Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Tuesday, 16 January 1883

Little Bastien takes us to Ville-d'Avray, to the house of Gambetta, where his brother is working.
[Blacked-out words: Until one has] seen it with one's own eyes, one cannot believe in an interior so wretched — for "modest" would poorly describe what it is.
The kitchen alone is decent in this sort of gardener's cottage.
The dining room is so small and so low that one wonders how the coffin fitted in it and how his famous friends could have gathered around it.
The drawing room is larger but bare and devoid of all comfort. A poor staircase leads to the bedroom, which fills me with astonishment and indignation. What! It is in this miserable cage — the ceiling of which I can touch with my hand, literally — that a sick man of Gambetta's constitution was left for six weeks, in winter with the windows shut. A large, asthmatic man — a wounded man! He died of that room too.
Cheap two-penny wallpaper, a black bedstead, two writing-desks, mirrors patched between the windows, and curtains of old, wretched red wool. A poor student would not be housed any worse.
This man who was so mourned was never loved! Surrounded by Jews, shareholders, speculators, exploiters — there was no one who loved him for himself, or even for his glory. But one should not have left him an hour in this unhealthy and miserable box! What! Could the dangers of a journey of an hour's length possibly compare with the danger of remaining without air in this horrible little room! But on a mattress, carried by hand, he could have been transported without the slightest jolt! Ville-d'Avray — the Jardies — which the newspapers depicted to us as a little house à la Barras! This man whom they said was so preoccupied with his comforts and his luxury! But it is an infamy! A house where he spent three days a week — and on such a footing!
I can still understand that he himself was not particularly troubled by it — but his friends and his women! If there had been a single woman who loved him, she would not have left him surrounded by such vulgar, such ignoble objects.
And these famous friends! But they lived off him — [blacked-out words: and that is] all.
Mme Arnaud is represented by a little silver saucepan; there is also an armchair with L.G. on it, in poor taste and shoddy. All of this is extraordinary! Ah! If it had been me — he would be alive. Bastien is working at the foot of the bed like this — here is the plan.
[Ed. note: a diagram of the room layout drawn by Marie appeared here in the diary.]
Nothing has been touched — the crumpled sheets on the eiderdown that represent the body, the flowers on the sheets. In the engravings one cannot grasp the proportions of the room, in which the bed takes up an enormous space. The distance between the bed and the window allows no stepping back at all, which is why the bed is cut off in the painting — one cannot see its foot. This painting is truth itself.
The head thrown back is seen in three-quarter view, with that expression of nothingness after suffering, of a serenity still living, and already of the beyond. One believes one sees him in reality. This body stretched out, spread, annihilated, just departed by life — it is gripping.
It is an emotion that seizes you in the legs and breaks your back.
Bastien is a very fortunate man. I am a little ill at ease in his presence after this newspaper foolishness. Though he has the physique of a man of twenty-five, he has that benevolent, unaffected serenity that one sees in great men — Victor Hugo, for example.
I shall end up finding him beautiful in any case — he possesses that infinite charm of people who are a force, a talent, and who know it without conceit and without foolishness. I watch him work while he talks with Dina and the others are in the next room.
On the wall one can see the bullet hole that killed Gambetta — he shows it to us, and then the calm of this room, the faded flowers, the sunlight through the window — all of it makes me weep... Only he has his back turned, absorbed in his painting, and so, not to lose the benefit of this feeling, I thrust my hand at him abruptly and go out quickly, my face covered in tears.
I hope he will have noticed. It is silly... Yes, silly to admit that one is always thinking about the effect.
Afterward we go to the Marquise de Villeneuve's, where we make the acquaintance of her mother, Princess Pierre — a former laundress, they say, but a very fine woman with magnificent hands.
This newspaper and Bastien incident vexes me... It is a nagging preoccupation!!
Tears for Gambetta are refreshing — but this is wretched, it is tiresome, it nags at one; one feels ashamed.
We seem to be passing off the brother for the real one — it is ridiculous, it is odious... And above all, above all, it will turn the brother away from us; he is very good, very excellent, etc., but I would rather see the real one, the great one, the only one.
He is the Gambetta of painting — he distinguishes himself from other talents as a master already dead; it is genius.

Notes

Paul Barras (1755–1829), corrupt and extravagant member of the Directory government. Marie implies the newspapers falsely portrayed Gambetta as living in similar luxury. ↩
Marie sketches a diagram of the room in the original diary. ↩