Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Wednesday, 6 April 1881

I am detained until nine o'clock by my father, who begs me not to go to work — but my torso study interests me too much, and I do not see the august family again until dinner, after which they go to the theatre and I remain alone. My father does not in the least understand that one can be an artist and that this might bring glory. I sometimes think he deliberately holds such opinions.
Follow the latest polemic between Cassagnac and Mitchell — it began on Tuesday I believe and ended yesterday. Handfuls of insults and strong language.
Girardin said: "It is the discrediting of the insult."
And Cassagnac on top of it all singing his own virtues between two lines of filth against M. Mitchell. Is it I who see badly, or is it truly repugnant? But then where are the heroes, where are the pure ones, where are the genuine ones??
He is still not on the Boulevard Malesherbes, 151. Which does not prevent me from adoring this gentleman. Is it not degrading! And the Acard girl and the Couvelet mother and the child? And the imperial collapse? And the contradictions, the weaknesses, the about-faces of Le Pays? Does none of that prevent Love? It appears not. But then what is this feeling made of? Why is he the only man to whom I could say everything, with whom I picture myself happy everywhere, whom I always find in whatever situation I imagine for myself in dreams. [Words blacked out: He is the supreme] aim? Was Audiffret not that for several months? Yes, in childhood, and out of vanity. And then Antonelli? Nothing. And Larderei — a passing and degrading madness, produced by grief; I was like a woman possessed that whole winter after the Figaro article about the white basket, and Larderei was a sickly whim with his three hundred thousand francs of income in view.
But then these little fops — and Alexis and Soutzo and Gabriel — I could have made... immense things of them three years ago and even now if I had the time. I sometimes invent stories, with Gabriel and with others — but even in dreams it is not that... there is only the other one, and for himself alone. But what remains of himself.
His physical appearance? Only that??
Why then this fraternal or filial feeling, these dreams of adorable conversations, of gentle friendship? This trust — wild, boundless — this desire to confide everything to him; that he might be to me what no one in the world has been: the friend, the confidant, the other self. In novels one has schoolgirl friendships of that kind. I have never had one and do not wish for one, being certain that all such friendships cannot withstand worldly jealousies or other considerations.
Well — it is not his appearance, so what is it? I find the public man affected and false. And the private man? I have often suspected him of every kind of ignominy and still do not believe him clean — despite that indomitable self-possession which always, in spite of everything, lets him land on his feet in the well-known chivalric pose. How, judging him thus, can I think of him? There are those who love terrible things but see them as angels. But I — I am not blind? Perhaps I even judge too harshly... But then???
Let us wait before judging... Perhaps some man will appear for whom I shall feel Love, and then I shall see that for this one it was only a... mirage.
In the meantime I have only him in my heart or in my head.
But... but I would never finish — it is inexplicable. I did not think myself capable of such lowness! Can I then work myself into a state over anyone at all? Over a mountebank? But it is very dangerous — I who used to reason! And I still reason, but it serves no purpose. Am I not mad to demean in this way a man who is as good as any other and who moreover possesses a kind of glory and talent?

Thursday, 7 April 1881

We went to see Divorçons — it is delightful.

Notes

Robert Mitchell (1818–1883): French journalist and politician, editor of various republican newspapers. Cassagnac's polemic with Mitchell was one of his characteristic loud press duels; such exchanges were a staple of Paris newspaper life in the 1880s. ↩
Émile de Girardin (1802–1881): the pioneering journalist who had transformed the French press by inventing the cheap subscription model. By 1881 he was in his late seventies but still publishing in Le Voltaire; he died in late April 1881. ↩
Boulevard Malesherbes 151 was Cassagnac's Paris address — Marie regularly checks whether she might encounter him there. ↩
Divorçons (1880): a hugely successful comedy by Victorien Sardou and Émile de Najac, running at the Palais-Royal. It satirised the new divorce debates of the Third Republic. ↩