The Diary of a Chambermaid (38 page)

Then turning to Madame Paulhat-Durand, she added:

‘It can’t be helped … I’m like that … I simply can’t bear to see people suffering … I’m quite silly when it comes to the misfortunes of others. And at my age I am scarcely likely to change … Come along now, child, you can come with me.’

At this point, an attack of cramp forced me to get down from my observation post. I never saw Louise again …

Two days later Madame Paulhat-Durand called me into her office and, after looking me over in a rather tiresome manner, said to me:

‘Mademoiselle Célestine, I have a good situation to offer you … extremely good … The only thing is it’s in the country … Oh, not very far …’

‘In the country? … I don’t fancy that much, you know …’

‘People are quite wrong about the country,’ she insisted. ‘There are excellent situations to be found there.’

‘Excellent? That’s a good one,’ I interrupted. ‘In the first place there’s no such thing as an excellent situation anywhere.’

Madame Paulhat-Durand gave me a friendly, simpering smile. I had never seen her smile like that before.

‘I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle Célestine … there’s no such thing as a bad situation.’

‘Heavens, I know that … only a bad employer.’

‘Not at all … only bad servants … You know very well I send you to the very best houses. It is not my fault if you choose not to stay there …’

Then, looking at me in an almost friendly fashion, she went on:

‘Besides, you are very intelligent … you have a good appearance … you’re pretty, with a good figure and charming hands, not ruined by hard work … And you certainly know how to use your eyes. Things might turn out very well for you … You might end up almost anywhere if you behave yourself …’

‘Misbehave myself, don’t you mean?’

‘That depends how you look at it … I call it behaving yourself …’

She was beginning to relax. Gradually she was dropping her dignified mask … revealing herself to me for what she was, an ex-chambermaid, adept at every kind of monkey business. At that moment she had the suggestive eyes, the soft, lewd gestures, the typical slavering mouth, that are typical of every procuress, and which I had noticed in the case of ‘Madame Rebecca Ranvet, Dressmaker …’ She repeated …

‘I prefer to call it behaviour.’

‘So what?’ said I.

‘Look, Mademoiselle Célestine, you are no longer a child and you know your way around … We can talk frankly … The situation in question is with a gentleman living by himself, already getting on in years and extremely well-off, and it is not very far from Paris … You will be expected to run his house for him … be a kind of housekeeper, you understand? … Such situations require a certain tact, but they’re much sought after and can be very profitable. There’s an assured future in it for a woman like yourself, intelligent and charming and, I repeat, one who knows how to behave herself.’

It was what I had always dreamt of … how often I had set my hopes on an old man’s infatuation for me, and now the paradise I had dreamt of was within my grasp, smiling at me, beckoning to me! … And yet, by some inexplicable irony of life, some stupid contradiction the cause of which I could not fathom, now that this happiness that I had so often longed for was mine for the asking … I turned it down flat.

‘A dirty old man? … Oh no, I’ve had some, thanks very much … I’m absolutely fed up with men … young, old, the lot.’

For a moment Madame Paulhat-Durand was completely taken aback … this was the last thing she had expected. Then, recovering the austerely dignified manner with which, as she thought, she maintained a proper distinction between the correct middle-class woman she would like to have been and a Bohemian creature like myself, she added:

‘Oh indeed, young woman … and what do you take me for? Who do you imagine you are?’

‘I don’t imagine anything … All I’m telling you is that I’m simply sick of men …’

‘Do you realize who it is you are talking about? This gentleman happens to be extremely respectable … a member of the Society of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, and at one time a royalist deputy …’

I burst out laughing.

‘Oh, get along with you! Don’t tell me … you and your Vincent-de-Pauls … Deputy indeed … Thank you very much.’

Then, abruptly, and without the slightest change of tone, I asked:

‘What exactly is he like, this old man of yours? … After all, I don’t suppose one more or less will make all that difference.’

But Madame Paulhat-Durand was not prepared to relent. In a severe tone of voice she declared:

‘It’s no use, young woman … I’m afraid you’re not the serious, reliable type of woman this gentleman is looking for … I thought you might have been suitable, but obviously you are not to be trusted.’

