Marie Bashkirtseff
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, at ten years of age, had a premonitory sense of life which was like the smell of the soup through a hole in the cover of the tureen : it took away his appetite. To Mademoiselle Marie Bashkirtseff, who opened a pair of charming eyes upon the world in 1860, in the government of Poltava, Little Russia, and who had the odor of life wafted to her nostrils a few years, or months, later, the soup-fragrance was in the highest degree appetizing, stimulating as the smell of battle to the war-horse of tradition. “ From the time that I began to think,” she confides to us, “from the time I was three years old (and I remained at the breast till three and a half), I had aspirations towards indefinable grandeurs.” The dates are deliciously Gallic, but may be accepted without protest, particularly as the record extends too far back for accurate verification. That a child should stretch hands for the moon, or a girl regard the universe as a commissariat for the supply of wealth, incense, happiness to her own pretty person, is no novel phase of history; were it new it would lose thereby much of its piquancy and significance. Shy little Hetty, alone in the Poyser attic, tied on her beads in the same faith; and the dreams, air-castles, imperious demands upon life, which a Parisian princess of the Ukraine heaps up in her journal have that adorable touch of nature which makes them kin to many a vagrant fancy buzzing unrecorded in other pretty or less pretty heads. There is individuality, too, and to spare, in this journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, — a book which came out in Paris a year ago. but does not seem yet to have caught the ear of its right public in this country, where the demand for such untranslated saucepiquante, though small, is not unappreciative. It has the interest not alone of dreams and caprices, but of poignant realities; it is not alone the outspoken wit, longing, and opinions of a girl writing for her own heart, and poising for her public at the same moment, but the self-revelation of a gifted and forceful nature, working itself out through successive phases of a life which, concentrated into a few short years, leaves an impression almost complete in its distinctness.
Marie Bashkirtseff, who began to think and to aspire at so early an age, and who wrote the last word of her lifestory at an hour when most workers are still upon the threshold, was the daughter of a small provincial land-owner in Little Russia, her paternal grandfather being an officer who had risen to the rank of general in the Crimean War. Her mother was of higher position, a Babanine, of older nobility and supposed Tartar origin, “ of the first invasion,” says Marie, shrugging her shoulders at the tradition. She was a beauty who married at one and twenty, “ after refusing very desirable offers,” and who, after two years of the society of M. Bashkirtseff, returned to the Babanine household with her two children, Marie and a brother, Paul. Marie was brought up by her grandmother, who idolized her, and her aunt, “younger than mamma, but not pretty, sacrificed by everybody, and sacrificing herself to all.”
After the death of the grandmother, her mother, who had yearnings after the gay world, managed to effect a migration of the family to foreign soil. They set out in May, 1870: grandfather, mamma and aunt, Dina, — a cousin, daughter of a son of the Babanines who seems to have married beneath him,— Marie, Paul, and a family doctor and friend, Walitsky, “a Pole free from exaggerations of patriotism,”who seems to have undertaken, with some measure of success, the rôle of peacemaker in the household. They went to Vienna, and luxuriated for a month in the shops and theatres; then to Baden-Baden, in the height of the season, just before its gayeties were eclipsed by the outbreak of the Franco - Prussian War. It was there that Marie caught her first glimpse of the world and of fashion, and was “tortured by vanity.” From BadenBaden they went to Geneva, and thence to Nice, where they were established for some years, and where the published journal (preceded, we are told, by other efforts) opens in January, 1873, its author and heroine being twelve years old.
At Baden-Baden, on the promenade and at the races, she had seen the Duc de H., apparently a typical and more or less prominent member of the society of that watering-place, and later of that of Nice. She had not spoken to him; but her imagination, prematurely active, and craving a part in the brilliant scene before her, had entrusted to him the Leading rôle in its drama. Two years later the candle still burns before his image. If she had been a Boston girl, the object of this exalted sentiment would probably have been an older person of her own sex, a pretty Sundayschool teacher or an unhappy society woman; but her surroundings are not of the New England character, and Marie is too ambitious to waste her dreams. She will have no lever de rideau, but must plunge at once into the drama.
“ Aunt Sophie is still playing; the music reaches me at intervals and penetrates all my being. I have no lessons to learn for to-morrow; it is Sophie’s birthday. O God, give me the Due de H.! I will love him and make him happy. I will he happy too. I will do good to the poor. It is a sin to believe that one can purchase the mercies of God by good works, but I do not know how to express myself.”
