Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday, 14 July 1884

I have begun the treatment that is to cure me. And I feel entirely calmed. Even my painting presents itself more favourably.
I think I shall... No.
I gave all the servants a day off and five francs each.
Well, that is something Maman would never do. Why does everyone think her good??? And she thinks herself very good.
She has a very dry heart, or at least one incapable of any spontaneous kindness. She goes out dressed like a drunken prowler — her skirt askew and torn, collarless and sleeveless, a hat stuck God knows how on an indescribable chignon — and this is why she thinks herself good.
When it is an outing with me things are approximately decent, but without me!...
These people think I want only exaggerated, extraordinary, poetic, mad things. So when I ask that Maman go buy herself a sixty-franc skirt at the Louvre, it seems as though I am competing with the late Louis XIV and Sardanapalus.
Ah! Misery.
I no longer see my wrestlers.
The booth audience and lighting do not give me what I dreamed of. Jugglers? That would be as well as any of those habitual everyday scenes, where the merit will lie in the deep study of characters.
A public bench on the Boulevard des Batignolles, or even the Avenue Wagram — have you looked at that? With the street and the people passing.
All that a bench contains — what novels, what dramas!
The déclassé with one arm resting on the back of the bench and the other on his knee, his gaze shifty; the woman and child on the knees, the working-class woman who drudges. The cheerful grocer's boy who has sat down to read a small paper. The workman asleep, the philosopher or the desperate man who smokes. I see perhaps too many things... Yet just look, around five or six in the evening.
That's it, that's it, that's it! It seems to me I have found it.
Yes, yes, yes — I may not do it, but my mind is at rest. I am dancing on one foot with joy.
There are moments so very different! Sometimes one truly sees nothing in life, and then... I take up loving everything again!
Everything around me! I wrap myself in my nightgown, half undressed — the skin is still beautiful and the form too; there are tones of such brilliance and fineness! [Ten lines cancelled]
It is like a flood of life rushing in!
And yet there is nothing to rejoice over.
Ah! Never mind — I shall find something cheerful and adorable even in my death; I was made to be very happy, but...
Why in thy celestial work, so many elements so ill-accorded!

Notes

Déclassé: a person who has fallen from their social position — no direct English equivalent. ↩