Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Tuesday, 8 August 1882

I have seen in a dream again the thirty-eight-year-old journalist — in fact, he will be thirty-nine on the coming 2nd of December, and I, on the 26th of November, twenty-four. We are growing old.
As for me, if I made great progress at first it was in order to produce this famous portrait. For three days I have been sitting and doing nothing; it seems to me that everything is over, that I can do nothing!...
I have sat again; my aunt brings me, goes off to do errands, and comes back, as every day. But my head is rather troubled by Daudet's Les Rois en exil, which I had already read but is beginning again; there are such delightful pages in it, such delicacy of analysis, such clarity of expression — I am enchanted — things that make one weep. Things of feeling... It is Tony too who makes me think of it this evening. He is sad: his father is eighty-six years old and his mother seventy-five; his brother-in-law is dying; he will be left with only his sister, who has her own children. There he is, quite alone, spending his evenings in solitude, bored and complaining of it. As I told you, he is a sentimental creature, and so he has ended up saying he will end by marrying... And then I, as if I were a bachelor myself, begin to think... That is to say, I begin to follow the feelings of others; it happens to me often — this is how novelists must proceed, it seems to me, is it not?
One almost gets under people's skin and thinks with or for them — it is a flight outside oneself that can become a passion, and then... Les Rois en exil. Oh, the delightful and touching things. Méraut's love for the queen. Love is beautiful. But where am I to find this extraordinary man, this hero... For he must be a hero — the word, though made ridiculous, is the right one.
Tony and his matrimonialism... It is sentimental, calm... like when I thought of Gabriel... But art needs the whole person; hence, one is told, the artist must renounce love or marry... It is better to marry, for art comes first — well yes, but women do not need as much as men what... Dumas fils calls love... Oh, to paint my picture, oh, to have talent. This portrait is wasting my time! This ordinary portrait, not even pretty. It is no life — when I don't work, everything abandons me; painting, I imagine I am weaving my happiness; idle, everything stops — night and silence.
Not to mention this great grief, this atrocity of hearing poorly — it is especially when I am sitting, and I am horribly humiliated by the indulgence with which Tony speaks to me without raising his voice too much...
In company, at the theatre, it doesn't show; but in a group of two or three, in quiet conversation, I am deaf. It comes from my throat ailment. I have tried to speak of it but lack the strength, and I have never managed more than to say half-heartedly that my throat is ill, that it rises there into my head, into my ears, that it is quite tiresome. And Tony advises me to see a proper doctor who will put it right.