The lessons, the Duc de H., and the good God make a curious company throughout these early pages. She prays on her knees, with tears, that she may make the duke’s acquaintance. She can hardly believe that God will leave so ardent a desire unfulfilled. “ Three times already be has heard and answered me. The first time, I asked for a game of croquet, and my aunt brought me one from Geneva; the second time, I implored his aid in learning English. I prayed and wept so hard that I seemed to see an image of the Virgin in the corner of my room which promised me success.”
She is invited by an English lady to spend Sunday with her children, and after dinner she sings to the young people in the gloomy salon. “ They were all in such ecstasies that they began to embrace me frightfully, — affreusement, — there is no other word for it.” She is enchanted with this admiration, even from children, and the thought comes to her, What if others should admire also ?
“ I was born for triumphs and emotions : therefore the best thing for me to do is to become a singer. If the good God will only presere, strengthen, and enlarge my voice ” (the italics are her own, as well as the definiteness of the prayer), “ I shall have in that way the triumph for which I thirst. Thus I should have the satisfaction of being celebrated, known, admired; and thus I may be able to obtain the man I love. If I remain where I am, there is little hope of his loving me ; he will not even know that I exist; but when he sees me in the midst of glory and triumph !
A little later she concludes that she will have to be “ either the Duchess of H. — that is what I desire the most (for God sees how I love him) —or a celebrity of the stage ; ” and she balances the two careers carefully, deciding, however, in favor of the duchess. Meagre as are the materials of her novel, there is no lack of intensity in the style. She goes back in memory to the day at BadenBaden when she sat near the duke’s mistress at the races, and heard his name mentioned, while “ my heart gave a throb which I did not then understand.” Afterwards, in the street, she caught his eye fixed upon her for an instant, and interpreted his mocking look into “ What an absurd little girl! ” “ And I was absurd in my little silk frocks; I was ridiculous ! I refrained from looking at him. And then whenever I met him my heart knocked so hard against my chest that it hurt me. I do not know whether any one else has had that experience, but I am afraid that my heart will be heard beating. I used to believe that the heart was only a piece of flesh, but I see now that it is in communication with the mind. I understand now the phrase ‘ It made my heart beat.’ Before, when I heard it at the theatre, I thought of it without comprehension ; now I recognize emotions which I have myself experienced. The heart is a piece of flesh which communicates by a little string with the brain, which in its turn receives information from the eyes or the ears; and thus it is the heart which speaks, because the string becomes agitated and makes it beat faster than its wont, and sends the blood to the face.”
We get glimpses of the whole French environment — le monde et demi — in this infantile diary. She sees the photograph of the duke’s mistress, and pays tribute to her beauty. “ But in ten years she will be faded; in ten years I shall be grown. I should be more beautiful if I were taller.” This is a long way from the idyl of Pet Marjorie, but a certain mixture of intensity and naive precocity recalls that happier child-journal and clears the air for us. Besides, young as she is, Marie has weighed her world, and subscribed unhesitatingly her allegiance to virtue and religion. She will marry and love nobody but her husband. If her brother marries, he must love his wife, and be faithful to her. She thinks of the temptations which will assail him when he glows up, of the need of his having a profession, and decides that when that time arrives she will write to him every Sunday, not letters of advice, but letters of a comrade, to help and encourage him. Alongside of the budding coquette, the embryo prima donna, there is a sweet little woman, well grown for her age, in Marie.
The Duc de H. romance ends like other novels with a marriage. She goes through the regulation amount of suffering, and steels herself to forget him, which time will enable her to do. No one has ever suffered so much, and yet she can read and write. And there are other grievances, less important, but more irritating,
“Tuesday, October 21. We come in ; they are already at dinner, and we get a little reprimand — un petit savon — from mamma for having eaten between meals. A breeze ruffles the sweet family life. Paul is scolded by mamma ; grandpapa tries to stop mamma, meddling with matters which do not concern him, and thus annihilating Paul’s respect for mamma. Paul goes off muttering between his teeth, like a servant. I go out into the corridor to beg grandpapa not to embarrass the administration, but to let mamma do as she will; for it is a crime to set. children against their parents simply from want of tact. Grandpapa became indignant: that made me laugh; such squalls always make me laugh, and afterwards I am filled with pity for all those unfortunate people who have no misfortunes, and who make their life a martyrdom for want of something to do. Mon Dieu, if I were ten years older ! If I were only free I But what can one do when one is bound hand and foot by aunts, grandpapa, lessons, governesses, and one’s family ? What a paraphernalia, mille trompettes ! ”
At fifteen, the quinze ans of French poetry, she is blooming into beauty. “ My hair, in a Psyche knot, is redder than ever. . . . My photographs can never do me justice; the color is lacking and my freshness. The whiteness of my skin is my principal beauty.” The portrait given as a frontispiece, with her cheek resting on her clasped hands, shows rounded contours and a childish seriousness of expression. She is looking out yearningly, but not with that bitterness of longing which we find in her journal.
