An American Heiress in Paris, 1900 — and the Diary She Never Meant Anyone to Read
She Had Everything. She Was Furious Anyway.
Paris, late May 1900. Alberta Sturges is twenty-two years old, living at 6 Place des États-Unis, and she is in a fury.
Not about anything large. That is precisely the problem. She is furious because her mother reads the newspaper when she says good morning. Furious because her father disapproves of something she has done. Furious at the sensation of being corrected, being overlooked, being treated — as she puts it — like a child.
And then, in the same diary entry, she turns the full force of her intelligence on herself. What follows is one of the most honest pieces of self-examination I have ever read.
An Excellent Princess you would make, Alberta
Alberta had been building to this moment for months. Since her mother’s return from California in February, she wrote, she had been “in one long struggle with myself.” She had spent the spring in Cannes for a friend’s wedding, then moved on to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, attending lectures by the Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes every morning at the Palais des Congrès, visiting fortune-tellers, going to garden parties at the Duchess de Rohan’s house. On the surface, a full and privileged life.
Underneath, something was wrong. She knew it. She kept writing it down.
The entry for May 29th, 1900 begins mid-storm:
Oh! the ingratitude — what is it that rises in me — in my heart up to my throat — a feeling of fighting and absolute misery. For days I have been angry and blue.
She diagnoses herself with clinical precision. There are, she writes, two different people inside her. The first has good reason, good nature, a clear vision of things — but weak character. The second is “more tempestuous, angry unreasonable and wilfully blind.” Between these two she wonders. And when the second nature takes over, she can see exactly what is happening — and is ruled anyway.
I am angry because Mother reads the paper when I bid her good morning — furious because Pater doesn’t like something I do. I feel miserable and of no use... I long to be socially recognized — I don’t give a fig for books — in fact I am unreasonable.
And then comes the pivot. She pivots so hard it almost takes your breath away:
An excellent princess you would make Alberta. With your wrinkled face and bitter heart your malicious love of fault finding. A pretty lady of the manse with your likes and dislikes.
She is talking to herself. Mocking herself. Using the fantasy she has just admitted to — dreaming of a château, of being her own mistress, of being a princess — to expose how absurd that fantasy is given the person she is currently being. It is devastating.
