years, but written day
by day. Marie Bashkirtseff was a child of precocious intelligence,
ardent will, extreme intensity of life. Maurice Barres 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 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
pl