Meta-Diary

Také známý jako: Meta-Diary, Meta Diary

Culture culture/themes Comprehensive Aktualizováno: 2026-05-24

Thematic Tag: Meta-Diary

This thematic tag collects diary paragraphs where Marie writes about the diary itself -- the act of writing, her reasons for keeping a journal, reflections on what she has written, and self-conscious commentary on the text as object. With 261 tagged references across the diary's twelve years (1873-1884), the meta-diary theme traces Marie's evolution from a girl who writes for private pleasure into a dying woman who consciously constructs a literary monument. The meta-passages are what make Marie's diary unique in the history of the genre: not merely a record of life but a sustained meditation on what it means to record a life.

Marie's Self-Reflection on Writing

Marie frequently steps back from narrating her life to comment on the narration itself:
- "Mon journal" / "ce journal" -- referring to the diary as entity
- "Ce cahier" / "ce carnet" -- the physical notebook
- "Ce livre" -- "this book" -- the diary as publication
- "J'écris" / "en écrivant" -- the act of writing
- "Ces pages" / "ces lignes" -- the text she is producing
- "Relire" -- re-reading previous entries, commenting on her past self
- "Monument littéraire et humain" -- the diary as literary monument (carnet 000)
- "Document humain" -- the diary as naturalist human document (carnet 000)

Functions of Meta-Commentary

- Self-justification: Why she writes, why the diary matters, why it should be published
- Quality control: Dissatisfaction with her own writing ("Tout est répugnant et horrible. Et surtout ce que j'écris rempli de: tout ça, de parce que, de et puis, de en somme," carnet 105, August 1884), wishing she could express herself better
- Continuity: Noting gaps, explaining why she hasn't written
- Retrospection: Re-reading old entries and commenting on her younger self, sometimes violently ("je me mets à pleurer puis à sangloter, je m'agenouille puis me couche par terre puis commence à rire," carnet 031, April 1875)
- The diary as companion: In loneliness and illness, the journal becomes her confidant
- Self-correction: Later annotations contradict or qualify earlier claims ("[Annotation: 1881. J'ai rien arrondi du tout et tout cela m'est bien égal.]" appended to an 1875 entry, carnet 049)
- The split self: "Moi spectateur vient de relire le charabia de moi-auteur" (carnet 106, August 1884) -- Marie as both writer and reader of herself, performing a doubling that anticipates modernist consciousness

The Diary as Literary Project

Marie's diary is not a naive outpouring. From early on, she treats the journal as a work-in-progress, subject to the same critical scrutiny she applies to her paintings. This reflexivity -- writing about writing -- gives the diary its distinctive layered quality.

Key Meta-Passages in Chronological Order

February 1873 (carnet 001) -- The earliest meta-passage, written at age fourteen: "Toutes ces pages qui composent ce cahier sont peut-être stupides, mais pour moi, le soir, lorsque je les relis, seule dans ma chambre, c'est un grand, un délicieux bonheur." (All these pages that make up this notebook are perhaps stupid, but for me, in the evening, when I reread them, alone in my room, it is a great, a delicious happiness.) The diary begins as private ritual -- nighttime, solitary, pleasurable.

April 1873 (carnet 004) -- Marie adds a marginal note to an earlier passage: "Ce sont de belles idées pour une enfant. J'aime à les relire." (These are beautiful ideas for a child. I love to reread them.) And an intercalated page: "Ce passage me remplit d'étonnement. En relisant mon journal, je m'oublie et pense comme alors." (This passage fills me with astonishment. Rereading my journal, I forget myself and think as I did then.) Already the diary has a temporal depth -- past and present selves in dialogue.

September 1874 (carnet 024) -- The first editorial impulse, at age fifteen: "Je pense qu'on peut beaucoup supprimer dans ce livre, et ne conserver que quelques journées, qui donnent une idée de ma vie." (I think one could cut a great deal from this book, and keep only certain days that give an idea of my life.) Note the word "livre" -- she already thinks of it as a book, not a notebook.

