At nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient cries, calls on God, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears that the young French prince about whom she has spun romances was killed by the Kaffirs; feels herself growing serious and sensible; despises death; realizes that God is not what she thought, but is perhaps Nature and Life or is perhaps Chance; she thinks out possible pictures she might paint; develops a Platonic friendship for her professor; might marry an old man with twenty-seven millions, but spurns the thought; finds herself growing deaf gradually, and at nineteen finds three grey hairs; has awful remorse for days, when she cannot work and so loses herself in novels and cigarettes; makes many good resolutions and then commits some folly as if in a dream; has spells of reviewing the past. When the doctor finds a serious lung trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and flannel, she at first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at the terror of her friends, but gradually does all that is necessary; feels herself too precocious and doomed; deplores especially that consumption will cost her her good looks; has fits of intense anger alternating with tears; concludes that death is annihilation; realizes the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her that some time or other will come out; reads the New Testament again and returns to belief in miracle, and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; distributes one thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow through her brain at night and the strange sensations by day. Her eye symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; she grows superstitious, believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is strongly impelled to embrace and make up with her mother; at times defies God and death; sees a Spanish bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of human cowardice, but has a strange intoxication with blood and would like to thrust a lance into the neck of every one she meets; coquets a great deal with the thought of marriage; takes up her art and paints a few very successful pictures; tries to grapple with the terrible question, "What is my unbiased opinion concerning myself?" pants chiefly for fame. When the other lung is found diseased the diary becomes sometimes more serious, sometimes more fevered; she is almost racked to find some end in life; shall she marry, or paint? and at last finds much consolation in the visits of Bastien-Lepage, who comes to see her often while he is dying of some gastric trouble. She keeps up occasional and often daily entries in her journal until eleven days before her death, occurring in October, 1884, at the age of twenty-three, and precipitated by a cold incurred while making an open-air sketch.