The Diary of a Chambermaid

by Octave Mirbeau

  ‘Oh well, that’s your business …’ And the lady resumed her reading: ‘“that the girl, Jeanne Le Godec, worked for me for thirteen months, during which time I had no complaint to make of her work, her conduct or her honesty …” Oh, these references are all the same … they tell you nothing you want to know … no real information at all … Where can I write to this lady?’

  ‘She’s dead, ma’am.’

  ‘Oh, so she’s dead, is she? … Heaven’s above, you offer me a reference, and then you tell me that the person who gave it you is dead … That’s pretty dishonest I must say.’

  All this was said with a humiliatingly suspicious expression in a tone of heavy irony. Then, taking up another reference, she asked:

  ‘And this lady? … I suppose she’s also dead?’

  ‘No, ma’am … Madame Robert is in Algeria, with her husband … He’s a colonel …’

  ‘In Algeria,’ exclaimed the lady. ‘But, of course, she would be … And how do you expect me to write to Algeria? … First, they’re dead, then they’re in Algeria. So I suppose if I want to know anything I must go to Algeria. An extraordinary business.’

  ‘But there are others, ma’am,’ pleaded the unfortunate Jeanne. ‘As you will see, they can give you any information you require …’

  ‘Yes, yes, I see you have plenty of others … which simply means you must have had plenty of other situations … far too many, if you ask me. At your age, that’s charming! … Still, leave your references with me, and I will have a look at them later … Now for another matter … What are you trained to do?’

  ‘Housework, sewing, waiting at table …’

  ‘Are you good at darning?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Do you know anything about fattening poultry?’

  ‘No, ma’am, that’s not my job …’

  ‘Your job, my girl,’ said the lady severely, ‘is to do what your employers tell you to … You seem to have a very rebellious nature.’

  ‘Oh no, ma’am, I’m not one for answering back … not me.’

  ‘That’s what you say, naturally … But, like all the others, you get upset about nothing … Still, as I think I told plenty of work. You will have to get up at five …’

  ‘In winter as well?’

  ‘Certainly … In winter as well, indeed! There’s just as much to be done in winter as in summer, isn’t there? What a ridiculous question! … The housemaid is responsible for the staircase, the drawing-room and the master’s study … and our bedroom, of course … And she has to see to all the fires. The cook does the hall, the passages and the dining-room … And remember, I insist upon cleanliness … I can’t bear to see a speck of dirt anywhere … The door handles must be properly polished, as well as the furniture and mirrors … And then the housemaid is expected to look after the poultry …’

  ‘But I don’t know how to, ma’am.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to learn … And the housemaid does the washing and ironing—apart from the master’s shirts—and the sewing—I don’t have any sewing done outside except my costumes. She waits at table, helps the cook with the washing up and does all the polishing … I like everything to be kept thoroughly tidy … In fact, the three things I am most particular about are tidiness, cleanliness, and above all, honesty … though, of course, everything is kept under lock and key. If you want anything you come to me for it … I detest waste … What do you usually drink in the morning?’

  ‘Coffee, ma’am.’

  ‘Indeed? … You certainly do yourself well. But, there, they all expect coffee these days … However, you won’t get coffee with me. You’ll have soup … It’s much better for the stomach … What did you say?’

  Jeanne had not spoken, though it was obvious she was trying to say something. Eventually she managed to stammer:

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but may I ask what we get to drink with our meals?’

  ‘You get an allowance of six litres of cider a week …’

  ‘But I can’t drink cider, ma’am … The doctor has forbidden it.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help that … You will get six litres of cider and, if you insist upon drinking wine, you must buy it yourself … That’s up to you … What wages do you expect?’

  Jeanne hesitated. She stared at the carpet, then at the clock. At last, her eyes fixed on the ceiling and twisting her umbrella nervously in her hands, she said timidly:

  ‘Forty francs a month, ma’am.’

