Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday, 17 September 1877

[Two lines crossed out.]
In case Marx's Gretchen should please posterity, I beg it to be noted that this picture, which seems strange at first, set me dreaming for three days without cease. It is so entirely the personification of Goethe's poem that one can only admire it if one has understood the poem — which also struck me as a... oddity on first reading.
It is not possible to be tyrannised thus by friendships at the moment of departure. One may understand it with Mme Batourine, an acquaintance of twenty-five years' standing, who everyone here says truly loves us. But Mme Gerbel and her daughters, Mme Lisander and her daughter! With us from morning... The Lisanders are not a burden — there are people like that. But the Gerbels are overwhelming even while adoring us... At four o'clock we invade the station: 1 Maman, 2 my aunt, 3 Dina, 4 Papa, 5 Walitsky, myself last, and three servants — that makes 9. Lautrec, 10; the Gerbels, 15; the Lisanders, 17; Lanz, 18; the Liemans, 20. What kisses, my Emperor! Fie! I am a horrible egoist to mock people's goodwill.
The Lisanders and Lautrec accompany us as far as Eltville, an hour from Wiesbaden.
Thanks to three thousand five hundred kisses we took a stopping train that stopped more than it moved. Grandfather, believing himself in Russia in his own carriage, cried out — but it made no difference. Thanks to these stops I managed, after a fashion, to see Cologne — Colonia Agrippina — one of the most interesting cities in the world. These old stones, these fragments of blackened columns, are dear to me as friends, as family. I prefer them to all the Gothic cathedrals in the world; yet Cologne's is of a truly striking beauty — though I have been put off that architecture by Milan's, which I shall never be made to admire and which is so admirable, they say. But I have antipathies for churches and cities just as for men.
I went to see the house of Rubens — famous on two counts, as a plaque on the wall informs you; a plaque I would have liked to tear from the wall had I been of the royal family of France. A medallion of Rubens occupies the top of the carriage entrance. I asked whether one could go in, recalling my visit two years ago to Michelangelo's house — preserved like a shrine, entered as one enters a temple, with such reverence for the great artist that one never even thinks of mocking the glass-fronted cabinet where his slippers are kept. So I asked whether one could enter.
"La wohl, gewiss," replied the coachman, "da ist ein gutes Restauration." The wretches!

German: "Yes indeed, certainly... there is a good restaurant." [Rubens' house had become a restaurant.]
To console myself I bought a litre of Eau de Cologne and arrived that same evening in Paris.