“ In every opera I find something of myself; the most ordinary words go to my heart. Such a state would do honor to a woman of thirty. But at fifteen, to have nerves, to cry like an idiot at every stupid, sentimental phrase! . . . I should like to possess the talent of all the authors who ever wrote, to be able to give an adequate idea of my profound despair, of my wounded vanity, of all my thwarted desires. Bet me only long for something and it is enough; nothing comes.”
After all, the miseries of youth are not entirely reserved for a sickly little Flaubert, with the growing burden of French realism on his childish shoulders. A coquettish, pretty Marie, in “ little silk frocks,” with a mile-long list of expectations and demands to present at the court of heaven, has her share of them; for to her also the specific which fills the horizon for most people was only a part. Behind all these catalogued desires — she prays for a pony and the Duc de H. in the same breath — there is an immense, undefined craving, the passion for another image; a feat of personification on her part more real than the effigy of the duke. It is life that she is in love with, — life in large capitals, with all the meaning that can be compressed into the word. This little Talma of ten, ready to recognize and portray emotions which she has herself experienced; this inquiring spirit of twelve who demands a physiological explanation of the beating of her heart; this sentimentalist who doubts “ whether any one else has had that experience,” has a leaven of the artist within her. She has generalized early; her dream is half a reality to her. An Italian who comes up now and then in the journal, a certain Doria, said of her at fifteen, “ I have never seen such a life-fever,” — une telle fiévere de vie. It is a fever which consumes her from the first. Life will not come to her fast enough. She cannot wait. What if it should not come at all ? She must seize, anticipate, invent it. if need be.
She is fifteen, beautiful, with hair of a Titian red, and a resemblance, as she tells us, to the blonde woman painted by Paul Veronese as an embodiment of Venice; and yet nothing has happened. She compares herself, with an information which has a very second-hand air, to Hagar in the desert waiting for some one, — apparently for a kindred spirit. But at last a ray of light, comes. The entry for New Year’s Day, 1876, is dated Rome, and at Rome she finds a lover. He sings at her window in troubadour fashion, and is afterwards brought to the house and introduced regularly, with a hint of his desirability. Pietro A. (the name occurs now and then in full), the nephew of Cardinal A., a charming fellow, “with a mustache of twenty-three,” flings himself at her feet with all the passion of his nationality, eats the violets from her bouquet and the threads of silk which she pulls out of the fringe on her dress. The real drama has begun. Marie takes her cue quickly. But she will not commit herself. She does not forget that she is made for the most superb fortune.
“Saturday, March 18. I have not had a moment alone with A. ; it is so tiresome. I love to hear him tell me that he loves me. Since his disclosure I have been thinking, with my elbows resting on the table. I am in love, perhaps. It is when I am tired and half asleep that I believe myself to be in love with Pietro. Why am I vain ? Why am I ambitious ? Why do I reason so much ? I am incapable of sacrificing to a moment of pleasure whole years of grandeur and contented vanity.
“ Yes, say the novelists, but this moment of pleasure will illuminate with its rays a whole existence ! Ah, no, indeed ! To-day I am cold and in love, to-morrow I shall be warm and not in love. On such changes of temperature hang the destinies of men. In taking leave, A. said ‘ Good-night ’ and took my hand, which he held in his, asking a dozen questions to gain time. I told mamma about it at once. I tell her everything.”
She is enchanted with her new toy, and will pull all the wires.
“ March 20. I behaved foolishly this evening. I talked to the creature in a corner, and gave him every reason to believe in things that will never be. . . . I listen mockingly to his outpourings from the height of my proud indifference, and at the same time allow him to take my hand. I take his with an almost maternal air, and if he were not reduced to idiocy by his passion for me, as he says is the case, he would see that while driving him away with my words I hold him back with my eyes. And while declaring that I will never love him, I love him, or at least I behave as if I did. I say all sorts of things to him. Any other man would be content, — any older man, at least, — but not he ; he tears a napkin, breaks two paint-brushes, destroys a picture.”
