Marie Bashkirtseff

Marie Bashkirtseff

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Title: Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood)
Author: Marie Bashkirtseff
Release Date: November 1, 2004 [EBook #13916]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration]
MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF
(From Childhood to Girlhood)
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MARY J. SAFFORD

PREFACE
THE SOUL OF A LITTLE GIRL

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