August 1874 (carnet 022) -- The first conjunction of diary and death: "Si je mourrai, je brûlerai mon journal. Je serais désolée de mourir..., je vivrais comme j'aime ou je mourrai. L'un des deux. Je n'ai que quinze ans. Mon Dieu!" (If I die, I will burn my diary. I would be devastated to die... I will live as I please or I will die. One of the two. I am only fifteen. My God!) The grammatical error ("Si je mourrai" for "Si je meurs") betrays the emotional heat. At this stage, death means burning the diary -- the exact opposite of her later position.

November 1875 (carnet 049) -- Marie discovers the diary as unreliable narrator: "Si je faiblis, je n'aurai qu'à relire ce journal où j'ai arrondi les choses, où j'ai amorti les coups que je recevais." (If I weaken, I need only reread this diary where I have rounded off things, where I have softened the blows I received.) She adds an annotation in 1881: "J'ai rien arrondi du tout et tout cela m'est bien égal." (I didn't round off anything at all and none of it matters to me.) The 1881 self contradicts the 1875 self, and both are preserved in the text.

December 1875 (carnet 051) -- The pivotal reversal. Death no longer means burning the diary but publishing it: "Si je meurs bientôt, je brûlerai tout, mais si je meurs vieille, on lira ce journal. Je crois qu'il n'y a pas encore de photographie, si je puis m'exprimer ainsi, de toute une existence de femme, de toutes ces pensées, de tout, de tout. Ce sera curieux." (If I die soon, I will burn everything, but if I die old, people will read this diary. I believe there has never been a photograph, if I may put it that way, of an entire woman's existence, of all her thoughts, of everything, everything. It will be curious.) The metaphor of "photography" is remarkable -- a technology barely thirty years old in 1875 -- positioning the diary as a total, mechanical, unsparing capture of consciousness. And the claim is true: no woman had yet published such a comprehensive record of female interiority.

December 1875 (carnet 051) -- Immediately after, Marie imagines her posthumous readers: "Si je meurs jeune, bientôt, et si par malheur ce journal n'est pas brûlé, on dira: pauvre enfant, elle a aimé Audiffret et tout son désespoir vient de là." (If I die young, soon, and if by misfortune this diary is not burned, they will say: poor child, she loved Audiffret and all her despair comes from that.) She anticipates -- and resents -- the reductive readings her diary will receive. She is already arguing with her future audience.

January 1878 (carnet 077) -- Marie reflects on the gap between the diary-self and the real self: "Je suis, je crois différente en réalité de ce que je suis dans ce journal; dans le journal c'est à peu près moi naturelle avec la légère différence de toute reproduction." (I am, I believe, different in reality from what I am in this diary; in the diary it is approximately me natural, with the slight difference of any reproduction.) A philosophically sophisticated observation: every representation alters its subject, even -- especially -- self-representation.

June 1880 (carnet 088) -- Re-reading becomes archaeological: "Moi, je relis le passé pour lequel je me passionne... C'est dommage que la nature de ces écritures ne me permette pas d'isoler les faits remarquables. Tout se confond. [...] Seulement quand je veux revivre ces évènements je suis choquée de les trouver entourés de tout le reste. Mais n'est-ce pas ainsi dans la vie?" (I reread the past, for which I am passionate... It is a pity that the nature of this writing does not let me isolate the remarkable facts. Everything blends together. [...] Only when I want to relive those events am I shocked to find them surrounded by all the rest. But isn't that how it is in life?) Marie grasps that the diary's apparent formlessness -- the significant buried in the trivial -- mirrors the texture of lived experience.

June 1883 (carnet 100) -- The diary confronts its own futility: "A quoi bon les appréciations, les impressions, les sensations. Ça meurt là dans ce cahier. Et toutes ces forces furieuses qui viennent se briser contre ce rempart [reste] suffoquée et meurtrie." (What is the use of assessments, impressions, sensations. They die there in this notebook. And all these furious forces that come crashing against this rampart [I am left] suffocated and bruised.) The diary as tomb rather than monument -- yet she keeps writing.

