Monday, 31 October 1881

I am glad that the cold is driving me away — otherwise I would not

leave — and I must go home. It is five months since I have seen Tony¹ — I must think about renting a studio and preparing my Salon, without rushing and doing all I can. The first year counted for nothing. Last year, as you know — so little time, Amélie,² etc. — and not to mention that the subject was not mine… But this year I think I have something interesting. [Blacked out: I would like to] do the interior of Lorenzo's bric-à-brac shop, which has a staircase at the back and dazzling light — with a woman mending carpets on a sort of raised platform, and in the foreground another woman crouching to clean the copper objects while the man stands watching her, hands in his pockets, smoking a cigar. The women dressed in their ordinary printed Persian-style dresses, which I shall buy on location in Madrid. And I have almost all the fabrics needed; it remains to set up the raised platform, which will cost about a hundred francs. But I need to find a studio large enough… In any case I leave this evening and cannot stop myself from singing for joy. My journey to Spain will have served to break me of the habit of eating for eating's sake, which takes time and dulls the mind; I have become of an Arab sobriety and take only the strict minimum, just enough to live on. The stepson of the gypsy chief in whose house I worked had just come out of prison, where he spent two years for having… abducted a thirteen-year-old girl.