Friday, 27 November 1874

Pâris left for Geneva yesterday.
Markevitch was telling me all evening that the Count was staring fixedly at me — yet for all that I did not turn round.
(Grey dress, new black hat, black jacket — good.) I walked with Madame Sabatini, the Italian woman who comes to talk with me, and I must admit I speak the language of Dante not badly. There was quite a crowd. [Crossed out: Audif] The Prince de Bravura is here; Audiffret went past me several times in his two-wheeled carriage driving himself, without my seeing him — [Crossed out: then] but when he got out at Prodgers', I watched him, and he, thinking himself unseen through the double gate, was slowing his step and looking at me in such a way [Crossed out: that he would have knocked] that if someone had come out of the house at that moment he would have collided with them, for his head was turned like the damned in Dante's Inferno.
The Echos de Nice lists a great many new arrivals, including Doria Pamphilii.
In the evening, an unpleasant scene. Anna, Georges's mistress, came to make a scene here for some sordid reason I cannot fathom; she said such impertinent things that my aunt sent for Maman, and Maman, after receiving her share, fled. After which I told her every truth to her face without sparing a single expression.
I am furious and wretched!
When I am alone I sigh and groan; when there is company I seek pretexts to forget my despair for a moment — in fits of wrath
I want to go to bed and see no one, to flee, even to die. They say that happy people desire death; I say that I desire it in my moments of despair — and even [Crossed out: (an illegible word) after having desired it, I think of it no more] at this very moment I think nothing of it.
Wretched, accursed creature that I am. Our false, miserable, contemptible position, abandoned by everyone, would drive me mad were I not stronger, and would kill anyone else. Anyone else, that is, who felt as I feel, who would understand, who would have blood and brains — who would not be made of fat and bone like Dina and her kind; anyone who would not be as weary, jaded and hardened as my mother and my aunt. To them all is indifferent; in Russia they managed on nothing, and cast off by society they did not even notice. If now some instinct is awakening in them, it is through me — and through me alone! I feel as if, were I to say to stones what I say to them, the stones would be more moved.
Wretched, accursed, rejected before growing up, humiliated before ever having any self-regard.
What am I! My God, I weep because it is a shame that a girl like me should be so placed. When I look at my arms, my neck — so white, so beautiful; my complexion so fresh; my skin so white, so firm; my eyes so brilliant; my lips so red; my teeth so white; my ears so pink; my golden hair — I weep over all of it as one weeps over a dead person!
Will no one rescue me from this dreadful position? Must my youth and my various beauties be wasted?
When I think that thin little black parasols like the Howards have so many things that I have not — alas! Thin, with their shoulder blades sticking out, cat's arms for limbs and legs like matchsticks — the wooden kind, not even the wax kind! God have mercy!
Wretched, accursed, despised, sullied before becoming anything at all!
Oh forgive me, my God! Forgive me!

Notes

In English in the original.