It is delightful to be able to look down from a height of indifference, to matromze a desperate lover, to yield one’s self to the charm of the moment in happy consciousness of a loftier fate waiting behind the curtain of to-morrow ; but the medal has a reverse side. It is one thing to coquet with one’s desires ; another, not to be desired. The cardinal will not hear of the match. Pietro is dependent upon allowances from the family purse, and exhibits all the Italian docility to the demands of his relatives, even allowing himself to be shut up for a time in a convent. Marie is furious. She returns to Nice. There are promises of letters, of a visit to Nice, which remain unfulfilled. Negotiations are begun between the families. Away from Pietro, mademoiselle is no longer quite indifferent to impassioned speeches. Excitement is lacking. She goes back to Rome with her aunt, and sees him again “ by chance.” He rises to the occasion with a renewed ardor. The flirtation takes a leaf from American literature, or perhaps from the Italian of an earlier day : she accords him a short interview at midnight at the foot of the staircase in the palazzo, the ground floor of which is unoccupied. In this damp trysting-place there is a holding of hands, a conversation, which is transferred in all its youthfulness and sentiment to the diary, and — a kiss, on which the modern Juliet makes her escape, thinking it is like a scene of some novel that she has read, and wondering if she can be really in love, and if she will always love to play the part of critic to her own drama. This time she does not tell mamma.
A few more negotiations and heartburnings. and the page is turned over. The cardinal will not be moved. Marie leaves Rome; and the impression which is strongest and most lasting in her mind is that of Rome itself, of its monuments and its pictures. She wonders if the ancients have sucked the world dry, if the human mind has nothing left to achieve. For the rest she is unhappy, but that also is a part of life. Already in her loneliness at Nice she had declared her ardor for life to he no mere love of pleasure. But I love life; I love its disappointments as well as its pleasures. I love God, and I love his world with all its meannesses, and in spite of all its meannesses, and perhaps because of all its meannesses.”
Love being out of the question for the time, at least, Marie determines to bend all her energies to getting settled in life through a suitable — that is to say magnificent — marriage. She assumes the responsibility herself, with the readiness with which a man undertakes to make a fire; recognizing the inefficiency, in a matter requiring so much tact and delicacy, of the rest of the family. For this purpose, and also with a view to effecting a reconciliation between her parents, — for a touch of the missionary spirit is part of her mental outfit as a nineteenth-century maiden,— she goes to Little Russia, to stay with her father and make acquaintance with her native land. The episode is entertaining, but not fertile in results. No ideal match presents itself ; she cannot make up her mind to the dreariness of the country, the absence of conversation. She likes to hear people talk about the ancients and about science, and Poltava is not a centre of intellectual life and activity.
The other mission, though partially successful, is an ultimate failure. Her father — her fichu pére, as she calls him in her ultra-colloquial style—figures in her acute and unreserved portraiture as a sort of semi-respectable Lapidoth. She brings him back to her mother, and they remain together a short time in Paris ; but the cord soon snaps again, and he takes his departure, having borrowed freely of his daughter’s pocket-money. “ My father is gone ! ” she writes on the 26th of November, 1876. “For the first time in four months I can breathe freely.”
To have the responsibility of her own establishment in life is to a European girl the extreme of loneliness and of self-dependence. But Marie has a deeper problem to contend with. To control in some manner that fièvre de vie, to reduce the temperature, to bring all those tossing ambitions and desires into some clear purpose, to organize a discipline that has not been forced upon her from without, — all this has to be done, and she is not blind to the necessity. “ The Slavonic character,” she says in her preface, “ scrawled over with French civilization and novel-reading, is a curious product.” It needs no further testimony than her own journal to show that the French civilization is not the whole story. This precocious little creature, devoured by vanity and living all her days in an unwritten novel, is tormented by the falseness of her situation. “ I am not even writing my own language ! ” she exclaims somewhere. “ I am making all sorts of mistakes.” One of the most curious evidences of foreign French in the early pages of the journal is a tendency to italicize words and syllables, with an emphasis which the intonations of the language would not allow in speaking; as when she writes, at the time of the duke’s marriage, “ C’éait une douleur mouillée, et e’est une douleur sèche.” But she has no other language equally at her command, and French is from the first that of her thoughts. She is constantly posing, and yet continually longing for reality. She cannot wait for her romance to grow, and yet she must have it a true one ; she pulls it up by the roots, and is tormented at its instability. She knows that the affair with Pietro is all a play, and puts in notes to beg the reader not to believe in what she writes ; at the same time she would fain have it real. The only poignant and true note in the episode is in the remorse which follows the kiss given — offered, as we learn afterwards — to Pietro. It comes in again and again, like a thought that rankles.
