Saturday, 3 November 1883

M. Eschmann — a former cavalry guardsman,¹ fifty-eight or sixty years old, married to a celebrated French actress whom we do not know — comes to present another Russian by the name of Safonoff, who wears a wig and who lives in Paris in hopes of obtaining a diplomatic post; very wealthy. Then the Princess Karageorgevitch, who comes as she does nearly every day to play piquet and dine. I am tired of her; she bores me. And finally Gabriel Géry, arrived from Constantinople for two months... He has grown still taller and still thinner, but pleasant nonetheless, and always with an air of great tenderness — I suppose that air comes naturally to him, unless I happen to inspire in him some genuine feeling... His arrival stirs something in me; it has been six months, or six years, since I have seen a young man... It is invigorating. I am surrounded by musty people.² Old Engelhardt and her son — a little Aztec³ of thirty — the Tchernitsky woman, the Karageorgevitches, the priest... mould and mildew, the lot of them. In any case, Gabriel's visit awakens my tenderness for M. Jules Bastien-Lepage; it makes no sense, but there it is. And during the evening I find myself thinking with sadness and discouragement that he will never love me. I tell myself this so that it will not be true... One ends up counting the stairs on the staircase, the steps one takes in one's room, the number of people present — he loves me, a little, a great deal, passionately, not at all!⁴... Everything does service — down to the letters on shop signs, the bread crusts on the table. A veritable obsession. And when the answer is passionately one is delighted, just as one's arms fall in despair when it is not at all. But I have given it up — have I not already given it up once before? Yes... Yet I insist on giving it up once more — like the fox renouncing the grapes. In giving it up I... what then? I insist on repeating to myself one more time that there is nothing whatsoever between me and this little artist — between him and me, that is... It is like those people anxious about the outcome of some affair who persuade themselves it is lost beyond recovery, so as to have nothing left to fear but a pleasant surprise... The impossible enrages me. [Words blackened: It is as though] I were to take it into my head that... How did I ever come to desire this conquest to such a degree?... And how did I come to speak of it here, and to think of it at all? Crystallisations!⁵ Crystallisations. But really. It is as though I were to set about trying to please... anyone at all whom I had seen four times and who was in love elsewhere and lived in the country. He knows fifty people in Paris who occupy his thoughts as little as I do — who never thinks of me. Do I ever think of M. de Morgan, of M. de Montgomery, of Alexis Karageorgevitch, of the host of young men I see from time to time in Paris? And it is quite certain that not one of those poor devils spends his time crystallising in a corner and asking himself — but, really, why? Maman says that she herself has sometimes spent hours wondering why a given thing is called by one name and not another, and why the forgotten object is not named — but the situation is the reverse. O Jules Bastien, you are ugly, you are short, you are indolent, you are sly — you are... And yet, all told, I... I prefer you to everyone.