Thursday, 3 April 1879

After all, life is good — I sing and dance when I am quite alone, for complete solitude is a great pleasure. But what a torment when it is disturbed [Words blacked out: now by my aunt, now by little Oelsnitz — that little creature makes my life bitter, as does mine by the servants and by the family — yet the] family... listen: this morning, coming back from the studio, I imagined myself happy, and you cannot believe what tenderness I found at the bottom of my heart for all my own people — for that good aunt, all devotion and self-sacrifice... but there it is — I am not happy.
Little Oelsnitz makes my life bitter. I no longer take tea because she pours it — and when I am forced to eat bread she has sliced with her own hands — I! I shall end up with an aneurism, running like a madwoman up and down stairs to make the shortest detour without her, getting ahead of her. When I take the carafe or the vinegar cruet I grasp them from the opposite side so as not to touch what she has touched. She has something of the insect about her, that poor girl — her plaintive air and her dirty fingernails both hurt and sicken me.