Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday, 10 March 1879

I arrived five minutes early and worked hard — not too hard; I needed to make up for the fifteen days spent away. I am sorry you could not have been there. I was amusing — stunning, as Captain Blanc would say — but no, "stunning" sounds vulgar.
I said, laughing, disagreeable things to all who were capable of understanding the implications — and then retorts, interruptions, remarks — in short, I am more furious than ever at being condemned to the obscurity of the feminine career... At the studio it still passes, but elsewhere — besides or elsewhere — where do you expect me to play the orator? And at the studio they are not the most refined in taste: one will laugh heartily when one of them, having repeatedly asked me to make the model resume her exact pose, I reply: "Good heavens, do you think I am her mother!" Or one will be delighted when one of them, looking for a cork, asks "Who took my bouchon?" and I reply with a straight face that it must be the most bouchée among us... You understand — it is humiliating. These are the boyish pranks that must be common among male students and that we lack because there are so many spinsters and foreigners.
I must confess that, however common it may be, I adore genuine pranks and hoaxes.
I am young — "when I am thirty, when I am a settled man..." — I swear I was in good faith up to the second moment, when the rest I thought only for a minute. I paid Julian and we talked about all manner of things.
I saw Schaeppi, who has returned from Switzerland and is distressed at having no money to come and work. I swear to you that if I manage to get hold of three hundred francs I shall pay for a six-month subscription for her.
Mademoiselle Collignon came. She is so foolish! She stands on ceremony with us, is overly formal. Her brother came to fetch her, and I was pointedly kind. I know they are in straitened circumstances — it is for that very reason the young woman fears to come too often. When one has 50,000 francs of income one goes to dine with friends every day; but if one is poor one fears to do so. With friends it is the same — but it is this devil of a delicacy that makes one think one is thought... you understand me. No matter — if one did good to this person... I do not believe her capable of gratitude; in fact it would be all the same to me. If I did it, it would be for myself... I prefer ingratitude — it doesn't soften one, and one can laugh at the rogue you have obliged who seems to be defying you. I like people who do not feel kindnesses; they are not weighed down by them, they do not hate you, and you can look at them without making them uneasy.
Now there are no doubt rarities, exceptions all the more charming for being so — but as there are only three or eight percent of them, I have not been in contact with enough people to have found any.