“I send to you all that remains to me of my heart.

“ANY.”

“Paris, August 4th.

“I can bear this no longer, my dear friend; you must come back, for something is certainly going to happen to me.  I ask myself whether I am not already ill, so great a dislike have I for everything I used to take pleasure in doing, or did with indifferent resignation.  For one thing, it is so warm in Paris that every night means a Turkish bath of eight or nine hours.  I get up overcome by the fatigue of this sleep in a hot bath, and for an hour or two I walk about before a white canvas, with the intention to draw something.  But mind, eye, and hand are all empty.  I am no longer a painter!  This futile effort to work is exasperating.  I summon my models; I place them, and they give me poses, movements, and expressions that I have painted to satiety.  I make them dress again and let them go.  Indeed, I can no longer see anything new, and I suffer from this as if I were blind.  What is it?  Is it fatigue of the eye or of the brain, exhaustion of the artistic faculty or of the optic nerve?  Who knows?  It seems to me that I have ceased to discover anything in the unexplored corner that I have been permitted to visit.  I no longer perceive anything but that which all the world knows; I do the things that all poor painters have done; I have only one subject now, and only the observation of a vulgar pedant.  Once upon a time, and not so very long ago, either, the number of new subjects seemed to me unlimited, and in order to express them I had such a variety of means the difficulty of making a choice made me hesitate.  But now, alas!  Suddenly the world of half-seen subjects has become depopulated, my study has become powerless and useless.  The people that pass have no more sense for me.  I no longer find in every human being the character and savor which once I liked so much to discern and reveal.  I believe, however, that I could make a very pretty portrait of your daughter.  Is it because she resembles you so much that I confound you both in my mind?  Yes, perhaps.

“Well, then, after forcing myself to sketch a man or a woman who does not resemble any of the familiar models, I decide to go and breakfast somewhere, for I no longer have the courage to sit down alone in my own dining-room.  The Boulevard Malesherbes seems like a forest path imprisoned in a dead city.  All the houses smell empty.  On the street the sprinklers throw showers of white rain, splashing the wooden pavement whence rises the vapor of damp tar and stable refuse; and from one end to the other of the long descent from the Parc Monceau to Saint Augustin, one sees five or six black forms, unimportant passers, tradesmen or domestics.  The shade of the plane-trees spreads over the burning sidewalks, making a curious spot, looking almost like liquid, as if water spilled there were drying.  The stillness of the leaves on the branches, and of their gray silhouettes on