Last night, it was venison for dinner. I told Papa I would rather starve to death, and he said that was fine by him and sent me to my room. Here, I felt the injustice and horror of the day well up inside me, and I began to rework the painting – the one of the horse and the lion. I could see now where I had gone wrong. Until this moment, I had captured only the pain of the horse, but now I was trying to show the intensity of the struggle that existed for both the hunter and his prey. After all, if the lion didn’t kill he would starve to death. The same was not true for us today when my father shot the stag – we have a kitchen full of food!

I think the revisions are successful enough for me to pass my end of term. Tomorrow we go back to Paris. Next week I’m back at school. I look forward to having the smell of oil paint on my hands once more instead of blood. I’m going riding in the morning before we leave. I shall take the roan and go alone.

August 31, 1852

I did not anticipate that the roan would be no better behaved alone than he was in company. From the moment we departed the yard he was atrocious, shaking his head and pulling the reins again and again, reefing until my fingers were raw, even through the gloves that I was wearing, and my nerves were frazzled from constantly fighting his urges to bolt with me. He trotted and sidestepped through the forest like a crab, constantly looking this way and that with his eyes on stalks and spooking at anything and everything on the ground. A leaf! A fallen bough! A squirrel! He was driving me demented and the ride was not in any way enjoyable, and after half an hour of this nonsense I had decided to turn for home when it happened.

The pheasant was right underneath his hooves when it flew up and the racket the bird made with its wing beats and the flash of rainbow feathers would have frightened even the most sensible horse. The roan went straight up. I remember thinking that I should try to stay on board, even though he was right up on his hind legs, that it would be safer to remain on his back than to fall and be trodden on. And then there was this sickening lurch and I felt gravity working in all the wrong directions and he was coming over backwards on top of me as we fell down to the ground. And then everything turned black.