Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Saturday, 18 August 1877

My uncle Etienne arrived this evening; we spoke of Russian affairs... of the injustices of Alexandre — (Uncle Alexandre) — and I am very irritated, knowing nothing and being able to do nothing about any of it.
The most disagreeable of all the barons spoke to me of Le Figaro's account of the Nice races. It is the counterpart of what Broussais said about Antonelli.
My God! If only this treatment could end!... Fauvel says that in a few days I shall be able to leave.
"My surgeon promises me that by the end of the week I shall be able to leave" (extract from the historic letters of Alexandre).
When I was reading Homer I compared my aunt in a rage to Hecuba in the burning of Troy. However dull one may be, and however ashamed to confess one's classical enthusiasms, no one it seems to me can escape this adoration of the ancients. One may well have a reluctance to repeat the same thing always, one may fear appearing to copy down what one has read in professional admirers, or to repeat one's teacher's words. In Paris above all one does not dare speak of such things — one truly does not dare. And yet no modern drama, no novel, no sensation comedy — by Dumas or by George Sand — has left me a memory as clear or an impression as deep, as natural, as the description of the fall of Troy. I seem to have witnessed those horrors, to have heard the cries, seen the fire, been with the family of Priam — with those wretched people who hid behind the altars of their gods, where the sinister glow of the flames devouring their city would seek them out and deliver them up.
And who can resist a slight shiver on reading the apparition of the ghost of Creüsa.
But when I think of Hector, who came down from his ramparts with such excellent intentions, fleeing before Achilles and running three times around the city always pursued... I laugh!
And the hero who, threading a strap through or around the feet of his dead enemy, drags him seven times around those same walls — I picture a horrible little boy galloping on a hobby-horse with an enormous wooden sword at his side.
I do not know... but it seems to me that in Rome alone could I satisfy my universal reveries.
There one is as if at the summit of the world. I have thrown to the devil the Journal d'un diplomate en Italie — that French elegance, that politeness, that commonplace admiration, offend me on Rome's behalf. A Frenchman always seems to me to be dissecting things with a long instrument he holds delicately between his fingers; a lorgnette on his nose.
Rome must be as a city [four pages torn] what I imagined myself to be as a woman. Every word used before and for others, applied to... us, is a profanation. Us? No — for I am nothing, and I dare nothing any longer.
Manara is in Paris.

Notes

Uncle Alexandre: Marie's uncle by marriage, not Alexandre Larderei, the young man she is in love with. ↩
Hecuba: Queen of Troy, wife of Priam. In Homer's Iliad, she watches from the walls as her city burns and her son Hector is slain. Marie compares her rage-transformed aunt to this archetype of grief-become-fury. ↩
Creüsa: wife of Aeneas, lost in the fall of Troy. Her ghost appears to Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid (Book II) to urge him to flee and seek a new homeland. Marie's shiver is Virgilian, not Homeric — a characteristic conflation of the two classical epics. ↩
Marie refers to Iliad Book XXIV: Achilles dragging Hector's body around the walls of Troy in revenge for Patroclus's death. The image of the mighty hero reduced to a boy on a hobby-horse is characteristic Marie — the classic punctured by an irreverent domestic analogy. ↩
Journal d'un diplomate en Italie: the book by the Comte Henri d'Ideville (1874), which Marie mentioned throwing away in the earlier August entries. Its polished, detached Parisian manner strikes her as inadequate to the grandeur of Rome. ↩