Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Thursday, 26 August 1875

We have received our photographs — some as the Graces, some as disgraces. One could die laughing!
Walitsky improvises some verses of a kind only he could produce.
*On the Promenade, Audiffret —
[two illegible lines]
Marie [?] having bought [something] on the ice... of goose — Emile winks at her and she shoves the goose into her mouth —
The other lads —
[one illegible line]
jump from the... [?] a landau and stare at her —
and the aunt comes forward and puts on airs —
she is delighted, puts on airs — those watching Marie call her pretty.*
No language but Little Russian can express things so clearly and so comically!
The Tcherkassys have departed, first for Wiesbaden then for Petersburg. They have left us.
[Four lines cancelled]
I go to Schwalbach with Machenka; Maman and Dina follow in a calèche. There we see Obeziana and her brother — a very well-turned-out and agreeable young man; they watch me a great deal and remain the whole time in the shopping gallery very close to us.
We also go to the concert. I love my dear little Schwalbach.
I dined at the Nassauer Hof, the fashionable hotel. I spoke there with the Comtesse Benvenuti, an amiable woman but nearly always tipsy. What a sorry state of affairs. No — I see that one must renounce every kind of pursuit. Let us be bored, let us be bored, and remain quiet.
Under our windows a human being did pass this morning — but in the course of the day I lost track of him.
At the door, Stiopa meets us — he has just received a telegram from my aunt; the lawyer Plevasko is awaiting him in Paris, and she is summoning Stiopa.
Once again we speak of horses — and they do not irritate me too much, fortunately.

Notes

A reference to the Three Graces of classical mythology — the personifications of beauty and charm. Marie's wordplay: en Graces (as the Graces, graceful) vs en disgraces (disgraced, unflattering). ↩
La petite russienne: Marie uses the diminutive to refer to what was then called "Little Russian" (малоросійська), i.e., Ukrainian, distinct from "Great Russian" (великоросійська). In Marie's milieu, the two Slavic languages were often heard together; she is likely referring to Ukrainian expressions in Walitsky's verse. ↩
Dépêche: a telegram. ↩