Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Saturday, 4 August 1877

I wager you do not know a very ordinary thing!! Which is that the entire human race is nothing but a heap of idiots!! Has my scholar not had the idea of beginning with Homer! But every doorkeeper knows Homer!
Well, I have Brunet in Nice, and I have yet another idea — to write to Rome, to the Chevalier Rossi, that uncooked lobster prancing backward... he knows priests, monks, all manner of poor devils who may perhaps be able to extricate me from this difficulty.
It is absurd to invent something and then find no one to do it! I would do it myself — but with my nerves I should go mad by the time I reached the Attic period.
Rémy called and I paid a visit to Lady Cartier. They irritate me, they vex me!
I am disgusted with everything!! What should I do in society? I have lost my assurance, my grace, my wit! I should be awkward, timid, frightened.
Well, since everything is lost, so much the better! I shall no longer have the trouble of despairing; I shall give myself up to an animal idleness and moulder in some corner or other.
At eleven o'clock the baroness came to call me and I went with Dina to join her in the dining room with the American. We stayed together until one o'clock. She had been calumniated — she is very nice; she is merely American.
[Five lines cancelled]
Naturally I drank only seltzer water. I am desperate. And by that very fact, calmer.
All is finished, all is dead, all is sacked! Health, talents, beauty or ugliness!
I no longer exist. The last energy, which expressed itself in indignations, is dead!!!

Notes

Marie writes maar (Dutch/Flemish for "but") — the reason for this code-switch is unclear. ↩