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Sunday, 17 December 1882

The true, the sole, the unique, the great Bastien comes today.

Le vrai, le seul, l'unique, le grand Bastien vient aujourd'hui.

I received him — frantic, clumsy and confused, agitated and humiliated at having nothing to show him.

Je l'ai recu, affolee, maladroite et confuse, enervee et humiliee de n'avoir rien a lui montrer.

He stays more than two hours, having looked at all the canvases in every corner — except that I kept getting in the way, nervous and laughing wrong. This great artist is very kind; he tries to calm me, and we speak of Julian, who is the author of this immense discouragement. Bastien does not treat me as a madwoman — he says what Tony says, what Julian says, only without those horrible little jests to the effect that it is finished, that I will never produce anything more, that I am lost... That is what drives me mad.

Il reste plus de deux heures apres avoir regarde toutes les toiles dans tous les coins, seulement je l'empechais de voir, nerveuse et riant de travers. Ce grand artiste est tres bon, il essaye de me calmer et on parle de Julian qui est l'auteur de cet immense decouragement. Bastien ne me traite pas en folle du monde, il dit comme Tony, comme Julian, seulement sans ces horribles plaisanteries que c'est fini, que je ne ferai plus rien, que je suis perdue... Voila ce qui m'affole.

Besides, I herewith fire these eight pages at that old monkey.¹

Du reste je decroche a ce vieux singe les huit pages que voici.

Bastien is — that is to say, I adore his talent. And I believe I found, thanks to my very agitation, delicate and unexpected flatteries — the manner in which I received him was already an enormous flattery in itself. He makes a sketch in Miss Richards's album, which she had entrusted to me so that I might draw something in it. And as the ink was passing through the page and soiling the next, he wanted to put a piece of paper between them:

Bastien est, c'est-a-dire j'adore son talent. Et je crois avoir trouve grace a mon trouble meme des flatteries delicates et imprevues, la facon dont je l'ai recu etait deja une bien grosse flatterie. Il fait un croquis dans l'album de Miss Richards qui me l'avait confie pour que j'y dessine quelque chose. Et comme l'encre passait a travers la feuille et salissait la suivante il voulut mettre un morceau de papier entre:

"Leave it, leave it — that will give her two."

- Laissez, laissez, ca lui en fera deux.

I don't know why I make Richards happy — sometimes it amuses me to give great pleasure to someone who does not expect it and who is, for me, a passer-by. When I was painting at the Grande Jatte,² one day a whole family appeared at the water's edge: the father and four or five children, in rags, with a sorry bundle of clothes — it looked like a poverty-stricken removal. I gave them two francs. One should have seen the joy, the surprise of these wretched people. I hid behind the trees. Heaven has never treated me as well as that; heaven has never had these beneficent whims — and I am no longer quite sure that...

Je ne sais pas pourquoi je fais le bonheur de Richards, quelquefois ca m'amuse de faire un grand plaisir a qui ne s'y attend pas et qui est pour moi un passant. Quand je peignais a la Grande Jatte, un jour est venu au bord de l'eau toute une famille, le pere et quatre ou cinq enfants, deguenilles avec un pauvre paquet de hardes, ca avait l'air d'un demenagement de misere. Je leur ai donne deux francs. Il fallait voir la joie, surprise de ces miserables. Je me suis cachee derriere les arbres. Le ciel ne m'a jamais si bien traitee, ce ciel n'a jamais eu de ces bienfaisantes fantaisies, et je ne suis plus bien sure que...

Notes

"That old monkey": Julian. The phrase (le vieux singe) is affectionately contemptuous — and the "eight pages" are the preceding diary pages of complaints about his teaching. ↩

The Grande Jatte: the island in the Seine at Neuilly, famous as a site for plein-air painting and Sunday recreation. Marie painted there in the summers of 1880–82, and it was also — four years later — the subject of Seurat's monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1886). ↩

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