  ‘Forty francs?’ cried Madame. ‘Why not ask for ten thousand francs, and have done with it? You must be crazy … Forty francs, indeed? Why, it’s absolutely unheard of. In the old days, when you paid a girl fifteen francs, you used to get much better service than you do today … Forty francs … and you don’t even know how to fatten poultry? … I’ll give you thirty francs, and, in my opinion, even that is much too much … You won’t have any expenses when you’re with me. I shan’t be fussy about your clothes, and you’ll get your food and laundry free. And, I can assure you, you will be well fed … I do the carving myself.’

  ‘I’ve been paid forty francs in all the other places I’ve been in …’ Jeanne insisted.

  But the lady had already risen from her chair, and in a dry, unpleasant voice she said:

  ‘Well in that case you’d better go back to one of them … Forty francs, indeed! What cheek … Here, take your references, your references from the dead, and be off with you.’

  Jeanne carefully folded up the precious papers, put them back in the pocket of her dress, and then, in an unhappy, pleading voice, shyly said:

  ‘If Madame could see her way to make it thirty-five francs …’

  ‘Not a sou … Be off with you! You had better go and work for Madame Robert, in Algeria … There are all too many lazy good-for-nothings like you. Be off with you.’

  Sadly, slowly, Jeanne turned and left the office, but not before she had curtseyed twice. I could see from her eyes and the puckering of her lips that she was on the point of tears.

  As soon as she had gone, the lady exclaimed angrily:

  ‘Oh, these servants. They’re an absolute pest. It’s hopeless trying to find anybody who is prepared to work nowadays.’

  To which Madame Paulhat-Durand, who had meanwhile finished sorting her papers, replied with majestic and overwhelming gravity:

  ‘I did warn you, Madame. They’re all the same … They all expect to earn a fortune without doing a stroke of work … I’m afraid I have no one else for you today. The others are even worse. I must see if I can’t find you something tomorrow. Oh, it’s really heartbreaking, believe me …’

  As I climbed down from my observation post, Jeanne Le Godec had just returned to the noisy waiting room.

  ‘Well?’ they asked her …

  She went back to her place on the bench, at the far end of the room, and there she sat, with lowered head and folded arms, hungry, dejected, silent and, except for the nervous twitching of her feet, motionless.

  But I saw even sadder things than this. Amongst the girls who used to attend Madame Paulhat-Durand’s every day, I had noticed one in particular—firstly, because she was wearing the Breton head-dress, and secondly, because the very sight of her filled me with overwhelming sadness … A peasant, lost in Paris, in this terrifying Paris, forever swirling and jostling in feverish excitement … Could anything be more pathetic? Involuntarily, I was reminded of myself, and I felt deeply moved … Where was she going? Where had she come from? What had persuaded her to leave her native soil? What madness, what tragedy, what gales and tempests had driven this frail vessel to shipwreck here, in this roaring sea of humanity? Such are the questions I used to ask myself as, day after day, I watched this poor girl, sitting in her corner, horribly alone …

  She was ugly, with that special kind of ugliness that excludes all idea of pity and arouses people to savagery, because they see in it an offence against themselves. However naturally ill-favoured a woman may be, it is only rarely that she achieves such utter
and complete ugliness. Usually there is something about her, no matter what, her eyes or mouth, some sinuous movement of the body, a swaying of the hips, or, even less, a gesture of her arms, the turn of a wrist, the freshness of her skin … something at least that other people may contemplate without disgust. Even amongst the very old, a certain grace almost always survives their physical deformities, defies the death of what they once used to be. But this Breton peasant girl had nothing of this, although she was still quite young. Small, rather long in the body, but squarely built, with narrow hips and legs so short that she almost seemed to be a cripple, she reminded me for all the world of one of those images of barbaric, snub-nosed saints, rough hewn from great blocks of granite, that have stood for centuries in some wayside Breton shrine … As for her face, poor wretch … beneath a heavy forehead, eyes that seemed to have been rubbed out with a dirty thumb, and a hideous nose, flattened from birth, with a gash running down the middle and sharply turned up at the end, revealing two deep, round, dark holes, fringed with stiff hair. And, covering all this, a grey, scaly skin, like a dead grass snake’s, that seemed, when the light shone on it, to be covered with flour … And yet this indescribable creature had one beauty that many women would have envied her—her hair … Her magnificent hair, thick and heavy, a glowing red, with gold and purple lights in it. Yet, far from mitigating her ugliness, this lovely hair only served to emphasise it, making it still more striking, still more irreparable.