“ He believed that it was a simple matter for me, that it was not for the first time, that it was a habit! Vatican and Kremlin ! I shall suffocate with rage and shame ! ”
This poor little life, moulded beforehand by restlessness and anticipation, has to be brought into accord with its present and made a reality. Marie has none of those outside helps which come in one form or another to the young of either sex, no person to guide or sympathize with her studies, no religious or intellectual influence directly at hand. But there is a streak of natural uprightness in her, an ever-growing enthusiasm for art, and there is that declared love of life and of God’s world “ with all its meannesses.” Success must lie before her, for the element of success is within ; but it is not to be gained without effort, and the temperature is not likely to be lowered by the proceeding. She clings a little to the old idea of the stage, and makes a visit incognita to Wartel, who hears her sing, and pronounces the organ a fine one, dwells upon the necessity of hard work, but promises that she shall succeed, that in three years she will be fitted for a career. But in this direction there is only disappointment. A throat trouble, which is the precursor of a more serious difficulty, and in fact the beginning of the end, carries away her voice. Hope has to be given up, and it never revives.
“ Tuesday, May 29 [1877]. The more I advance towards the old age of my youth, the more I wrap myself in indifference. Few things agitate me, and everything used to agitate me ; so much so that in reading over my past I attach too much importance to trifles, seeing how they made my blood boil at the time. ... I have been turning over the A. episode; it is really surprising how well I reasoned. I am astonished and filled with admiration. I had forgotten all those clear perceptions and true conclusions. I was anxious lest people should believe in a (past) passion for Count A. ... It is a year since that time, and I was really afraid of having written nonsense. No, truly, I am quite pleased. Only I do not understand how I could behave so foolishly and reason so well. I am obliged to tell myself that no counsel in the world would have hindered me from doing anything whatever, and that experience was needed.”
“ La vieillesse de ma jeunesse ” is a bit of felicity in expression which suggests Sophie Arnauld’s “ les heureux jours où j’étais si malheureuse.” Marie has wisely begun her adjustment to the present by acceptance of the past. But the past is also to be laid aside. Dramatic and effective in her earnestness as well as in her poses, she draws up a paper of resolutions which rounds off deliciously the first volume of her journal. It is italicized throughout, with an emphasis of capitals. The date is September 6, 1877.
“ I am resolved to remain in Paris, to study there, and to make excursions from there in the summer to watering-places. All dreams are exhausted; Russia has failed me; and I have been soundly punished. I feel that the moment has at last come to STOP. With my natural aptitudes, in two years I shall make up for the time I have lost. Therefore, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, so be it ; and may the divine protection be with me. This is not an ephemeral decision, like all the rest, but a final one.”
We find ourselves in a different atmosphere in the second volume. True there is a whiff of sulphur in the air ; the first day is spent in tears ; there is the old fever and rage: but underneath all we are aware of a strong current of resolution ; we feel a power which grows daily, an intellectual perception and force which is constantly gaining. She enters the Julian studio, is well received there from the first, and is assured that by the end of the winter she will he able to execute very fair portraits. She deducts at once from the praise bestowed anything which may be due to her position, or to the fact that as a society girl nothing is expected of her. She takes account in the first week of her own powers and prospects.
“ All ray companions draw better than I do, but no one of them produces so good a likeness. What makes me believe that I shall do better than they is that, appreciating their merits, I feel that I should not be content with their achievement, whereas beginners generally think, If I could only draw like such or such a one! They have had practice, study, experience, but these middle-aged women will never do better than they do now. Those who are young . . . draw well and have time before them, but no future. I may not succeed myself, but it could only be because of my impatience. I could kill myself for not having begun four years ago. I feel that it may be too late.”
Her first “ académie ” wins warm praise from the artist who visits the studio, M. Tony Robert - Fleury, who pronounces it astonishing fora beginner, and hints at des dispositions tout à fait extraordinaires. From him she receives encouragement throughout, as well as from her master, Julian. She works incessantly, feverishly, pursued by the phantom of those four lost years. There are feuds in the studio, gusts of jealousy to be met: she herself is swayed by them. Her judgment of the work about her had been too hasty; one, at least, of her fellow-students has talent enough to be a dangerous rival.
“ Breslau had many compliments from Robert-Floury, I had none. ... I have been working just two weeks, excepting of course the two Sundays. Two weeks ! Breslau has been working two years at the studio, and she is twenty years old, while I am seventeen; then Breslau had drawn a great deal before coming here.”
