Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Saturday, 23 February 1884

The scheme is good — but I shall not use it until after I have sent my works to the Salon, 15 March.
And besides, I am discouraged — this schoolboy prank made me laugh yesterday and makes me weep today.
The maréchale and Claire arrived around one o'clock to receive Mme Madeleine Lemaire, who comes to see the painting. This lady is a celebrated watercolourist and society woman too — but she sells her paintings at very high prices.
She said flattering things to me — naturally.
She attacked Claire's daisies — like Popelin — adding "but the figure is good; that is the main thing."
I am tense, annihilated, furious. It is probably because I shall die soon — but my whole life comes back to me, from the very beginning, in detail, foolish things that make me weep: I have never been to balls as others have — one ball a year, by chance, where I would arrive knowing no one... and that only two years ago, when it could no longer amuse me...
The one real ball — the Fitz-James ball, where I went in evening dress, exhausted, ill, at the last moment, in a bad humor... then two charity balls at the Hôtel Continental, then three or four evenings in the half-world, a costume ball at Dalmas's...
In nine years! And it is the great artist who regrets this? Indeed, yes. I might perhaps not have gone — but not to have been able to go: that is the abomination!
[Across the page: That is not quite right. There is fantasy and imagination involved.] And now my finest years are over — and then so many things...
Now there is something other than balls — there are the gatherings where one meets all those who think, write, paint, work, sing: all that constitutes the life of intelligent beings.
The most philosophical and reasonable people do not disdain meeting once a week or twice a month with those who are the flower of Parisian intelligence... I give these explanations because I don't know — I am going to die; I have always been unhappy in everything!
Through sheer effort I manage to get to know a few people... and even that is a source of humiliation — not at all genuine; when they first knew us we were very reserved.
One is too unhappy not to hope that there is a God who can take pity on one... But if this God existed, would he allow what is allowed? And I — what have I done to be so wretched. Too much imagination.
Reading the Bible is not what can make one believe... It is only a historical document in which everything touching on God is childish.
One can only believe in an abstract, philosophical God — a great mystery; the earth, the sky, everything: Pan. But then it is a God who can do nothing for us. This God one admires and imagines while looking at the stars and contemplating the scientifico-spiritualist questions in the manner of Renan.
But a God who sees everything, who concerns himself with everything, to whom one can ask anything... That God I would very much like to believe in. But if he existed, would he allow what is allowed?
As for the religious clutter — it is good for imbeciles; if Christ returned, he would certainly not recognise the doctrines he preached in Catholicism, nor in... But then Christ acknowledged the Bible?!
That proves he was only a man, and that one must allow for his human nature and his milieu and his country...
Though a sublime genius, he must have been subject to all those influences; had he been God, he would not have relied on the prophecies of Scripture... He would have...
You are about to dictate retrospective conduct to Christ, dear child.
Go to bed.

Notes

Madeleine Lemaire (1845–1928): celebrated French watercolourist, famous for her roses, and one of the most brilliant salon hostesses of her era. Marcel Proust is thought to have partly modelled Mme Verdurin on her. ↩
Pan: the Greek god of nature in all its totality; the reference is to pantheism. ↩
Ernest Renan (1823–1892): French philosopher and philologist, whose rationalist Life of Jesus (1863) was enormously influential and controversial. ↩