Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Thursday, 1 May 1884

The Salon... Is it truly getting worse and worse, or am I the one becoming more and more demanding?
There is nothing to see. This heap of painting — without conviction, without thought, without identity — is horrible. They are either clever operators, factory hands, or idiots.
Except for the great decorative composition of Puvis de Chavannes. This man is incomprehensible in his small pictures, but his large decorative canvases are beautiful. They transport you into an archaic, strange, yet deeply poetic atmosphere. After all, it is neither drawn nor painted nor human but... And I am only just beginning to love it. It is either a conversion or a perversion of taste. There is also a small canvas by Béraud — an anarchist club. Altogether charming and witty.
There is also the portrait of the beautiful Mme Gautereau by Sargent. It is a great succès de curiosité — everyone finds it atrocious. For me it is perfect painting, masterly and true. But he painted what he saw. The beautiful Mme Gautereau is horrible in broad daylight because she paints her face dreadfully despite being only twenty-six. This plaster-like makeup gives her shoulders the tone of a cadaver. Moreover she paints her ears pink and her hair mahogany. The eyebrows are drawn in dark mahogany — two crude lines. She is either mad or blind.
What one cannot understand is the husband and the mother, who allow it.
But in the evening she is truly very beautiful.
My own painting has a quality of oldness in the paint — at least, that is how it seems to me.
And then I no longer see the necessity of anything, anywhere.
What new thing shall I invent in Art? If it is not to burst upon the world like a meteor, what is the point?
To have talent? Merely that? And then? To die, for one must always die.
And life is sad, awful, black. What is to become of me? What to do? Where to go? Why? How is one to be happy? I am weary before I have done anything. I have exhausted all pleasures in imagination. I have dreamed of such grandeurs that whatever may come to me will never be more than an approximation, or less still. So?? So??? — so tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in a week's time, some trifling thing will come along to change the course of my thoughts, and then it will start again, and then — Death.