Tuesday, 18 October 1881

Yesterday I began a study in the shop of the illustrious Lorenzo, and I had fever all day, and at night half-dreams, half-visions: Lorenzo's fabrics and Dumas's landscape of Spain. I kept reading in my sleep and it was so real that this morning I am quite astonished not to find in the book what I believed I had read. And the bullfights. I wanted to see what Dumas says about them. Dumas attended those fights at the time of the wedding of the Duke of Montpensier,¹ which rather changes things. Besides, in his two volumes on Spain one finds only a long succession [blacked out: of stories about how] he and his friends fed themselves, and the difficulties they had finding beds and meals. One truly needs an extraordinary wit to make one swallow so much… domestic detail. But after all, he traveled with artists, friends, witty people… Man entirely alone is a very incomplete creature — to be alone to admire some sublime work of nature or of men, very well; but alone for a journey requiring animation, ideas… Ah! I much regret Daillens — we were to go to Spain together… It would have been altogether different… Oh, my family!… My aunt asked Pollack for the address of a doctor because I am coughing… So one knows what I have — I am treated by the greatest physician in the world, who knows me and has studied my illness, I am following a course of treatment… and a doctor is required in Madrid. It is sheer imbecility! One cannot even

get angry… Ah! Yet if you were in my place! I, who am impatiently awaiting Andalusia, Seville, those beauties of nature — a painting perhaps… And Maman, who writes three times in every letter: Leave for Seville — the climate is very healthy; I have inquired — one finds pure milk and chickens there. Leave for Seville. — Amen, is it not? How fortunate some people are — and how, having everything to be so, am I not? I have enough money to come and go, to paint, to travel; one does what I want. You know the rest. I would rather lack money and not do everything I want, but not be with idiots who enrage me with their stubbornness for my own good. When one is convinced one is doing right, there is nothing to be done. My family is convinced. Were it not for this sawing, cramping, murdering fault of persecuting me out of love — I would perhaps forgive them for being neither artists, nor intelligent, nor agreeable. Ah! How fortunate some people are. No, you see — this journey with my aunt! One might as well leave for Paris tomorrow.