Time, like life, is personified in her mind : it stands over her like a vision. Everything is going well, but when will the goal be reached ? “ Time is more terrible, more enervating, more crushing, when there are no other obstacles.” She clenches her fist, shuts her teeth, and battles with the idea.
“ Sunday, February 24. I will go to the studio, and I will prove that one succeeds when one has the will, and when one is desperate, bruised, and infuriated, as I am.”
After a comparatively short period of study she has acquired a vigorous, “ almost brutal ” style, an endowment well calculated to hold its own in a Parisian studio. She reads Zola, and subscribes her allegiance to realism and the modern spirit. “ Ah ! for us of this day who have read Balzac and who read Zola what enjoyments of observation ! ” She is investigating, expanding in every direction, and the results are tumbled pell-mell into the journal : we have discussions on Kant and Epictetus, readings in Roman history (" Up to this moment,” she cries, “ I have never loved anything but Rome!”), and aphorisms on marriage. In regard to this vexed question she comes to the tranquil resolution, “ I will try first to achieve the marriage of my dream. If that fails, I will marry, like the rest of the world, by means of my dowry.” Religious speculations and fervors alternate with art gossip, flirtations, and ennuis. Often her remarks show great insight, nearly always — and this amid all caprices and air-castles — a direct perception, an empoignement of the object itself, a truth of feeling which has not come to her at second-hand. The effect throughout is that of rapid talk, charming, witty, variable, sympathetic, excited. —talk in which we seem to hear the voice, and see the lithe little figure, the auburn head on which at twenty she discovers two gray hairs, the figure d’ enfant which prevents her from looking as old as she feels.
Alas ! it was not for nothing that she found time terrible in its shortness, and clung with both hands to life. Throughout the volume we watch the inroads of the disease, destroying as resolutely, as impetuously, as its victim seeks to build. The fever is no longer wholly mental; to the exaltations and depressions of temperament are added the alternate hopefulness and depression of consumption. At first we read of colds, of laryngitis, of medical examinations, courses of treatment, orders to this and that wateringplace, and anxieties on the part of her family. She resents these things fiercely, shutting herself up with her work, yet reproaching herself bitterly for her coldness to those who love her: to her mother, whom she adores, “ and yet we cannot remain together two hours without exasperating each other almost to tears ; " and to the aunt who “believes that I do not love her, and when I think of the life made up of sacrifices of this heroic creature I burst into tears ; she has not even the consolation of being loved like a good aunt! ” One of the most distressing of her symptoms is a growing deafness caused by the throat disease. “ The wind in the branches, the murmur of waters, the rain falling on the panes, the low tones of the voice, — I shall hear nothing of all that! ” She pushes on with her work, determined to make a position, to do something for her fame, before the end comes. She has two favorite ideas for pictures : one of a studio interior, in which the model, in the absence of the artist, is seated astride a chair smoking a cigarette, and looking at the skeleton with a pipe in its mouth; the other is one to which she recurs again and again as “ my picture.” “ What I want to do is something which I feel profoundly; I am held by it heart and head, and have been for months, for nearly two years. I do not know that I shall be strong enough this winter to do it well. . . . It is when Joseph of Arimathea has buried the body of Jesus and the stone has been rolled before the sepulchre : all have departed, the night is falling, and Mary Magdalen and the other Mary remain alone seated before the sepulchre. It is one of the greatest moments of the sublime drama, and one of the least hackneyed in art. There is in it a grandeur, a simplicity, something awful, touching, and human ; a sort of formidable calm, the exhaustion of grief.” This is after a journey to Spain, made for her health, when she has seen Velasquez and Ribera, and comprehended more things in painting than ever before. But the strength to do is fast ebbing.
“ Wednesday, January 26. Tuesday, on coming home from the studio, I was seized with fever, and remained till seven o’clock without a light, shaking in ray arm-chair, half unconscious, and always with my picture before my eyes.”
Not her favorite picture, which is never painted. She waits for more strength and opportunity, and in the mean time paints for the Salon a group of street boys. The various influences about her are evidently beginning to blend and to crystallize into an aim and manner of her own. Strongest of all. stronger even than Zola, is an influence which was a pronounced one at the moment in French studios, that of the latest and youngest talent of the higher school of French painting, — Bastien - Lepage. She is penetrated by his pictures. She notes certain defects in them from the first, the monotony of the greens, the tendency of the landscape to come forward, to the injury of the figures ; but the truth, the poetry, of these idyls of realism is an inspiration to her.
