Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday 6 March 1876

I remember now — yesterday during the race I dropped my bouquet; Antonelli jumped down, retrieved it, and was obliged to scramble up on his knees to get back.
"However will he manage to get up," cried Dina.
"Oh! It is very easy," I say.
"Everything I do is very easy," says the little one, brushing the dust from his knees, "I expose myself to ridicule and that is very easy" — and he began to gaze into the distance, to make believe he was piqued.
[Struck out: Not knowing at what hour.]
Visconti called on us yesterday; I told him about my papal dream.
"A marriage beyond all doubt!" cried the old baron.
[Written across the page: Please once and for all do not attach too much importance to what I was writing about Antonelli. I was embellishing things to create a novel.]
God willing, I thought.
What a bore! We missed Parliament! Convinced it began at noon, I was ready and waiting at a quarter to eleven. We arrived when it was all over. The King's speech, the deputies, all those princes! *Bigre. I notice that I let myself go in my deplorable style — so vulgar, such common expressions — but bah!
[It's] better than [sic] a ridiculous stiffness; all the more so since I do it deliberately.
We saw Pietro on the Corso — Pietro out in the morning, Pietro reading a newspaper, like a man of substance!
Walitsky gets out and goes to meet him; as for us, we go to Gagiabi to buy gloves for Dina, and the two men find us there.
"He has been up since half past nine," he says, to find me a horse — the one he had wanted for me being ill, he went to find me another, and missed Parliament.
"Ah! I have been at work, I tell you!"
"Thank you."
You know the sort of life he leads — he makes day of night and night of day.