Wednesday, 22 October 1879

They come to bother me because my window is open and I might catch a chest cold! That is just like them. You know the life they make me lead, you know that I am buried alive and they come to overwhelm me with worries about my health... Yesterday I read the account of a dinner at Emile de Girardin's in honor of M. Gladstone, several ladies are mentioned. This had the effect on me that... things relating to the Couvelet marriage have. So it is proof that I have never loved anyone... no, but when one suffers as much as I one cannot love. My dear mother says that one torments and frets oneself as long as one is not fixed by love. I wonder why she does not say that I would cease wanting to see people when I can sleep with a man.
I would like to speak even more crudely in my exasperation.
I write and I weep with rage. I weep for myself, nothing moves me like when I pity my own fate, I laugh but it is serious.
O my God.
I no longer even have the resource of going to quarrel with my good and dear family to calm myself. It serves no purpose! I am condemned to rot in a corner and meanwhile my mother goes out dressed in old black wool dresses and holed gloves like the aunt of a second-rate courtesan.
Life is a beautiful thing, mine especially.