Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday, 8 January 1883

Truly this man filled France and almost Europe. Everyone must feel that someone is missing; it seems there is nothing left to read in the newspapers, nothing left to do in the Chamber. There are doubtless more useful men — obscure ones, workers, inventors, patient administrators... They will never have this prestige, this magic, this power. To excite enthusiasm, devotion, to rally [words blacked out: to run between parties] — to be the heroic mouthpiece of the nation: is that not useful, skilful, admirable? To embody one's country, to be the flag towards which all eyes turn in the moment of danger... Is that not more than all those cabinet merits, those virtuous and wise abilities of [word blacked out] ripened [minds]? Good God — if Victor Hugo were to die this evening it would mean nothing to anyone; his work is there whatever happens, and it matters little whether he died today or ten years ago — besides, he has accomplished his career. But Gambetta was life, the daylight renewed each morning; he was the soul of the Republic; he was the glory, the fall, the triumph or the ridicule of the entire country. He was events; he was the word; he was an epic in action and in speech of which not a gesture nor an inflection of voice will ever be recaptured. Prodigious incarnation of a party that is almost the whole of France — and in any case the dispenser of everything that made hearts vibrate with sympathy, fear, envy, admiration, or hatred.
And it is over for ever.
What will become of Rochefort — and about what will he be witty? And who will now prevent the development of M. Clemenceau's talent?
At Père Lachaise there was a tremendous procession of the people. Never, a newspaper says, has such a day-after been seen.
If I had had the happiness of knowing this man, I do not know what I should have become by now...
The illness and death of Gambetta,
Germany and Gambetta,
The demonstrations,
The wreaths,
Gambetta in private, etc.
One reads this in the newspapers and it seems so incredible, so atrocious, so unjust, like...
My family thinks I am very silly to remain prostrated over things that do not concern me. And Dusautoy says that such feelings have this horror about them — that I would always prefer to my own man, to a man who had given me his soul and his life, some great man, some hero with whom I may perhaps not have spoken twice, and to whom I shall devote myself. There is no danger — I shall never have so much happiness; I always pass beside it, or below.
It is sad, all the same.
My portrait has been "delivered." It is a veritable horror. I am not ugly in it — but I am making an extraordinary grimace; one would say I had been impaled, I am so stiff; I look as though I am afraid of falling out of the armchair. The eyes [words blacked out: vacant and] wide open stare into the void; the nose is hard and thick. But the crowning touch is the mouth — which is pretty in reality — rendered with a pinched grimace [word blacked out: of a smile] that balloons the cheeks. You know that I protest against such a representation for posterity. When it was brought, the servants came to say that someone had sent me a painting. What is it? — It is a lady in white. And when Rosalie says it is me, the others reply: "That Rosalie — what a joker, she always talks nonsense." Four thousand francs is steep for a grimace with no artistic value. The background is very dark red, thick, opaque — and above it shoulders lacking atmosphere, and this abominable head. The hands are good. The lace is so worked-over that it is heavy, thick, horrible. I have luck in everything.

Notes

Père Lachaise: the famous Paris cemetery in the 20th arrondissement, where Gambetta was buried. The day after the public funeral, crowds continued to gather there. ↩
The newspaper section headlines (La maladie et la mort de Gambetta etc.): Marie lists the sub-headings of newspaper special coverage as a kind of litany — the itemisation of grief by the press machine. ↩
Four thousand francs: the sum she sent Tony as payment for the portrait (noted in the 24 December entry). In the 1880s, four thousand francs represented perhaps four to six months' salary for a comfortable bourgeois employee. ↩
Shoulders lacking atmosphere (manquant d'enveloppe): a technical painter's term — enveloppe means the atmospheric haze or gradation that integrates a figure into its background. Without it, the figure looks pasted on. Marie uses it with professional precision even in the middle of her indignant complaint. ↩