The Diary of a Chambermaid (34 page)

‘You’ll have to be very careful, Marianne … It would be terrible if Madame caught you,’ I said affectionately.

‘Oh, there’s no danger of that,’ she cried. ‘He only comes when she’s out … and he never stays for long … As soon as he’s had it, he’s off … Besides, the scullery door opens onto the backyard, and from there there’s a door into the alley. At the slightest sound he can get away without anybody seeing him … But what’s the odds? If Madame does catch us, that’s that!’

‘But she’d give you the sack, my poor Marianne.’

‘Well, there it is,’ she said, swaying her head from side to side like an old bear.

After a short silence, during which I tried to imagine these two poor creatures making love in the scullery, I asked:

‘Is the master gentle with you?’

‘Oh yes, ever so.’

‘Does he talk to you nicely sometimes? What does he say?’

‘Well, as soon as he comes in, he starts making love straight away … Then he says, “That’s better, that’s better”, and puffs and blows a bit … Oh, he’s really lovely …’

By the time we parted, I was feeling genuinely sorry for her … Never again should I laugh at her and, instead of pitying her, I felt a kind of sorrowful affection for her.

But it was myself I really felt sorry for, and when I got up to my room I was filled with a sense of shame, an immense dejection … One should never think about love … it’s too sad, and all it leaves behind is absurdity, or bitterness, or just nothing … What remains to me today of Monsieur Jean, preening himself up there on the mantelpiece, in his red plush frame? Nothing, except for a feeling of disillusion that I could once have loved such a heartless, conceited idiot. Could I really have ever loved this fop with his white unhealthy face and black mutton-chop whiskers, and that absurd parting? His photograph irritates me. I simply can’t stand those stupid eyes, staring at me all the time with that impudent flunkey’s look of his. No … It may as well join all the others at the bottom of my trunk, until the time comes when I can make a magnificent bonfire of my whole detestable past.

I began to think of Joseph … Where would he be at this time of night? What would he be doing? Was he thinking about me? He was probably at the little café, looking around, arguing, taking measurements, trying to imagine how I should look, standing at the bar in front of the mirror and all those shelves full of sparkling glasses and brightly coloured bottles … I wish I knew what Cherbourg was like, with its streets and squares and harbour, so that I could imagine Joseph wandering about, conquering the town as he had conquered me … I was rather feverish, and kept turning over and over as I lay in bed. My thoughts were shuttling back and forth, between the forest of Raillon and Cherbourg … from little Clara’s corpse to the café. And when, at last, after a distressing period of sleeplessness, I finally dozed off, it was with a picture of Joseph before my eyes, dour, uncouth, motionless, silhouetted against a dark, stormy background, criss-crossed with tall cranes and swaying masts.

Today, Sunday, I went into Joseph’s bedroom. The two dogs eagerly accompanied me, and seemed to be asking what had happened to Joseph. The furniture consisted of a small iron bedstead, a big wardrobe, a kind of low cupboard, a table and two chairs, all made of unpainted wood; and there was a portmanteau, concealed behind a green cotton curtain to keep the dust off it. Though scarcely luxurious, the room was tidy and extremely clean. It had something of the stiff austerity of a monk’s cell. On the whitewashed wall, between portraits of Déroulède and General Mercier, there were unframed pictures of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints, an Adoration of the Magi, a Massacre of the Innocents and a scene from Paradise. Over the bed was a large crucifix of black wood that could be used as a holy water stoup.

