October 24th, 1875.

I boasted of my conduct yesterday; there was no reason for it; if I appeared indifferent it was because I was indifferent.  These people don’t know how to talk; the Arts, history, one doesn’t even hear their names.  I feel that I am gradually growing stupid.  I am doing nothing.  I want to go to Rome—­to take up my lessons again.  I am bored.  I feel myself being gradually enveloped in the spider’s web which covers everything here, but I am struggling, I am reading.

At the theatre P——­ with R——­, her good friend, as they say in Nice, began to yawn when she saw all the people in our box.

Why do women yawn when they are jealous and curious?  My mother has noticed it a hundred times, and I, too, in my short life.

Wretched feminine position!  Men have all the privileges, women have only that of waiting their good pleasure.

I should be quite proud if I could make myself really loved by this man.

Wild, reckless, ruined, vicious, fickle, brutalised by association with wicked women!  His feelings of delicacy, of true love, of virtue, which are the bloom of the human heart, have been early swept away from him.  The desire for money holds the first place, money to lead a gay life, to support the riffraff he has in his train.

How much women are to be pitied!  It is the man who first takes notice, it is the man who asks to be introduced, it is the man who makes the first advances, it is the man who gives the invitation to dance, it is the man who pays attention, it is the man who offers marriage.  The woman is like this paper, this nice paper on which we write whatever we please.  God does not hear me, yet I will not doubt God.  Often a desire to do it seizes possession of me, but I am very quickly punished.

Pshaw!  Life is an ugly thing!

* * * * *

Before dinner we went to walk, it was wonderful moonlight.  I said a thousand foolish things to O——­, and if Dina and M——­ were as crazy as we, a great scandal would have happened, for we wanted to dance a ring around a priest who was passing.

O——­ is writing a novel, it appears.  After dinner we went in search of her; I shut myself up with her, and the good girl read it.  But at the second page I stopped her and proposed that we should write one together.  I gave the idea, everything, everything, and the girl imagines she is composing too.  It would be the story of Dumas with the Tour de Nesle, but I shall not assert my rights, I am giving her a love scene for to-morrow.  She makes no pretensions, and asks for ideas, details, and love scenes with perfect simplicity.

As for me, I set to work and, at one dash, wrote the first chapter, in which my hero bursts open a door and leaps through the window.

People are doing me the honour to busy themselves very much about me, to gossip a great deal over me.  Haven’t I always desired it?