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mandolin, and piano) and her fine voice delighted a society where music seems to have been little known; her painting (we find her painting portraits of her brother and his friends) raised her father's admiration of her to the highest possible pitch. We see her the centre of an admiring crowd, who fête her and worship her; she is carried in a carpet when tired; she holds her court on the stairs like Goethe's Elenore. "I like stairs," she remarks in this connection, "because one ascends." Books were at a discount; society life entirely to the fore. Yet it was not the society life of an or dinary coquette, much as she delighted in coquetry at this epoch; for the character sketches she gives of her admirers show a faculty of observation, and an increased knowledge of human nature, which would not only be remarkable in any person of mature age, but which reveal the enormous strides her own character had made in development since she went to Rome in the spring of that same year. To dazzle by her toilets and accomplishments was, however, by no means sufficient for Marie's restless nature. She threw herself with energy into all the outdoor sports in which her father delighted, determined to surpass all others of her sex in Russian active life, and to conquer the timidity inherent in her nature-thoroughly enjoying the novelty of the purely animal pleasure to be found in riding, fishing, or shooting. Now she successfully mounts an unbroken horse, "partly to spite my own coward ice, partly to fill up the newsbags of those dandies from Poltawa ; now she rates herself for fearing a gun, and sets to work to practise shooting; now it is a huntingparty in which she walks for miles

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in man's costume (ending by shooting a crow !), or takes her place, gun in hand, alone in the damp thicket with a couple of dogs, lying in ambush for the wolves which it is the peasants' duty to beat up. Her intellectual nature needed the relief of the fatiguing reality of this bodily activity, just as her society life found rest in contact with the poorer classes. "You know j'adore m'encanailler," she says quite untranslatably; and goes on to describe how she mixes with the peasants, is within a little of dancing with them; how she dresses in the costume of a peasant maiden, and is discovered by her father sitting with her brother at the door of the village inn.

During her stay in Russia, too, we have the first exhibition of the enthusiastic interest in politics which she displayed in later years. It was the time of the Bulgarian atrocities, of the war between Turkey and Servia, and of the great pan-Slavist agitation. The Russians were clamouring for war, streaming over the frontier to serve as volunteers in the Servian army. "On the reverse of the bill for lunch," she writes immediately after entering Russia, "there is printed a despairing appeal to the Russian people and clergy, on behalf of the Slav Committee at Moscow. This heartrending appeal was put into my hand this morning. I am keeping it." She longs to subscribe to the fund; is enraged with the Czar for not declaring war; cries and shouts with the crowd at the sight of the volunteers who are leaving the station at Poltawa, and is indignant that her companions remain unmoved; hears her father addressing his peasants (on the law concerning horses, as it happens), and immediately jumps to the con

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clusion he must be haranguing in Russia; the mother is with them for the Servians. It is the him when he dies. first indication of the wider, more impersonal feelings which in afteryears urge her to frequent visits to Versailles; which provoke indignant tears on the death, of the Prince Imperial; which overwhelm her with grief at the untimely removal of Gambetta; which nearly produce a fainting fit when the artist Julian, to see if she is capable of emotion, tells her that the Czar has been assassinated.

So Marie was again at Nice with her "two mothers," grandfather, cousin, and doctor; enjoying the garden and the sea, playing with her. dogs, haranguing her fishwomen and market-women. old restlessness had taken possession of her; she plunged with redoubled vigour into reading of every description. Gradually her artistic nature asserted itself more and more strongly at the expense of the social side. "I must cling

But Marie was not happy in to painting," she had said already Russia.

"This life makes my flesh creep (m'horripile)," she says. "The days pass; I am losing precious time in the best years of my life. Evenings passed en famille, charming pleasantries, a gaiety of which I myself am the moving spirit. But what ennui! Not a word of sense, not a phrase that shows a cultivated man. I am a pedant, unhappily,

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and love to hear talk of the ancients
and of science.
Is there
anything of the kind here? Cards
and nothing else. I would shut my-
self up to read, but, my aim being to
make myself liked, that would be a
strange method of attaining it."

Heartily glad, therefore, was
she, when in November she started
with her father to return to Paris.
There they met her mother, and
Marie's work was speedily undone.
The mother, as
we gather from
the diary, was a passive, yielding
woman, capable of great devotion,
but entirely wanting in the firm-
ness, forbearance, and tact, in that
intellectual grip of another's char-
acter, which had enabled Marie
to dominate her father. The
quarrels broke out again, and
M. Bashkirtseff soon returned to
Russia. Yet relations were de-
cidedly improved. Twice after-
wards we find him in France;
Marie and her mother visit him

in Rome; and now: "I grow

every day more enthusiastic for
and again: "You
painting;
think I still want to go into the
world? No, no longer.
I am
embittered, fretted (dépitée), and
turn artist as the discontented
turn republicans." Like a wail
come the melancholy words: "I
have a fever for study, and no
one to guide me." The discontent
culminated in a long talk with
her mother, and a decision of
which Marie tells
us in the

following words :

"I have decided to remain at Paris, where I shall study, and whence I shall go to enjoy myself at the waters in the sunimer. Fancies are exhausted; Russia has failed; I am corrected for good. I feel that the moment has at last come to stop. . . . This is no passing resolution like so many others, but definitive."

It proved the determining moment in Marie's life. Of the traditional marriage idea we hear after this but little. She had refused offer after offer which fell short of her ideal; it was becoming more and more apparent that the glory she desired must be selfearned, that the surging energy within her could not be dominated except by strenuous independent work-work which should gather

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There was, however, a reason for this imperious necessity of serious work very different from the oft-expressed desire of glorya reason unformulated, probably unsuspected, by Marie herself. The loosening of conventional religious beliefs was awakening in her, as it does in all veracious natures, a deepened feeling of the value of human nature as human nature, and, working in union with her impetuousity, was already beginning to produce an almost frenzied desire to reach the living bottom of the world around her. The religion imbibed from her family had never been much more than fetishism, her God a being whose duty it was to make her happy in return for pilgrimage and almsgiving - an essentially artificial religion, not likely to persist in an analytical mind subject to the strain and stress of nineteenth-century life in the great centres of civilisation.

"My God!" she says, quite at the beginning of her diary, "if you let me live as I should like, I promise you, if you take pity on me, to go from Kharkhoff to Kieff on foot.

If you satisfy my ambition and make me quite happy, I promise to go to Jerusalem, and do the tenth part of

the road on foot."

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is very original to converse with the good God, but that does not make Him any the kinder to me.”

We find her telling her beads, and hitting her head on the pavement at each bead; or again, quietly reasoning away the existence of the soul. Now she is lifted up to the seventh heaven in an ecstasy of belief; again, she shyly remarks that she felt the first pain in her right lung while her father and mother were so fervently praying for her recovery in that specially favoured church at Kharkhoff. We may surely believe that this fluctuation of religious belief, this want of the spiritual excitement which acts as a safety-valve to most women, had much to do with the frenzied zeal with which she sought realisin in heart. An indolent. inactive religion was not akin to her nature, yet that was the religion which she had been accustomed from childhood to see before her.

if God wills-by the help of God. "Mamma always speaks of God: One calls on God so often ouly to escape from all kinds of little duties. That is neither faith nor devotion: a weakness, the cowardice of the idle, indolent, incapable. If it is written that such a thing will happen, it will happen,' she says, to avoid the trouble of exerting herself. 'If everything were written beforehand, God would only be a constitutional president, and our wishes, vices, virtues, miere sine

cures.'

Deprived, then, both by her analytical mind and by the loftiness of her ideals of religion, and of the ability to make a good match, Marie, in the autumn of 1878, settled in Paris to begin the artistic career which was to prove her consolation until her death. Painting was the only form of art left open to her. Her voice was irrevocably gone in consequence of

a chronic laryngitis. From the beginning it seems to have been fluctuating; it went and came, and she received it back after each attack of hoarseness with tears of joy, the value of which singers will be well able to appreciate. "It is as though a mother should find living, in her arms, a child whom she believed to be dead, and dead through her own fault," says Marie in one such transport. But at Rome the terrible cough began; chest and larynx were both affected: "You know, doctor, I spit blood, and must be looked to." "Oh, mademoiselle, if you persist in writing till three o'clock in the morning you will have every malady under the sun." But to preach calm to Marie was to impose moderation on some devouring conflagration; and her answer to the warning was-her Paris life.

October 1878 saw her first entry into Julian's art academy, and an immediate grip of her work, which greatly astonished Julian, and Robert Fleury, the teacher in her section. It was certainly an extraordinary thing that a vivacious girl of seventeen, whose position enabled her to go into society as much as she wished, should work for eight and nine hours a day in a small, close, ugly studio, with a fervour not to be surpassed by those whose art was their bread. "All that in an hour!" cried M. Robert Fleury, correcting one of her sketches, "but she must be

furious (enragée)." Her powers were at once apparent; so plainly so, in fact, that it took some time to convince both Julian and Robert Fleury that she had never worked seriously at art before. "You did all that alone?" is the constant and somewhat incredulous demand

during the first few days of her studio-life, to be followed by encouragements to work which spoke

volumes in the mouths of such masters of the art. "Reassure yourself," said Julian three days after her entry, "you will not be long on the road."

"And when," Marie goes

on

mamma came to fetch me at five o'clock, he said something like the following: 'I thought it was the caprice of a spoilt child, but I must confess that she really works, has plenty of will, and is well gifted. If this Salon in three months."", continues, her works will be fit for the

Such words of praise were to Marie the sine quá non of successful work; they were a mental champagne, needful to counteract the desponding tendency so curiously blended with her ambition. They never elated her unduly ; they simply made her see clearly.

"Do not think I do wonders because M. Julian is astonished," she says. "I am wanting in experience,

but what I do is correct and like the original. As to the execution, it is what one might expect after a week's work. All my companions draw better than I do. . . . What makes me think I shall do better than they is that, though I feel their merit, I should not be content to do as they do; whereas most beginners say, 'If I could only draw like So-and-so, or So-and-so !'"

Yet, if M. Julian did not praise, but blamed her, or if even his words of praise were not glowing enough, her fears got the better of her, she ceased calculating the number of months which she would and began to think that, after all, need to make herself renowned, she had mistaken her vocation; neither could she judge herself fairly again until she had provoked a renewal of the praise which was her medicine. • She brooded on blame, and passed lightly over praise.

"What a much greater impression disagreeable things make than pleas

ant ones!" she says epigrammatically
"For the last
in this connection.
month I heard nothing but encourage-
ments, except once, a fortnight_ago;
this morning I am scolded, and I only
remember this morning; but it is so
in everything and always. A thou-
sand persons applaud, one only hisses,
and one hears that one more than the
thousand."

Most characteristically Marie proceeds to grow jealous of the successes of the most gifted and advanced artist in the studio.

"Breslau has been working in the studio for two years, and she is twenty, while I am seventeen; but Breslau had drawn a great deal before coming here. And I, wretch! I have only been drawing for a fortnight. How well Breslau draws!"

Her artistic life resolves itself henceforth in great measure into "In two or a race with Breslau. three months I shall draw as she does that is to say, very well." She compares all her work with Breslau's; she is continually pulling herself up to ask herself how Breslau drew at the corresponding stage of her studies. When her painting seems at a standstill (she was encouraged to begin to paint very soon after entering the studio) she consoles herself with the thought that Breslau too, was said at first to be no colourist; "yet now," she adds, with the artistic appreciation of a generous rival "now, 'her tones sing." She is glad to have found

"With

a rival worthy of her.
the others," she says, "I should
have gone to sleep."

"This girl,” she writes later on in one of her moments of despairing depression-"this girl is a power; she is not the only one, of course, but we come from the same cage, not to say from the same nest, and I divined and foresaw it, and told you so in very first days, I, ignorant being as I was then. I despise myself, I

the

renounce myself, I do not understand
how Julian and Tony [Robert Fleury]
can say what they do. I am nothing,
I have nothing dans le ventre (0
Beside Breslau I feel like
Zola !).
a thin, fragile card-board box near
a massive, richly sculptured oaken
chest."

She envies Bresiau her milieu,
where persons and things are
"The milieu is half the
artistic.
talent while one is a pupil," she
says later, comparing Breslau's
advantages in this respect with
the constant friction and nervous
tension to which she herself is
subjected through her efforts to
control her impatience at the
philistinism of her family, through
her struggles to feel and show
gratitude for the numberless marks
of devotion which the fundamental
want of sympathy between herself
and her "mothers" rendered in-
tensely galling to her spirit of
independence. But she puts her
finger on the real difference be-
tween herself and Breslau, and
reveals the cause of the fever of
her work in the words in which
success at-
she comments on a
tained by Breslau while she her-
self was too ill to work.

One

Besides, it's not my fault. must act according to one's nature. She is entirely devoted to her art; as for me, I invent dresses, I dream of draperies, bodices, triumphs in soShe follows her bent, I mine. But my powers are cramped by it."

ciety.

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Art and society, she could renounce neither; must be first in both; and lost her life in the struggle.

In the studio she escaped from the artificial atmosphere which had hitherto stifled her full development, to find herself in an element of true equality which sustained her, braced her, and encouraged her powers to their fullest energy of expression.

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