Friday, December 13:
R. had a good night. "I ought to sacrifice a cock," he says. "Poor Berlioz, whose head is still plucked bare - he looks like the monk in the rose garden."
We come to the subject of chronicles. He used to own the chronicles of the city of Cologne, in rhyme, and he liked them; he does not know the chronicles of the emperors, but feels they should provide the foundation for the language used in dramas dealing with those times. Two days ago, when I told him about the curious language in K. Ritter's drama, he pointed out how much wiser Goethe had been to use doggerel verse in Faust. R. says he wonders whether the tremendous popular element in Goethe has been sufficiently appreciated.
Fine wintry weather. R. goes for a walk before lunch, the children go skating. At lunch we spoke about the novel; R. says, "I feel as if I have known such people, and this movement, which is really nothing at all but nevertheless upsets the characters." In the evening R. asks me to read the book aloud from the point I have reached.
Concerning the revolutionary matters in it, he says: "I was almost at the point of hawking pamphlets myself! And when I think of all the things I told Minna, such as that the movement was being built up somewhere else, and that it was bound to happen that people like me would be needed, and that I should be appointed secretary of the provisional government. I had to put it to her in the form of a permanent appointment, and at the same time humbug myself. But all the same I could not agree with your father when he said to me curtly in Weimar, 'Admit you've been foolish.'"
When it comes up in conversation that the Emperor is now so well that he intends to take part again in a hunt, R. says, "Yes, that's all they can think of." And a little later he says, "I was on the point of writing a witty remark - 'Biarritz was after all nothing more than tossing a fox in a blanket' - but I won't do it." At the conclusion of our reading he says to me, "It often occurs to a man that women are much better than he is, that a woman is much more of a whole than he; for a man, a woman is an episode" - he looks at me and adds, "I am not talking about us now" - "but for a woman the man is everything, and when the thing for which a man gives up a woman turns out to be nothing, he must feel very contemptible." At the first stage of saying good night he remarks, "Don't call up a Solomin!" I: "I hope your feelings for me are not the same as Nezhdanov's." He, laughing: "It would be a bit late to start that." Much merriment.