Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Friday, 5 January 1883

Gavini has us admitted through the privileged doors. I could feel myself growing pale already in the courtyard — the men with preoccupied faces, the wreaths, the reddened eyes — and finally the imposing, grandiose catafalque, and that hall entirely draped in black, made small by the number of wreaths and the avalanches of flowers. The lights after the sunlight; the coffin up high beneath the canopy between the four black columns wrapped in tricolour flags...
I began to weep at the moment Maman brought Hecht to me — the enemy, who was also weeping, [words blacked out: while pressing my hands] and repeating: "Oh! thank you, thank you!"
I made a gesture, smiling, to excuse myself for weeping, and he came back several times; and at the door — where, cooled down already, I wanted to pass without looking at him — he pressed both my hands again with his tearful: "thank you, thank you." In any case the great man has brought me back to the realities of life — as has poor Gavini, who had taken Hecht for Bastien-Lepage and had overwhelmed him with attentions.

Notes

Hecht: probably Albert Hecht, a Republican sympathiser of modest literary connections. He interprets Marie's tears as political solidarity — and she does not disillusion him. The comedy of Gavini mistaking him for the celebrated painter Bastien-Lepage is characteristic of the social confusions that attended great public occasions. ↩