Saturday, 10 August 1878

Princess Thyra is to marry Napoleon IV... It is a blow to me.
I am furious... Dourassoff, whom I adore, did not dine; having gone to Frankfurt with my aunt, he missed the train while buying socks.
Schwarz pushed back his plate as he sat down; I immediately invited him. Then I fan myself in such a way as to make him cough. They leave for Homburg, Dourassoff returns.
This evening Mühle attempted another illumination and burned the flag. The princes returned and instead of hiding as is their habit, they hovered around us.
But Dourassoff is a brute — the like of which does not exist in the world!
Madame Doubelt writes to tell me there is lobbying under way and that my friend will probably be decorated. And Napoleon going to marry Thyra. This alliance is dangerous for the Republic. Our princess, Princess Thyra's sister, is going to Paris. Seeing this ravishing little future Empress, the French will think of her sister — who will be the wife of their probable emperor — they will let their imaginations run away with them, they will grow hungry for an empress, not the sort that Eugénie was, but a real one...
[Written across the page: Madwoman! It is not true.]
A thousand Geese!
In nearly an hour I have finished a portrait of Mühle — round, drunk, red, smiling.
But before that I painted on a size-ten canvas the Gans' balcony surmounted by the tricolour flag which marks mine.
Schwarz reclining in the hammock — impassive, pale, long. His moustache droops over the side, long as a Chinese queue; the pince-nez on his nose, the cord of the pince-nez falling lower than the moustache, and a white cat pulling the cord while regarding the public with a vexed air. Gans sits near his brother, hat pushed back on his neck and a book in hand — one can see it is a children's picture book, a red horse and a green rider; Gans smiles.
You know that I know Schwarz's face by heart like a La Fontaine fable — or rather like a canto of Dante. Full face, profile, three-quarter view, with or without hat, standing or lying down. He looks me straight in the eyes when we meet... I can draw his eye, his nose, his moustache separately — and the eye is so true to life...
Why can I not draw Cassagnac... Schwarz's eye is a large, heavy eye, slightly suffering... Where the devil does a German come by such eyes? I find him so interesting and so beautiful that I want his portrait. I shall draw it from memory, large, in charcoal.
If only he could sit for me three times... It is eleven o'clock and I am seized with a mad urge to draw, to compose — something I have never grasped despite Julian's urgings. I have just sketched our table in pen and it is very convincing; before I had never been able to place two people together.
What an idiot that Schwarz is... I loathe him when he speaks German, but I want to draw him.
There must be a kind of inspiration for every thing — otherwise do not even try.

Notes

Princess Thyra of Denmark (1853–1933) was rumoured in 1878 as a potential bride for the Prince Imperial (Napoleon Eugene Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, 1856–1879), commonly called Napoleon IV by Bonapartists. The match never materialized; Thyra married Ernest Augustus, Crown Prince of Hanover, in December 1878. The Prince Imperial died the following year in the Anglo-Zulu War.
A toile de 10 in the French standard canvas-sizing system measures approximately 55 × 46 cm (figure format).
The Académie Julian was a private art school in Paris founded in 1868 by painter Rodolphe Julian. It was one of the few schools that accepted women and allowed them to draw from the nude male model, making it crucial for aspiring female artists like Marie who were barred from the official École des Beaux-Arts.