Monday, 10 December 1883

Morning: sculpture. Afternoon: I paint the bodice and bouquet of the laughing head. She is a little wench — half dancer, half model — and she laughs in an amusing way. Finished.

By gaslight: a drawing, a woman reading beside an open piano. Finished.

If it were like this every day it would be delightful.

I feel such flights toward great things that my feet no longer touch the ground. What dominates is the fear of not having time to do all of it. It is perhaps a fatiguing state — but one is happy.

And so I shall not live long; you know the children who are too clever...¹ And, joking aside, I believe the candle is cut in four and burning at every end... It is not that I boast of it... Leonardo da Vinci did everything and did nothing very well. Michelangelo... but when Michelangelo was compelled to paint he did not sculpt for thirteen years — the whole duration of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. Or so they say... In any case it is established that one cannot excel in several arts... If I invoke great names, do not laugh — I know I am nothing. Only, when one cites Michelangelo or Leonardo the argument is unanswerable... And besides, how should I know that for thirteen years the man never touched clay or marble? Come now!

And besides, if Leonardo had done nothing but paint, he would not have been otherwise.

In sum he made only one colossal horse,² at which he spent sixteen years. I like to believe he worked with interruptions; that horse in clay was destroyed; the statue that was to have stood upon it was never even begun... And do not all the sculptors nowadays paint as well? Millet, Mercier, Falguière, Dubois, etc., etc.

But fifty unknowns do what I do and do not complain that genius is stifling them! And if your genius stifles you it is because you have none — the one who has it has the strength to bear it.

The word genius is like love: I found it painful to write for the first time, but once written I employed it every day and on every occasion. It is the same with everything that at first seems enormous, frightening, inaccessible: once one touches it one gives oneself to it freely, to make up for the hesitations and terrors. This witty observation does not seem to me very clear — but I must spend my vital fluid; I have worked until seven in the evening and there is still some left, and it will flow out through the pen.

I am losing weight. In any case... May God be indulgent to me.

The cards say that Jules — not Caesar, the other one — will love me, or loves me. That would be magnificent — and yet I should prefer to become... illustrious...

Very well: it is agreed. I shall be illustrious, and that great man will love me for it. Next year.