Friday, 12 January 1877

I was born on the 12th of November, but I was only meant to be born on the 12th of January; accordingly my age is reckoned from the 12th of January, old style.¹ So in twelve days I shall be eighteen... Merjeewsky, confusing the Russian style with the other, comes today with his mother to congratulate me and bring me flowers. Then Galula turns up.

I was dressed as a monk... Everyone asks to see my room, and I show it willingly. One goes up to the first floor and enters a tiny anteroom [words crossed out] in red satin, ceiling and draperies, and as the room is small, the doors and the window, painted in the Pompeian style, fill it entirely.

From there one passes into my bedroom, which is azure blue — a striking and delicious contrast; one would think oneself in heaven. The room, moreover, is like the inside of a glove box, all hung and padded with satin mingled with white lace and tulle. The bed takes the form of a shell borne on winged lions’ paws; not the least piece of useful furniture — all is poetry. From the ceiling, gathered in a sunburst, hangs a Sèvres chandelier. Beyond, a fairly spacious dressing room in light flowered cretonne, with white and pink lacquered wood. A profusion of wardrobes and mirrors; [Two words crossed out] Great armchairs that make you want to sink into them, a few light chairs; the chest of drawers is hidden beneath a mirrored shelf for a few indispensable books. Further on still, the real dressing room — bath, etc., then a closet full of cupboards, from which one comes back into the red anteroom. [Three words crossed out] All this is bright and radiant, for there are windows everywhere, onto the sea, onto the mountains, onto the Tour Audiffret.

With my visitors I went no further than the studio — I call it that because I sometimes paint there and always work there.

Journey to Russia, fatigue, expense, tears, prayers, boredom, vexation in the country, efforts to awaken some fatherly tenderness, some human feeling... All of it useless. But I do not regret having gone. This way at least I know that I have nothing to hope for from that quarter, whereas before, everything seemed to lie there. If I had not gone I should regret it all my life.

M. Constantin Bashkirtseff married the most beautiful and most virtuous of women, the daughter of the most esteemed man in the province of Poltava. He made this woman perfectly miserable, humiliating her more than words can say and reducing her — he and his sisters — to such despair that she fled to her parents, content to spend her best years in the country, as in a tomb, so long as she could live in peace. And with her beauty she could have... done everything the others have done, and they are honoured and rich and beautiful — like the Souvoroff, for example.

M. Constantin Bashkirtseff [words crossed out] gave his wife two children, for whom he has never cared. The wife is another matter — he was free to give her nothing — but the children were his.

For two years Paul has been in the country without a tutor, without a book!

I have become a young woman. What does my father do?

He comes with Mme Tutcheff to disgrace us wherever we are, by his equivocal presence and his hideous attitude.

Treat him roughly and he becomes meek and humble; but say a kind word to him and he turns arrogant, coarse, abominable. I go to his house, and in answer to all I do and say, he does all that he has done, and proposes that I come and live at Gavronzi...

Poor fool! Who knows what God has in store for us. Perhaps he will be punished in his old age for having been so infamous towards me. For I disown him.

There exists a man whose name I bear and who gave me life — and even then, were it not for my mother, I should be ugly and rotten like him — but this man is not my father. By that reckoning one ought to honour Prater; he too sires puppies... for his own pleasure.

I sat for two hours in front of the mirror and saw nothing. Tomorrow — or rather today — is our New Year.