The stories of the Manet brothers [Edouard and her future husband Eugène Manet] tell about all the horrors we are likely to face [in Paris, during the war between France and Germany] are almost enough to discourage even the bravest of us. [But] you know they always exaggerate, and at the moment they see everything in the blackest possible light.

In a letter to her sister Edma, who stayed then in Britanny, 1870; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 72