The Diary of a Chambermaid E-Book

Octave Mirbeau

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Celestine becomes as corrupt as the men who uses her in this satire of French society. The Diary of a Chambermaid was written as a satire of Parisian society in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. Mirbeau brings a journalist's analytical eye to Celestine's adventures as she loses her innocence and becomes as corrupt and depraved as the men who exploited her. Since its publication in 1900 it has never ceased to shock and fascinate its readers and has been made into a film by Jean Renoir in 1946 and Luis Bunuel in 1964.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

The Diary of a Chambermaid - An Introduction

Foreword

14 September

15 September

18 September

26 September

28 September

1 October

6 October

27 October

28 October

3 November

10 November

12 November

13 November

18 November

20 November

24 November

Copyright

The Diary of a Chambermaid - An Introduction

‘What filth and decay there is under the pretty surface of our society!’

Jean Grave, editor of the leading anarchist journal, Le Révolté, on reading The Diary of a Chambermaid.

The Diary of a Chambermaid is probably the best known novel by the French writer, Octave Mirbeau. This is largely due to the interest of two giants of the cinema, Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel, who based films on Mirbeau’s popular and controversial satire. Both directors felt, in their own, very individual ways, a special affinity with this picaresque story of Célestine, a spirited chambermaid who keeps a diary charting her career in service. For the modern reader too, Mirbeau’s tale is more than a confessional romp. It exposes the seamier aspects of an over-romanticised period in French history, the Belle Epoque, the era of the can-can, the Impressionists and high Parisian fashion, through the gradual corruption of its innocent heroine.

In Mirbeau’s portrait of France at the end of the nineteenth century we can see a society at root not so different from our own. The gap between rich and poor - the central theme of this novel - is now writ large across the globe. The callousness of those who hold economic power is as vicious as ever. The earth itself seems consumed by a chemical rottenness that matches the human pollution Mirbeau exposed in his fiction and polemical journalism. The difference lies not in the problems, but in the poignant hopes and beliefs of Mirbeau and many of his contemporaries which it is almost impossible for us to share: hopes of revolution, beliefs that society can be remade through political action.

Mirbeau’s life spans a crucial seventy years, from the ‘year of revolutions’ across Europe in 1848 to the unimagined horror of the Great War. The issues that concerned Mirbeau throughout his maturity - state authoritarianism, militarism, anti-semitism, the powers of the Catholic Church - continued into the Vichy period and are alive today. For Mirbeau, anarchism - the philosophy developed by thinkers like Prince Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy - provided the clearest analysis of social ills. Its visionary espousal of individual liberty spurred him politically and artistically. What George Woodcock has called ‘a system of social thought, aiming at … the replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of non-governmental co-operation between free individuals’ became a lifelong credo.

In the thirty years between the founding of the Third Republic and 1900, when The Diary of a Chambermaid was published, France was convulsed by scandals that exposed tensions in society that remained unresolved well into the twentieth century. The most well known is the arrest and conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 on charges of passing secrets to the German military attaché in Paris. The subsequent discovery that Dreyfus was innocent and that the army had attempted a cover-up might have been less significant had Dreyfus not been a Jew, the first to enter the General Staff. The stage was set for conflict between the republican supporters of Dreyfus - the so-called dreyfusards - and an alliance of dissidents dominated by Catholic royalists and anti-semitic ‘patriots’. It is these latter elements that frequent Joseph’s Cherbourg café at the end of Mirbeau’s novel, which draws a disturbing picture of violent racism. For Joseph, the only good Jew is a dead one - and that goes for Protestants and free-thinkers too. He carves his racist and patriotic slogans everywhere, ‘even on the handles of the brooms’. This attitude resurfaced in the 1930’s, when the French fascists vilified Leon Blum, the Jewish socialist leader of the Popular Front, with the slogan ‘Rather Hitler than Blum’.

What is remarkable in an age that celebrates writers without taking them seriously is the vigorous engagement and influence of authors like Octave Mirbeau and Emile Zola in the thick of this political controversy. Zola’s open letter to the President, ‘J’accuse’, has been called the prime catalyst in the whole affair, leading to the retrial and acquittal of Captain Dreyfus. Mirbeau consistently championed artists and writers whose work was attacked or suppressed by the authorities.

The battlelines evident in the Dreyfus affair had been drawn up much earlier, in the aftermath of the Revolution. On one side stood the republicans who wanted to consolidate their political victory by secularising the state, especially education. On the other side stood monarchists, Catholics threatened by the anti-clericalism of the Republic, and militarists who flocked to Boulanger’s failed attempt to challenge the Republic in 1889. The revelations of government corruption in the Panama scandal in 1892 exposed another powerful and unpleasant trait of those opposed to the republic. Because the Panama Canal Company’s Jewish financiers had bribed Republican officials to offer a large public loan to their ailing business, Jews became targets of a vitriolic campaign designed to discredit the ‘patriotism’ of the republican government. The fact that the vast majority of Jews belonged to the same working class as everyone else escaped the anti-semitic ideologues, who were later to claim that the Dreyfus affair had been a Jewish plot. This prejudice against the Jews puzzles Célestine, the heroine of Mirbeau’s novel, even as she publicly affirms it: after all, whether Jews or Catholics, as masters and mistresses they have ‘the same beastly natures, the same nasty minds’. If anything, Jews were more ‘free and easy’ with their servants.

Célestine often acts as Mirbeau’s mouthpiece for his acid observations on the status quo. All his fiction is autobiographical, drawing on his development from the rural middle-class boy, educated by the Jesuits, who went on to study law in Paris, serve in the Army of the Loire and write for the monarchist press to the radical anarchist and best-selling novelist that he had become.

Reg Parr, author of the only considerable study of Mirbeau in English, pinpoints 1885 as the year when the thirty-seven year old journalist discovered Kropotkin’s seminal anarchist work, Paroles d’un Révolté and Tolstoy’s Ma Religion. 1885 was also the year when the government attacked the stage adaptation of Germinal, Zola’s powerful novel about a miners’ strike. Already a supporter of the avant-garde in the art world - Monet was, for example, a lifelong friend - Mirbeau finally made connections between his unease at government power and his libertarian instincts. The catalyst was anarchism and Mirbeau became the leading literary voice of the anarchist movement. Even when anarchism was tainted by the spontaneous terrorist bombings and assassinations of 1892 to 1894 (the so-called ‘I’ère des attentats’), Mirbeau kept faith with its essential idealism and rationalism until the very end.

