Thursday, 26 July 1883

The weather still uncertain stops my picture, and I have demolished all my clay compositions save one — which is not even in place yet — and at that very moment, naturally, Saint-Marceaux arrives... Attention to heartbeats, crystallisations, etc. I hurry and change into two dresses, keep him waiting a long time, and receive him at last — badly arranged and red. This very morning I was thinking that every time he comes I am ugly. Tiresome... He is very amusing — always indignant against the modern school, the naturalists, and human documents. One must seek something that is art and cannot be explained... I understand very well, but... He saw only that poor composition and told me to continue like that — that is all. Disconcerting. The reclining figure, which Carriès had advised me to have cast to preserve it, was at the mould-maker's — he could not see it. I had no compliment at all, except for that eternal portrait of Dina, which everyone finds so fine... He is charming, Saint-Marceaux — original, witty, nervous, almost abrupt — and he does not restrain himself from criticising everyone. It is curious, that hypocrisy which makes one praise everyone's talent. He saw my urchins and said it is easy to do common things — peasants, guttersnipes, caricatures in short — but make something pretty, refined, with character; that is the difficulty. And above all, put into it that indefinable something — that which one cannot explain — which is art itself, and which we find only within ourselves. Did I not say that? Down with vile copyists, photographers, naturalists. And off you go! In any case, what left me with a painful impression is that I was not pretty, not lively, not witty... What misery! Is this going to be a chronic condition? He is a man of genuinely fine breeding — nothing like that little Anglophile from Damvillers. Do you see what the great matter is... It is... It is... No — I shall never be able to say with what violence, what atrocious violence, I desire to be somebody! Heaven has given me only relative beauty — I cannot therefore be a Récamier. But I am much better than many celebrated women, most of whom were plain... And so the desire to conquer a man like Saint-Marceaux amounts to frenzy...