It was not very nice of me, I admit, but I couldn’t resist a violent desire to search the place, hoping rather vaguely, to discover some of Joseph’s secrets. But there was nothing mysterious about the room, no attempt to conceal anything. It was the sparsely furnished room of a man without secrets, a man whose life was completely straightforward, free of all complications … Though the cupboards and drawers all had keys, none of them was locked. On the table stood some packets of seeds, and a book called
Good Gardening;
and, on the mantelpiece, a prayerbook with yellowing leaves and a small notebook, in which he had copied out recipes for making furniture polish and Bordeaux mixture, and the correct amounts of nicotine and iron sulphate to use. Nowhere could I find a single letter, nor even an account book … not a trace of any correspondence, business or political, family or personal … In the cupboard, amongst a clutter of discarded shoes and old sprinkler valves, were piles of pamphlets and several numbers of
La Libre Parole.
Under the bed there were some rat traps … I turned everything upside down, felt everything, emptied everything … clothes, mattress, linen, drawers … but there was nothing else! In the wardrobe everything was just as I had left it a week ago, when I had tidied it up with Joseph looking on … Could it really be possible that Joseph possessed nothing else? … That he simply managed to do without all the thousand and one intimate, personal little things that reveal a man’s tastes and passions and thoughts? Yes, there was just one thing … At the bottom of the table drawer I found a cigar box, wrapped up in paper and tied round with four strands of tightly knotted string. With the greatest difficulty I undid the string, and there, packed in cotton wool, were five holy medals, a small silver crucifix and a rosary made of red beads … Always religion!

My search concluded, I left the room with a feeling of nervous exasperation at having found nothing that I had been looking for, nothing I wanted to know. Joseph certainly manages to infect everything he touches with his own impenetrability. His possessions tell you no more than he himself does, they are as inscrutable as his eyes or his forehead … Throughout the remainder of the day I could see, actually see before my eyes, Joseph’s face, alternately enigmatic, sneering, churlish. And I seemed to hear him say:

‘So your curiosity didn’t get you very far, then, you little duffer … Oh, you can try again, you can search through all my underclothes, turn out my trunks, even peer into my soul, but you’ll never find out anything!’

But I want to stop thinking about all that … and about Joseph … My head is aching so badly that I feel I’m going mad … We had better get back to my reminiscences …

No sooner had I left the convent at Neuilly, than I found myself once again condemned to the drudgery of a registry office, although I had sworn I would never have recourse to one again. But when you are out of a job and haven’t even got the wherewithal to buy yourself a meal, what else is there? … Friends? Old Comrades? Why, they don’t even answer your letters … Advertisements in the papers? They cost a great deal, and simply lead to endless correspondence, endless journeys that get you nowhere … Besides, they are such a chancy business. And then, you have to pay in advance … and Cléclé’s twenty francs had soon melted away … Prostitution? Wandering about the streets picking up men, who as often as not are as hard up as yourself? My God, no! I don’t mind doing it for pleasure, but not for money. I simply can’t. Besides, I’m no good at it—I always get done down. I even had to hock the last few bits of jewellery I’d managed to hang on to, just to pay for a room and my keep … No, you can’t get away from it—when you’re down and out, the agencies are your only hope, even if they do rob and exploit you.

And they really are a filthy swindle, these registry offices … For a start, you have to pay ten sous down, just to get your name on their books … In return for which they give you the chance of some lousy job or other … Oh, yes, they’ve got plenty of them to offer, all right. And if you’re not fussy, you can take your pick … Why, nowadays, every tuppeny ha’penny little shopkeeper likes to show off by keeping a servant … But the rotten part of it is, that if, after submitting to a humiliating cross-examination and even more humiliating haggling, you do at last manage to come to terms with one of these rapacious creatures, you have to pay the registry office three per cent of your wages for a whole year … If you can’t stick the job for more than ten days, that’s just too bad. The registry office doesn’t worry, because they still draw their full commission … Oh, they know what they’re up to all right. They know the kind of place they’re sending you to, and that it won’t be long before you’re back again … Take my case, for instance. I had seven situations in four-and-a-half months … a run of bad luck … all quite impossible, worse than prison. Well, I had to pay the registry office three per cent on seven whole years’ wages … that is to say, when you add the ten sous booking fee each time, more than ninety francs in all … And in the end I was simply back where I’d started! Do you call that fair? Isn’t it sheer robbery?