In the same way as Lu Xün, China’s greatest modern writer, struggled for the same causes as the Chinese revolutionary leaders in the 1920s and 30s without compromising his independence, Mirbeau chose to speak the same language as many of the leading anarchists in France, people like Jean Grave and Sebastian Faure. His fiction and his newspaper articles were welcome barbs in the flanks of what they considered a repressive regime. Mirbeau embraced the whole anarchist philosophy and its practical implications. He argued cogently against universal suffrage as an elective dictatorship, a method for the ruling classes to retain their power over the masses. He railed against the death penalty. He attacked the use of charity to keep the poor in their place. He condemned the arbitrary violence of the police and the parallel atrocities committed abroad in the French colonies. He discovered that everywhere he looked evil was paraded as good. Hypocrisy was Mirbeau’s prime target; satire, sometimes so savage that it rebounded on him, was the chief string to his bow.

Mirbeau wrote several novels in the first flush of this conversion to anarchism: Le Calvaire (1886), L’Abbé Jules (1888) and Sebastian Roch (1890), all placing the individual against an implacable social order. Sebastian Roch, for example, describes the unhappy fate of a young man entrusted as a child to the less than tender mercies of Father de Kern at the Jesuit College of Vannes. The conflict between the hero’s instinctive sense of justice and the religious and military indoctrination he is subjected to creates an unbearable tension that Mirbeau had only recently resolved for himself.

In 1899 Mirbeau returned to fiction, after years of dissident journalism and political activism, again out of anger at injustice. The Dreyfus affair found its literary metaphor in Le Jardin des Supplices (The Torture Garden), a cruel tale that sets out to demonstrate Mirbeau’s thesis that ‘murder is the greatest obsession of mankind’. In this dystopian narrative Mirbeau links high society with depravity and torture, a theme he returned to in a more realistic vein in his following book The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), where Célestine, in one memorable comment on the upper class, says: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the main aim of its existence is to enjoy the filthiest of amusements.’

Another link to the earlier novel is a disturbing emphasis on the darker sides of eroticism. While not taken to the logical extremes of de Sade or a later French writer, Georges Bataille, Mirbeau’s treatment of sex and its relationship to corruption, cruelty and death did create controversy (and no doubt helped sales of his books). Célestine’s vigorous sexual appetite - she admits, with typical candour, that she enjoys making love ‘too much to be able to make a living from it’ - seems healthier than the depraved tastes of her employers, with enough money and power to indulge their fetishes and fantasies. This makes her final capitulation all the more ironic, even tragic.

For a modern reader, though, the misogyny that runs through Mirbeau’s writing must appear to weaken his reputation as a progressive radical thinker. Partly influenced by the fashionable symbolist cult of the femme fatale - Woman as evil seductress of Man’s best instincts - Mirbeau also had an unhappy experience with an unfaithful mistress that apparently soured his view of women. However, in the person of Célestine he has created, whether he intended to or not, a strong and compassionate social critic at war with her oppressors. The fact that she succumbs in the end to the evil around her does not weaken the overall effects of her scathing and often riotously funny diagnosis of the petty-minded inanity and callousness of the bourgeoisie. Her fatal attraction to evil, despite her awareness of its moral and personal implications, is psychologically convincing. Deflowered at the age of twelve by a brutish foreman, whom she remembers ‘with gratitude’, she is ultimately drawn to men like Joseph, a wolfish rapist and proto-fascist, almost as a revenge on a society that offers her nothing beyond degradation and contempt.

The servant-master relationship and the scope it offers to an author to compare and contrast two classes runs through world literature and still fascinates: the Upstairs Downstairs school, one might call it. Seldom has the exploitation of the poor by the rich been explored as angrily as here: ‘Solitude is … living in other people’s houses, amongst people who have no interest in you, who regard you as being of less importance than the dogs they stuff with titbits … from whom all you get are, useless, cast-off clothes and left-over food, already going bad.’ Servants are ‘hybrid monsters’, torn from their roots and never able to rise above their situation. And money rules all, money earned from exploitation. Célestine’s last mistress owes her wealth to her father’s unscrupulous scheme to help rich men’s sons evade the draft by substituting the poor - a white version of the slave trade. As Célestine observes: ‘I’ve never seen any money that wasn’t dirty or any rich people who weren’t rotten.’

Struggling not to become a victim, Célestine defends herself with what weapons she can lay her hands on: her sexual power over men, her intelligence, her bitter humour, her knowledge of the foibles of her employers. The price she pays is loneliness and a restless search for a better life: ‘I have always been in a hurry to be somewhere else.’ She can be perverse but she excites our sympathy to the end because we identify with her disgust - which is Mirbeau’s as well - and with her love for life, which is thwarted at almost every turn by the relentless animosity of the ruling class. Only in the poignant episode with ‘Monsieur George’ does Célestine glimpse what could be. The cruel trick played on these lovers, when what should give life ends it, closes that avenue for ever. There are few options for women in Célestine’s position.

Célestine’s sensuality only came home to Luis Buñuel after he had cast Jeanne Moreau in the role for his 1964 film adaptation of Mirbeau’s novel. ‘When she walks,’ he recalled, ‘her foot trembles just a bit on its high heel, suggesting a certain tension and instability.’ It is easy to understand Buñuel’s interest in The Diary of a Chambermaid, looking over his career as one of the great moralists of the twentieth century. Buñuel used surrealism to disturb and provoke, not simply to amuse. His translation of the novel’s action to the 1920s drew conscious parallels between the dark side of the Belle Epoque and sinister rise of Fascism in the later period: from Dreyfus to Vichy. Like Mirbeau, Buñuel was an anarchist and delighted in satirizing the bourgeoisie. He too found sexual metaphors for repression - he makes a classic sequence out of Monsieur Rabour’s foot fetish. Where Buñuel differs is in his transformation of Célestine into a moral avenger, secretly betraying Joseph to the police for his savage rape and murder of a young girl. Although the film ends with her marriage to an older, buffoonish version of Joseph - Captain Mauger - and Joseph’s reported acquittal, Buñuel’s conclusion is less bleak than Mirbeau’s, evoking as it does the survival of the moral impulse.

In Jean Renoir’s version, premiered in 1946, the moral heroism of Célestine is never in doubt. While Buñuel thrust doomed innocents into the den of bourgeois iniquity in films like The Diary of a Chambermaid and Viridiana, Renoir in the forties was focusing on how individuals defined themselves against, even outside the social order. Renoir’s Célestine is an observer of corruption, not Mirbeau’s participant. The fatal attraction of evil is replaced by moral repugnance. The Lanlaires’ household is a trap - a ‘tyranny of the enclosed’, as one critic has it. The cathartic moment, when Célestine’s sweetheart smashes a window to let symbolic light in, is matched by the mob celebrating Bastille Day, who settle accounts with Joseph. News of the liberation of Paris was coming in during filming and this might explain the optimistic interpretation Renoir makes of Mirbeau’s much darker vision.

Mirbeau has been unjustly neglected. In France, his letters, plays and newspaper articles are now being reprinted. There are the beginnings of a reappraisal of his literary achievements and his influence on the shaping of modern French politics. It is intriguing to discover that he was hailed at the time as France’s ‘greatest secular writer’ by no less a figure than Leo Tolstoy. Laurent Tailharde, an anarchist poet, memorialised his old friend’s writing as ‘chaotic, smouldering, fiery, maledictory, nothing less than an appeal for justice, a long cry for pity, gentleness and love’.

Like Shelley, whose radicalism is likewise underplayed today, Mirbeau was an impassioned artist, seeking to change the world through his writing. He used powerful exaggerations to illustrate the grotesqueries of Western civilisation, which was based, in his view, on an inversion of moral values. His purpose in laying bare the sick organism of French society was not to titillate, but to evoke in the reader a sense of outrage, a necessary impetus for change.

Richard Ings

FOREWORD

This book, which I have called The Diary of a Chambermaid, was in fact written by a chambermaid, a certain Mademoiselle Célestine R … When I was asked to revise the manuscript, to correct and re-write parts of it, I at first refused, for it seemed to me that, just as it was, with all its ribaldry, the manuscript had an originality, a special flavour, that any ‘touching up’ by me would only render commonplace. But Mlle Célestine R … was a very pretty woman. She insisted, and, being only a man, eventually I gave in.

I admit that this was a mistake. By undertaking what she asked of me, that is to say by modifying here and there the tone of the book, I am very much afraid that I may have diluted its almost corrosive elegance, weakened its melancholy power, and above all, transformed the emotion and life of the original into mere literature.

I say this in order to meet in advance the objections that certain grave and learned—and of course high-minded—critics will certainly not fail to make.

O.M.

14 September.

14 SEPTEMBER

Today, 14 September, at three o’clock in the afternoon of a mild, grey, rainy day, I have started in a new place, the twelfth in two years. Of course that’s not counting all the jobs I’ve had previously. That would be impossible. Oh, I don’t mind telling you I’ve seen the inside of a few houses in my time, and faces, and nasty minds … And there’s more to come. Judging from the really extraordinary, crazy way that I’ve knocked about so far, from houses to offices and offices to houses, from the Bois de Boulogne to the Bastille, from the Observatoire to Montmartre, from the Ternes to the Gobelins, without ever managing to settle down anywhere, anyone might think employers were difficult to please these days … It’s incredible.

This time everything was fixed up through the small ads in the Figaro, without my having set eyes on my future mistress. We wrote to each other, and that was all: a risky business, which often holds surprises in store for both parties. True, Madame’s letters were well-written, but they revealed a touchy, over meticulous nature. All the explanations she asked for, all the whys and wherefores … I don’t know whether she’s really a miser, but she certainly doesn’t spend much on notepaper … She buys it at the Louvre. Poor as I am, that wouldn’t suit me. I use fine scented paper, pink or pale blue, that I have knocked up at various places I’ve been in. I have even got some with a countess’s coronet on it—that ought to have made her sit up.

Anyway, here I am in Normandy, at Mesnil-Roy. The house, which is not far from the village, is called The Priory. And that’s about all I know of my future home.

Now that I find myself, as a result of a sudden impulse, living here at the back of beyond, I cannot help feeling both anxiety and regret. What I’ve seen of it frightens me a bit, and I wonder what is going to become of me. Nothing good, you may be sure; and, as usual, plenty of worries. Worry, that’s the one perquisite we can always count on. For every one of us who is successful, that is to say marries a decent chap or manages to get herself an old one, how many of us are destined to misfortune, to be swept away into the whirlpool of misery? In any case, I had no choice; and this is better than nothing.

It isn’t the first time I’ve taken a place in the country. Four years ago I had one, though not for long … and in quite exceptional circumstances. I can remember it as though it were yesterday. The details of what happened may be rather sordid, even horrible, but I am going to describe them. And here I may as well warn anybody who thinks of reading this diary that, in writing it, I don’t intend to hold anything back, either as regards myself or other people. On the contrary, I mean to put into it all the frankness that is in my nature and, where necessary, all the brutality that exists in life. It is not my fault if, when one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people’s souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.

This is what happened then:

I had been engaged at a registry office, by a kind of housekeeper, as chambermaid for a certain Monsieur Rabour who lived in Touraine. Having come to terms, it was agreed that I should take the train at a certain time on a certain day for a certain station; and this was done as arranged. Having given up my ticket at the barrier, outside the station I found a coachman of sorts, a man with a red, loutish face, who asked me if I was M. Rabour’s new chambermaid.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Have you got a trunk?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Then give me the ticket for it and wait for me here.’

He went on to the platform where the porters treated him with considerable respect, addressing him in a friendly way as ‘Monsieur Louis’. He found my trunk amongst a pile of baggage and got one of the porters to put it into the dogcart which was standing in the station yard.

‘Aren’t you going to get up then?’

I took my place beside him on the driving seat, and we set off. The coachman began looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and I did the same. I could see straight away that he was nothing but a country bumpkin, little better than a peasant; a fellow without the slightest style, who had certainly never seen service in a decent establishment. This was a bore for I love fine liveries—there’s nothing I find more exciting than a pair of well-shaped thighs in close-fitting, white breeches. But this Louis just didn’t know what elegance means. He had no driving gloves, and was wearing a suit of grey-blue serge, much too big for him, with a flat patent leather cap decorated with gold braid. Really, they’re all behind the times in this part of the world. To crown everything he had a scowling brutal expression, though maybe he was not such a bad chap at heart. I know the type. When there’s a new maid they start by showing off, but later on things get fixed up between them—often a good deal better fixed than they intended.

For a long time neither of us said a word. He was pretending to be a real coachman, holding the reins high in the air and flourishing his whip. Oh, he was a scream! As for me, I just sat there in a dignified way looking at the countryside, though there was nothing very special about it—fields, trees, houses, like anywhere else. When we came to a hill, he pulled up the horse to a walk and, with a mocking smile, suddenly asked me: ‘Well, I suppose you’ve brought a good supply of boots with you!’

‘Naturally,’ I replied, surprised by such a pointless question, and even more by the curious tone of his voice.

‘Why should you want to know? It’s rather a stupid question to ask, my man, isn’t it?’

He nudged me lightly in the ribs and, running his eyes over me with a strange expression on his face, a mixture of acute irony and jovial obscenity that puzzled me, he said with a sneer: ‘Get along with you! As if you didn’t know what I was talking about, you blooming humbug, you!’

Then he clicked his tongue and the horse broke into a trot once more. I was intrigued. What could all this mean? Maybe nothing at all. I decided the fellow must be a bit of a booby, who just didn’t know how to talk to a woman and thought this was a way of starting a conversation. However, I felt it best not to pursue the matter.

M. Rabour’s property was a fine big place, with a pretty house, painted light green and surrounded by huge flowerbeds, and a pinewood that scented the air with turpentine. I adore the country—though the funny thing is, it always makes me sad and sends me to sleep. I was more or less dopey by the time I reached the hall, where I found the housekeeper waiting for me. It was the woman who had engaged me at the registry office in Paris, after God alone knows how many indiscreet enquiries as to my intimate habits and tastes, which ought to have been enough to put me on my guard. But it is no use. Though every time you have to put up with some fresh imposition, you never learn from it. I hadn’t taken to the housekeeper when I first met her; here I felt an immediate dislike for her, for there was something about her that reminded me of an old bawd. She was a big woman, not tall, but with lots of puffy, yellowish fat. Her greying hair was done in plaits, and she had a huge, bulging bosom and soft, moist hands, transparent like gelatine. Her grey eyes had a spiteful expression, cold, deliberate and vicious, and she looked at you in a cruel, unemotional way, as though trying to strip you body and soul, that was enough to make you blush.

She took me into a small sitting-room, and almost immediately left me there, saying she would let Monsieur Rabour know that I had arrived, as he wanted to see me before I started work.

‘The master hasn’t seen you yet,’ she added. ‘It’s true I engaged you, but unless the master takes to you …’

I inspected the room. It was kept extremely clean and tidy. Brasses, furniture, floors, doors, were all scrubbed, waxed, polished till they shone like glass. Nothing trashy, no heavy embroidered curtains and hangings like one sees in some Paris houses, but a general air of wealth and solid comfort, of the regular, tranquil, well-to-do life they lived in the country. Crikey! How unutterably boring such an existence must be!

Monsieur Rabour came into the room, such an odd creature I could scarcely help laughing. Just imagine a little old man dressed up to the nines, freshly shaven and with pink cheeks like a doll’s, very upright, very much alive, very attractive even, and skipping about like a grasshopper. He bowed to me and, with the greatest politeness, asked: ‘What is your name, my dear?’

‘Célestine, sir.’

‘Célestine?’ he repeated. ‘Célestine? Bless me! A pretty name and no mistake … But too long, my child, much too long. If you have no objection I shall call you Marie. That’s also a very nice name, and shorter. Besides, I always call the maids who work here Marie. It’s become a habit that I should hate to give up. I would rather find somebody else.’

They’ve all got this strange mania of never calling you by your own name. So I was not really surprised, having in my time been called after every saint in the calendar. He went on:

‘You don’t mind if I call you Marie? That’s agreed?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Pretty girl … and good character. Excellent, excellent.’

He said all this in a spritely, extremely respectful way, and without putting me out of countenance by staring at me as though he were trying to see through my blouse and skirt as men usually do. Indeed, he had scarcely been looking at me. Since the moment he came into the room his eyes had remained obstinately fixed on my boots.

‘Have you any others?’ he asked after a short silence during which it seemed to me that his eyes had become strangely brilliant.

‘Other names, sir?’

‘No, my dear, boots,’ and he kept licking his lips with the tip of his pointed tongue in the way cats do.

I did not answer immediately. I was amazed by this reference to boots, which reminded me of what that rascally coachman had said to me. What was behind it? After M. Rabour had put the question again I managed to reply, but I was flustered and my voice sounded hoarse like it does when you have to confess to the priest that you have committed sins of the flesh.

‘Yes, sir, I have some others.’

‘Polished ones?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Properly polished?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Good, good. Have you a brown pair?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But you must have brown ones. I shall give you a pair.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Good, good. Not another word.’

I was frightened, for a troubled look had come into his eyes, which were bloodshot with excitement, and drops of sweat were running down his forehead. Thinking he was going to faint, I was on the point of calling for help, but the crisis passed over and after some minutes he managed to say in a quieter voice, though there were still traces of froth at the corners of his mouth:

‘It was nothing … it’s all over … You must understand, my dear … I am a bit of a crank. But at my age that’s not extraordinary, is it? For one thing, you see, I don’t think it’s right for women to have to clean boots, especially not mine. I have a great respect for women, Marie, and I won’t allow it. So I shall clean yours … your dear, sweet little boots. I shall look after them. Now, listen carefully. At night, before you go to bed, you will bring your boots to my room and put them on the little table beside my bed, and in the morning, when you come to draw the curtains, you will take them away again.’

And as I appeared utterly amazed, he added:

‘Come now, that’s not such a tremendous thing to ask, is it? After all, it’s quite natural, and if you’re very good …’ He quickly took a couple of louis from his pocket and handed them to me.

‘If you’re really nice, really obedient, I shall often give you such little presents. The housekeeper will pay you your wages each month. But I shall often give you little presents, ‘Marie … just between you and me. And what do I expect in return? Come now, it’s nothing so extraordinary. Is it really so extraordinary, my God?’

He was getting worked up again, and all the time he was speaking his eyelids kept fluttering like leaves in a gale.

‘Why don’t you say anything Marie? Speak to me … Don’t just stand there—walk about a little so that I can see your little boots moving, coming to life …’ He suddenly knelt down, kissed my boots, stroked them feverishly with his finger-tips, and began to unlace them. Then, still kissing and caressing them, he said in a plaintive voice like a child about to burst into tears:

‘Oh, Marie, Marie, your little boots. Let me take them at once, at once. I want them now, straight away. Give me them!’

I felt completely powerless, stupified with amazement scarcely knowing whether I was really alive or simply dreaming. All I could see of Monsieur Rabour’s eyes were two little white globes, streaked with red, and his whole mouth was covered with a kind of white froth. In the end he took my boots off to his bedroom, where he shut himself up for the next couple of hours.

‘The master is very pleased with you,’ said the housekeeper, as she showed me over the house. ‘You must try to keep things that way. You’ll find you have a good place here.’

Four days later, when I went to his room at the usual time to draw the curtains, I almost fainted with horror. Monsieur Rabour was dead. He was lying on his back in the middle of the bed, his body almost completely naked, and one could sense immediately the stiffness of a corpse. The bedclothes were scarcely disturbed. There was no sign of a struggle, not the slightest trace of a convulsive death agony, of clenched hands straining to fight off death. Except for the hideous colour of his face, the sinister purple of aubergines, you would have thought he was asleep. But a ghastly sight, worse even than his face, made me tremble with fear. Clenched between his teeth was one of my boots, so firmly gripped that, having tried in vain to prise it loose, I was obliged to cut away the leather with a razor.

Now I don’t profess to be a saint. I have known plenty of men and experienced at first-hand all the crazy and filthy things they are capable of. But men like this! No, really, such types shouldn’t be allowed to exist. What on earth makes them want to think up such horrible things, when it’s so nice, so simple to make love properly like everyone else?

I feel pretty sure that nothing of this kind is going to happen to me here. They are obviously quite a different sort of people. Though whether they will turn out to be any better remains to be seen.

One thing does really worry me, however. Perhaps I should have chucked up this beastly job for good … taken the plunge and swapped a skivvy’s life for a tart’s, like so many of the girls I have known; girls who have ‘fewer advantages’ than me, even if I do say it myself. Though I am not what you’d call pretty, I have got something better than that: an appeal, a style, that plenty of society women and plenty of tarts have often envied me. A bit on the tall side, perhaps, but slim and well-made, with lovely fair hair and fine, deep blue eyes, saucy and enticing, and a bold mouth—and on top of that a sort of originality, a turn of mind at once lively and languorous, that men like. I could have been a success. But, apart from the fact that through my own fault I have missed some stunning opportunities that probably won’t occur again, I’ve always been afraid; afraid, because you never know how things are going to turn out. I’ve come across so much wretchedness amongst such women … listened to such heartbreaking confidences! All those tragic visits to the hospital, that no one can hope to escape for ever. And, in the end, the sheer hell of St Lazare. The very thought of it is enough to give you the shivers. Besides, who knows whether I should have had as much success as a tart as I’ve had as a chambermaid? We have a special kind of attraction for men, that does not depend merely upon ourselves, however pretty we may be. It’s partly a question, I realize, of the surroundings we live in—of the background of luxury and depravity, of our mistresses and the desire that they arouse. When men fall for us, it is partly our mistresses, and even more their mystery, that they are in love with.

And there’s another thing. In spite of the free and easy life I have led, I have always fortunately had a very sincere religious feeling, that has saved me from going too far, held me back from the brink of the abyss. Oh, if it weren’t for religion, for being able to go and pray in church on those dreary evenings when you feel morally down and out, if it weren’t for the Blessed Virgin and St Anthony of Padua and all the rest of them, life would certainly be a great deal more miserable, that’s certain. Without them, the devil alone knows what would become of you, or how far you would let yourself go.

Besides, and this is more serious, I haven’t the slightest defence against men. I should always be sacrificing myself to my own open-heartedness and their pleasure. I am altogether too pleasure-loving … Yes, I enjoy making love too much to be able to make a living from it. I can’t help it, but I couldn’t ask a man for money when he had just given me such happiness, opened the radiant gates of ecstasy for me. They only have to begin talking to me, the monsters, and directly I feel the warmth of their breath and the pricking of their beard on the back of my neck, it’s no use. I just go as limp as a rag, and they can do what they like with me …

So, here I am, at The Priory … waiting for what? Heavens above, I haven’t the slightest idea. The most sensible thing would be not to think about it, but just wait and see what turns up. That way, perhaps, things work out best in the long run. Provided that tomorrow, at one word from the mistress and pursued by the pitiless bad luck that never leaves me, I don’t have to chuck up the job once again. That would be a pity. For some time now I’ve been getting pains in the back of my stomach, my whole body feels worn out. My digestion’s upset, and I’m losing my memory, and I’ve been getting more and more nervy and irritable. Just now, looking at myself in the glass, my face seemed to have a really fagged-out look and my complexion—the high complexion I’m so proud of—was as white as a sheet. Can it be that I’m getting old already? I don’t want that to happen. But in Paris it’s so difficult to look after oneself properly. There’s no time for anything. Life is too feverish, too hurried—one is always in contact with too many people, too many things, too much pleasure, too many surprises. Yet you have to keep going just the same. Here, everything is so peaceful … And the silence! The air you breathe ought to be healthy and do you good. Oh if only I could relax a little, even if it does mean being bored to tears.

But the fact is I don’t feel at all sure of myself. True, the mistress is quite nice to me. She was good enough to compliment me on my appearance, and to congratulate herself on the references she had received; though I don’t like to think what she’d say if she knew they were false, or at best, just an act of kindness. What surprised her most is that I am so elegant. Of course, to begin with, they’re nearly always pleasant to you, the bitches. The newer the better, as they say. But before long the atmosphere begins to change—and that’s another story we also know. Besides, she has cold, hard eyes that I don’t fancy at all … the eyes of a miser, and as suspicious as a policeman’s. I don’t like her lips, either: thin and dry and covered with a white film. Nor the sharp, cutting way she has of speaking, that makes even a friendly word sound almost insulting or humiliating. All the time she was cross-questioning me, enquiring about my aptitudes and my past life, she was watching me like an old custom’s officer, with that calm, sly impertinence they all have.

‘Sure enough,’ I said to myself, ‘she’s another of these lockers-up. I bet she counts how many lumps of sugar and how many grapes are left and, before she goes to bed, marks all the bottles. Oh well, it’s just the same for a change!’

Still, I must wait and see, and not allow myself to be too much influenced by first impressions. Among so many mouths that have spoken to me, so many eyes that have tried to peer into my soul, perhaps—who can tell?—I shall one day find a friendly mouth and compassionate eyes. Anyhow, it costs nothing to go on hoping.

As soon as I arrived, still dazed after travelling for four hours in a third-class railway carriage, and without anyone in the kitchen even thinking of offering me a slice of bread and butter, Madame took me all over the house, from the cellars to the attics, to show me ‘what was expected of me.’ She certainly doesn’t mean to waste either her time or mine. Oh, what a huge house it is, and every nook and cranny stuffed with furniture. To look after it properly would need at least four servants. In addition to the very large ground floor, which is extended on either side of the terrace by two little pavilions, there are two more storeys, so that I shall be continually running up and downstairs. Madame, who has a small sitting-room near the dining-room, has had the brilliant idea of putting the linen-room, where I shall be working, right under the rafters, next to our bedrooms. And then all the cupboards and wardrobes and drawers and storerooms, packed with every kind of junk—you can have the lot as far as I’m concerned, for I shall never be able to find my way about.

Every few seconds Madame would point to something and say: ‘You must take great care of that, my girl… That’s very pretty, my girl … That’s very rare, my girl … That cost a great deal, my girl.’

Of course she couldn’t just use my name. Instead, she kept on with her everlasting ‘my girl this … my girl that,’ in that overbearing, hurtful tone of voice that is so disheartening, and sets such a distance, so much hatred, between us and our mistresses. After all, I don’t call her ‘my good woman.’ And then this beastly habit she has of insisting that everything is ‘very expensive.’ It’s infuriating. Everything that belongs to her, even the most miserable tuppenny-ha’penny things, is ‘very expensive.’ These women are so houseproud, you never know what they will find to boast about next … It’s pitiful … After explaining to me how an oil lamp worked, just an ordinary lamp like any other, she insisted:

‘You know, my girl, this lamp cost a great deal of money, and if it needs repairing it has to be sent to England. So treasure it like the apple of your eye.’

I should like to have replied: ‘So what, old girl? How about your chamber-pot? Did that cost a great deal? Do you have to send that to London when it gets cracked?’

No, really, they’ve got a nerve, making such a fuss about nothing. And when I think that it’s simply to humiliate and impress you!

After all, the house isn’t all that grand … nothing to write home about, really. From the outside, standing amongst big clumps of trees and with the garden sloping gently down to the river and laid out in huge rectangular lawns, it does have a certain distinction. But inside … it’s old and rickety and gloomy, and smells as though the windows were never opened. I can’t understand how anybody can live in it. Nothing but poky little rooms, awkward wooden stairs that shake and creak when you tread on them and where you could easily break your neck, and long dark passages where, instead of fine, thick carpets, there are only badly-laid red tiles, polished again and again till they’re as slippery as ice. The walls between the rooms are too thin, made of wood so dried out that the rooms echo like the inside of a violin. Proper country style. And the furniture certainly isn’t up to Paris standards. Room after room filled with old mahogany, old moth-eaten curtains, old worn-out, faded carpets, ridiculously uncomfortable armchairs and old worm-eaten sofas with no springs. How they must make your shoulders ache and take the skin off your backside! Just imagine, and me so fond of bright colours, and huge, springy divans where you can stretch out voluptuously on piles of cushions, and all the pretty furniture you can get nowadays, so luxurious and rich and gay. All this dreary gloom makes me feel melancholy. I’m afraid I shall never get used to such a lack of comfort and elegance, to all these crumbling antiques and old-fashioned designs …

The mistress doesn’t exactly dress in Parisian style, either. She just doesn’t know the meaning of chic, and has certainly never been near a decent dressmaker … A proper sight. Although she has certain pretensions about her clothes, she’s at least ten years behind the fashion … and what a fashion! Mind you, she might not be so bad if she tried, at least not too bad. But what’s really wrong with her is that she arouses no sympathy, there’s nothing feminine about her. Yet she has regular features, pretty, naturally fair hair, and a good skin; though her colouring’s a bit on the high side, as if she had some serious internal illness … I know her type only too well, and I’m never taken in by the brilliance of their complexion. Pink and white on the surface all right, but underneath it, rotten. They can’t stand up to anything, and only keep going with girdles and medical bandages and pessaries, and every kind of secret horror and complicated mechanism. Of course, that doesn’t prevent them putting on airs in public. Oh yes, if you please, very charming … flirting in corners, showing off their made-up skin, making eyes, waggling their bottoms, when all they’re really fit for is to be preserved in spirits … A miserable lot. It’s almost impossible to get on with them, I assure you, and there’s no pleasure at all in working for them …

Whether by temperament or because of some organic indisposition, I should be very surprised if Madame was much good in bed. You can tell from the expression on her face, from her awkward gestures and the stiff movements of her body that she hasn’t an idea about making love … and she certainly wouldn’t know what it was to really let herself go. Her whole body has that sour, dried-up mummified quality that one finds in elderly virgins, though it’s unusual in blondes … She certainly isn’t the sort of woman you could imagine passing out at the sound of music, even music as beautiful as Faust, or fainting voluptuously into the arms of a good-looking man. Not on your life! She isn’t, even, one of those very ugly women, whose faces are sometimes lit up by sexual passion with such radiant vitality and seductive beauty … Still, you can’t always judge by appearances. Some of the grumpiest, most severe-looking women I’ve ever seen, women you would think were immune from the slightest feeling of love or desire, turned out to be regular trollops, prepared to go the whole hog with the footman or coachman.

