Poem on Schlangenbad (1876)

Overview

A rhymed daydream that Marie Bashkirtseff wrote into her diary on 11 June 1876 (062.0325), in the middle of an ordinary prose paragraph. Sitting in the garden at Nice on a calm moonlit evening, half listening to her aunt, she lets her fancy drift to the spa of Schlangenbad in Germany, where she walks under a leafy tunnel of trees and a man she has hoped for, without daring to expect him, comes towards her, offers her his arm and walks with her, "mon cœur est ému, j'ai peur et ma voix tremble". The lines are irregular verse, mostly rhyming, with a line and a half struck out by Marie in the manuscript (marked in the text as "UNE LIGNE ET DEMIE RAYÉE"). The poem is not a separate document and has no title; "poem on Schlangenbad" is how Marie herself later describes it.

Marie and this poem

The poem is followed at once (062.0326) by a prose comment in which Marie says that the memory of "le fantôme" was enough for this "quasi-rêve", that reality has more than once shaken the edifice of her fantasy, and that she is troubled by kisses on the mouth. She then turns to the question of whether Antonelli behaved badly towards her (062.0326, 062.0328). The imagined walker is therefore a daydream built from a recent hurt, not a recollection of a real meeting at Schlangenbad. (Reading of the passage by the project; the diary does not name the man in the verse.)

More than a year later, on 29 August 1877 (074.0127), Marie walks into a wood with a volume of Amédée Thierry to settle a point of Roman and Italian history, "m'imaginant vainement des rencontres comme celle que j'ai décrite dans une monstrueuse poésie sur Schlangenbad, l'année passée à Nice." The self-mockery ("monstrueuse") and the place and year match 062.0325, which is how the two paragraphs are tied together. The earlier "Revue de Nice" verses were also composed at Schlangenbad, in 1875 (#Revue_de_Nice); this poem is a different, later piece.

References in Diary

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