Yesterday the marriage of Mlle Dureau to M. Henri de France — the whole Bonapartist clan, and that horrible Gavini who gave us tickets for Friday to be used today. And today is the immense Gambetta session. We go all the same in the hope of managing something, but it is impossible — it is maddening. Coquelin, whom we meet on the steps, says he had the greatest trouble obtaining a single ticket. Hecht sees us talking to Leon's friend. Being all dressed up, Maman and I go to the Marquise de Lambertye's, where there was a ball last evening. A ball like all balls; I wore one of those extraordinary toilettes that [words blacked out: only I can] carry off, for one must arrange them oneself — the dressmaker contributes only the seams. An astonishing draped gauze, wound around the body with a sash made of running bindweed flowers. They describe draped dresses, but this was not that: all the dresses one has made are stitched à la mode and then draped on top, always à la mode, ruining an artistic draping with a Louis XV point or the pure Louis XV with a modern draping; in mine it is so ravishing and so simple that all of Doucet's fitters came to look, and last evening all the women and even all the men were enchanted. I danced but did not enjoy myself... I went to Doucet's to have the famous dress redone. The skirt, which is short and trimmed with bindweed in the lining, is only visible when I sit or dance — then the feet emerge from a confusion of lace and flowers. Nothing is as elegant as a very simple top and a ruffled underskirt. There is a charming disdain for wealth in it, which lends height and wit even to a woman's moral character.

Ah! Do you think I have my mind on such things? If I speak of them it is because one must give things the place they occupy — but I am very tormented. I do nothing!!

This desperate machinery, where dancing readily becomes an accomplice to my idleness, is atrocious! One can go into society and work, and it is not an evening or two... I always had them, soirées of the third rate it is true, but former or present ones — it is still time spent in the evening. Well, that is not what prevents me from working... I have no studio; or else I am constantly interrupted — this portrait of Nini, this departure. Yes, I must leave; it will cut short this waste of life, and on returning I will take a studio away from here and work.