Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Sunday, 16 April 1876

He will spend this day with his family — afterward he will be free to leave. That is how I arrange it in my mind.
There was Mass this morning, said by a Greek priest in Greek, in two very small rooms at the consulate-general.
The Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich — son of the Grand Duchess Konstantin and brother of Fanny Lear's grand duke — a young man of twenty, attended the Mass.
It is Easter: God — in honour of this great day — has He heard me?
Frightened the previous evening, I had gone to bed on edge and could not sleep for long — because of doors opening, lights moving about, windowpanes rattling. I called out aloud; Walitsky answered me, but I was not very reassured. I do not know why I am afraid in Naples.
I am rather pale. Altamura will come at two o'clock to take us to visit the royal residences of Naples. How tedious it is to sightsee — especially when one is sad and tired. I woke twice last night. Perhaps it was the ghosts from the other world of the novel.
I feel ugly — I would not want to go out, but people would start to wonder; they would look at me with that observant, I know perfectly well what this means air that I detest so.
Involuntarily I await Pietro's arrival. Leaving this evening, he would be here tomorrow morning. But there is also a train leaving Rome at two in the afternoon that arrives in Naples at about half past nine.
No, listen — it is very strange, and I would give a great deal to know what it means.
If he is free he cannot fail to come — but good heavens upon heavens! I doubt everything more than ever.
We visited the Palazzo di Capodimonte. The park is something admirable — I am enchanted by it. Altamura was escorting Maman, and I walked alone while Chocolat carried my train — it had a charming effect in this paradise of greenery. Altamura and Walitsky had a victoria and we a landau. We drank the king's milk, as Walitsky calls it. I enlivened the party as much as I could. Naples displeases me — in Rome the houses are black and dirty but they are admirable palaces from the point of view of architecture and antiquity; in Naples it is just as dirty with the difference that one sees only cardboard houses, à la française. Very well — there are all the French furious; let them calm themselves: I admire and love them more than any nation, but I must confess that their palaces will never attain the massive, the splendid, the graceful majesty of Italian palaces — above all Roman and Florentine ones.
The Palazzo di Capodimonte is large and magnificent, but rather barbaric — if one may put it so — a little like a barracks. Whereas in Rome, look at those porticoes, those windows, those vaults, those sculptures!
The doorways alone are worthy of admiration!
I am accustomed to these antique splendours, these temples, these columns — and everything seems to me meagre and wretched by comparison. It is not that I affect a blind admiration for cracked walls and columns without bases, but it is beautiful — grandiose, incredible. Is it my fault if the moderns make only cardboard palaces? Is it my fault that one is so degenerate — that one scorns posterity and is content to build for the lifetime of a man alone?
On the Chiaia we encountered the Muliterno family, and young Muliterno was on a balcony with other young men.
It takes the greatest effort to persuade me to go to the Teatro Mercadante, the only one open at present. I am sluggish in a new city — and yet an evening at the theatre tames me more than anything else.
Altamura and Walitsky have a box opposite ours, and Doenhoff is with us — we had encountered him on the promenade and told him to come.
We are on the left — I detest being on the left. The opera-glasses from the left-hand stage box annoy me. I am greatly stared at, but it is not the uproar there has been in Rome. In the stage box are several very distinguished gentlemen, as young Muliterno was with them.
This performance calls to mind the La Vestale in Rome — they whistled, they howled, and to crown it all they threw a cat onto the stage, which, after vainly attempting to leap onto the bald head of a musician and into the stage box of those gentlemen, fled in a frenzy of terror to the delight of the audience.
Toward the end I became somewhat myself again — I chatted, I laughed.
We left Doenhoff at the Hôtel du Louvre and returned home to supper. I drank a large glass of wine and became tipsy. It is very funny. I felt rather vague, and I opened the book ten times asking whether he would come to Naples. Ten times the book said yes. Judge whether I was pleased.
Besides, I noticed a fine carriage, two beautiful horses, and a fair beard that noticed me as well. So that if one were to ask me: Have you taken anyone in Naples —
as Pietro asked me in Rome, I could answer that I am in the process of taking someone.
Prendre quelqu'un — "to take someone" — in Pietro's vocabulary, means to notice or to love.
One day he was asking me goodness knows what, and I replied that I would tell him what he wished to know:
— Oh! he said, I shall not believe you — you say nothing but bougies (buggia in Italian: a lie).
— You mean chandelles? [candles?]
— Yes, chandelles! — ah! no, he cried, noticing his error after two minutes. No — that is not it!
It made us laugh, and for two days I did nothing but repeat: when one takes someone in Rome and there is no correspondence, one always says bougies.
I await his arrival tomorrow — I sense that I am wrong; the disappointment will be unpleasant, but at least for this evening I shall have a Christian thought and a calm spirit. I am still tipsy, and I am finishing the process of stupefying myself with cigarettes.
Fie! What a sordid habit! you will say. I assure you it does not show on me.

Notes

Fanny Lear's grand duke — Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich of Russia, elder brother of Konstantin Konstantinovich. Nicholas had a scandalous affair with the American courtesan Harriet Blackford ("Fanny Lear") and was exiled after a notorious diamond theft from his mother's icon. The younger brother Konstantin (here) was by contrast a cultured, serious young man who would later become a distinguished poet. ↩
Victoria — a light, open horse-drawn carriage seating two, named after Queen Victoria, fashionable among the aristocracy in the 1870s. ↩
Landau — a larger, four-wheeled carriage with a folding hood, more formal than a victoria. ↩
"The king's milk" (lait du roi) — Walitsky's joke: milk from the royal dairy at Capodimonte, which supplied the Neapolitan royal household. ↩
Teatro Mercadante — one of Naples' principal theatres, named after the Neapolitan opera composer Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870), still operating today. ↩
La Vestale — opera by Gaspare Spontini (1807), a staple of the Italian repertoire. The chaotic reception describes the volatile atmosphere of Italian opera audiences in the 1870s, for whom throwing objects was a standard form of critique. ↩
Marie is using a book for sortilège — bibliomancy: opening a novel at random and reading an answer into whatever passage the eye falls on. This form of fortune-telling recurs throughout the diary. ↩
Pietro confuses the Italian word buggia (lie) with the French word bougie (candle) — a bilingual slip that Marie finds irresistible. The wordplay continues across the next two paragraphs. ↩