Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Friday, 15 April 1881

An article has appeared in Gil Blas about Berthe — everything is there except the names, which even the least perceptive can guess. The story with Blanc, the cheque for a hundred thousand francs that Robert cashed, keeping ten thousand for himself. All the sordid details and things I did not want to believe when the young Karageorgevitchs told them. But this newspaper article is nothing compared to the rest — tradespeople down to the little dressmaker say openly, shamelessly, that she has become a kept woman. She supped, went out, and went to the theatre with Laure Hermann and la Peeger this past winter in Nice.
However monstrous it may seem, it comes from so many quarters that one is forced to believe it. And to crown everything, she has left her mother's apartment and installed herself at 4 rue Le Pelletier.
It is dreadful, but everything conspired as if on purpose. First Berthe's extravagant nature, and then above all Robert. He has brought it all about — and before marrying her he was perhaps already thinking of trafficking in her. I guessed the vile creature's character from the very first.

Saturday, 16 April 1881

I dreamed of Cassagnac — he had committed suicide; I walked through puddles of his blood, then flinging myself into his arms I cried that I wished to die with him.
Then it was at Julian's, who showed me with a sneer Cassagnac lying on an improvised bed and rejoiced at the spectacle of this romance — me nursing the wounded man. There was a great crowd around, and I kept hiding so as not to be seen by Cassagnac, who after twenty-four hours was quite recovered, at which I was somehow displeased.
On that I woke with regret. Is it not humiliating to keep returning always to this man who perhaps no longer knows whether I exist, who never thought of me as someone agreeable, who has a poor opinion of me, whom I knew when my mind was only half-formed — saying blundering, extravagant things... In short, a great many rough edges that have since been rounded off. Perhaps I was more interesting then... all that, all that, all that... In short, what is clear, and what must explain everything: you know what he is to me. And I am Nothing to him.
There is something both humiliating and foolish in it! But truly it is mad, idiotic, imbecilic — it is provincial, it is caretaker-class, it is bourgeois, it is old-maidish — to cling in this way to the memory of an indifferent man!!
Here in the middle of Paris, with painting in full progress, I have been so obstinately fixed on this same idea for nearly three years — the three years since he married?!! If it were the famous Love — well, I should be suffering from it, since one is apparently made ill by it, one dies of it. I am indeed ill, but it is not on account of that. It is simply a ridiculous side of my nature, or else I am becoming an old maid at twenty-two — but I have always been like this. And then the lack of distraction: I am in the middle of Paris, yet for every once that I go out I live shut in for months. A slight creature like Gabriel could hardly distract me. In sum, if this clerical Cassagnac were nothing to me, I should not think of him in any case — I should be entirely reclusive.
I had myself photographed at Waléry's in costume — Dina too. We have company: Tchoumakoff, Goldsmid, Kireyewsky, and Mme Gavini who stays a long time and recounts that Appletcheieff has declared he bears Mme Gavini eternal hatred because she got us invited to Dalmas's and because Le Sport speaks of me and not of his wife. It is no doubt he too who gossipped at the Queen's. Mme Gavini received an invitation; we did not. The Queen invited verbally, but it is the Altavillas who send out the cards — and after Appletcheieff they no doubt made enquiries at the embassy with Bachmetieff. So that is complete. And all this because of the lawsuit! Good Lord! My father himself says there is not enough in it to whip a cat, and that if instead of tacking, temporising, and dragging things out they would go to Russia and finish it there would be nothing left of it. Like the Soulima affair! — how much was said about it, what a commotion it made, how much one was dragged through the mud for it! (The Babanine brothers boxed an ispravnik's ears.) Maman, the moment she arrived in Russia, presented herself and was immediately removed from the affair in court since she had no business being mixed up in it. I write like a drunkard but these things are too vexing for me to express them well.
You will never form any idea of the ineptitude of my family! One might think they had some particular interest in harming themselves. The other day my father spoke at length to my aunt to persuade her to leave. Much good that did! She believes it elegant to speak ill of Russia and strikes poses.
Ah — it is enough to make one sing with fury.
In the meantime it is I who suffer. Not to be invited to the Queen's... people will notice this — and [word blacked out: Cassagnac] may also get to [word blacked out: know]. In the end it becomes amusing, it is so persistent. I am flattered by heaven's attention and determination in persecuting me.

Notes

Gil Blas: a Parisian daily newspaper founded 1879, known for literary content and gossip columns. It was where many writers published their first work. An exposé without full names was a standard way of airing scandal while maintaining deniability. ↩
Rue Le Pelletier: a street in the 9th arrondissement, near the Opéra, associated in this period with fashionable kept women and demi-monde apartments. ↩
Waléry: the fashionable Paris photographer Stanisław Julian Ostrowoski, known as Waléry (1838–1900), who had studios at 39 boulevard des Capucines. He photographed the great beauties and celebrities of the era. ↩
An ispravnik was a Russian district police chief. The Babanine-Soulima affair appears to be a family legal entanglement from their Russian estates, involving an assault on a local official — the kind of provincial dispute that dragged on for years through Russian bureaucratic courts. ↩