Thursday, 2 January 1879

What I envy is the freedom to walk alone, to come and go, to sit on the benches in the Tuileries gardens and especially the Luxembourg, to stop before artistic shop windows, to enter churches, museums, to walk in the evenings through the old streets — that is what I envy, and that is the freedom without which one cannot become a great artist.
Ah! Blast it all. This is when I rage at being a woman. I shall arrange things. Some plain clothes and a wig — I shall make myself so ugly that I shall be free as a man.
This is one of the great reasons why there are no women artists. Oh, crass ignorance — oh, savage routine!
I, for my part, shall try to show society what a woman can become — something — despite all the disadvantages with which society burdens her.