But there, whichever way you turn, it’s always the same, and naturally it’s always those that have got the least that get robbed the worst … But what can you do about it? You can rage about it as much as you like, you can try to revolt, but in the end you just have to admit that it’s better to be cheated than to starve, and die in the street like a dog … There’s only one thing certain, and that is that the world’s damned badly organized … It’s a pity General Boulanger was defeated … At least he seems to have liked servants …

The registry office where I had been fool enough to put my name down was in a courtyard off Coliseum Street, on the third floor of a dark, old house, more or less working-class. Immediately inside the door, you went up a steep, narrow staircase, so filthy that you could feel the soles of your shoes almost sticking to the treads, and the banisters were slimy with damp. There was a horrible smell of sinks and lavatories, enough to dishearten anybody. I don’t pretend to be all that fussy, but the very sight of that staircase turned my stomach. It used to make me feel so weak at the knees that I could scarcely bring myself to face it. All the hopes that had been singing in your heart on the way there, were immediately stifled by this thick, greasy atmosphere, the filthy stairs and the sweating walls, which you felt must be swarming with creeping insects and clammy frogs. Honestly, I should have thought ladies would have been afraid to visit such a filthy slum. In fact, however, it did not seem to disgust them at all … But there, is there anything that does disgust them these days? They’d never think of visiting such a house if it was a question of helping the poor, but to find themselves some wretched servant to plague they’d go anywhere.

This particular registry office was run by a Madame Paulhat-Durand, a tall woman, about forty-five years old, with black, wavy hair, which, despite the flabbiness of her body squeezed into a terrible pair of corsets, had not yet begun to go grey. Her face still showed traces of beauty, and what a presence, what an eye! … Crikey! I bet she used to have a good time, all right! … She dressed with austere elegance, always in a black taffeta dress, with a long gold chain gleaming on her formidable bosom and a black velvet scarf round her neck. And she comported herself with the utmost dignity. She lived with a local government clerk, Monsieur Louis—we only knew his Christian name —a funny little chap, extremely short-sighted, with mincing gestures, who never spoke a word. In his shabby, grey suit, that was much too large for him, he always looked extremely awkward … Sad, timid, stooping, and still quite young, he seemed to be resigned rather than happy. Yet Madame was so furiously jealous of him that he never dared to speak to us, or even to glance in our direction. When he got back from work with his brief-case under his arm, he would just touch his hat to us, without so much as turning his head, and then, dragging one leg slightly, he would disappear down the passage like a ghost. And how exhausted the poor fellow must have been, for every evening it was he who had to deal with all the correspondence, keep the accounts, and all the rest of it.

Neither Paulhat nor Durand was Madame’s real name. Though she had adopted them because they went well together, they had apparently belonged to two gentlemen, long since dead, with whom she had once lived, and who had put up the money to set her up in business … Her real name was Josephine Carp. Like most of the women who run registry offices, she had once been in service. That was obvious from her pretentious behaviour, but though she aped the manners of the ladies she had once worked for, she could not altogether disguise her squalid and lowly origins. She had all the unmistakable insolence of a one-time domestic servant, but her insolence was reserved exclusively for us: towards her clients, she displayed an obsequious servility, strictly proportioned to their social standing and fortune.

‘Oh, you never saw such a lot, my dear Countess,’ she would say with a simpering smile. ‘High-class maids they call themselves … that is to say, girls who just are not prepared to do a stroke of work, and whose morals I simply wouldn’t care to vouch for. When it comes to women who really know their job, who are prepared to get down on their hands and knees and have been taught to sew, I just don’t know where to find them any more … and nor does anyone else. That’s what things are coming to nowadays.’

Nevertheless, she did a thriving business. Her clientele consisted mainly of people living near the Champs Élysées, mostly Jews and foreigners … Oh, the stories I could tell you.

The door opened into a passage, which led to the room where Madame Paulhat-Durand sat in state, wearing her everlasting black silk dress. On the left of the passage was the waiting room, a great dark cavern of a place, with benches round the walls and, in the middle, a table covered with a faded serge cloth. Nothing else. The only light in this room came from a high window, that ran the whole length of the wall between it and Madame’s office, and the subdued, murky twilight was sadder than if we had been in complete darkness. Here we used to sit, through the long mornings and afternoons, a whole crowd of us, cooks and housemaids, gardeners and footmen, coachmen and butlers, passing the time away recounting our troubles, gossiping about our employers and dreaming about the wonderful situations we were going to obtain in some fairyland of freedom. Some of the women used to bring books or magazines with them, and devoured them passionately. Others wrote letters … And every now and then the murmur of conversation would be interrupted by the sudden appearance of Madame Durand, shouting angrily: