In her work A Meeting (Un meeting) Monna, a Russian aristocrat, was interested in modern subjects. Her picture, painted in 1884, is contemporary with the social movements and laws governing work and trade unionism at the time of the Third Republic.

Using a bright palette and great precision, she observes the street and the gathering of six schoolboys in their smocks holding a discussion or plotting at a street corner. Exhibited at the Salon, A meeting was bought by the French state for the Musée du Luxembourg.

Drumont, writing in La Liberté of May 16, 1884:
“These really are children of the people, as Mlle Bashkirtseff could have seen them on leaving the rue Brémontier. Their narrow eyes, puny limbs and pallor revealing lymphatism and anemia.

A suggestion of cunning is evident on the faces of all these children, full of admiration as they watch a grown-up explaining some game with a top.”