“ I come hack to the street. ... I dare not attempt the country ; BastienLepage is sovereign there ; but for the street there has been as yet no Bastien. And in our garden one can paint almost everything.”
She is introduced to Bastien-Lepage at his studio. A little later he goes to see her pictures. His brother Emile appears to be already a friend of the Baslikirtseff household.
“Sunday, December 17 [1882J. the real, the only, the unique, the great Bastien-Lepage came to-day.
“ I received him in a flutter of excitement, awkward and confused, enervated and humiliated at having nothing to show him.
“ He stayed more than two hours after having looked at all the pictures in every corner; only I hindered him from seeing, being nervous and laughing at the wrong moment. The great artist is full of kindness : he tried to calm me, and we talked of Julian, who is the cause of this immense discouragement.”
“ Saturday, February 24. Do you know, I think continually of BastienLepage : I have got a habit of repeating his name, and I avoid repeating it before people, as if I were guilty. And when I speak of him, it is with a sort of tender familiarity, which seems to me natural, considering his talent, but which might be misinterpreted.
“ What a pity, mon Dieu, that he cannot come often, like his brother !
“ And on what footing ? As a friend ! What! Do you know what friendship is ? Ah ! for my part, I could adore my friends if they were great men, not only from vanity, but from perception, on account of their qualities, of their intellect, of their talent, their genius : it is a race apart; get beyond a certain commonplace mediocrity, and we find ourselves in a purer atmosphere, a circle of the elect with whom one could join hands and dance a round in honor of — What am I saying ? Do you know, really, Bastien has a charming head.
“ I am afraid of painting in his manner. I copy nature very sincerely, it is true, but I think always of his painting.
. . . But then a gifted artist loving nature sincerely and endeavoring to reproduce her will always resemble Bastien.”
Is it a note of deeper feeling repeated with the old indomitable accent of girlish folly ? Is it part of that ardent enthusiasm which has never really loved anything but Rome,” of that exaltation for art, that passion for passion, that delight in living, which inspires such a passage as this ?
“ It seems to me that nobody living loves everything as I do, — art, music, painting, books, the world, dresses, luxury, noise, quiet, laughter, sorrow, melancholy, blague, love, cold, sunshine ; all seasons, all atmospheric states; the still plains of Russia and the mountains which surround Naples ; snow in winter, the autumn rains, spring and its madness, the serene summer days and beautiful nights with brilliant stars. . . . I adore and delight in them all. Everything presents itself to me in an interesting or sublime light: I want to see everything, to have everything, to embrace everything, to be confounded with the whole, and to die, since I must die, in two years or in thirty years, — to die with ecstasy in order to experience this last mystery, this end of all things or the divine beginning.
“ This universal love is not a consumptive’s dream : I have always been thus, and I remember exactly ten years ago I wrote (1874), after having enumerated all the charms of the various seasons:
‘ It is in vain that I attempt to make a choice ; all seasons are beautiful, all the year, the whole of life. I must have the whole ! The rest will never content me. I must have all nature, beside which everything else is poor. In short, everything in life gives me pleasure, I find everything good, and while demanding happiness I find myself happy in being wretched. My body weeps and cries out, but something which is above me rejoices to live, in spite of all! ’ ”
This is written not far from the end. The intimacy with Bastien-Lepage deepens ; the two families see each other often.
“ Saturday, September 13. We are friends: he is attached to us; he esteems me, he likes me. I interest him. He said yesterday that I am wrong to torment myself ; that I ought to consider myself very fortunate. No woman, he said, had had the success that I have, after so few years of work.”
The Salon of 1884 affords her first real triumph. Her picture is accepted, talked about, praised, reproduced in the newspapers. But it gains her no medal, and disappointment succeeds to triumph. She sits down and counts up the results of life, the reason for her failures. Her second volume, like her first, must be finished effectively.
“ Friday, August 1. When I serve you up touching phrases, do not let yourself be taken in by them.
“ Of the two parts of me which are seeking to live, one says to the other,
‘ Why don’t you experience something, sapristi ! ’ And the other, who endeavors to be touched, is always ruled by the first, by the looker-on in me, who is at his post of observation and absorbs the actor.
“Will it always be thus? “ And love ?
“ Do you know, it seems to me that becomes impossible when one sees human nature under the microscope. They are happy who see no more than is necessary.
“ Shall I tell you ? Well, I am neither a painter, nor a sculptor, nor a musician, nor a woman, nor a daughter, nor a friend. All reduces itself in me to subjects of observation, of reflection, of analysis. A look, a face, a sound, a joy, a grief, are immediately weighed, classified, recorded. And when I have said or written I am satisfied.”
