Marie Bashkirtseff, beginning at twelve years old, wrote her journal
ingenuously, sincerely, amusing us by her whims, thrilling us by her
enthusiasms, touching us by her sufferings.
We have gone through these note-books bound in white parchment,
slightly discoloured, like the winding sheet in which sleeps a
memory, and have already gathered a volume, precious, not because it
describes such an entertainment or such an event, but because it
reveals the mentality of a young girl.
This time we have been especially interested by the first books,
written in a large, unformed hand, dashing, variable, following the
successive impressions of a changeful, sensitive nature.
Very few documents exist concerning children, in whom the nineteenth
century alone began to interest itself.
In fact the real personality of the child is very secret, for it
distrusts these comprehensive and authoritative beings, "grown-up
people." And it hides its ironical observations, its dreams, all the
ardour of its little soul.
Children play. They have built, with sand and twigs, a fantastic
world peopled with their familiar toys: a grey cloth elephant, a
multi-coloured duck as big as that white plush bear. And they are in
the jungle, tracking, hunting, killing. Then they dance round to a
secret rhythm. Stop to look at them, the game will end. The little
mouths will become silent. The child will always hide the ingenuous
observations it makes with its clear eyes.
Therefore it seems to us very interesting to show a little girl's
existence, not told from the distance of past years, but written day
by day. Marie Bashkirtseff was a child of precocious intelligence,
ardent will, extreme intensity of life. Maurice Barrès defines it
sensibly in saying that she had, "when very young, amalgamated five
or six exceptional souls in her delicate, already failing body."
The nomad life led by her parents, residences in Paris, London,
Nice, Rome, hastened the development of a vivid intelligence.
This little "uprooted" girl accommodated herself to these varied
lives with the versatility of children, but she knew how to reserve
her personal life of study. It was a strange intellectual solicitude
of the little girl living among idle people and dreaming of
"becoming somebody famous." And, completely surrounded by refined
luxury, she knew how to see the humble folk, whose expressive
features she has inscribed in a way not to be forgotten in her
pictures.
If this journal reveals a precocious intellect, it preserves--and
this is its charm--a spontaneity of childhood--for the little Slav
was a bewitching little girl, with rosy cheeks and clear eyes. Has
she not evoked all the marvellous imagination of the little ones in
these words: "Because I put on an ermine cloak, I imagine that I am
a queen"?
Marie's sentimental life has greatly perturbed her biographers. They
have accused her of having a cold, indifferent heart. Others, more
penetrating, have seen that Marie considered love as a religion for
which a god was necessary. Hence her dream as a young girl: "to love
a superior being." And she wrote to Maupassant.
Jean Finot has pointed out that there was something "infinitely
tragical in the approach from a distance of these two sublime beings
already stamped by death." Besides, Marie did not know the novelist.
Another person interested the young girl, Bastien-Lepage. Their
double death-struggle drew them together for a moment, and death
permanently unites their names in our memory.
So let us not seek the sentimental secret which Marie did not wish
to reveal to us. Goncourt tells us the story of that Hokousaï who
signed "_An old man crazy to be conspicuous_." Let us think that
Marie was also the _young girl crazy to be conspicuous_.
But let us go back to an idyl little known of Marie's twelfth year.
The fact itself is not very extraordinary. The little girl is
training herself for motherhood by lavishing caresses on wretched
papier-mâché baby dolls. She is practising for her part of woman by
playing at being in love. Artless little affairs outlined in the
catechism, pervaded by the fragrance of incense. Very similar to
these appears to us the enthusiasm the little Slav felt for the Duc
de H----. Candid, affectionate little girl, she says deliciously: "I
love him, and that is what makes me suffer. Take away this grief,
and I shall be a thousand times more unhappy. The pain makes my
happiness. I live for it alone. All my thoughts are centred there.
The Duc de H---- is my all. I love him so much. That is a very
ancient and old-fashioned phrase, since people no longer love."
After such a passage of captivating vivacity, in which work and
pleasures inflame this ardent vitality, other days,--numerous, alas!
have the mere mention of a date followed by a dash. These are the
stations of the disease when the charming body was weakening like a
dying flower. And there were the alternations of hope, the
physicians consulted when at first she believed everything, to
doubt, later, all the remedies with which their pity beguiles
anxiety, at last the resigned almost certainty:
"And, nevertheless, I am going to die."
Should the shortness of her existence be regretted for Marie?
Certainly, thoroughly in love, she would not have found happiness in
marriage, which fashionable society too often transforms into a
partnership of egotisms, interests, and hypocrisy. But would not
maternity have consoled her, affording her a delicious refuge, her
who bent patiently over the faces of the very little children,
expressed their fleeting occupations, their intent looks?
Sly death did not permit her to finish her destiny, and the little
Slav preserves for us her disturbing virgin charm.
In that villa in Nice, where Marie Bashkirtseff lived, clearly
appears the vision of a young girl, harmonious in the whiteness of
her usual clothing, with a gaze sparkling with ardent life, her who,
Maurice Barrès says,[A] "appears to us a representation of the
eternal force which calls forth heroes in each generation and that
she may seem of sound sense to us, let us cherish her memory under
the proud name of Our-Lady who is never satisfied."