Monday, 19 November 1883

Father Tchoumakoff brings us his daughter — that great Léonie who announced her marriage to me with such joy barely a year ago. The husband: a Greek-Turk, a dismissed embassy attaché, twenty-four years old, named Loghadès. He takes her to Constantinople, where instead of a palace she finds herself in an oriental hovel. Sleeping in a loft — a kind of cupboard that served as a bedroom — no linen; and eating olives, cucumbers, and cold water... She did not write to her mother out of pride — but when her mother came for the birth of the child... You can imagine her face. And so she took her daughter away. "But what did your husband say?" He found it all perfectly natural, did not even apologise, and spent his days sleeping and smoking — with his Parisian slave, whom he had got for nothing. This great turkey,¹ who has a marvellous profile when she is silent, pours out all her miseries to me with a very calm air, and platitudes about life... As though reciting. But what is charming is that she abandoned her child — a little girl only a fortnight old. Warm-hearted, I suppose. In any case... But it is nothing to me — and I add: unfortunately. Oh! To be stupid! To be beautiful — and yet such people are not interesting. What a great fool! "And what is more," she says with discernment, "he had an exalted imagination and a Turkish temperament, and... it is very tiring, I assure you!" Charming woman, I must say! No — these people are not interesting. Her mother married her off because she was twenty-three and that terrified her, and he was willing to take her without a dowry. She married in order to be married. And he married her in order to have a wife of his own for nothing, in the hope of being kept by Father Tchoumakoff. And the young woman abandons her baby. Oh! No — it is not interesting. A cardboard cutout.²