arouses the wish to go to Bologna; the fact that we are expecting my father makes R. cross, as obstacles always do; he enlarges upon my father’s character, how he is not one of us, how to him we are just a cipher like so many others [the last nineteen words obliterated in ink by an unknown hand]. He is indignant with him for visiting Frl. Ramann at this time. To console him, I suggest that Lohengrin in Bologna would certainly tire him and cause him vexation. He agrees with that and contemplates my father’s great aspects. We play whist. Lusch joins us; our good Princess H[atzfeldt] is mentioned, R. recalls that she did not take him in at Trachenberg, and that if the King had not come along, he would have been completely deserted. And in bed he says, “First came your father, then the King, then you - you set things right, you combined them both.” This morning we went through all the characters of the Ring des Nibelungen from the point of view of race: the gods white; the dwarfs yellow (Mongols); the blacks the Ethiopians; Loge the half-caste. Yesterday R. recalls an expression his mother heard used by a workman in connection with cholera: “There are always such blights.”