Sunday, 23 December 1883

No confidence in Julian — I ask Tony, who will come tomorrow morning. We lunch at Count Mazewsky's, who has asked ten times that we do him the honour of coming to see his townhouse and his works of art. His mother doing the honours. Given the gentleman's character, I had expected a velarium to be erected and six footmen in knee breeches to serve us. It was lamentable — he does not know how to receive; a single flustered servant. The Countess his mother too simple; a ridiculous lunch... In any case. The house is large; a new wing contains pretentious rooms — a bust of Agrippa (!) on a monumental chimney-piece. And the paintings! Enough to make cats weep. No... Nothing is more dispiriting than this accumulation of large, enormous canvases signed with half-known names — pretentious banalities that have already battered one's eyes at the Salon. Things paid for dearly and heartbreaking to an artist's eye. Consider the happiness of [words blackened: a sort of] moral myopia rather than this refinement of taste that we take such pains to acquire, or which is innate... An incurable condition. One suffers on a thousand fronts unknown to the common person — like a man [crossed out: who would see objects through a] whose eye were furnished with a microscope: the wretch could neither eat nor drink nor love anyone. Faults of taste, of tact, stupid conversation, richly decorated drawing rooms, lamentable paintings... Everything grates, bores, fatigues and above all saddens — for by dint of seeing repugnant and irritating objects one acquires a kind of sad, resigned indifference... True artists cannot be happy; first because they know, they themselves, that the great mass does not understand them; they know they are working for a hundred individuals and that the others follow their bad taste or Le Figaro. Ignorance in matters artistic, in all classes, is frightening. Those who speak of it well are repeating what they have read or heard from so-called experts. The very wealthy are still the best of it — for they buy whatever costs the most, and these are always paintings that have some merit, whether by fashion or by academic qualities that may leave one cold but are nonetheless respectable. But the merely comfortable, or the misers! They buy neither the works of young artists (which require discernment) nor the works of celebrities — they buy large machines that have been exhibited, signed with honourably known names. That is worst of all. In any case... I believe too that there are days when one feels all these miseries too acutely; days when inept conversation is particularly insupportable, when inanities make one suffer, when listening for two hours to the exchange of absurdities that have not even the merit of gaiety or social varnish causes genuine grief. Note that I am not one of those elite souls who weep when compelled to listen to the commonplaces of drawing rooms — small gossip, conventional compliments, observations on the weather or the Italian opera. I am not foolish enough to require interesting conversation everywhere, and all that is worldly banality — sometimes gay, more often dull — leaves me calm; it is a discomfort I sometimes even endure with pleasure. But real inanity, real stupidity, real absence of... in short the absence of worldly banality alongside the absence of wit — that is death by slow fire. I should like to cite examples but they would give only a faint idea... Things so stupid and so entirely empty, and at the same time so heavy, that one feels impatience rising!!! Coming away from there we went to the Gavinis' and to a charity sale. Father Géry dines here this evening. His son has gone back to Constantinople.