The Diary of a Chambermaid (32 page)

Trembling all over, out of breath, my throat dry, I nevertheless managed to complete my indictment:

‘If religion means all this … If it’s just a prison and a brothel, then all right, I’ve had about as much religion as I can stand … My trunk, do you hear? I want my trunk, and you’re going to give it to me right away.’

Sister Boniface was frightened.

‘I refuse to argue with a fallen woman,’ she said in a smug voice. ‘It’s all right, you may leave.’

‘With my trunk?’

‘With your trunk.’

‘That’s good … A pretty carry-on, just to get hold of your own belongings, I must say. Why, it’s worse than going through the customs.’ Cléclé, who had a little money put by, was very sweet and lent me twenty francs … I took a room in a lodging house in La Sourdière Street, and I stood myself an evening out at the Porte-Saint-Martin, where they were performing
The Two Orphans
… It might almost have been the story of my own life … And I enjoyed myself thoroughly, sobbing my heart out …

Rose is dead. Fate has certainly struck the captain’s household. Poor fellow—first his ferret, then Bourbaki, now Rose! Two days ago, in the evening, she died of congestion of the lungs, after a short illness. She was buried this morning. I watched the funeral procession from the linen-room window as it passed along the road … The heavy coffin, carried by six men, was covered with wreaths and bunches of white flowers as though it were a young girl’s. And it was followed by a considerable crowd—the whole of Mesnil-Roy—a long stream of people in black, chattering away, with the captain himself at the head, tightly buttoned into his black frock coat, and very upright and soldierly. And the solemn tolling of the church bell in the distance seemed to echo the tinkling of the little bell carried by the verger … Madame had forbidden me to go to the funeral, but I had no wish to anyway. I never liked this coarse, malicious woman, and her death leaves me quite cold. Still, I daresay I shall miss her, and perhaps now and then I shall regret not meeting her on the way to church. What a to-do there will be at the grocers!

I was curious to know what effect her unexpected death had upon the captain, so, as my employers were out visiting, during the afternoon I walked as far as the hedge. The captain’s garden was sad and deserted, and his spade stuck in the ground, suggested that he was not working. I don’t suppose he’ll come out this afternoon, I thought. He’s probably shut up in his room, crying over his memories. Then suddenly I caught sight of him. He had taken off his frock coat and, dressed in his ordinary working clothes and wearing his old policeman’s cap, he was furiously spreading dung on the flower-beds. I could even hear him humming a marching song in his deep bass voice. He left his barrow and came over to me, carrying his fork on his shoulder.

‘It’s a pleasure to see you, Mademoiselle Célestine,’ he said.

I wanted to condole with him, to say how sorry I was, and I tried to find suitable words … But confronted by that ridiculous face of his it wasn’t easy to express any genuine emotion, and all I could do was to keep on repeating:

‘A sorry business for you, Captain … a sorry business … Poor Rose!’

‘Yes, yes,’ said he feebly.

His face was expressionless, and he gestured vaguely. Sticking his fork into the soft bit of ground near the hedge, he added:

‘Especially as I can’t manage on my own.’

‘It certainly won’t be easy to find anyone to take her place,’ said I, emphasizing Rose’s domestic virtues.

But, obviously, he wasn’t in the least upset. Indeed, judging by the greater alertness of his movements and the lively look that had suddenly come into his eyes, one might almost have thought that he’d just got rid of a tremendous burden.

‘Nonsense,’ said he after a short silence. ‘Nobody’s irreplaceable.’

His philosophical resignation astonished me, even shocked me a little. Just for fun, I tried to make him understand all that he had lost through Rose’s death.

‘After all, she was used to all your little ways … understood all your tastes, all your whims! And then, she was so absolutely devoted to you.’

‘Heavens, it just needed that …’ he sneered. And, with a gesture that seemed to sweep away every objection, he went on:

‘Do you really believe she was so devoted? … Look, there’s something I’d like to tell you. I was fed up with Rose … not half! Ever since we took on a lad to help her, she didn’t bother to do a thing in the house. Everything was going to pot … to pot! I couldn’t even get her to boil me an egg the way I liked it … And scenes from morning till night, all over nothing … Every penny I spent she’d be on to me, scolding and shrieking. And if I so much as spoke to you, like I am now, I’d never hear the last of it, she was so jealous. The way she was carrying on, I tell you the place was no longer my own, damn it.’

