Monday, 27 February 1882

After a thousand torments I slashed my canvas. The urchins would not pose; attributing these failures to my own incapacity I kept starting again — and in the end... It is just as well; those dreadful monsters were fidgeting, laughing, shouting, fighting... In the end I am simply making a study, so as to be tortured no more by pictures — everything I undertook became, after twenty-four hours, hackneyed or sentimental or banal or clumsy or pretentious, after having greatly pleased me at first... Besides, it is better to do simple studies; I am in such a critical passage (what sort of French is that!)

So humiliated by my inferiority, so shaken by Breslau, that I am left helpless. And how much time wasted — Biarritz, the illness, and already a month here!! If I had not chased after pictures like a fool, or rather if I had not been half stunned by those few lines of Wolff's... There is only one way to set myself back on my feet: to bring back things that will be found very good — but there it is...