Friday, 31 December 1883

Géry sends sweets in gilded wicker heaped with violets; Mme Gavini a charming easel. I modelled — but too little. This statue... I no longer know... So let me quote you a whole passage from Balzac¹ whose truth will strike every artist — indeed everyone. Were I the one telling you this, it would carry no weight: "What must deserve glory in art — for in that word must be understood all creations of the mind — is above all courage, a courage of which the common herd has no notion, and which is perhaps explained here for the first time... To think, to dream, to conceive beautiful works is a delicious occupation. It is to smoke enchanted cigars, it is to lead the life of the courtesan occupied with her caprice" — I would add that it is also a frightful anxiety which seizes you and cries that you are wasting time. Let us continue: "The work then appears, in the grace of childhood, in the wild joy of generation, with the balmy colours of the flower and the swift saps of fruit tasted in advance — such is conception and its pleasures... He who can sketch his plan in words is already an extraordinary great man. This faculty every artist and writer possesses — but to produce, to give birth! "But to rear the child laboriously, to put it to bed gorged with milk each evening, to embrace it each morning with the mother's inexhaustible heart, to clean it when soiled, to clothe it a hundred times in the finest jackets which it incessantly tears; but not to grow weary of the convulsions of that wild life — and to make of it the living masterpiece that speaks to every eye in sculpture, to every mind in literature, to every memory in painting, to every heart in music — that is execution and its labours. The hand must advance at every moment, ready at every moment to obey the mind... "Thus work is a wearying struggle which fine and powerful natures dread and cherish, and in which they are often broken. A great poet of our time, speaking of this sorrow, said: I plunge into it with despair and leave it with grief. Let the ignorant know it! If the artist does not hurl himself into his work as Curtius² into the gulf, as the soldier into the redoubt, without reflection; and if in that crater he does not work as the miner buried in his cave-in; if at last he contemplates the difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one, in the manner of those lovers of fairy tales who, to win their princesses, combated ever-renewing enchantments — the work remains unfinished, it perishes at the bottom of the studio..." Lord, the ignorant will understand it no better — but those who are of our kind will find in these lines a striking lesson, a consolation, a force. All that is to give myself importance. This evening we go to the Opéra-Comique to hear Carmen³ — so that I enter the New Year in the midst of the truly charming and excellent Canrobert family: myself, Dina, Claire, Louis, Marcel, and the Maréchale, who embraces me at the stroke of midnight, wishing that my precious friendship remain with Claire, and that this friendship — so wholesome and so serious — is a great happiness that the year just past has brought her. There are people who appreciate me, at least... Oh! I hear you — you think it is because I shall paint the young woman's portrait; she knows all the artists who frequent Princess Mathilde's salon,⁴ and many of them would be delighted to oblige her, as they are the Marquise d'Hervey and Mme de Luynes, etc. Poor Cot,⁵ who has just died, used to correct the work of all his aristocratic pupils. Come, enough — it is understood that it is my merit alone... The Maréchale and Claire dined yesterday at Princess Mathilde's, and Claire tells me that Lefebvre⁶ said he knows my talent — very real — that I am a rather extraordinary person, that I go out into society every evening, and that I am in any case watched over, guided, or protected by illustrious painters. Claire looks him in the eyes: "Which illustrious painters? Julian?" Lefebvre: "No — Bastien-Lepage." Claire: "But you are entirely mistaken, Monsieur — she goes out very little, works the whole time; as for M. Bastien-Lepage, she sees him in his mother's drawing room and he almost never comes up to the studio." She is a love, that girl, and she told the truth. For you know well, O Lord, that this wretched Jules helps me in nothing at all. It seems that Lefebvre had the air of believing it. I advise you to believe what people say! Besides, it is the fault of that Jesuit Julian — he thinks he is praising me by describing me as eccentric. Did he not say the other day that Clairin, Duez, Gervex, etc., not to mention Bastien, never left our house? Come — either he is mad, or I am. It is two o'clock — the New Year. At the stroke of midnight, at the theatre, watch in hand, I made a wish. In a single word. A word that is beautiful, sonorous, magnificent, intoxicating — written or spoken: Glory.