Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Wednesday, 2 January 1884

Morning: sculpture; afternoon, Dina's portrait.
My aunt Hélène, my father's sister, died eight days ago; Paul telegraphed us the news, which moved no one in particular. Another telegram today: my uncle Alexandre has just died of a stroke. It is striking. And this poor man... who had his bad sides, yet adored his family, his wife, whom he had ended by loving to distraction. Having read neither Balzac nor perhaps any novelist, he knew no ready-made phrases — yet I have retained things he used to say that make his death painful to me. Someone had tried to make him believe his wife was accepting the attentions of a neighbour, and I remember hearing him say: "Well! Even if this infamy were true — is not my wife, whom I married when she was fifteen, my own flesh, my blood, my age — are we not one? If I myself had failed, would I not forgive myself? How could I not forgive my wife? It would be as though to punish myself I were to gouge out my own eyes or cut off an arm!"
And during my last journey to Russia he would always repeat: "You don't know, little Marie, and I don't know how to explain myself — but you, so perceptive, you will understand me... Before, I had so many preoccupations, so many torments, such a thirst for acquiring, for becoming rich, that I did not think of Nadine as I should have. But now everything is settled; I no longer have those dry, consuming preoccupations of then. Now life is altogether different — now there is nothing but happiness and the constant preoccupation with the slightest wishes of my wife, that poor dear adored Nadine. Yes, now everything is different... It would take too long to say — but everything is different..."
He leaves three children: Étienne, who is sixteen; Julie, who is fifteen; and Alexandre, who is ten months old.
And his poor wife, who is thirty-three, and who they say was deceiving him with a starovoï — a police functionary — but I believe none of it. It is very sad.

Notes

Starovoï: Russian (старовой), a lower-level rural administrative or police official. The term carries connotations of provincial vulgarity, which would make such a liaison doubly scandalous in Marie's social world. ↩