Wednesday, November 29:
A lovely sun is shining on us, and R., coming to breakfast, shows me the little hare in his arms; soon afterward he gets up and writes the verse about Dr. Luther in my little swallow-Ricardo notebook! [Enclosed a piece of paper bearing in Wagner's handwriting the words "I and Dr. Luther, each one sang of a little hare."]
Around 1 o'clock we ride to the Piazzetta; the weather is splendid, we catch sight of Siegfried, and we spend a merry and amiable time there together. But, home again, R. has a chest spasm, he comes to lunch rather late and is rather silent throughout; but he does then show the children his little hare, for which he has ordered a chain.
In the evening R. is worn out - he has a cold; Eva made a nice copy of our dictation, he looked through it and has now sent it to friend Gross with a request to consult Herr Holtzendorff. This also proves a strain on him. He sends a telegram to Herr Neumann, telling him not to make any agreements with V. & Batz. At supper he tells us about Halevy and then disappears and does not join us until later, at whist, soon withdrawing again. I follow him out. (He read to us a telegram from Seidl which had amused him, he came to our whist table singing, "You robbers, you thieves," etc., and was annoyed that my father, serious and immersed in the game, did not join in the laughter.)
Today he begins to talk about my father again, very blunt in his truthfulness; he describes his new works as "budding insanity" and finds it impossible to develop a taste for their dissonances [the foregoing sentence obliterated in ink by an unknown hand; an additional twelve words in it illegible]. He keeps talking about it to me, while I remain silent, sorry that there is nothing I can say in reply! (I am also depressed today by the news, conveyed to me by my father, that Hans's health is deteriorating.) I read Prof. Haeckel's lecture on Goethe, Darwin, and Lamarck, and praise it, but R. points out to us the absurdity of going from effect to cause back as far as the monad, thus always remaining trapped in the idea of time, space, and causality.