From her she learnt that lack of money was the cause of their sordid life, and from that moment she worshipped money.
“I sometimes buried a coin that had been given me,” she writes, “as a dog buries a bone.”
When she went to school little Elsbeth Bugge was soon informed that she was “the prettiest girl in the school”; that a pretty face was worth a fortune.
“From that moment I entered upon the accursed cult of my person which absorbed the rest of my childhood and all my first youth.... I avoided the sun lest I should get freckles; I collected rain water for washing; I slept with gloves, and though I adored sweets, I refrained from eating them on account of my teeth. I spent hours brushing my hair.”
One day when she came home she found the only big mirror in the house had been transferred from her father’s room and hung in her own.
“I made myself quite ill with excitement, and the maid had to put me to bed. But later on, when the house was quiet, I got up and lit my lamp. I spent hours gazing at myself in the glass. There I sat till the sun rose.”
Then follows an account of how this child, scarcely in her teens, positively set her cap at a rich, elderly widower, because he had a fine house.
“My brain reeled as I said to myself, ‘Some day I will live in that house as wife of the Chief Magistrate.’”
The precociousness of Marie Bashkirtseff who fell in love with a duke when she ought to have been playing with her dolls, pales into insignificance beside this confession.