Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Wednesday, 14 November 1877

I went to the neighbourhood of the École de Médecine to look for various books and plaster casts. At Vasseur's — you know Vasseur, who sells every sort of human form, skeletons, and so forth — well, I have connections there, and word of me has been passed to Monsieur Mathias Duval, professor of anatomy at the Beaux-Arts, and to others, and someone will be coming to give me lessons.
I am delighted — the streets were full of students coming out of the schools, those narrow streets, those luthiers' shops — all of it, in short.
Ah! Good heavens — I have understood the magic, if one may put it so, of the Latin Quarter.
I have nothing of the woman in me but the shell — and that shell is devilishly feminine; as for the rest, it is devilishly something else. It is not I who say so, since I imagine all women are like me.
Give me the Latin Quarter — there, now! That is where I am reconciled with Paris; one feels far away, almost in Italy... in a different sort of way, I mean.
Society people — in other words, the bourgeois — will never understand me. And so it is to our own kind that I address myself.
Wretched young people — read me!
Thus my mother is horrified to see me in a shop where one sees things... oh! things. "Naked peasants." Bourgeoise! When I paint a beautiful picture, one will see only the poetry, the flower, the fruit... One never thinks about the dung. I see only the goal, the End. And I walk toward that goal.
I adore going to booksellers and to people who take me, thanks to my modest dress, for some ordinary Breslau; one is looked at in a certain benevolent, encouraging way — quite differently from before.
One morning I went with Rosalie to the studio by cab. To pay for it I gave her a twenty-franc piece.
— Oh! My poor child, I have no change.
It is so amusing.
Blanc is at our house.