From the period of the little silk frocks and the long list of desires, from the longing to be understood, she has come to sacrifice everything for the sake of understanding. But there is still the same insatiable spirit. She cannot get near enough to her object. If love is impossible. — though we must not take her even here too literally,—the loneliness is gone. She speaks herself, somewhere, of her lack of pathos, of her never finding the pathetic note. It is a fact, yet one which has its origin in her very passion for truth. After arranging a pose, a touching effect, she pushes away with both hands the pity it inspires; she will have no light on it but the clearest.
The story of these closing days has all the features of a finished dénoûment. She knows her Dumas fils too well not to perceive the dramatic effects of the situation, yet she is true to her watchword of realism. She has longed to feel the whole experience of death, to study it as she studies life. She moves towards it with the spectacle before her in another, who is going through the same ordeal ; it is a question which will reach the goal first. Bastien-Lepage, like herself, is dying by inches. As long as she is able she goes to see him, getting scolded affectionately if she is absent a day beyond her usual time. But the visits, brightened at first by happy art-talks, grow more and more sad.
“ He is going, and he suffers greatly. When one is there it is like being detached from the earth ; he is already in a region above us; there are days when I am conscious of a similar condition, One sees people, they talk to you, one answers, but one no longer belongs to the earth, — a quiet indifference, not painful, a little like the dream that comes from opium. In short, he is dying. I only go there from habit : it is his shade, I also am half shadow; of what use is it ?
“ He does not particularly feel my presence ; I can do nothing. I have not the gift to call life into his eyes. He is pleased to see me. That is all.
“ Yes, he is dying, and it hardly matters to me : I cannot explain it ; it is something which is going from me. . . .
“ Thursday, October 16. I have terrible fevers, which leave me exhausted. I pass the whole day in the salon, going from arm-chair to lounge. Dina reads novels to me.
“ . . . I cannot get out, but poor Bastien-Lepage is able to go out; he has himself brought here, installed in an arm-chair, with his legs stretched out on cushions, and with me beside him in another chair, and so we remain till six o’clock.
“ I am dressed in a mass of lace and plush, all white, but of different whites; Bastien-Lepage’s eye dilates upon it with pleasure. ‘ Oh ! if I could only paint! ’ he says. . . .
“ Monday, October 20. Notwithstanding the magnificent weather, Eastien-Lepage comes here instead of going to the Bois. He can scarcely walk ; his brother holds him under the arms, almost carrying him. And once in his arm-chair the poor fellow is breathless. Alas for us ! And how many concierges have perfect health ! Emile is an admirable brother. It is he who carries Jules on his shoulders up and down the stairs leading to their third story. I have from Dina an equal devotion. For two days my bed has been in the salon ; but as the room is large and partitioned off by screens it is not noticeable. It is too hard for me to get up-stairs.”
The journal breaks off, and a note tells us that Marie Bashkirtseff died eleven days later, on the 31st of October, 1884. Bastien - Lepage lingered into the following year.
Her dreams had not been realized ; but in her own feverish, impetuous, cleareyed way, Marie had found reality to be better than dream. She had determined, if she did not die young, to be a great artist; but if that fate overtook her, to have her journal published. She claims for it — she makes claims to the last — the merit of being “ the exact, the absolute, the strict truth.” “ In the first place, " she says, “I wrote for a long time without any thought of being read ; and in the second place, it is precisely because I hope to be read that I am entirely sincere. ’ The reader who has followed with enjoyment this entertaining record of her follies, her caprices, her hopes and disappointments, her efforts and observations, is not likely to quarrel with it on the score of insincerity. Her affectations belong mainly to the singularly impressionable quality of her nature. One is reminded now and then of Bettina by her precocity of sentiment, her responsiveness to emotion; but the century lies between them, and the phases which Marie not only reflected but absorbed and made part of herself belong to its later decades. She had the thirst for genius ; had she " the vision and the faculty " ? One is hardly tempted to think so from this record ; but the intellectual ardor shown in it is something distinct from a mere desire to be intellectual. M. André Theuriet, who writes some verses by way of preface to the book, speaks of the truth and beauty of her painting. His vision of her in the future as a “ blanche et pure statue ” may be taken as a fee to the conventional demands of French verse. If Marie goes a little way into the future, it will be as a very human, breathing, and rather breathless creature, charming in her whims, ready with her vote for truth, and living through her very love of life.
Sophia Kirk.