Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday, 31 March 1879

After the studio we go to Madame Gavini's dressmaker, where we find her. My aunt had been at the Basilewskys', where she saw the Linsingen woman — that vile baroness, the ever-obliging creature of the Souvoroffs and Doublts, in exchange for which she is kept by those ladies: herself, her husband, her children, and her lover.
This delightful creature is received everywhere — at Princesse Mathilde's, at the Orléans princes', at the embassies, at official government receptions.
So you understand what a state I am in. But I do not want to kill myself. What good would it do? I am just as dead here as I would be over there. If it is only a change of obscurity and oblivion, it is not worth it. Rest? Can one be quite sure of finding rest there? Once dead it will truly be over — whereas by living... I may perhaps find a way out. Oh yes, indeed...
No — you see — there is no denying it, nothing to be said. One must find a way out! One must live like everyone else! And this damned present society — so varied, so convenient, so amusing... it drives me to despair and furious rages. One must get into it, one must... But how!
And I have only God!
— I do not go to the studio — for I weep the whole evening in a flood of hot tears without being able to stop myself.
I write to remind you that it is not so gay as you seem to believe to be buried alive at the happy age of twenty. Only do not take my complaints for personal insults, as is your habit. I am bored in the most formal and definitive manner. One must not think that a trip to Versailles is the height of happiness. And even that enormous felicity is ruined by our way of living — for it looks rather odd, women who go nowhere and know no one. You tell me I shall marry... Very well. But is that a reason to live buried? And suppose I do not marry at all? Then what? Am I to spend my whole life shut up, making myself miserable by going now and then to order dresses? It is really not serious — you cannot believe that to be an existence, and sleep easy. Everyone goes out, everyone sees one another — I alone am condemned to solitary confinement for I know not what crime. Every time I told you this, you would answer that I was in love with someone; this time, I think, such filthy insinuations cannot be invented — and I am grown up.
Besides, I am quite foolish to tell you all this — you know it better than I do, but you pretend not to believe it in order to infuriate me. Now what new scandal will they invent about your exile in Nice? Instead of playing the role of the Duchess of Acqua Viva there (our former property — a disgraced woman with three grown daughters — a former actress) you might perhaps bestir yourself on my behalf one-tenth as much as you bestir yourself for your dear Georges — whom may the plague strangle, suffocate, and disfigure for all eternity.
I know that you will immediately write to my aunt to ask her why I am writing this and what has happened. Needless. Nothing has happened. I might perhaps remain calm if we lived in a desert. But the sounds of the outside world reach one — one hears what is going on — and all these rages accumulated over months come one day to strangle you and make you wish to dispatch yourself to the other world. It seems to me, therefore, that you might take a little trouble and write to your ravishing Anitchkoffs — those dear and devoted friends, so elegant, so aristocratic, so well-placed — so that they may find a way to give you a letter to someone at the embassy; in short, someone to introduce you — for outside of the embassy, foreigners can do nothing, and all those who tell you otherwise are idiots or liars. You might also write to Princesse Galitzine — she has, I believe, relatives here.
Finally, you might write to Pelikan. There are three people I suggest to you. Only, I beg of you, do not write to tell them that you wish to have me dance "at least once, at a ball." Simply say that, living in Paris, you have need of making connections there. (Everyone will understand that — everyone knows it is natural and indispensable — everyone except you.)
I do not think I am asking you for anything... very extraordinary — and I trust that the most holy and most intelligent Dina will not think it might damage your health. Only one must not write in a year's time — but immediately. In a year we shall perhaps all be happily rotted away.
This epistle was literally "watered with my tears" — as in Paul et Virginie.
I am content, in the end — the more I am tormented, the more surely I shall be rewarded.
I have a cold and Rosalie attributes my red eyes to that — and as I joke about it she believes her.