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