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 Hokousai 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-mache 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: