Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Wednesday, 5 March 1884

Wretched me and my painting.

Thursday, 6 March 1884

What had to happen has happened. Eight days remain and the portrait will not be finished. Oh! I am calm. Only — for a year now I have been unable to work because of little Canrobert; at the beginning things still went along, she worked a little, but for several months now it has been nothing but conversations, laughter, jokes, pranks, teas, cakes, and so forth.
And I am going mad. The street children took more time than necessary — and even then I was working outdoors, and that dreadful girl came less. But for three months it has been death. Her painting is costing me the portrait of Dina. If only... But by irritating me, these people make me paint badly, and I might perhaps have managed without them to earn a medal, had I been left in peace.
My exhibition at the women's show is being noticed — I am cited with praise in major newspapers where I know no one.
But those are studies done in peace.
My family is prostrate before the Canroberts, imagining that it will give us standing and that I shall finally leave them in peace. If we were modest, respectable people, no one would trouble themselves over why we are not in contact with the embassy.
[In the margin: fantasy again — I was always on good terms with my embassy. (Mme Bashkirtseff's handwriting)]
Well... as for all that, and all the fantastic tortures it has brought me — it has been going on for ten years now, and I am beginning to feel it: I am thin, I cough, I cannot hear — a brilliant state, all told. I promise them my death; they will believe it when I am buried. I keep telling them I can only prove it by dying, and that by then it will be too late. They do not understand — they are oblivious — and yet I am their most beloved victim. Well, despite all these humiliating things that made me weep daily with rage, I could still live by working, by having talent; for two years I have been almost resigned — but for two years it has been too late. I am lost — and it is that, now, which makes me dissolve in tears: I am on the verge of having real talent, and their atrocities have killed me; I have no more health, I am overwrought, I have no more strength — and to crown it all I have this Claire, who in three months has aged me five years and made me lose twenty pounds...
I try to deceive myself but it is impossible: eight days remain and the portrait is still to be done.
I can no longer see clearly, I no longer know what I am doing — for three months I have been in a frenzy...
Look — I pose Dina well; whereupon the conversations and laughter begin: "She is going to change it again!" — "Come now, Marie, it amuses me to watch you fiddle with that."
"But it is admirable — why do you change it?" And all of this without malice — yet it is horrible none the less.
For three days I have had it given out that I am in the country and will not return until five o'clock. But three days too late. Everything I have done these past six weeks is nameless — yet I know perfectly well that I can no longer see straight; I am overwrought, on the verge of weeping because someone enters from the left instead of the right.
[In the margin: because you are ill, my poor, my adorable and adored child. (Mme Bashkirtseff's handwriting).] The portrait was too small — I noticed today: otherwise it would have gone to the Salon just like that! A thing far smaller than life-size at the Salon — you know that wretched intermediate scale that is neither life-size nor a reduction.
Well then, in eight days... two for the head, two for one arm, one for the other, one for the dress, one for the hand... There must not be a single moment of weakness... and even then.
Ah! Damnation.