She is far better than her portrait — a woman of sixty who looks forty-five or fifty. Her hair is a rather pretty blond with almost no grey; a...
I went looking for wrestlers at the fair and on the outer boulevards, in the company of Rosalie and Irma.
To crown it all! To crown it all, it turns out the wrestlers do not perform outdoors but inside the booths and chiefly in the evenings. That changes...
The background too green in places. But on the whole, he said, as a sketch it is very good. With three days' work you can make something very fine of...
He is going out — a turn in the Bois with his mother. This woman takes part in all my preoccupations, and often while dressing me she makes remarks...
Listen, it is very curious. These ladies are going to the Louvre department store; I ask them to bring me back thirty metres of white muslin.
The architect was summoned here this morning. He is the third person to tell me that there are never wrestlers performing outdoors in Paris. So... I...
Small dinner. The Gavinis, Vicomtesse Pernetti, Saint-Amand, Géry, Zuccarini.
But I am making myself ill with doing nothing.
As the little one had written to me, I went to Jouy with Maman. And I come back more on edge than before.
The lighting is not at all attractive. It would be false. One is accustomed to this spectacle in the evening, and then...
I have begun the treatment that is to cure me. And I feel entirely calmed. Even my painting presents itself more favourably.
The new volume of Maupassant comes with his portrait. He looks like a bull. And since he is very proud of his... his... physical faculties, it is a...
The priest's wife and daughter came.
Yesterday they said to each other: we really ought to pay a call on these ladies who are so kind — Emile will go. And Emile came back to report that...
Happy Meissonier, happy Cabanel, thrice-blessed Bouguereau.
But he had a delicate thought for me. Naturally, he and Bojidar were talking about me, and Bojidar told him he found me tired and that I ought to go...
Oh! They will not ask me directly — but they will send Claire, who will prevent me from working. It is with fury in my heart that I resolve to give...
And, should it turn cool, a grey ribbed velvet jacket.
Jealous of Bojidar as I am, I give him instructions in the third person. On hearing him say that Emile had told him to call his brother by his first...
Then!... I understand he says it very simply given how grave his brother's condition is, but for me who am already so afraid of boring him — it kills...
Alas, that is all it is. Yes — it is to amuse my spectator-self that my actor-self grows tender.
Yes — what does that mean??
Can there really be women who... Come now, I am being foolish — it is perfectly natural. If one only loved men of genius the world would cease to...
[Words blacked out: About Bastien] — but I do not love him at all, I who was speaking of him with maternal tenderness. It is an amusement [Crossed...
As you see, it is considerable.
A pretty little woman with enormous hands and abominable fat fingers. It is perhaps in those fingers that one should look for the motives that drove...
The Marshal is much surrounded. We have good seats on the right, the same as five years ago at the last Congress. The Marshal's wife, Claire and I.
The Bièvre valley with its railway, its clipped trees, its laid-out paths — official, administrative nature!! Oh! And the Canroberts with their hunt...
And as they consoled him, saying that he would soon be well and that nothing would remain of this illness, not even the memory —
I am so afraid of not being welcome that someone must come to fetch me... Yes, and Emile was afraid that Jules might ask why I do not come, and if he...
Provided he does not think we lavish things on him to wheedle a painting out of him.
In the afternoon I go through the streets again — nothing holds any more!
Emile dines here. He is so good — he will set up the easel and the canvas and the whole arrangement to avoid the sun, etc.
It requires a real effort for me to go to Bastien's.
Emile set up my canvas this morning. As for that wretch Jules — he is better; he went to the Bois, carried up and down in an armchair. It was Félix...
Monday, 18 August 1884. Tuesday, 19 August 1884.
— So you are not going to see Jules? We could tell him that these ladies had locked us in out of jealousy and that we escaped through the kitchen...
I had a photograph taken of the corner I am painting, in order to have the pavement lines quite exact. The operation took place this morning at seven...
Baude, who is spending the evening here with Emile, tells Maman.
But last night I received a letter from *Le Figaro*. Yes — from *Le Figaro*, from M. Périvier, asking to visit my studio with a view to the...
— It is a vicious circle, says Emile.
Périvier took note of *Jean-Jacques*, of which I shall make a drawing, and besides they will send me the dimensions and I shall do something else....
I keep thinking of that mysterious abomination he has in the groin. It is like a terrible answer to everything I might think, plan, desire, or fear....
I am not even a woman to that monster Bastien. This evening he takes my hands, claps me on the shoulder as one does a good old comrade.
Bastien goes to the Bois every day, but...
I do nothing. Since the Sèvres painting was finished, I have done nothing. Nothing, save two miserable panels.
Since he must die [Crossed out: there is nothing to be done] — it is no longer amusing.
And people will say that we are taking him out for drives. It is true. But they will draw foolish conclusions.
A dreadful fever; I can bear no more. I have never been so ill — but since I say nothing, I go out and I work. What is the use of speaking.
We bring him back with us, and I have him tell me how he killed a Prussian and how they lay flat on their stomachs for half an hour, caught by...
There is the old painter Jean Gigoux, to whom he is showing his etchings.
Emile came to dine yesterday; his brother wonders why we have been missing for so long.