Sunday, 25 June 1876

I am in an appalling mood — I am miserable! My every eccentricity is being indulged; I have them all today.
The sky, heavy with storm yesterday, has burst into rain. It is very pleasant. Ah! if only I could refresh myself with tears.
Deceived, despised — and by whom!!
And then this vanity, this world that draws me — this gloriae cupiditate... I have spoken of it calmly with my mothers. The only way is to bring Monsieur Bashkirtseff with me — a marshal of the nobility is always something. He surely owes me this grace — to lead me into society; he who has never done anything for me, for my mother, who has done harm in everything and always. Besides, I bear him no ill will; I shall be a gentle and amiable daughter, so long as he makes me live again! I shall give him money... We must go to Russia.
This journey seems like a chimera. My God, help me!
In a fit of impatience, I write this to you — you wretched readers. My greatest fury — and the one that gave rise to all these words of love — has been to have taken seriously something I ought to have laughed at, given the utter insignificance of the gentleman.
It is above all now that I am furious — which is perfectly understandable, devil take it. One imagines oneself to see a fickle lord, mad, ungovernable. And what does one discover? That he is nothing but a young man who behaves badly.
In the name of all the shame I feel at having lowered myself, I beg you to believe that not for one instant did Antonelli please me. When I said I love him — it was to an invisible being.
I shall finally confide something to you...... it is that out of vanity I have a repugnance to denigrating Antonelli; each time I want to diminish him I stop myself, in order to leave you with the impression that he was an important man and this was a serious romance.
When all is said, I detest him — not out of spite, but because of the humiliation I have suffered on his account.

Notes

Gloriae cupiditate: Latin, "thirst for glory" — a phrase Marie uses repeatedly as a kind of personal motto.
A marshal of the nobility (maréchal de noblesse) was an elected representative of the provincial nobility in the Russian Empire — a rank that would lend social standing at court and in society.
This is the key self-revelation of the whole episode, echoing the annotation at 062.0380 (17 June): "I never loved him — I loved someone invisible who had loved me."