Sunday, December 18:
A discussion of Laube’s behavior produces from R. the remark: “I find it so sad when people who have played a pleasant role in my life suddenly behave so badly—not only toward me, but altogether. Like young girls, a great many men have their beauté de diable, a time when they look promising, and later one is quite surprised to find there was nothing in them.” I said it seemed to me that every person, man or woman, had a phase in life in which he was better than during the rest of it. R. replies: “Because in every individual all potentialities are contained, just as the whole universe is contained in cellular tissue. This is also why an artist can count on making an overall impression; I dare to maintain that even the most extreme of philistines can feel with Tristan and Isolde, for there has certainly been one hour in his life when he fought shy of falling in love.”
Yesterday, in connection with the division of the Roman Empire into Latin and Greek provinces, R. says, “You can see at once how certain peoples, such as the Greeks, are unable to give up their language and their culture; the ancient Germans could not do it, either, while others, including the Gauls, became Latinized.”
The way in which the war is being conducted is being bitterly condemned; it is said Moltke has ordered that Paris be merely surrounded, and that the pursuit of the Loire army was very halfhearted, the deployment of troops too scattered, leading to terrible losses. These things unfortunately dominate my thoughts entirely, and R. notes it with disapproval. I ought certainly to have concealed my agitation. At lunch R. asks Hermine whether she has been to church like a good girl—he himself went there only every 30 years in order to get married!
“What a fleeting, meaningless thing life is!” he exclaims after humming to himself the “Song of May 3.” “When I think of these Poles—where have all those happy faces gone, the half-chivalrous, half-pedantic mood of that public holiday I told you about? The same people would have no idea what they looked like: it was all caused by the emergence of the idea of Poland.”
I go to Countess B.’s. R., who had wanted to go for a walk with me (which I had not understood), hurries after me through meadows and marshes, and to my great astonishment I see him near the railroad striding along ahead of me on the other side with Rus. “You just don’t realize how attached I am to you,” he says. In the evening Gibbon.