Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Wednesday, 12 March 1884

Thursday, 13 March 1884

You cannot imagine this madness — I am imagining that the portrait of Claire will be ready by Saturday at four o'clock. I am painting it in the garden, life-size to the knees. It is charming, but...
Bastien-Lepage is better — he has even been out; my aunt swears she saw him getting into a carriage, supported by a lady and Emile. She says "supported" so that I will not be put out by his not coming here.
But I am put out...
Well, what would you have — it is how things are; he has other preoccupations, worries, etc. It is entirely natural. Do I myself concern myself with X, Y, Z — whom I may even find agreeable on occasion — but whom I would not go to see when I am unwell or out of sorts?
Never mind. But why? Why, why? It makes me miserable for three hours. Le Gaulois speaks of him and of the studies he brought back from Damvillers, and announces his imminent departure for Algeria where he will complete his convalescence... That old invalid — that quiet little peasant in love with a loose woman, and what a loose woman at that — the former one, the intimate friend of Mme Cartwright!
Faugh! And there he is, ill and ugly and shrunken. Why occupy myself with him? Bah. I shall find another subject. Good night.
So then — have I no interest in life whatsoever?! Must I say, like Flaubert, that I see nothing before me but an endless succession of pages to fill — that is to say, canvases to daub?
So life is filled with nothing but work? But if it is sometimes a pleasure, it is more often a suffering. But then?
Nothing? We shall see — if I do not die.

Notes

Damvillers: Bastien-Lepage's native village in the Meuse, to which he regularly returned to paint. Several of his most celebrated works, including Joan of Arc (1879) and Les Foins (1877), were painted there. ↩
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was famous for his total dedication to writing as a vocation, treating literary work as the only worthwhile end in itself. Marie wryly translates his writer's vocation into the painter's equivalent. ↩