I did my best to get her to change her mind but she remained implacable, and I returned to the waiting-room, feeling moody and depressed … Oh that dreary, dark waiting-room, always the same! All those wretched creatures sprawling about on the beaches, just bodies for sale, to satisfy the voracious appetite of the bourgeoisie … All that eternal ebb and flow of misery and filth, forever washing us up here, pitiable odds and ends from the shipwreck of humanity.

‘What a strange creature I must be,’ I thought. ‘I long for things, so many, many things, just as long as they seem to me to be unattainable. And as soon as they are within my grasp, as soon as they begin to assume concrete shape, I no longer want them.’ Certainly this was one reason for my refusal. But there had also been another … an irresistible desire to take Madame Paulhat-Durand down a peg, to revenge myself on this scornful, high and mighty creature by showing her up as a common or garden procuress.

I was sorry about the old man, who now had for me all the appeal of the unknown, all the attraction of an inaccessible ideal … And I amused myself by imagining what he would have been like … A natty, little old chap, with soft hands and a merry smile on his well-shaven pink and white face, gay, generous, easy to get on with, not too passionate and with none of Monsieur Rabour’s perversions … An old boy that I could have ordered about like a little dog … ready to come when I called him, wagging his tail affectionately and gazing at me with submissive eyes.

‘Beg … There’s a good dog, beg …’

And then he’d sit on his little backside waving his front paws in the air, while I gave him lumps of sugar and stroked his silky back. The thought of him no longer filled me with disgust, and I asked myself again:

‘Must I always be such a fool? … A pet of a little man … a lovely garden … fine house … money, peace of mind, and an assured future … Fancy having refused all that without even knowing why! … And never knowing what it is I want … and never taking it when I have the chance. Though I have given myself to plenty of men, the fact is, when I am by myself, men scare me … worse even, they disgust me. But I only have to be with them, and I let myself be caught as easily as a sick hen … and then I’m capable of every folly under the sun. I can only resist things that won’t ever happen and men I shall never meet … Something, I’m convinced, will always prevent me from being happy …’

The waiting room was stifling. The thought of that dingy light and those sprawling creatures made me feel more and more depressed. Something heavy and irremediable seemed to be hovering over my head … I left early, without waiting for the office to close, my heart heavy and my throat on fire … Outside I passed Monsieur Louis. Clinging to the banister, he was slowly and laboriously climbing the stairs … For a moment we looked at one another. He did not speak to me, nor I to him. But, though I could not find a word to say, the glance we exchanged expressed everything … He, too, was unhappy … I waited a moment for him to reach the top, then I rushed downstairs . .. Poor little sod!

In the street I paused for a moment, bewildered … I looked to see if any of the old bawds were waiting about. At that moment, if I had caught sight of Madame Rebecca Ranvet, Dressmaker, I should have rushed up to her and handed myself over … But none of them was there, and the passers-by, preoccupied and indifferent, had no thought to spare for my anguish … On the way home I stopped at a pub and bought a bottle of brandy, and, after wandering about for a time, I got back to my hotel, still feeling half dazed.

Later in the evening I heard someone knocking at the door. I was stretched out on the bed, half-naked and muzzy with drink.

‘Who’s there?’ I cried.

‘Me.’

‘Who’s me?’

‘The waiter …’

I got up, my breasts half exposed, my hair coming down and falling over my shoulders, and opened the door.

‘What do you want?’

The waiter smiled … He was a great strapping fellow with red hair, whom I had often passed on the staircase. And he was staring at me with a strange look in his eyes.

‘What do you want?’ I repeated.

Still smiling with embarrassment, screwing up the bottom of his greasy apron in his huge fingers, he stammered:

‘Mademoiselle … I …’

With an expression of gloomy lust he was considering my breasts, my almost naked stomach, the shift hanging round my waist …

‘All right, come in then, you great brute,’ I suddenly exclaimed. And, pushing him into my room, I shut the door behind us with a bang …

When they found us next day, we were in a terrible state, wallowing on the bed and still drunk … The waiter got the sack. I had never even discovered what his name was.

