Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Sunday, 29 July 1877

[In the notebook Marie wrote the 30th]
A deadening drive in the Bois! Nothing but wigmakers and third-rate cocottes.
I tried to speak of hotels but was reproached with being ashamed of my own mother — but you may understand it did not get very far. Grand-papa shouts so loudly that one is stunned, and since the arrival of our dear cohort I am hoarse again.
It is scarcely more cheerful, and one does nothing, and I always reproach myself for a heap of things when I do nothing. I cannot understand spending an hour on something that serves no purpose, that is not for something, that does not advance one toward where one wants to go. Unless it be a true pleasure — in which case, if called to account, you answer yourself and others: "it gave me pleasure," and since that is, after all, the purpose of human life, I did well.
The purpose of human life? Yes — and here is how. Those who devote themselves, who make themselves unhappy, who die for others, find pleasure in doing so: pleasure even in their suffering. The praise of the world below, or the reward of the world above, or quite simply the pleasure of having done good at the expense of oneself. So it is that the purpose of life turns out to be that which gives pleasure — for the virtuous, as I have explained; for the wretched, otherwise.
This virtuous little digression does not prevent me from repeating to you that however much time one may have wasted, whatever foolishness one may have committed, one never regrets it (when one is rational) if one has had a true pleasure. And so I console myself for having committed... foolishnesses; I tell myself: it gave me pleasure, and the mere memory of a moment of amusement silences everything that cries out in me — for everything I do is for amusement, whether I have succeeded in one way or another... it is almost the same thing.