At a quarter-past six I was called to dinner. Among those present, in addition to the Prince and Princess, were the Rantzaus, Dr. Schweninger, of Munich, who was in attendance on the Chancellor, and Herr von Ohlen, another of the doctor’s patients. The Prince, as I now observed for the first time, suffered from a slight attack of jaundice. Schweninger (a man of lively temperament, with dark hair and beard, who seems to be very much at home here) diagnosed the Prince’s ailment as chronic catarrh of the stomach, and has been successful in his treatment. (...) While taking our coffee, which was served in the Princess’s room, the conversation was at first of little significance. It turned on Becker’s portrait of the Prince during the Frankfurt period, and on two groups of his male and female ancestors, who from their costumes would appear to have flourished in the time between the death of Luther and the Thirty Years’ War, and on the portrait of his sporting grandfather with the shot-gun, which was formerly in Berlin, but has now found a place here too. The conversation gradually grew more lively and interesting; and the Chancellor, who had remarked in the _tête-à-tête_ with me at midday that he would henceforth be careful of what he said in my presence, had probably forgotten his intention. On my stating, among other things, that the war of 1870 appeared to have had an excellent effect upon the national feeling in Saxony, he added, “and still more so in Bavaria. I once said jestingly to Fabrice[10] that we should live to see order restored in Saxony one day by Bavarian troops.” Speaking of Court circles in Berlin, he complained: “Whenever I performed on the political tight-rope they hit me on the shins, and, if I had only fallen, how delighted they would have been! Particularly the eternal feminine (das ewig Weibliche).” It was only after lunch on Tuesday, the 13th, and again before dinner, that the work with the Prince was resumed, when Chapter II., the remainder of Chapter III., and about half of Chapter IV. were weeded out, the weeds again proving much less abundant than I had anticipated. He maintained that in the second chapter I made him out to be a “hypocrite” in religious matters, an idea which he had no difficulty in entirely disproving, inasmuch as he justified his belief in God among other things by a reference to facts which could only be accounted for by the existence of a Deity. In the second section he began to dictate to me an account of his attitude towards the Kulturkampf, which he broke off on our being called to dinner. Before that he again suddenly renewed his grumbling at Grunow, I, too, coming in for a small share. He was also displeased with my long full beard. “My wife asked me,” he said, “if you were older than I. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I thought you were four or five years younger.’ But she was right. It’s your beard. It should be cut shorter. As it is it makes you look fearfully ancient.”