Although Madame does her best to make herself agreeable, she certainly doesn’t know how to set about it like some of those I’ve known. I should think she’s a mean, grumbling sneak, with a nasty nature and a spiteful heart … the sort that would always be after you, plaguing the life out of you in every possible way … ‘Can you do this? Can you do that?’ Or, ‘Do you break things? Are you careful? Have you got a good memory? Are you tidy in your habits?’ On and on and on. And then ‘Are you clean? I am very particular about cleanliness. There are some things I am prepared to overlook, but cleanliness I insist upon.’ What does she take me for? A girl off the farm, or a country skivvy? Cleanliness indeed. I have heard that one before. They all say the same, but as often as not when you get down to brass tacks, when you lift up their skirts and have a look at their underclothes … why they are just filthy, enough to turn your stomach sometimes.

Anyway, I don’t believe Madame is all that clean. When she showed me her dressing-room, I didn’t see a bath or even a bidet, none of the things a woman needs if she’s to look after herself properly. And certainly none of the knick-knacks and bottles and perfumed intimate things that I so much enjoy playing about with … I can scarcely wait to see her in her birthday suit … That’ll be a sight for sore eyes…

That evening, as I was laying the table, the master came into the dining-room. He had just come in from shooting. He is very tall, with great broad shoulders, a huge black moustache and pale skin. Though his manners are rather heavy and awkward, he seems to be a decent sort. Obviously, he is no genius like M. Jules Lemaitre, whom I’ve waited on so often in Paris, nor a swell like M. de Janzé —Oh, he was a one! From his thick curled hair, his bull’s neck, his athlete’s calves and his full lips, very red and smiling, you can see he is strong and good-natured. I wouldn’t mind betting he enjoys a bit of sex when he can get it! I could tell straight away, by his nose, with its sensual twitching nostrils, and by the brilliance of his eyes, gentle and gay at the same time. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a human being with such eyebrows, so thick they’re almost obscene … and such hairy hands. Like a lot of physically powerful but not very intelligent men, he’s extremely shy.

He looked me over with a funny expression that was a mixture of kindliness, surprise and satisfaction, but which was also lascivious, though not impertinent; suggestive, though not brutal. It is obvious that he has not been used to maids like me … I have quite bowled him over already, made a deep impression on him. With some embarrassment he said: ‘Oh … er … oh, so you’re the new maid?’

Thrusting forward my bosom and lowering my eyes, and in my sweetest voice, at once saucy and modest, I answered simply: ‘Yes, sir, I am.’

Then he stammered: ‘So you managed to get here all right? That’s good, very good.’

He would have liked to continue the conversation, but, being neither eloquent nor resourceful, could think of nothing to say. I was highly amused by his embarrassment. After a short silence he managed to bring out: ‘So you come from Paris?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good, good.’

Then, growing bolder: ‘What’s your name?’

‘Célestine, sir.’

To hide his embarrassment he began rubbing his hands together, and then went on:

‘Célestine? And very nice too, so long as my wife doesn’t insist upon changing it—it’s one of her manias.’

To which I replied in a respectful and submissive tone: ‘That is for Madame to decide, sir.’

‘Yes, of course, of course. But it’s such a pretty name.’

I almost burst out laughing. He began walking about the room, then, suddenly flinging himself into a chair and stretching out his legs, he looked at me as though to excuse himself and, in an almost pleading voice, asked: ‘Well, Célestine—I shall always go on calling you Célestine—would you help me to pull off my boots? You wouldn’t mind, would you?’

‘Of course not, sir.’

‘They are very awkward, you see … difficult to get off.’

With a movement that I did my best to make graceful and supple, even provoking, I knelt down in front of him, and while I was helping him pull off his boots, which were soaking wet and covered with mud, I was perfectly aware that he was delightedly smelling the back of my neck and that his eyes were following the outline of my bust and as much of me as he could see through my dress with growing interest. Suddenly he muttered:

‘Bless me, Célestine, but you smell jolly nice.’

Without looking up, I said as artlessly as I could: ‘What, me, sir?’

‘Why, of course you. Damn it all, it’s certainly not my feet!’

‘Oh sir.’ And I managed to put into this ‘oh sir’ at once a protest on behalf of his feet, and a kind of friendly rebuke for his familiarity—friendly to the point of encouragement. I think he understood, for once again, in a voice that trembled slightly, he repeated:

‘Yes, Célestine, you smell jolly good, jolly good.’

Oh, so the big fellow was coming on a bit. I pretended to be slightly shocked by his insistence, and remained silent. Timid as he is, and knowing nothing of feminine wiles, he was upset, afraid lest he had gone too far, and hurriedly changed the subject, he said: ‘I hope you’re settling down here, Célestine?’

What an idea—‘settling down’ indeed, when I’ve scarcely been in the place a couple of hours. I had to bite my lip to stop laughing. The old boy’s got some funny ways … really he’s a bit stupid. But that’s nothing to worry about. I don’t dislike him. Even his vulgarity has a kind of strength, and there’s a masculine smell about him, warm and penetrating like the scent of a wild animal, that I find rather attractive.

When we had finished taking off his boots, in order to leave him with a good impression of me I asked him in my turn: ‘So you are fond of shooting, sir? Did you have a good day’s sport?’

‘I never have any sport, Célestine,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘I only carry a gun as an excuse for walking—anything to get out of this house, where I’m bored to death.’

‘So you find it boring, sir.’

Then, after a pause, he gallantly corrected himself:

‘That is to say, I used to be bored, but now … at last… well …’

And with a stupidly touching smile, he continued:

‘Célestine! Do you mind fetching me my slippers? I’m sorry, but …’

‘That’s what I’m here for, sir.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is. You’ll find them under the staircase, in the little closet on the left.’