He drew a deep, loud breath, like a traveller who had just returned from a long journey and, looking around him, he contemplated with a new kind of pleasure the sky, the empty flower-beds, the dark tracery of the trees against the light, and his little house … His delight, which was scarcely very complimentary to Rose’s memory, struck me as being quite comic. Hoping to encourage his confidences I said, reproachfully:

‘I don’t think you’re being very fair to Rose, Captain.’

‘Look here, for God’s sake,’ he retorted vigorously, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about. You have no idea. She wasn’t going to tell you all about the rows she kicked up … her overbearingness … her jealousy … her selfishness. I couldn’t call a thing in the place my own any more. She thought she owned the lot. Why, would you believe it, I wasn’t allowed to sit in my own wing chair any more. She was always taking it. And not only that, she took everything else. Just imagine, we weren’t allowed to eat asparagus because
she
didn’t like it … No, it’s a good job she’s dead! It was the best thing that could have happened to her for, one way or another, I’d decided not to keep her on … No, damn it, I wouldn’t have kept her on much longer. She was driving me crazy. It was more than I could stand … But I’ll tell you one thing … If I had died before she did, Rose would have been jolly well caught out… I’d got something up my sleeve that would have put her nose out of joint properly. I can tell you that!’

His mouth twisted into a smile that ended as a hideous grimace. And he continued, intercepting his words with damp little puffs:

‘You know I’d drawn up a will leaving everything to her … house, silver, investments, the lot. She must have told you … She used to tell everybody. But what she couldn’t have told you, because she didn’t know about it herself, was that, two months later, I’d made a second will, cancelling the first … and in that I had left her nothing, damn it.’

And he burst out laughing … a strident laugh that scattered through the garden like a flock of twittering sparrows. Then he almost shouted:

‘A good idea, what? Can’t you just see her face when she discovered that I’d left my little fortune to the Academy? For that’s precisely what I did, my dear Mademoiselle Célestine. I left everything I possessed to the Academy.’

Waiting until he had finished laughing, I asked him in a serious voice:

‘And now what are you going to do, Captain?’

He stared at me for a moment or two with a slyly amorous expression, and then replied:

‘Well, that’s just it … It all depends on you.’

‘On me?’

‘Yes, entirely on you.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

There was another short silence, during which, drawing himself up to his full height and jutting his little beard at me, he seemed to be trying to envelop me in an ambience of seduction. Then suddenly he said:

‘Come on now, let’s get down to brass tacks … Putting it bluntly … one man to another … how would you like to take Rose’s place? … It’s yours for the asking.’

I was prepared for this attack. I had seen it maturing in the depths of his eyes, and I met it with a grave, impassive expression.

‘But what about your will, Captain?’

‘Good God, I’ll tear that up.’

‘But I can’t even cook … ,’ I parried.

‘Oh, I’ll do the cooking … and I’ll make the beds … our bed, I mean. Why, damn it all, I’ll do everything.’

His manner had become very amorous and there was a randy glint in his eye … It was lucky for me that there was a hedge between us, otherwise I’m convinced he would have flung himself upon me there and then.

‘But there’s more than one kind of cooking,’ he explained in a hoarse, rattling voice. ‘And the kind I want to do … Oh Célestine, I bet you know how to … I bet you can make it spicy … Oh, for God’s sake …’

I smiled ironically and, shaking my finger at him as though he were a child, I said:

‘Now Captain, now Captain … you’re behaving like a dirty little pig!’

‘Not little,’ he retorted boastfully, ‘a big one, a huge one, damn it! … And there’s another thing, Célestine … I must tell you.’

He leant over the hedge, craning his neck, his eyes bloodshot. And in a lower voice he said:

‘If you come to me, Célestine, you see …’

‘Well, what then?’

‘Why, it would drive the Lanlaires absolutely mad, don’t you see?’

I remained silent, pretending to be pondering some problem … The captain grew more and more impatient, on edge, grinding his heel into the gravel path.

