Her masters always assured her of her talent, but she was much of the time depressed.  She admired the work of Mlle. Breslau and acknowledged herself jealous of the Swiss artist.  But after a year of study she took the second prize in the Academy, and admitted that she ought to be content.

Robert-Fleury took much interest in her work, and she began to hope to equal Breslau; but she was as often despondent as she was happy, which no doubt was due to her health, for she was already stricken with the malady from which she died.  Julian wondered why, with her talent, it was so difficult for her to paint; to herself she seemed paralyzed.

In the autumn of 1879 she took a studio, and, besides her painting, she essayed modelling.  In 1880 her portrait of her sister was exhibited at the Salon, and her mother and other friends were gratified by its acceptance.

At one time Mlle. Bashkirtseff had suffered with her eyes, and, getting better of that, she had an attack of deafness.  For these reasons she went, in the summer of 1880, to Mont-Dore for treatment, and was much benefited in regard to her deafness, though not cured, and now the condition of her lungs was recognized, and what she had realized for some time was told to her family.  She suffered greatly from the restrictions of her condition.  She could not read very much, as her eyes were not strong enough to read and paint; she avoided people because of her deafness; her cough was very tiresome and her breathing difficult.

At the Salon of 1881 her picture was well hung and was praised by artists.  In the autumn of that year she was very ill, but happily, about the beginning of 1882, she was much better and again enthusiastic about her painting.  She had been in Spain and excited admiration in Madrid by the excellence of her copy of “Vulcan,” by Velasquez.  January 15th she wrote:  “I am wrapped up in my art.  I think I caught the sacred fire in Spain at the same time that I caught the pleurisy.  From being a student I now begin to be an artist.  This sudden influx of power puts me beside myself with joy.  I sketch future pictures; I dream of painting an Ophelia.  Potain has promised to take me to Saint-Anne to study faces of the mad women there, and then I am full of the idea of painting an old man, an Arab, sitting down singing to the accompaniment of a kind of guitar; and I am thinking also of a large affair for the coming Salon—­a view of the Carnival; but for this it would be necessary that I should go to Nice—­to Naples first for the Carnival, and then to Nice, where I have my villa, to paint it in open air.”

She now met Bastien-Lepage, who, while he was somewhat severe in his criticism of her work, told her seriously that she was “marvellously gifted.”  This gave her great pleasure, and, indeed, just at this time the whole tone of the journal and her art enthusiasm are most comforting after the preceding despairing months.  From this time until her death her journal is largely occupied with her health, which constantly failed, but her interest in art and her intense desire to do something worthy of a great artist—­something that Julian, Robert-Fleury, and, above all, Bastien-Lepage, could praise, seemed to give her strength, and, in spite of the steady advance of the fell tuberculosis from which she was dying, she worked devotedly.