  And that was not all. Her slightest movements were clumsy and awkward. She couldn’t move a step without knocking into something; if she picked anything up she was sure to drop it. Her arms caught in the furniture, sweeping away anything that happened to be in the way … When she walked, she trod on your toes, banged you in the chest with her elbows. And when she apologised in her rough, deep voice, her breath gave off a horrible odour of decay. From the moment that she first arrived in the waiting room, everyone had complained about it, and before long complaints had turned to grumbling insults … People booed and hissed at the wretched creature as she walked across the room, stumbling on her short legs, flung from one to another like a ball, until at last, at the far end, she managed to find a place on the bench. Even then, her neighbours drew themselves away from her with gestures of disgust, raising their handkerchiefs to their noses … And in the empty space thus created around her, the poor girl would sit, leaning against the wall, silent and accursed, with never a word of complaint or a gesture of revolt, without even seeming to be aware that she was the object of all this scorn.

  Though sometimes just to be like the others I joined in this savage by-play, I could not help feeling a kind of pity for her. I realized that she was one of those beings predestined to suffer, a creature who, whatever she did, wherever she went, would always find herself rejected by man and beast … for there is a certain degree of ugliness, a certain kind of physical deformity, that even animals will not tolerate.

  One day, overcoming my disgust, I went up to her and asked:

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Louise Randon …’

  ‘I’m from Brittany, from Audierne … You’re a Breton, too, aren’t you?’

  Surprised that anyone should wish to speak to her, and fearing that it might only be a joke or an insult, it was some time before she replied … I repeated my question:

  ‘What part of Brittany do you come from?’

  She looked at me and, seeing that I was not being unkind she answered:

  ‘I come from Saint-Michel-en-Grève, not far from Lannion.’

  Her voice was so horrible that I scarcely knew what to say next … hoarse and staccato, like a hiccough, with a rumbling accompaniment as though she were clearing her throat … At the sound of it I felt my sympathy for her ebbing away. But I went on:

  ‘Are your parents still alive?’

  ‘Yes, my father and mother … and I have two brothers and four sisters. I’m the eldest.’

  ‘And what does your father do?’

  ‘He’s a blacksmith.’

  ‘Is your family hard up?’

  ‘My father owns three cottages and three plots of land, and he has three threshing machines as well …’

  ‘So he’s rich, then?’

  ‘I’ll say he’s rich! … He farms the land himself and lets the cottages … And then he goes round the countryside threshing for the peasants. It’s my brother that shoes the horses.’

  ‘And your sisters?’

  ‘They wear lovely caps, covered with lace … and embroidered dresses.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Me? Oh, I haven’t got anything.’

  I drew back a little to avoid the deathly odour of her breath. Then I asked:

  ‘What makes you want to be a servant?’

  ‘Because …’

  ‘Why did you leave home?’

  ‘Because …’

  ‘Because you were unhappy?’

  Speaking very quickly so that her words tripped over one another like the sound of falling pebbles, she replied:

  ‘My parents used to beat me … and my sisters … they all used to beat me, and made me do all the work … It was me who had to bring up my sisters.’

  ‘Why did they beat you?’

  ‘I don’t know … Because they wanted to, I suppose … In every family, there’s always one that gets beaten, because … Well, there it is.’

  My questions did not seem to have upset her, and she was becoming more confident.

  ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘Didn’t your parents beat you?’

  ‘Why, yes … Of course they did. That’s the way things are.’

