The tall fellow Bazille has done something I find quite fine: a young girl [in his painting 'View on the village' ] in a very light dress in the shad… - Berthe Morisot

I can not get over everything you did for me in that first day [for his support to hang her works on the 7th Impressionist exhibition, Spring 1882], it seems to me that you are working yourself to death, and all on my account. This touches me deeply and vexes me at the same time.

He [Manet] came about one o'clock [the day for submitting works for The Paris Salon of 1870]. he found it [ 'Reading', Berthe's double-portrait of her mother with her pregnant sister Edma] very good, except for the lower parts of the dress. He took the brushes and put in a few accents.. ..mother was in ecstasies. That is where my misfortune began. Once started, nothing could stop him, from the skirt he went to the bust, from the bust to the head, from the head to the background. He cracked a thousand jokes, laughed like a madman, handed me the palette, took it back; finally by five o'clock in the afternoon we had made the best caricature you have ever seen.

I saw the passers-by on the avenue clearly and simply, in the way they are in Japanese prints [she saw some earlier, together with Mary Casatt in the 'Ecole des Beaux Arts', Paris]. I was thrilled, I knew definitely why I had been painting badly and why I would never paint that way again. I mean to say, I am fifty years old and once a year at least I have the same joy and the same hope.