Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Wednesday, 21 July 1880

I have begun my treatment. They come to fetch you in a padded sedan chair. A costume of white flannel, footed trousers, and hood and cloak.
Then follow: bath, douche, drinking cure, inhalation, etc., etc. I submit to everything; this is the last time I shall take treatments, and I would not take them if I did not fear going deaf. My deafness is much better, almost well.
The Moreaus bore me. The mother is common and has a Chilean-Bordelais accent! The daughter is a careful and elegant young lady, a little too much a concierge's daughter. There is no one to whom one would wish to speak, and I have no canvases; I did not bring any and here there is nothing.
I ask myself if there is in the world a sensible being who is not a republican at heart. If one is anything else, it is through obligations or connections, or because under another regime one would have obtained what one does not obtain from the Republic. A past too compromising, parents and ideas proclaimed too loudly prevent one from rallying. But what sensible, intelligent, patriotic, and proud man can be anything but a republican?
I appeal to everyone; I do not ask that they confess it --- there is not in the world a being with a sense of his own dignity who does not agree with me in his innermost conscience.
And what a lackey's soul, what a need for base servitude one must have to be sincerely a monarchist! But there are none sincerely, as I tell you: necessities, needs, timidities, drifting along out of false shame, but otherwise never. One is royalist or Bonapartist, but it is a role, a career, a trade, and nothing else.