‘Look, Célestine … Thirty-five francs a month … have your meals with me … share my bed … and a new will, damn it all! … What more could you want? Tell me …’

‘We’ll see about that later on … But, in the meantime, find somebody else, damn it all!’

And turning my back on him, I went off towards the house to prevent myself bursting out laughing.

So now I have two of them to choose from … the captain and Joseph. Either I can become the captain’s servant-cum-mistress, with all the risks that entails, that is to say, to be always at the mercy of a coarse, unreliable, stupid man, and dependent upon every kind of unpleasant circumstance and prejudice; or else, by marrying Joseph, I can achieve a measure of tolerable freedom and respect, and live without being continually subject to other people’s orders and all the hazards of existence … which would mean realizing at least part of what I have always dreamt of …

True, I should have preferred something on a rather grander scale. But, considering the few opportunities that are likely to present themselves to a woman in my position, I ought to be glad of what would, after all, be some alternative to everlastingly chopping and changing, to the monotonous succession of different situations, different beds, different faces …

Actually, I have already made up my mind to turn down the captain’s proposal … It didn’t need this last conversation with him to convince me that he is an utterly fantastic specimen of humanity, a grotesque and sinister crackpot. Apart from his sheer physical ugliness—and there’s nothing to be done about that—there’s not the slightest chance of exercising any moral influence over him. Rose firmly believed that he was completely under her thumb, but he was simply leading her up the garden … It’s just as impossible to influence something that doesn’t exist, as it is to act in empty space … Besides, the mere thought of lying in this ridiculous creature’s arms, and kissing him, is simply laughable … not just because he disgusts me, for disgust presupposes the possibility of my doing it, but because I am perfectly certain I never could … If, by some fantastic miracle, I happened to find myself in bed with him, I know perfectly well that every time I tried to kiss him I should burst into uncontrollable laughter. One way and another I have slept with plenty of men—out of love or pleasure, boredom or pity, vanity or self-interest. It seems to me to be a perfectly normal, natural and necessary thing to do. I have no feeling of guilt about it, and there are very few occasions when it has not given me some pleasure … But, with a man as utterly ridiculous as the captain, I just know that it simply couldn’t happen … it would be physically impossible … To me, it would seem completely unnatural … worse even than Cléclé and her little dog … Yet, despite all this, the captain’s proposal still gives me a certain satisfaction, almost a feeling of pride … Sordid as it is, nevertheless it is a tribute to me, and, as such, it gives me added confidence in myself and in my looks.

With regard to Joseph, my feelings are quite different. Joseph has got a real hold over my mind … He dominates and obsesses it … He alternately disturbs, enchants and scares me. True, he’s ugly, brutally, horribly ugly. But when you examine this ugliness closely, there is something formidable about it that is akin to beauty, an elemental force that is more than beauty, beyond beauty. I don’t at all under-estimate the difficulties, the danger even of living with such a man whether married or not … a man that I feel so deeply suspicious of, without really knowing him. But it is precisely this that attracts me to him, till I feel almost giddy … At least he is a man who is capable of achieving a great deal … of evil perhaps, but also, perhaps, of good. I just do not know … What does he want of me? What will he make of me? Shall I become the unwitting instrument of schemes I know nothing about, the plaything of his savage passions? Or does he simply love me … and, if so, why? . .. Because he thinks I’m good … or vicious … or intelligent? Or because I am no more bound by prejudice than he is? I just don’t know .. . Besides the attraction of the mysterious and unknown, the sheer power of the man has cast a bitter, powerful spell upon me. And this spell—for that’s what it is—is more and more getting on my nerves, reducing me to a state of physical passivity and submission. When I am near him my senses are on fire. I have a feeling of exaltation that I have never experienced with any other man. I feel a longing for him, more sombre, more terrible, more violent than the desire that swept me off my feet with Monsieur George … It is something different, something I can’t properly describe, that takes possession of my entire being, spiritual and sexual, revealing instincts that I was previously unaware of, that must, unknown to me, have been asleep within me, and that no love, no shock of passion, had ever before brought to life. And when I remember what Joseph once said to me, I tremble all over: