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Thursday, 22 October 1874
Jeudi, 22 octobre 1874 J'ai repris ma première leçon d'italien et de latin. J'étais en robe de chambre blanche et ma mère m'a dit une telle chose ! Une chose que je n'oublierai jamais dont je me souviendrai avec dégoût et horreur et pour laquelle je l'ai durement réprimandée et lui dis des paroles pleines d'une juste indignation, j'aurais voulu l'écraser de ces paroles pour ce qu'elle me dit:
I resumed my first lesson in Italian and Latin. I was in a white dressing gown, and my mother said such a thing to me! A thing I shall never forget, which I shall remember with disgust and horror, and for which I harshly reprimanded her and spoke to her words full of righteous indignation — I would have liked to crush her with those words for what she said to me:
— If you dress in an improper manner, you may seduce a professor of a hundred years; not long ago a man of seventy was tempted by a little girl. They might outrage you.
That is what she said to me!
I shall not say what I felt upon hearing this; let it be read, and I am sure that everyone will shudder with indignation, disgust, shame, and all that hell could create most cruel, most vile, and most abominable.
The music plays too late; toward six o'clock it is dark.
Everyone went out in the evening. I remain before the mirror and have arranged my hair so poetically that I should like to show myself to someone. I am pretty this evening, and this conviction makes me happy and gives a particular radiance to my face, glowing and fresh.
Is it Nice or the iron phosphate? That is the question.1 In any case, blessed be Nice, for in Nice I am healthy and pretty.
Thanks be to God.
Notes
In English in the original. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1. ↩