By now I felt that he was ready to eat out of my hand. He’s not one of the cunning ones, but the kind that surrendered at the first blow. You could do what you like with him …

Dinner, which was far from being luxurious and consisted of left-overs from the day before, passed without incident, almost in silence. The master ate ravenously, while Madame picked at her food sulkily, with a contemptuous expression on her face. But you should see the number of tablets, syrups, drops and pills that she gets through, a regular chemist’s shop, that has to be laid out beside her plate at every meal! They scarcely spoke and, when they did, only about local affairs, which were of very little interest to me. One thing I gathered was that they do very little entertaining. It was obvious that they were not at all interested in what they were saying: they both had their minds fixed on me, and both of them were observing me, though with very different ends in view. The mistress, severe and stiff, contemptuous even, was more and more hostile and already thinking up all the dirty tricks she could play on me; the master never raised his eyes from his plate, but nevertheless they kept flickering in a very significant way, and every now and then, though he tried to conceal it, came to rest on my hands … I have never been able to understand what it is that men seem to find so exciting about my hands … I pretended not to notice what was going on, coming and going, dignified, reserved, attentive and remote … Oh, if only they could have seen into my mind and heard what it was saying, as I saw and heard what was going on in theirs.

I simply love waiting at table. That is where your employers give themselves away, revealing all the beastliness, all the squalor of their inner natures. Careful at first, and keeping an eye on each other, gradually they begin to expose themselves for what they are, without any pretence. They forget all about the servants lurking in the background, noting down every moral blemish, every iniquity, every secret scar, all the infamous and ignoble dreams concealed in the minds of respectable people. Collecting these revelations, classifying and labelling them against the day of reckoning when they will become a terrible weapon in our hands, is one of the great pleasures of our job, a precious revenge for all the humiliations we endure.

From this first contact with my new employers I was not able to gather any very distinct and positive impressions. But I did feel that things were not going well between them, that the mistress was boss, while the master counted for nothing, and was as scared of her as a child. Oh, it can’t be much fun for the poor man. He certainly has plenty to put up with from her … I fancy I shall have a good time here now and then.

During dessert Madame, who throughout the meal had been continually sniffing at my hands and arms, said in a clear, peremptory voice: ‘I do not like people to wear scent.’

And when I made no reply, pretending not to realize that she was speaking to me, she added: ‘You understand, Célestine?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

I glanced stealthily at the poor master, who takes such pleasure in perfume, at least in mine. Apparently paying no attention, but at heart humiliated and hurt, he was sitting with both elbows on the table, watching a wasp hovering above the fruit dish. And, in the deepening twilight, a mournful hush fell upon the room, and something inexpressibly sad, some unspeakable weight, seemed to have descended upon these two creatures, till I found myself wondering what purpose they really served by their presence here on earth.

‘The lamp, Célestine!’

Madame’s voice, shriller than ever in the shadowy silence, made me jump.

‘Surely you can see it’s getting dark. I shouldn’t have to remind you. Don’t let this happen again.’

As I was lighting the lamp, the one that could only be mended in England, I felt like calling out to the poor master: ‘Just you wait a bit, my beauty. Don’t be so upset. I’ll see you have your fill of the forbidden perfumes you like so much. You shall breathe them in my hair, on my mouth, on my breast, on every part of my body. We’ll soon show the old misery what it is to enjoy ourselves, I promise you.’

And to give material form to my silent promise, as I put the lamp on the table, I was careful to brush gently against his arm. Then I withdrew.

The servants’ quarters here are hardly what you’d call cheerful. There are only two others besides myself; a cook who never stops grumbling, and a gardener-coachman who never says a word. The cook’s name is Marianne, the coachman’s Joseph; wretched peasants, the pair of them. She, fat, soft, flabby, sprawling, the fleshy folds of her neck showing above a filthy kerchief that you’d think she used for wiping her saucepans, with enormous shapeless breasts under a kind of blue cotton blouse bespattered with grease, and a skirt too short for her, revealing thick ankles and broad feet clad in grey woollen stockings; he, in his shirtsleeves, with a green baize apron and clogs, clean-shaven, dried-up and nervy, with a hideous grin on his lips that splits his face in two from ear to ear, with a twisted walk and the sly movements of a sacristan. Such are my two companions.

As there is no servants hall, we take our meals in the kitchen, on the same table where, during the day, the cook does all her dirty jobs—cutting up meat and vegetables, gutting fish, with her fat round fingers like black puddings. It’s really the limit.

This first evening, the heat from the fire made the atmosphere of the room stifling, and there was a continual smell of stale grease, rancid sauces and everlasting frying. All the time we were eating, a foul stench came from the saucepan where the dog’s food was cooking, which caught you in the throat and made you cough … enough to make you throw up … They show more concern for the criminals in their prisons, and the dogs in their kennels … The meal consisted of fat bacon and cabbage, followed by stinking cheese, with only rough cider to drink … nothing else. The plates were earthenware, and as most of the glaze had worn off they smelt of burnt fat; and, to crown it all, the forks were made of tin.

Having only just arrived, I did not want to complain. But I didn’t want to eat, either. There’s no point in making my stomach worse, thank you very much. ‘Why aren’t you eating anything?’ asked the cook.

‘Because I’m not hungry,’ I replied in a dignified tone of voice.

Whereupon Marianne grunted: ‘I suppose her ladyship would prefer truffles?’

Keeping my temper, still snooty and standoffish, I said: ‘It might interest you to know that I have at least eaten truffles, which is more than some people can say.’

That shut her up. Meanwhile, the coachman went on stuffing his mouth with huge chunks of fat bacon and watching me furtively. I don’t know why, but the way this man looked at me was embarrassing, and his silence worried me. Though he was no longer young, I was astonished by the suppleness of his movements, swaying his hips when he walked like the undulations of a snake. But it’s time I described him in more detail. His rough, greying hair, low forehead and slanting eyes, his prominent cheekbones and broad, powerful jaw, and his long, fleshy, jutting chin, all combined to produce a curious effect that I find hard to define. Was he a scoundrel, or was he just a simpleton? I couldn’t tell. Yet the strange thing was that in some way the man impressed me, though eventually this obsession wore off. I realized that it had been just another of the thousand and one tricks of my excessively romantic imagination, which makes me see both things and people as all black or all white, and which was now doing its best to transform this wretched Joseph into someone superior to the stupid lout, the dull peasant that he really was.