I cannot leave the subject of the registry office without mentioning another of the poor devils I met there … a gardener, who had lost his wife, four months previously and was looking for a job. Of all the pitiful faces I saw there, none was as sad, as utterly overwhelmed by life, as his. After being out of work for two months, his wife had died of a miscarriage, the very day before they were due to start a job at a country estate … she looking after the poultry, and he as gardener. Whether from bad luck, or whether because he was just fed up with life, he had been unable to find any other work since this misfortune befell him. Indeed, he had scarcely bothered to look for any. And what little money he had managed to save had quickly disappeared during the time he was without a job. Although he was very distrustful of everybody, I managed to get round him a bit. What follows is an impersonal account of the simple, human drama, which he described to me one day, when, feeling very upset by all his misfortunes, I had been more than usually sympathetic. Here it is.

After visiting the gardens, with its terraces and greenhouses, and having inspected the gardener’s cottage which, thickly covered with ivy and Virginia creeper, stood at the entrance to the park, they slowly returned, in a state of mingled hope and anxiety, and without speaking to one another, to the lawn where they had left the Countess. She was sitting fondly watching her three, fair-haired, pink-faced children, who, daintily dressed, were happily playing on the grass, watched over by their governess. While still some distance away, the couple stopped respectfully, the husband bareheaded and cap in hand, his wife standing timidly beside him, ill at ease in her black straw hat and dark, woollen jacket, and twisting the chain of a little leather bag in an attempt to keep herself in countenance. Behind them, stretching far away into the distance, lay the undulating parkland, with its massive clumps of trees.

‘Come closer,’ said the Countess, in a kindly, encouraging voice. The man was tanned and weatherbeaten, and the fingers of his gnarled, earth-coloured hands were smooth and shining from the continual handling of tools. The woman was rather pale, the greyness of her skin accentuated by the patches of freckles that covered her face … rather awkward too, but very clean and tidy. She kept her eyes on the ground, afraid to look at the splendid lady who would soon be examining her, overwhelming her with embarrassing questions, turning her inside out, like they all did … But she watched delightedly the charming picture of the three babies, who, as they played on the grass, already displayed such restrained manners and such easy grace …

The couple slowly advanced a few steps and then, simultaneously, both of them with the same mechanical gesture folded their hands on their stomachs.

‘Well?’ asked the Countess. ‘Have you seen everything?’

‘Your ladyship is very kind,’ replied the man. ‘It’s a fine big place … a magnificent property … There’s plenty to do and no mistake…’

‘And I warn you, I’m very particular … Quite fair but very particular … I like everything to be just so … and heaps of flowers everywhere, and all the year round … Of course, you will have some help. Two men in summer, and one through the winter.’

‘Oh,’ said the man, ‘I’m not afraid of work. The more there is, the better it suits me. I’m fond of my job, and I know a good bit about it … Trees … early vegetables … mosaic work … the lot. And when it comes to flowers … if you’re prepared to work, and have a fancy for them, all you need is plenty of water, a good mulching now and then and, saving your presence, your ladyship, lots of dung and manure, and you can grow what you like …’

After a pause he went on: ‘My wife’s very active, as well … very handy … And she’s a good manager. You might not think she was very strong to look at her, but she’s got guts and she’s never ill, and when it comes to looking after animals, there’s no one to touch her … Why, in our last place, they kept three cows and two hundred chickens … so you can see!’

The Countess nodded her head approvingly … ‘And how did you like the cottage?’

‘Oh, the cottage is all right … A bit on the grand side, you might say, for folk like us. We’ve hardly got the furniture for it. But you live where you’ve got to live, and that’s that … Besides, its a good long way from the house, and that’s all to the good. The masters don’t want their gardeners on top of them, and we don’t want to be a nuisance to anybody … This way, we can both be on our own, so to speak … That’s best for everybody … There’s only one thing …’

He paused, overcome by sudden timidity at the thought of what he wanted to say …

‘Only what?’ asked the Countess.

The man still hesitated, and the silence increased his uneasiness. He clutched his cap tightly, twisting it between his great fingers, and eased his weight from one foot to the other. Then, plucking up courage, he said: