Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Sunday, 13 July 1884

I went to see a daytime performance of wrestlers.
The lighting is not at all attractive. It would be false. One is accustomed to this spectacle in the evening, and then...
Tomorrow is the Bastille Day celebration. Paris is magnificent — flags everywhere, everyone is happy; I have myself driven about from two until seven o'clock all over the city, from Montmartre to the Hôtel de Ville.
Well, and Bastien-Lepage? Does our attention at least give him pleasure? He might at least have said: how kind you are, Madame, or something of the sort that one normally says. Can it be that it displeases him?
Yet he avails himself of it very fraternally. All the same, I am going to stop the expenditure; I am not sure of being agreeable... For after all, if all these civilities on our part bore and embarrass him?
His mother and brother would act accordingly and would not ask us to come... Well, I know nothing; only it is very uncomfortable...
We shall eat the same things, he said, and I shall say to myself: poor girl, she is doing as I do at this hour, while you will say: poor fellow, and so on.
Can one demand social courtesies from a sick man — and an illustrious sick man — especially when one presents oneself as friends... as artists?