Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Monday, 21 July 1884

I walked for more than four hours searching for the corner I shall use as background in my painting. It is the street — the outer boulevard, even — but one must still choose...
Happy Meissonier, happy Cabanel, thrice-blessed Bouguereau.
And we idiots torture our brains trying to render a particle of humanity! Give me the model and the plush curtain, or a dawn on a background of cloud! What horror.
You will say then: you believe humanity is only to be found among common people? I do not believe that — and it is, besides, exactly what idiots reproach talented people for. Common people or kings, it matters little. But dawns and springs!!!
Now it is evident that a public bench on the outer boulevard has far more character than a bench on the Champs-Élysées, where only concierges, grooms, nurses, and dandies sit.
There, no more study, no more soul, no more drama. Mannequins, unless one finds particular cases.
But what a poem — the déclassé on the edge of that bench.
There man is real. There it is Shakespeare.
And here I am seized with wild anxiety before this discovered treasure — what if it were to slip away from me! What if I were not to have the strength, or the time, if...
Listen: if I have no talent, then heaven is mocking me — for it inflicts upon me all the tortures of artists of genius...
Alas.

Notes

Meissonier, Cabanel, and Bouguereau were the leading figures of the French academic tradition Marie disdained — celebrated for mythological and allegorical subjects that required no laborious study of real life. ↩
Déclassé: a person who has fallen from their social position, no longer belonging to any recognised class — a figure of particular pathos in 19th-century Paris. ↩