Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Wednesday, 21 May 1884

[Crossed out: On the whole] Maman's attitude ought to move me, for it is naïveté itself — but it is truly tedious, tedious, tedious... Oh. Yes. First of all... No! But she is unhinged to such a degree! And it will end up affecting me, perhaps.
Julian comes to dinner this evening; he did not want to come, he says, having no good news to give. As the moment approaches all his men are buttoning up and he cannot get anything positive out of them. Things had seemed well under way, but now that the moment comes everyone is on guard. Then Maman, in a voice she is trying to make calm:
— "But Monsieur, last year you said in advance that it was certain. And it happened. You had announced it."
Which means that if he says nothing positive it is not because we are at a critical moment but because the chances are fewer.
These people are insufferable. And I, so calm, am afraid of starting to become upset.
Come to my aid, Hayem! I should have liked to believe you were truly stirring yourself, you filthy Jew.
We read some of Maupassant's letters, and that is how the evening passed. Julian is vastly amused by mine and by his. Ah! Julian is a good audience. He is slightly surprised by my weakness in the face of Maupassant's abominable letter — he seems to have made a discovery: I am nothing but a braggart about boldness, at bottom a child, who is floored by a coarse remark. He says one could have — that if I had only waited two days before replying, I would have sent him something that would have left him a small boy for life. And that by hurrying I revealed myself to be a little girl — a little girl who sees a great person, her idol, do something vile and is annihilated.
He says that my letter — the one that provoked this horror — must have struck him... in the bull's-eye. No, he would never have believed it would hit him to such a degree, while all along believing it must hit him somehow. Because this Maupassant is... a ladies' man, and his pose is to dream of living in a harem in the Orient. Mercy. We...
Ah! I must have wounded him — he who had posed as...
Well — let us go to sleep.