Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Friday, 14 October 1881

Yesterday at seven in the morning departure for Toledo — Pollack accompanies us, and we talk the whole way: four hours of painting, studios, models; then a word recalling some operatic air and we are off into music, singing entire acts almost; then it is Victor Hugo, verses, and then jokes again. I am by turns the baby, the world-weary man, and the old art student smoking his pipe, as Pollack says. It seems that it is as the baby that I am most charming — for tired on the return I stretched out in the railway carriage and had him tell me fairy tales and everything in the world for four hours, always asking again: well, and then? Continue, tell me more — like a real child. In short I no longer know whether it is a performance or whether I have only to let myself go to my natural state to become that. You know how when one is weary, the voice weakens, the words grow confused, and one amuses oneself by playing the baby. But do not think, naïve readers, that I am spiriting Toledo away from you — never!
So much had been said to me of it that I had imagined I know not what marvel; despite good sense I persisted in picturing to myself Renaissance and Middle Ages, wonderful architectural fragments, doorways with sculptures blackened by time, ironwork balconies divinely wrought… etc. I knew well enough it was something else — but that was fixed there — and it spoiled Toledo for me when I caught sight of this Moorish city with its inevitable spare walls and chipped or apparently chipped gateways. Toledo sits all the way at the top like a citadel, and when one looks from the summit at the countryside and the Tagus, it resembles those improbable backgrounds in portraits by Leonardo da Vinci or even Velázquez — the countryside almost from a bird's-eye view, a bluish green [blacked out: that one sees] through the window beside which stands the lady or the cavalier in black or plum velvet with fine beautiful hands. As for Toledo itself, it is a labyrinth of small, narrow, irregular streets where the sun does not penetrate, where the inhabitants seem to be encamped, so little do the… houses resemble anything — a mummy, a Pompeii preserved [blacked out: entire] but seeming to crumble to dust with age; the ground scorched, the high walls burned by the sun; courtyards astounding in their picturesqueness; mosques converted into churches and whitewashed over — though they scrape away little by little, and what is uncovered is very curious: drawings, arabesques still vivid in color, ceilings of blackened wood with coffers, a sort of beams meeting strangely at the top [cancelled: are superb]. The cathedral — naturally admirable, like that of Burgos, the same profusion of ornaments. Ah! the doorways are marvels, and the cloister with its courtyard full of oleanders [blacked out: and rose-bushes grown into] the gallery and [blacked out: climbing] along the pillars with [blacked out: grave and solemn statues]. And when a ray of sunlight falls it is an incomparable poetry. Besides, Spanish churches are something one cannot imagine. The guides in rags, the sacristans in velvet, the foreigners, the dogs — all walk about, pray, bark, etc. And it is of a strange charm — one wishes, just there, in coming out of a chapel, to encounter suddenly behind a pillar "the idol of one's soul." It is incredible that a country so close to the center of European corruption should still be so new, so virgin, so wild. At Toledo one is at the back of beyond, it seems… I don't know — there is too much to see, and I was there only a few hours. Yet I shall return to paint a certain entirely black street… In short… It is very strange, and those little columns, pilasters,
ceilings, old doorways with large Spanish and Moorish iron studs — jewels, marvels as they say. But it was hot, I saw poorly — or rather I had known it in advance… The Moors and the Spanish… it is haughty, storied, dry, melancholy. I knew this before setting foot in Spain. It is picturesque — [blacked out: everything] is a painting, one does not even need to… choose; everything is strange and interesting — but it has not the sympathies of my heart… seeing it better, perhaps… But it is this mixture of Goths, Arabs, and Spaniards — in any case that is not my concern. The Coro of the cathedral is truly a marvel, however — the choir stalls with historical bas-reliefs in carved wood, so detailed and of such finesse that one [blacked out: is seized] with admiration. Ah! As I said, the cathedral is prodigious in elegance, richness, and above all lightness — it seems as though those little columns and chiseled details and vaults cannot resist time, one fears that such treasures must fall to ruin, it is so beautiful it feels like a personal anxiety — yet it is four or five centuries since this prodigy of patience has been [blacked out: standing], indestructible and admirable. I tell you, the thought one carries away from there is: let's hope it lasts! And a dread that it may be damaged, deteriorated, worn away — I would wish that one had no right to touch this creation with a fingertip, and the people walking through it are already guilty, for it seems to me they contribute to the very slow but inevitable destruction of the marvelous edifice — I know well that for centuries still, but… And on leaving it, the great crenellated walls with their Arab windows, dried out in the sun; the mosques with their grandiose successions of pillars with [blacked out: arabesque] ornaments. Go to Rome then, to watch the sun set behind the dome and all those prodigious baubles — all those elegances of carved stone on Gothic and Arab doorways — all those marvels, thin and brittle, of a [blacked out: proud] and disquieting character. All of that will fall away like scales and seem to you mere puerile ornaments leaving uncovered some fine marble temple. I look at the photographs of Toledo — it seems to me I was mistaken; I saw poorly… There is something constrained about Pollack — he does nothing, being always here, and his family is, I think, displeased.