Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Sunday, 24 December 1882

Saint-Amand and Géry come to prevent me from working.
The portrait being finished, I send him this morning four thousand francs in an envelope and a basket of flowers from Vaillant, the incomparable artist in flowers. An immense, ravishing basket.
He was positively overcome, Rosalie says; I wager that this artist who came to age in this "modern" century — this artist of 1835 — has never received anything like it. He did not even give Rosalie five francs. Although his portrait is bourgeois, Orleanist, etc., etc., I treated him graciously — one does this for oneself, and besides it avoids having to write a tiresome letter that would otherwise have to accompany the bank notes.
Ah! it is not Bastien who would make such a portrait. I had imagined Tony would do it draped, Grecian, fine, pure, with well-drawn forms. And instead he shows me as a young lady in an armchair with a fan in her hand.

Notes

Vaillant: the most celebrated florist in Paris at the time, known for spectacular arrangements. Sending flowers from Vaillant's was a gesture of the first order. ↩
Orleanist: in French political and aesthetic vocabulary, orléaniste meant belonging to the style and taste of the bourgeois monarchist establishment under Louis-Philippe (1830–48) — respectable, conventional, unimaginative. The worst thing Marie could say about a painting. ↩