June 1883 (carnet 100) -- Then, days later, the opposite: "Ah! qu'on est heureux et qu'on est malheureux quand on a franchi certaines limites de l'intelligence. Il me semble par moments que cet interminable journal contient des trésors de pensées, de sentiments, d'originalités." (It seems to me at moments that this interminable journal contains treasures of thought, of feeling, of originality.) And: "J'emmagasine depuis des années et je prends des notes à part dans un cahier..." (I have been stockpiling for years and I take notes separately in a notebook...) The diary as raw material for future literary works.

July 1883 (carnet 100) -- The conditional literary afterlife: "Ce journal serait d'un intérêt prodigieux après ma mort si de mon vivant j'écrivais quelques bons livres..." (This diary would be of prodigious interest after my death if during my lifetime I wrote some good books...) Marie understands that the diary's value depends on what she becomes. Without fame, the diary is nothing; with it, the diary becomes everything.

August 1883 (carnet 100) -- Direct address to the reader as elite: "Heureusement que vous, poignée d'êtres d'élite, gens supérieurs, vous chers et bien-aimés confidents qui me lisez, Vous savez à quoi vous en tenir. Mais quand vous me lirez tout ceux dont je parle seront probablement morts." (Fortunately you, handful of elite beings, superior people, you dear and beloved confidants who read me, you know what to believe. But when you read me all those I write about will probably be dead.) The reader is imagined as a future intimate, not a contemporary public.

May 1884 (carnet 000) -- The preface, written five months before death. Marie frames the entire diary with her most famous meta-statement: "A quoi bon mentir et poser? [...] Si je ne meurs pas jeune, j'espère rester comme une grande artiste, mais si je meurs jeune je veux laisser publier mon journal qui ne peut pas être autre chose qu'intéressant. [...] Si ce livre n'est pas l'exacte, l'absolue, la stricte vérité il n'a pas raison d'être. [...] Du reste, je me crois trop admirable pour me censurer." She invokes Zola, Goncourt, and Maupassant to validate the diary as "document humain," then calls it a "monument littéraire et humain" -- a literary and human monument. See carnet 000, entries 000-01 and 000-02 for the full text.

August 1884 (carnet 105-106) -- In the final months, the meta-commentary turns against the writing itself: "Tout est répugnant et horrible. Et surtout ce que j'écris rempli de: tout ça, de parce que, de et puis, de en somme, j'en suis agacée à pleurer de tout ces ça, ça, ça." (Everything is repugnant and horrible. And especially what I write, full of: all that, of because, of and then, of in short, I am irritated to tears by all those that, that, that.) And: "Moi spectateur vient de relire le charabia de moi-auteur. Moi-spectateur est parfaitement indifférent mais il veut bien que je m'amuse dans cette voie..." (Me-spectator has just reread the gibberish of me-author. Me-spectator is perfectly indifferent but is willing to let me amuse myself in this vein...) The final splitting: Marie is simultaneously the writer, the reader, and the critic of her own text, and the critic finds the text wanting. She kept writing anyway.

The Diary's Publication History

Marie wanted the diary published, but what was published in 1887 was not what she wrote. Her mother, grief-stricken and intent on honoring her daughter's wishes, enlisted André Theuriet, a popular poet and novelist, to edit the diary. With a preface by François Coppée, it appeared in two volumes from Charpentier/Fasquelle. The censorship was devastating: approximately 75% of the diary was cut. All references to Uncle Georges's scandals, the family's legal troubles, Marie's romantic attachments, her progressive deafness, her sharpest social and political observations, and much of the material that constituted the "document humain" she had claimed the diary to be were removed. Her mother also changed Marie's birth year from 1858 to 1860, making her appear even more precocious. See #Censored_1887 for full details.