  Louise had stopped picking her nose; her hands with their bitten nails were spread out flat on her lap. What with all the whispering that was going on around us, all the laughter and quarrelling, the others could not hear what we were saying. After a silence, I asked:

  ‘But what brought you to Paris?’

  ‘Well you see, last summer there was a lady from Paris at Saint-Michel-en-Grève, who used to go bathing with her children. I suggested working for her, because the servant she brought with her was caught stealing, and got the sack … And then she brought me to Paris with her, to look after her father … an old man, an invalid, with paralysis of the legs …’

  ‘Then what made you leave? In Paris it’s not easy …’

  ‘Oh no,’ she interrupted violently, ‘I should never have left. It wasn’t that … Only you see things didn’t work out.’

  Her lustreless eyes lit up with a gleam of pride, and she drew herself up. ‘It was impossible,’ she continued. ‘The old man turned out to be a filthy old swine …’

  For a moment I was utterly dumbfounded … Could it really be possible. Could anyone, even a sordid, miserable old man, feel the slightest attraction to this shapeless body, this monstrosity of nature? Imagine anyone trying to kiss her, with those terrible decayed teeth and that foul breath … Oh, what absolute beasts men are … I looked at Louise, but the light had already died from her eyes, and once again they had become grey, lifeless smudges …

  ‘Was that a long time ago?’ I asked.

  ‘Three months …’

  ‘And you haven’t had another situation since?’

  ‘Nobody seems to want me, I don’t know why. When I go into the office, as soon as the ladies see me, they say, “Oh no, she certainly won’t do” … Somebody must have put a curse on me … After all, it isn’t as though I were ugly. I know how to do housework … I’m very strong … and I’m willing. If I’m too small, that’s not my fault … No, I must be under a curse.’

  ‘But how do you manage to live?’

  ‘I’m in a lodging house … I do all the rooms, and mend the linen and so on … and they give me a mattress in one of the attics and a meal every morning …’

  The thought that here, at least, was someone worse off than myself, revived my sympathy for her.

  ‘Listen, Louise, dear,’ I said, trying to make
my voice sound gentle and convincing. ‘It’s very difficult finding work in Paris. There are a lot of things you have to know, and the employers are much more difficult to please than they are in the country. I’m worried about you … if I were in your place I should go back home.’

  But the idea seemed to terrify her.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘never! If I went home, they’d say I’d been a failure … that no one would have me … And everybody would laugh at me. No, no, it’s impossible … I’d rather be dead!’

  At that moment the door of the waiting room opened, and the harsh voice of Madame Paulhat-Durand called out ‘Louise Randon.’

  ‘Is it me she’s asking for?’ asked Louise, trembling with fear.

  ‘Yes, it was you … Hurry up. And this time, make up your mind you’re going to succeed.’

  She got up, striking me in the chest with one of her elbows, stumbled over my feet, knocked into a table and, swaying on her short legs, she disappeared through the door to an accompaniment of boos.

  I climbed up on to the bench and pushed open the fanlight, anxious to see what happened … Never had Madame Paulhat-Durand’s office seemed to me so utterly dreary, though God knows it used to freeze my heart every time I went into it. All that ghastly furniture covered with worn blue rep, and the big registration book in the middle of the table, with its cloth of the same blue material, covered with inkstains … And that desk, where Monsieur Louis’ elbows had made pale, shining patches on the blackened wood … And, at the far end, the sideboard, with its hideous array of glassware brought from abroad, and old-fashioned dishes … And on the mantelpiece, between two bronze lamps, among all those fading photographs, that infuriating clock, that seemed to make the time pass even slower with its maddening ticking … And the dome-shaped cage, with its two home-sick canaries puffing out their drooping feathers … And the mahogany filing cabinet, with its scratched sides … But I wasn’t there just to make an inventory of this lugubrious, tragic room. In any case, I knew it only too well unfortunately, and often my crazy imagination used to see its bourgeois smugness as a fitting showcase for the display of human flesh … No, what I was there for was to see how these slave-dealers would treat poor Louise…