Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Tuesday, 5 October 1880

I had a fever all day yesterday.
My dear aunt contributed somewhat by making me angry with the usual petty harassments.
First there were bitter complaints in front of Wodzinski so that he might go about spreading everywhere that I am a pretty little monster who drives my family to despair.
I always wonder whether my family does this out of cowardly hypocrisy or stupidity.
It must be stupidity, because after all it is "for my own good" — it is so that I take care of myself, that I do not go to the studio, etc.
Then the little tricks — not sending for the carriage while saying they have, to make me late.
You can picture it — or else sending Rosalie on errands at the hour when I rise, to prevent me from being ready for the studio.
You can imagine how well that works. I get up, I shout, I call; I break a bell-pull, I catch cold walking about naked and wet, finding neither my dressing gown nor my undergarments. In short, it would be very amusing if it were not so hopelessly stupid and infuriating.
Oh, the sinister idiots!
It is through these ministrations that they think to cure me.
The hell I find outside, they organize for me inside my own home so that I have nowhere left to hide.
But then again, I have too many enemies.
What have I done to Hecht, for example?
Existence is no longer possible — to begin with there is Nice, all the faces from Nice make me lower my eyes; then Rome, which is worse still... Let me only go to the Bois and I shall encounter God knows how many witnesses to my humiliations.
And my aunt!
Oh! That one, when she starts making so-called gossip about ladies she knows only by sight!
No, you see, it is enough to make one weep.
Saint-Amand, for example, knows everyone; well, she will go and tell him the most preposterous stories, and all this in the hope of mitigating what those people might say about us.
No, you see, there is nothing to be done.
And it is the same in everything.
For four years I have been treating a laryngitis with the most celebrated doctors, and it goes from bad to worse.
For four days my ears were fine, I could hear well; now it is starting again.
Well, see — I shall be a prophet.
I am going to die, but not right away — right away would put an end to everything, that would be too good.
I shall drag on with my colds, my cough, fevers, all sorts of things; I shall die as I have lived — wretchedly.
In four years perhaps.
Gabriel is not what I thought, and those charming tones I admire occur apropos of everything.
Thus he will pay you a compliment with a deeply sincere air, and a minute later he will say with the same air that Madame X is exquisite and Mademoiselle Y ravishing, or that tomorrow he will dine at a restaurant.
One is taken in at first, then one discovers that it is merely a quality of his voice and nothing more.
Berthe came to dinner, very elegant, with expensive things, jewels, a dress of eleven hundred francs.
Is it possible that it is What's-his-name who pays?
And if so, how does she manage it?
For after all, it is vile to have oneself paid for.
To resign oneself, or rather to gather oneself together, ~~one knows that~~ to penetrate to the depths of one's being, and then to ask oneself whether all that is not a matter of indifference.
To have lived in one way or another — what does it matter?
To conquer one's sensations and tell oneself with Epictetus that one is master enough to take evil for good, or rather to remain indifferent to what happens.
One must have suffered horribly to accept departing from life through this kind of death, and it is only after unheard-of sufferings and complete despair that one begins to understand the possibility of this living death.
But after all, if one really applied oneself to it, one would at least be at peace... It is not an idle dream, it is a possible thing.
But why live then? you will say.
And because one came into the world — it is obvious that it thus becomes useless to live; so it is only after having fully recognized that real life is for you an endless source of suffering that one accepts the other, or hides from the first in the second.
Having reached a certain point of physical pain, one loses consciousness or falls into ecstasy; the same is true of moral sufferings — having reached a certain point, one soars, one is astonished at having suffered, one scorns everything and walks with head held high like the martyrs.
What does it matter after all whether the fifty years I have to live are spent at the bottom of a dungeon or in palaces, among people or in solitude?
The end is the same; the sensations enclosed between the beginning and the end, which leave no trace — that is what preoccupies us.
What does a thing matter that does not last and leaves no trace?
I can make use of my life by working; I shall have talent perhaps, that leaves traces... After my death.