Friday, 10 May 1878

The Swedish ladies told me that Mme Boje has taken up with her singing teacher and is going to try opera. Her husband and children are returning to Sweden, and her mother Mme Indebetten is coming to live with her.

Julian, who is a Bonapartist, came to talk with me about the pit in which Paul de Cassagnac finds himself. Defections everywhere. I have followed the appearances of the pamphlets, the letters, the articles. As for him, he has burned his bridges too often to be able to turn back.

He will be left all alone if this goes on.

He will only have the more charm for women, the more greatness for men, because of it. I know what they say... Dr Michel said it again this evening when I told him of the famous marriage — he said after much hesitation that he will never marry because he has a golden chain about his neck. This is a vile slander and entirely improbable. His newspaper has a print run of four thousand, four thousand five hundred, but with his deputy’s salary he has in all twenty to twenty-four thousand francs a year. He appears no more prosperous than that. The house costs four thousand francs a year. As for servants, there is the valet, his daughter and his wife — a stout cook — who opens the door and, if the visitors are women, turns her head away and flees with a great discretion that speaks volumes about the ways of the household. And there are foul serpents who hiss that he is kept by a woman, and that the Empress gives him money... The latter is very natural — but for the party, not for himself.

Where would he put such money, since he barely appears to have his twenty-four thousand francs!

Mouzay, who is dining here, tells us that his daughter says of me: every time I see Marie, she amuses me like an illustrated book.

Blanc, who is also dining, complains of his friend’s Faubourg Saint-Germain tendencies — women may call themselves Bonapartists, he says, but they are all Faubourg Saint-Germain at heart, and since it is they who lead him...

That ignoble frigate captain tells us that his friend has been enquiring about us in general and about my intellectual faculties in particular. It is perhaps the first time he has spoken of it without our bringing it up first. I pretend to be angry, put on a veil, and speak of marrying Gambetta, which always makes him genuinely angry. If you knew how grotesque that man seems to me when he tries to play the Cassagnac — prostrating himself, remaining on his knees, then kissing my hand. He thinks himself full of grace; he wishes to be amusing, and is only ridiculous.

— Is she rich, this Mlle Acard? asked Breslau.

— Not at all.

— Then... why on earth is he marrying her?!

— Because she pleased him.

— Because she pleased him?... But how very strange that you did not please him...

It was said with such conviction that, coming from this intelligent girl — morally crippled though she is — I am flattered by it.

Alas! It is not surprising. I, as that scoundrel Blanc puts it, am a phenomenon. I know everything, I can learn anything I wish, I am “astonishing, stupefying, strange, amusing” — but all that frightens people. I am “too strong, too clever” — men do not like to be inferior to a woman.

Fools, though, ought not to be afraid — when I speak to them I do as with people who don’t speak French: instead of saying, will you drink? I say:

You wanting to drink water, you having thirst? I do it quite involuntarily, I assure you.

And the more good feelings I have, the more I suppress them inwardly, and the more fire and flame I throw outward.

— About others you show judgement, said the eternal captain, but when you speak of yourself you don’t know what you are saying.

— You are not very clever, Blanc, I replied, if you think I would ever debase myself so far as to speak sincerely about myself.

O Blanc! You let me understand that if I were not such a phenomenon, you would dare look at me as a woman.

O Blanc! O my captain.

You also said that men who weep beat their wives. O my captain.