Friday, 30 April

Yesterday with Marie and Olga we told fortunes; I opened the book for Blackprince¹ and read: he marries.

Truly, I have only to let my thoughts touch a man for him to go and get married.

I am dying of hunger — our cook is quite useless now. I take Léonie and go off to the Sapogenikoffs’. I find them all in the garden: Maman in an armchair, the parrot at liberty opposite her; Nina, Yourkoff, and Walitsky on a sofa; and further off, in the shade of the orange trees — stretched out — on a carpet, Marie, Olga, and Dina reading, Prater at their feet, and Mistigri, Nina’s monkey, leaping, running, playing, and flying from branch to branch. I breathed the air of laziness that reigned there — one feels soft and incapable of anything. One feels like a shepherd of Virgil. A blazing sun that one escapes under beautiful orange trees laden with fruit, lying — not on the grass, for the grass is too dirty on account of the insects — but on a carpet spread over the grass.

Now there are happy people.

Nina and Walitsky seated side by side, reading attentively from the same book — what book? Theocritus, perhaps, or Virgil? No — something still more sublime: a book that gives joy and peace to the soul and body alike. A cookbook.

They read reverently, now and then lifting blissful eyes to each other to consult.

This sweet reading over, they repair to the temple, where they sacrifice a victim, and having consecrated the entrails to the dogs, they season it and eat it, taking care to regale everyone. From time to time Yourkoff goes into town and brings back asparagus as fat and white as L’Étoile candles,² or strawberries, or fresh cucumbers.

They sit down to table. Walitsky opposite Nina; the soup is too salty. Was it you, Loukantchik, who salted it?³

— No, it was you, Nina Alexandrovna, replies Loukantchik.⁴

— Loukantchik, Nina goes on, we put in too many vegetables⁵, and so on.

After dinner they go to Maman’s room; at eleven they leave her, and Walitsky goes into the room of Nina and the girls (who, having given up their room to Maman, sleep in their mother’s), sits down in the middle of the room and tells a multitude of stories and anecdotes about a certain Nikonor, his jester in Russia.

Walitsky is no great prince, but he had his jester, Nikonor Nikolevitch Popoff, a government clerk and a priest’s son. He goes on like this until four in the morning, then retires to Yourkoff’s, and the next day they take up the book again, the Bible of the profane, and begin all over again as on the day before.

The Sapogenikoffs’ life at present is an idyll; our own life is an Iliad more terrible and bloody than Homer’s.

The Sapogenikoffs, from millionaires, have become poor, and they take it so nobly that it is a pleasure to see. My coat of arms has been sent to me from Russia; here it is: now I am going to add certain things to it which will remain there from my time on, and I shall write on it my motto, which I have not yet found.

I shall add nothing at all; these are only jokes.

You can see what I have added: I want three roses (the rose is my flower) in place of three feathers, but in place of Ich diene⁶ I really cannot see what to put. I thought of putting volo⁷, but that is too presumptuous for a little girl like me, and besides I would rather have a more pious motto — God might be angry. I have added my two dreams, the five stars and the ears of wheat. I really don’t know how to arrange it all. We shall think about it.

Detestably dressed, in one of my aunt’s gowns, I go to see La Belle Hélène with Marie, Olga, my aunt and Louba. I keep out of sight, for dressed like this I am not myself.