Tuesday, July 11:
R. relates to me a comical dream: “I suddenly saw my old Aunt Friederike, but now much younger, and I wanted to bring her to you, thinking, ‘What will Cosima say when I bring her the old aunt about whom I have dictated anecdotes to her?’ I gave her my arm, she felt very heavy, so I asked if she was tired. ‘Well, I should have preferred to ride.’ So I went in search of a carriage. Suddenly I thought, ‘But she is long since dead!’ She hardly spoke. I look for a carriage, but see nothing but baskets of a sort, and I think, ‘No, you don’t want to put her in one of those, she should see how well you are living.’ I ask, ‘Isn’t there another carriage?’ And then someone rather like Pecht comes up and says, ‘Keller and Brandt have nice carriages, you should fetch one of theirs.’ I: ‘Oh, dear, we are almost at the house’; whereupon he: ‘But Brandt is very busy, he has been in Shepherd’s and made some bad bargains.’ Then the dream ended, but Shepherd’s is a part of Praeger’s address; what a lot of nonsense it all is!”
Jakob has taken the 1,000 francs to the savings bank, where I now have 5,641 francs; 3,500 in the steamship company, which so far has brought me in nothing; 2,000 francs with R., who is very angry if I do not assume that he will pay me back and in the meantime pay interest on them; and 1,000 in the Paris insurance company.
R. works, but is much hindered by the weather, which has turned bad again. Fidi as table companion wrings from him the despondent remark that he will probably not see him grow up.
In the afternoon, games in the salon with the children; R. makes corrections. In the evening read Henry VIII to the end, inexpressibly moved by it.