Friday, 8 January 1875

Everyone was seized by a dreadful fright last night, and today Maman is very, very ill. Yesterday Georges again had the audacity to come and make a racket; and when I tried to throw him out, Maman — like a woman out of her mind — leaped from her bed to stop me, and Dina, seeing this, began to howl, to sob, to moan, to fall to her knees with her slanted eyes grown yet more slanted and narrowed, her hands clasped together, crying and weeping and imploring God knows what — until, weary of that dreadful scene, I pushed her away with my foot. That moved her off, but did not stop her, and the girl — fit to serve as a paid mourner at funerals — went and collapsed on the bed with her head lower than her backside. Meanwhile Georges, that adorable Georges, kept up his harangue like an incessant and monotonous piece of music — like a coward or a madman — and Maman in a nervous fit that resembled madness stood upright as if to defend that dear brother I had every intention of killing.

For a moment I was seized by terror, for all these people seemed to me to have lost their minds — and truly I think they had, at that moment.

I was calm, and under my cloak held a riding crop with which I had a furious desire to slash the face of that wretch — that monster who spreads the most dreadful slanders against us, in order to drive everyone away and leave us alone with his Anna, hoping and certain that then there would be no further obstacle to her becoming one of the family. O man a hundred times contemptible! That torturer of his mother and the plague of his entire family — who passes his life casting shadows over ours, doing his utmost to blacken us and drag us down into the filthy life he leads!

In the morning Foster came to see me; in the afternoon I went out in the carriage with Sabatini — half-closed carriage, it being windy — and in the evening the brother of Dr Botkine, a great lout, came for tea.

Nothing irritates me more than the sobbing and groaning of our people, who on every occasion display prodigious quantities of it. I am ashamed for them.

I was far more anxious, far more wretched — and yet I was nothing but pale. How plain one looks without colour!

From now on I shall take no part in any of Georges's scenes — these rages irritate me, wrinkle my face and make me old. To the devil with all that. I cannot put my brain into their heads — what is the use of disturbing myself!