Saturday, 4 May 1878

I believe him capable of wicked things — myself as well.
There are moments when one would send the intellectual furnace, glory, and painting all to the devil, to go live in Italy — to live on sunshine, music, and love.
Wretched Paris.
[Several words crossed out]
The newspapers described our Easter, the embassy supper, and we are mentioned by name. I know it is thanks to little Karageorgevitch, who spends his life among journalists.
Gloriae Cupididas
Book the 80th
begun Saturday 4 May 1878 — ended Saturday 22 June 1878 — Paris, avenue de l'Alma 67
Annotation:
Nude woman, head in shadow, the body in light — for Florence; a boys' school seen from the sea in the distance, the bridge.
Robert-Fleury gave me a thirty-five-minute lesson. What is astonishing is that Cassagnac does not reply at all — that has never happened before.
After Tuesday evening I thought he would truly come, especially since he had wanted to come Thursday, and I had not wished it, and he more or less invited himself — which I rather like. A disappointed expectation, whatever one is waiting for, is one of the things that disturbs me most, above all when it is the visit of a brother for whom one has a friendship as eternal as it is disinterested. The evening we found him in blue, he inspired in me the same feeling I have upon arriving in a great city — a thirst for possession [sic] that has nothing exclusive or tender about it.
I had the stupidity of wanting to drape my dress between five and seven o'clock. It frayed my nerves to the point of rendering me incapable of arranging my hair, which I undid twenty times. This numbing task leaves me good for nothing, and I am thoroughly irritated while Mme Yorke dines; then in the evening, de Daillens, M. d'Andigné and Goldsmid.
It is as though I am afraid of something.
I adore everything that is simple — painting, feelings, everything...! I have never had simple feelings and I never shall, for they are impossible where there are doubts and apprehensions grounded in past events. Simple feelings can exist only in happiness, or in the country, in ignorance of all those things which...
I am an essentially scheming nature — partly from an excess of subtlety, partly from vanity, the desire to analyse, the pursuit of truth, the fear of going wrong, of failing.
Well, when the heart or mind is tormented by all these things, one arrives only at exhausted results — which may well be violent, but are also subject to strange reversals, to exaltations, to collapses; in short, an absolute and tormenting unevenness which, all told, is preferable to absolute evenness, which, as they say, wearies one and excludes those extremely delicate nuances that must give supreme pleasures to the sensitive, to the [word blotted: schemers] who want refinement in greatness, even in the sublime — without which one never achieves effects as powerful or as vivid.
One might think I know something about it. I only know that I write my fancies and steal nothing from anyone.

Notes

Latin: Gloriae Cupiditas — Desire for Glory (Marie's motto; her spelling).