Despite the heavy censorship, the 1887 edition caused a sensation. By 1890, Bashkirtseff's name was, as one English reviewer put it, "a household word." It was translated into English by Mathilde Blind (1890) and Mary J. Serrano (1890), and into numerous other languages. In 1887, sixteen-year-old Pierre Louÿs conceded in his own diary that the idea of writing it had come from reading Bashkirtseff's. In 1895, Oscar Wilde had Gwendolen tell Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest: "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." The complete uncensored text was not published until 1995-2005, in sixteen volumes by the Cercle des Amis de Marie Bashkirtseff, transcribed from the original manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Marie and the Diary Tradition

Marie Bashkirtseff wrote in a tradition she was largely unaware of -- the great European diary tradition that stretches from Samuel Pepys (1660-1669, first published 1825) through Benjamin Constant's Journaux intimes (1804-1816, published posthumously 1895/1952) to the contemporaries whose journals she would never read. The two most significant diary publications of her era were strikingly close to her own project:

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881), a Swiss philosopher and critic, kept a journal intime of over 16,000 pages spanning more than thirty years. The first volume of Fragments d'un Journal Intime was published in December 1882, the second in 1884 -- precisely contemporaneous with the last years of Marie's own diary-keeping. Amiel's journal was introspective, philosophical, paralyzed by self-analysis; Marie's is extroverted, dramatic, furious with ambition. They are complementary portraits of 19th-century consciousness: the professor who thought too much to act and the young woman who acted too much to think. Whether Marie read Amiel is unknown -- she never mentions him -- but the Fragments were widely discussed in the French press during the years she was writing her most self-aware passages.

The Journal des Goncourt (begun 1850) was the diary Marie came closest to. The brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt kept a collaborative diary of Paris's literary and social life for decades. Extracts appeared in Le Figaro in 1886, and the first published volume followed in 1887 -- the same year as Marie's diary. Marie explicitly invokes Goncourt in her preface as an authority for the "document humain." The Goncourt journal and Marie's diary are sibling texts: both chronicle Parisian life with savage observation, both treat the journal as literature rather than mere record-keeping, both were published in censored form and caused scandals. But the Goncourts wrote as established insiders; Marie wrote as an outsider desperate to become one.

Diary-Writing as Social Practice in 19th-Century Europe

Diary-writing in Marie's era was a widespread and socially encouraged practice, especially among educated women. By the mid-nineteenth century, keeping a journal was considered a mark of intellectual attainment and moral discipline. Young women of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy were often encouraged to keep journals as exercises in self-examination and as records of their spiritual development. The practice had Protestant roots -- the Puritan examination of conscience, the Pietist spiritual diary -- but by Marie's time had become secularized into a literary form.

What made Marie's diary extraordinary was not the act of keeping one -- many girls of her class did -- but three distinctive features: its duration and comprehensiveness (twelve years, 106 notebooks, covering "toute une existence de femme" as she put it); its explicit intention to be published (most women's diaries were understood as private); and its self-conscious literary ambition (Marie did not merely record her life but critiqued, re-read, annotated, and framed it as a work of art). Her use of the term "document humain" -- borrowed from Zola and the Goncourt brothers -- was a deliberate claim to literary seriousness, positioning a young woman's private journal alongside the naturalist novel as a vehicle for understanding human nature.

The Paradox of Sincerity

The central paradox of Marie's meta-diary is stated in the preface itself: "cette idée qu'on me lira a peut-être gâté c'est-à-dire anéanti le seul mérite d'un tel livre; eh bien non. D'abord j'ai écrit très longtemps sans songer à être lue et ensuite c'est justement parce que j'espère être lue que je suis absolument sincère." (This idea that people will read me has perhaps spoiled, that is to say destroyed, the only merit of such a book; well, no. First, I wrote for a very long time without thinking of being read, and then it is precisely because I hope to be read that I am absolutely sincere.) Marie turns the objection inside out: awareness of a future audience does not corrupt sincerity but guarantees it, because she writes under oath, as it were, to a court of posterity. This is a philosophical position of genuine originality. It also happens to be at least partly self-deluding -- as she herself admits elsewhere, she has "arrondi les choses" (rounded things off) and the diary-self is not quite the real self ("la légère différence de toute reproduction"). But the contradiction itself is the most honest thing about the diary.