Monday, 11 January 1875

The sun reappears — the kind of Nice spring weather: wind and abominable dust.
My aunt has finished her questionnaires — and tomorrow, if God permits, we shall leave. Oh! happiness!
I succumb to Dumas’s books like every madcap of my age — these volumes change every day on my table, while the venerable Walter Scott is always the same, halfway through, and the folded page in the middle of the book never advances.
These past few days I have noticed that I am pretty — every day I forget it, and the next day I remind myself of it and try to convince myself, for there is nothing that beautifies like knowing one is beautiful — unless one is plain, in which case it is simply ridiculous.