Sunday, 18 December 1881

Visitors all day. Gavini, de Maufras, M. and Mme Gaillard, Turquan. Everyone admires my Spanish studies. Maufras goes down on his knees before them, closes one eye and peers through the other through a monocle with a dark glass, as against the sun. He is quite mad, by the way. He apparently gets up at night, sets his wife at the piano and dances with the maid. He has a sixteen-year-old daughter, and the two poor women are quite stupefied by his eccentricities. Alexis dines with us, and Julian, arriving around nine, finds him sitting opposite me and looking very handsome. Julian believes, as you know, that Alexis is in love with me and that I flirt with him. There may have been something in that, long ago and for a few days, but just now poor Alexis has taken me aside and spent an hour exhorting me to take care of myself — in my ear, so that my family would not be alarmed... "How can you, you who have everything in the world, compromise so fine an existence through recklessness, imprudence, folly!" and so on. Then a kiss on the hand and an oath of brotherly love. As for Julian, he tells me that Breslau brought him some sketches and studies, and that there are truly remarkable things among them. He insists, swearing it, that as a painter I will easily surpass her — but that these drawings are extraordinary, and that I am mad not to listen to him, he who has told me for three years to compose anything, in any way, but every day; to remember impressions, fix them on the spot and draw them afterward. She was not doing it before; it is only in the last two or three years that she has done it. I remember she always used to say she did not feel it and that she was forcing herself to develop this faculty. She has arrived there... That is an iron will. That

girl surpasses me from afar. Besides, most of her convictions were drummed into her by me. I put her nose into Bastien-Lepage, and I believe I also make a certain impression on her. Then she has done a large canvas this summer (and I?) — a fisherwoman at the seashore. It must be very good, and right in the taste of the moment. I am certain it is very good. And I — nothing. Oh, poor Cassagnac, you never stung me to the heart as sharply as all this does. I feel as though I were wounded; I feel something almost like physical pain. Then afterward, complaints to Julian, a tête-à-tête in which he tries to console me — that is, to give me courage by exhorting me to make sketches every day of whatever strikes me. What strikes me?... And what do you expect one to find in the banal surroundings in which I live. Breslau is poor, true, but she lives in an eminently artistic sphere. Her closest friend Maria is a musician, and furthermore [two lines blacked out, illegible] whichever way one looks at her. Schaeppi is original, though common, [words blacked out] — another artist. And there is a ridiculous poet with long hair, and Sarah Purser, painter and philosopher, with whom one has endless discussions about Kantianism and so on, and about life and the self and death — discussions that make one think and that engrave upon the mind what one has read or heard. And others I have not known since we became estranged two years ago. And I? My family, ignorant and bourgeois? Saint-Amand, cracked and forever repeating the same social inanities? Tchernitsky, mad about wood? And then? That is all. Down to the very neighbourhood she lives in — the Ternes; and my quarter, so clean, so uniform, where one sees neither a ragged woman, nor an unpruned tree, nor a winding street. In short, I am complaining against fortune. No — but I note that ease impedes artistic development, and that the milieu in which one lives is half the man.