I am reading Stendhal's histories of painting. This intelligent man is always in agreement with me, yet it seems to me that he looks for too much...
To follow Stendhal's precepts — to be charming, to make him feel he is not God without wounding him — and then the vexation of knowing it is his...
The model arrives and I take a hundred measurements — but my composition is correct! Whatever was Jules looking at?
That is to say — here it is. I have identified what that feeling of the other evening was. I have felt it before, in London, in Italy, at the Louvre....
I had almost given up the idea of sending something… I no longer thought of it…
And stupid, like all my misfortunes. I was going to send my picture to the Triennial on the 20th of August, the final deadline — but it is not the...
No one believes in my timidity — yet it is explained by excess of pride. I have a horror, a terror, a despair of asking; it must be offered… When I...
It appears Maman wrote her something disagreeable.
My voice, my voice, my voice! Certainly. It is the talent I desire most, for one reaps one's glory immediately, and it is intoxicating. Nothing...
If you knew how vile it is… He studies my quirks and conforms to them.
Julian writes to me — he thinks I have been rejected. The fool.
My aunt, Dina, myself, the Marshal, the Maréchale, Claire, Louis who is eleven, and the brother of seventeen who is on holiday. They are all charming...
I gave my *Fisherman with a Line* to the Ischia lottery; the lots are exhibited at Petit's on the rue de Sèze — the fashionable, modern, Wolffist...
The statue. The street urchins. The *Holy Women*. If I have these three things at the Salon, I shall give a thousand francs to the poor — incognito....
I shall never grow accustomed to it — and at my age, a young girl… it is monstrous.
The stronger sex goes off to amuse itself, and we weak women go to the château. All I take away from it today is the Napoleonic battles, the...
Then a small family drama — Marcel slips off to Paris without permission. He is a future Marquis de Tarente, resembles him, wants to do nothing, and...
I work only on Louis's portrait. They are keeping me until Sunday.
One is foolish, and does it all the same; one has a corset too long that chafes, a riding habit from three years ago that has not taken one's shape...
He has just punished twenty thousand people at Batavia. And God… And God…
Conversations about art, as always every evening — but tonight there is more genuine intimacy, and above all I am thinking about my painting; it will...
Furthermore received at the Orléans princes'… Very beautiful, very tall, and very wise.
My room at Jouy will be occupied by the Maréchale's mother, who is coming to spend six weeks there. But so that I may still come during her stay,...
Madame Bogdanoff has come because people are saying that I am to marry General Fleury's son, and she wanted to find out whether it was true. They...
Well — may God's will be done. The phrase comes to me mechanically and I almost mean it.
Since I have not seen the Bastiens, it is difficult for me to speak of painting.
He has a small painting entitled *Les Blés mûrs* — a man seen from behind, reaping. That painting is fine.
And amid so much misery, I am relatively happy. I learn that Géry and the princess are downstairs, and I send word that my migraine is improving and...
Through them I shall have every facility for making the painting I have dreamed of at Jouy.
Madame Basilewsky is enormously rich — she is seventy-one years old and the Metropolitan is eighty-four; his name is Isidore.
Per my instructions, Bojidar has sent my letter to Saint-Marceaux, having removed the signature and anything relating to Bastien, and has sent me...
I do not for one moment suspect his good faith, yet Little Russia people are such liars; and besides, there is a way of stating the full truth, all...
My painting drags on! It is…
The Orthodox priest to dinner; I amuse myself recounting scenes from life in Poltava, and as Paul feels the barbs, he slips away after dinner.
But all of this wearies me, and the idea of painting near Paris disgusts me — there are no horizons vast enough. I shall go to Brittany, I think.
He has sworn on his children's heads not to cheat.
In short, everything is going badly — everything, everything, everything! There is…
The King of Spain, arrived on an official visit, has been booed, whistled at, insulted, threatened by the crowd. Grévy has been rather dishonest. And...
About spoke rather quietly and I heard little; Renan — whom I see now through the lens of Saint-Marceaux's bust — was very good, and the final...
Julian says that Concarneau is madness at this season.
I interrupted him at once:
"Really, Mademoiselle — how dare you confess to such flat superstitions!" Why flat? Napoleon and Caesar were superstitious — to cite only those two...
Otherwise it would be a pity. Let it rest, and then in the spring allow yourself the pleasure of executing certain passages in such a way that there...
To me it seems charming. He is leaning on the balcony railing, the body almost full-face and the head in profile against the sky; one sees the...
Instead of a will hold between his fingers a nasturtium branch that he will have torn from the balcony. He does not smoke, and this flower completes...
Recently she and Maman swore to me that everything was finished — thanks to some arrangement or other, and on account of the coronation. It ought to...
I get home just in time to dress. There is a small dinner this evening.
I am always arguing to the death with Gavini, who fancies himself a connoisseur, who pronounces sweeping judgments — and who, little by little,...