Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Thursday, 30 January 1879

This evening at dinner we were talking of entertaining, of going into society... Paul urges me to marry, and I reply that my mothers are waiting for some accident as picturesque as it is unexpected to deliver a prince to me — to which my aunt responds with complete sincerity and conviction that it is the most possible thing in the world.
So, say I, my cab bolts and collides with a carriage on the boulevards; a man steps out, saves me, or carries me to the Café Riche; the prince falls in adoration before my weary face, my paint-stained jabot, my black fingers — and there is the husband! And the answer I get is that it can very well happen — more than that: finding herself so well guessed, she only believes the more in these dreams!
You know how old I am? Twenty, you will say — you believe it, and I believed it too.
I am a good thirty-five, my friends, and in saying thirty-five I am being kind to myself.