Wednesday, 7 September 1881

I come to write in the grip of a wild rage. You know how the health persecutions enrage me: I walk into my studio and find it heated white-hot, the stove blazing, every window shut. A delicate attention from my aunt. Not four days ago I had it heated — but that was my own whim. But what is beyond all imagining is that people know these things throw me into fits of rage and they do them all the same. I ran back in, tearing off my clothes, and stood for twenty minutes in a perfect draught, shouting that one must defend oneself by any means. Can they really not understand that rages of that kind, and the extravagances that are always their consequence, do more harm than anything else! No, truly, there is a lack of intelligence all around me. Not to mention that I am genuinely more careful than people imagine — only it is so tiresome to let it show, the care one takes of oneself! Besides, what possible pleasure could I have in being uncomfortable, in suffering from cold or damp. In short, it is idiotic. Only — there is a day lost, I cannot work, and my rage grows for it! And then perhaps I have caught pleurisy, or, short of that, two months of careful nursing have been undone in twenty minutes. But they will never understand this here. It is like this in everything. That is how it comes about that — having had an absurd, useless, tiresome existence — they have wasted my finest years, and I am in no way on the road to recovering them!