Tuesday, 27 November 1883

The lady and her daughter came. They noticed that I hear poorly.¹ It is horrible. It is enough to drive one mad... Apart from that... Everything had to be shown — down to the smallest sketches in the albums; all this interests the young woman, who works in earnest and tells me of the detestable routines of Russian academic instruction! They are forced to draw in pencil instead of charcoal, and they spend a month on the same study... and not always from life! On seeing my paintings she asked whether they had been done from life! I explain to her nature, open-air painting, the necessity of painting objects in their own setting — Paris, the modern Athens!² These ladies are going to perfect themselves in Rome after two years at the Academy. As for my own ladies — they will be the death of me. The Karageorgevitches and their friend a Princess Yablanovska (of mixed blood)³ rushed to the Hôtel Drouot and learned there that my painting had sold for one hundred and twenty-five francs. And Princess Karageorgevitch asks me this evening whether I had two — one at four hundred, the other at one hundred and twenty-five. That stupid and pointless lie can do me enormous harm; it will be exhumed (if I have talent) at the wrong moment, and when I have sold a painting for three thousand they will say it was three hundred. I say this to these inept women, who spend an hour proving to me that I am wrong and consoling themselves with remarks about the Yablanovska woman who is kept by a certain Cartier. Myself... I am even more idiotic than these women, for I give myself the easy, irritating, fatiguing, and useless satisfaction of defeating them with their own disjointed arguments — which are not even arguments but heaven knows what... A shapeless mass of incoherent words and concierge-level reasoning!... The Russian character!!! The Russian character is in certain respects terribly like a concierge's... One finds in it an infernal self-assurance, a marvellous obstinacy, a pliability bordering on cowardice, stupidity, complacency and crass ignorance, lying, lying, lying! Imagination or lying at every turn. Fatuity and mendacity, [words blackened: likewise malice, vulgarity even. Warm-heartedness] in spite of everything, in a manner of speaking... And all of it wrapped in a tinge of naïveté that recalls the savage... The mischievousness of a child. Bojidar said something the other day that struck me as insolent; I reprimanded him with a certain firmness, his mother apologised, and he sent me flowers this morning before venturing to show himself again. Oh, my system! And I — I dine alone this evening; these ladies are dining at the Faleyeffs'. Enjoy yourselves. Never let anything pass, oh my friends. Ah! If only one could treat in the same way those from whom one wishes to earn... esteem!