Monday, 25 February 1884

With unequalled steadfastness I work on Dina — whom I shall show to no one before she is finished.

Bagnitsky and the architect to dinner. The latter has been ill — that explains his long absence. I am delighted to see him; he is almost Jules, and I shall end by blushing at the sight of this younger brother... But it has already happened. Stendhal says that one blushes on hearing the name of the street where the friend of the woman one adores lives.

As a child, when I was in love with the Duke of Hamilton,¹ I would blush horribly at the word Duke — and it came up often during my historical readings aloud before Mlle Collignon.

Jules is still ill — he is going to Algeria in about ten days. Beware — if he paints the Shepherds of Bethlehem before my Holy Women, my dearest dream collapses. Both are evening effects... I would appear to be imitating him... It will be impossible.

I talk about Jules all evening. I intoxicate myself on it... But what then? He is from Lorraine — which, relative to France, is a little like being from Ukraine in Russia... If he were from Marseilles I would find it the same again, for Ukraine is Russian Provence — while also resembling Lorraine, whose inhabitants are scheming and shrewd. Joan of Arc, the most extraordinary of heroines and even of heroes, was Lorrainer. Bastien has made a masterpiece of her, and in my mad presumption I feel a kinship with all heroes and all masterpieces. One could develop an interesting thesis there... To see the mysterious bonds that unite heroes and masterpieces with all those — all those who think... for the sun, the ocean, the air, the beauties of nature belong to everyone... My sentence is obscure, but if there are people who think as I do, they will understand; others would never understand — even if the lucid, clear, practical, logical M. Clemenceau² were to undertake to explain it to them... I admire Clemenceau; he lacks fire but arrives at almost the same effects through sheer precision and exactness of expression.