Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff
CZENUKFR

Sunday, 3 August 1884

At luncheon there were M. de Bourgoing and his sister Mme Fortoul.
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 her husband to leave for Tonkin.
They have been married four years and he is said to be exceptionally intelligent — a gentleman one seldom meets, Claire says.
I have a fever and must hold myself upright and endure the walk and the dinner. I attribute my dejected air to a fit of misanthropy.
Rosalie has gone to Paris to fetch me a dress for tomorrow's trip to Versailles — to the Congress. The constitutional revision. But I no longer concern myself with current politics.
It seems Bastien is no better, and that Mme Bastien-Lepage came to these ladies... to ask why we had stopped coming... But this must be a lie that Maman has invented to excuse herself for having gone to see him despite my prohibition.
As for Bojidar, he is always to be found there — and he all but claims he went to school with Jules. Plague take him.
The Marshal's wife has no doubt suggested to Claire to appropriate everything I say that is worth keeping — and very often I hear myself repeated. And since Claire has assurance, intelligence and a certain drollness, she will end by making me feel that I am stealing from her... She already tries to outmanoeuvre me in conversation, before her mother who is flattered by this sparring.

Notes

Tonkin (northern Vietnam) was the theatre of French military operations from 1883 to 1885 — a posting that carried genuine danger. ↩