Tuesday, December 12:
R. slept well; at breakfast (doubtless because of the Goethe mask which Countess La Tour has sent him in the name of our friend) he turns to the subject of our friend Gob.’s poem Amadis and says he is surprised that he chose the magicians’ tales and things of that sort, since they belong quite definitely to Provence and its “Moorish population,” whose trivial and gaudy images stifled the genuine features of Nordic legend. Of the history of the Persians, on the other hand, R. says this should have altered the entire course of historiography, and he says he remembers that friend Sulzer once expressed to him an opinion concerning the Greeks and Persians (mainly with reference to Alexander) which suggests that he knew G.’s book.
At lunch conversation turns to various friends of ours: R. says there are bad and good people, but for each one there comes a moment when he must decide whether he is capable of sacrificing another for his own sake or not. When this theory is felt to be rather harsh, particularly in relation to the one friend, R. says, “There are certain feebly good talents which express themselves at most in bad music.” Before lunch R. visited the Conservatoire and its president. To my father, who is somewhat better but still very run down, R. gives various words of advice, and he also wishes that he would remain with us. In the afternoon he goes out with Fidi to Saint Mark’s Square, comes home cheerful. He prescribes a quinine powder for Evchen, who has had to go to bed with a chill. Dr. Keppler, summoned by us, comes in the evening, alarms me by saying that one cannot yet tell whether it will develop into an infectious fever. We play whist and then chat a little, but unfortunately R. keeps coming back to his Voltz-Batz-Feustel experiences.
At supper he tells us about a letter to Herr v. Holtzendorff and says he can no longer write letters; he is always making mistakes. Before whist the singers came around, and R. (who no longer cares for them) remarked, “On the other hand, they are a part of Venice.” He finds the mask of Goethe Roman. R. glances through the poems of Michelangelo, which Jouk. brought with him, and significantly he gives me one sonnet to read, “The slave, held captive by a strict master ...”