Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Friday, 31 December 1875

It is two in the afternoon; I have been up for two hours.
Yesterday's tribulations make me cheerful today. Last Sunday Audiffret, Tournon and Mayer gave a dinner at the London House, and among the guests were Prodgers and Robenson. How they will amuse themselves this evening! Ah!
The one, the true, the sole passion of Audiffret was Miss Robenson — so I was told from every quarter when we first made the acquaintance of the Surprising One; told as if to make me understand that I am and shall never be anything. One always returns to one's first love.
[In the margin: It is very tiresome that Audiffret should be spoiled for me by all these annoyances in Nice.]
I would give anything to know the truth.
— It is an ancient and sacred affair — and it appears this affair is going to last, and from ancient and sacred will become modern and contemporary. After all the scandals, after the great theatre scandal when they were hissed at — here they are together again, Mme Prodgers and Miss Robenson. Yet the Surprising One spoke of her and the scandal quite lightly the other evening at the theatre.
What has done Miss Robenson a great deal of harm is her intimacy with Mme Prodgers — for, after all, Mme Prodgers is not proper company for a young lady of good family; that is what everyone in Nice says.
And who knows, perhaps Mme Prodgers will arrange a marriage. The pretty American would make a charming châtelaine.
There is an English book, Fair in the fearless old fashion, which reviews Nice society and describes the origins of Mrs Bodgers, daughter of a gentleman, married to Bodgers, son of a gardener and himself a humble and wretched minister. All her life she had dreamed of becoming somebody, and after every imaginable humiliation and torment, " Mrs Bodgers attained the summit of her ambition in Nice."
They also say that her blue boudoir is a marriage bureau on a grand scale.
Heiresses and titled people without money flock there in droves.
She is older than he is. The Surprising One is not yet twenty-five; the Pointed One is twenty-eight. What does that matter if he adores her.
[In the margin: Miss Robenson could not have been more than twenty-six.]
Since last summer Prodgers had been sending word via Saetone that she would bring Miss Robenson.
Audiffret used to treat her with contempt; now he comes to her house. That is a little humiliating — but she does not look too closely at these things, and she knows she cannot be anything on her own, and so surrounds herself with magnets. So long as her drawing rooms are full, so long as her box is full.
People speak ill of the American and court her at the same time.
People say: she is very pretty, but she is not a young woman one would make one's wife. Nonsense — if one loves, one loves. Yes, but does one love?
Because a man spends an interval in a box — is that reason to believe it?
Yes, one interval — and the dinner at the London House, and all the other times I do not know about?
Prodgers said yesterday:
— Émile, you did not come to my Christmas tree — M. Saetone was kind enough to come.
He replied something I could not hear, and the Pointed One said:
— You would have made the dolls dance — it would have been splendid.
My little, my miserable flirtation has angered Prodgers — how dare this little nobody! she must have said to herself, and she has taken back what was hers. God bless her, or let the devil choke her.
Why am I saying all this?
The Sapogenikoffs come and after dinner we start telling fortunes and laugh almost as before — that is to say, the others were as before, but I could not manage it. As names I drew Pierre and François.
The street door bell rang and we all ran to open it — it was the postman, and we screamed so loud that he was quite dazed by it. Then we poured melted wax into cold water. I got a shape one could easily take for a château with two large crenellated towers; turning it in every direction (it is the shadow one looks at), I got successively a sort of crouching lion with one front paw extended and holding a rose. Is that not strange? Then a great mass of something or other surmounted by a garland supported by cupids.
As for Marie — oh, that poor unfortunate girl — her wax figure cast a terrible shadow: a woman lying like a corpse with her hands crossed on her chest, just like the dead.
Turn it as she would, from every angle it was the same thing — and this dead woman resembled her singularly.
Olga and Dina got insignificant shadows. At a quarter to midnight four mirrors were prepared — two at Dina's, two at mine. And we proceeded to the great fortune-telling. I stared with all my eyes, motionless and hardly breathing, in my chemise with my hair loose, as is proper. Towards the middle, Marie came to open the door to fetch her dress, and Giro nearly wept at the brutal interruption. That Marie is brutal — a great oaf without delicacy or tact. Then it was Victor's turn to barge in like an ill-bred dog.
But I did not look away; the candles blurred, the corridor lengthened, and I vaguely saw a beautiful empty drawing room — then everything blended together. My eyes were burning; I was desperate to see something, and suddenly, out of elusive little shadows and confused lights, a face took shape that so resembled the Surprising One that I blushed crimson, and immediately above that face another exactly like it — and they both vanished. I was still trembling when I saw a white cravat, and above it a stupid, ugly face, a mixture of Godard and Robillard. That one reformed itself three times.
But all of this was very vague — one cannot call it seeing. It trembled, danced, formed and dissolved at every instant. Two years ago I saw far more clearly, and I still remember the man with the bottle near the counter of the London House. A man with black hair, a clean-shaved chin — that is all I know, as the bottle covered the middle of his face.
At half past one Marie came in again telling Giro abruptly to get dressed. Then I left the mirror, and we went to the pavilion where everyone was gathered, including Maman and Nina returning from Monaco.
When the Sapogenikoffs had gone, my aunt said Nina had told her that all these young men had been speaking ill of us in Gros's company. This led to a conversation about these gentlemen and we wondered why they had all grown distant.
Each gave their reason. None was convincing, and I could not find a better one. Walitsky claims Audiffret was angry about the letters. Very well, and the others? The others because Audiffret ordered them to be so. Nonsense! Nonsense! Audiffret began growing distant since July, when I was in Paris with Etienne — you will recall he did not come — but let us suppose I was alone at the time and he did not know my uncle! Very well, and afterwards — after Schlangenbad — I was in Paris with my aunt, and he did not come.
When we came back to Nice, he said he had been but that we had already left. A lie!
In Nice he paid no call; after my trip to Florence he came only in the evening, and only once. After that evening he said he was leaving, did not leave, no longer came down in his carriage as before to drive out with us.
In a word, he was growing distant at a time when I did not yet know that he was destined to rot.
Then we had all gathered at Nina's on Sunday, 26 September. The following Tuesday we saw him with Gioia, and Wednesday the first You shall rot was dispatched. You can see perfectly well that it was not the letters.
I verified the dates against my diary.
And there you have it.
So the year is over. It is three o'clock — it is already 1876.
O God, grant that the year to come may be more favourable to me than the one that has passed.
There is a way for me to clear my name, and when after my departure he receives a letter every day he will think differently. And the letter from America will make him think it is Robenson. If I stop writing he will say to himself: she knows I know and has stopped. So I shall not stop — quite the contrary.
I did not go out today, but my aunt saw Tournon and Audiffret on horseback with the English woman and her sister. Who are these women? They are not beautiful.
Ugh, what a wretched year! Let the new one be better. God, let it be better.
Good God, what a great affair this Émile d'Audiffret has become! How will it end?
In the meantime, I leave on Sunday.

Notes

In English in the original. ↩
In English in the original. ↩