Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Friday, 5 May 1882

I was to have lunched at the Cartwrights' with Bastien, but we have a lottery for placement and I am left with nothing but the pleasure of walking with the aforesaid Mrs. Cartwright. And I was embarrassed!... People say all manner of foolish things, but she is an American, she knows all the celebrated artists and speaks of me to them — I was introduced to Jules Breton; Maman was there as well.
That portrait of Cassagnac is abominable — do you know, he is already thirty-eight.
Ah! It is sad. Weathered skin, eyes almost puffy, withered lips, a paunch... And after dinner a man like that grows heavy and slack; if he has had one glass of wine too many his eyes close; he sinks into an armchair smoking his cigar and brooding over tomorrow's article or his financial and domestic affairs — and this is the man of my dreams, the one who is to love me one day with all the poetry of youth?...
He was eligible at thirty-two, when I first knew of him — the Bonapartist hero in his prime, newly elected, the ladies' man and duellist, always ready for any adventure — and now?
And later still?? Then it would be a lost illusion, a dream to be buried? I am beginning to think so. I should be curious to see him at close quarters. If it is true he has become quite... describable by Zola. Oh! Zola's Pot-Bouille — what filth! Say what I will, he is no less than thirty-eight and a half, and he will be forty by the time I have any real talent... And a Parisian, a journalist, a man-about-town, Mlle Acard's husband... At forty?.. Besides, any man at forty... lacks a certain freshness, and I think love ought not to be troubled by... material inconveniences. [Blackened words: It is now necessary to] answer those narrow minds who will imagine I insist on... fresh flesh... One cannot love that alone, clearly — but it must also be very hard to love someone whose intellectual poetry is spoiled by physical ugliness or deterioration. All of this ought to fit together well enough that one need say nothing about it, for good or ill.
I will add now that, however faded he may be, I still prefer a man like the Deceased to some fashionable twenty-five-year-old, or a tall, dry, and virtuous diplomat like the very correct, very elegant, very virtuous Gabriel, whose father we saw today.

Notes

A competition to determine the placement of paintings at the Salon. ↩
Pot-Bouille (1882), Zola's novel exposing the sexual hypocrisy of the Parisian bourgeoisie. ↩
Marie's ironic nickname for Cassagnac — le Défunt, "the Deceased" — suggesting he has died to her romantic imagination. ↩