The Diary of a Chambermaid (12 page)
I should like to have gone home … But Audierne is miles away, the end of the earth, and I just haven’t got the fare. When I draw my first month’s wages I shall have to pay the registry office their fee, and there won’t be even enough to settle the little debts I had to run up when I was down and out.
Anyhow, what’s the good of going? My brother’s in the navy, in China I think, for it’s ages since I last heard from him. And as for my sister Louise, where she’s got to I’m sure I don’t know. Ever since she left home, and went off to Concarneau with Jean the Duff, we never had another word from her. She must have been knocking about all over the place … God only knows! As likely as not she had ended up in a brothel. Or maybe
she’s
dead as well … and my brother … so why go? There wouldn’t be any point in it. I’ve got nobody there now. And my mother certainly won’t have left me anything … her few clothes and bits and pieces of furniture won’t even be enough to pay what she owes for drink.
It’s funny, all the same … As long as she was still alive I scarcely ever thought of her … never wanted to see her again … The only times I ever wrote to her were if I changed my place, and then simply to give her my address. She used to beat me such a lot … and I was so miserable with her always drunk! Yet now, suddenly hearing she has died, my heart grieves for her, and I feel more alone in the world than ever.
I remember my childhood as clearly as anything. I can recall everything … all the things and people where I began my hard apprenticeship to life … Honestly, for some people there’s too much unhappiness, and for others too little. There’s no justice in the world.
I remember one night—though I must have been very little at the time—I remember us all being suddenly woken up by the lifeboat’s siren. What a melancholy sound that used to be, in the middle of the night, with a storm raging! Since the previous day the wind had been blowing a gale, the harbour bar was all white with the crashing of waves, and only a few sloops had managed to get back to port. All the others must have been in terrible danger, poor devils! Knowing that my father was fishing in the shelter of the island of Sein, my mother had not been too worried, for she hoped he would have put into the harbour on the island, as he had often done before. Nevertheless, directly she heard the siren she got up, pale and trembling from head to foot, and hurriedly wrapping me in a huge woollen shawl set off for the pier. My sister Louise, who was already a big girl, and my brother, who was younger, followed her, and all three of them kept calling out: ‘Oh blessed Virgin! Oh Jesus!’
The streets were full of people: women, old folk, kids. On the quay, where you could hear the noise of the boats grinding against the side, a crowd of frightened shadows were scurrying all over the place. But it was impossible to get on to the pier because of the high wind, and especially the waves that broke against its stone foundations and swept it from end to end with a roar like gunfire. My mother—‘Oh blessed Virgin! Oh Jesus!’—took the footpath that runs along the estuary as far as the lighthouse. Everywhere was in pitch darkness, but now and then, in the distance, the sea was lit up by the flashes from the lighthouse, and you could see the huge white-capped waves rising and breaking. Despite their thundering crash and the deafening roar of the wind I fell asleep in my mother’s arms. And when I woke up we were in a small room, where, through a forest of dark bodies and mournful faces and waving arms, I could see, lying on a camp bed and lit up by two candles, a corpse … a terrifying corpse, long and naked and stiff, the face crushed in, the limbs scored with bleeding gashes and covered with bruises. It was my father.
I can see him still. His hair was plastered to his skull, with strands of seaweed caught up in it, making a kind of crown. Leaning over him, men were rubbing his body with warm cloths and blowing into his mouth. The mayor was there, and the rector, a customs house officer and one of the harbour police. I was terrified and, struggling out of my shawl, I ran across the wet flagstones between the men’s legs, wailing and calling for my father, for my mother. A neighbour took me away.
It was from that moment that my mother started drinking. To begin with she did her best to find work in the sardine factories, but, as she was always drunk, none of the owners would ever keep her on. So she stopped at home, steadily drinking, getting more and more miserable and quarrelsome, and when she had had her fill of brandy she would start beating us. God only knows how she didn’t kill me! Whenever I could I escaped from the house, and spent my time playing about on the quay, plundering orchards or, when the tide was out, paddling in the pools. Sometimes I would take the road to Plogoff, and there, at the bottom of a grassy slope, sheltered from the sea wind and covered with thick bushes, I would be sure to find some of the lads from the village and, hidden amongst the hawthorn bushes, they would introduce me to their games … Often, when I got home in the evening, I would find my mother stretched out across the threshold, motionless, her mouth fouled with vomit and a broken bottle in her hand, so that I’d have to step over her body. And when she came to, it was terrible. She would be seized by a crazy passion for destruction, and without listening to my prayers and cries she would pull me out of bed and chase me round the room, trampling on me and banging me against the furniture, and shouting: ‘I’ll murder you, you little misery! I’ll murder you!’
Many a time I thought I was going to die …
And then, to earn money for drink, she took to whoring. At night, every night, there would be a soft knock on the door, and a fisherman would come into the room, bringing with him the tang of the sea and a pungent odour of fish. He would get into bed with her, stay an hour, and then go away. And he would be followed by another, and the same business would be repeated. Sometimes they would start fighting, and the darkness would be filled with a terrifying clamour, so that often enough the neighbours would call the police.
Years passed like this. No one would have anything to do with us, me and my brother and sister. People would shun us in the street, and respectable folk would pelt us with stones to drive us away from their houses, whether we were on the look-out for something to steal or simply begging. One day my sister Louise, who by this time had also started going with the sailors, cleared out altogether. Then my brother got a job as cabin boy, and I was left alone with my mother.
By the time I was ten years old I was no longer chaste. My mother’s example had initiated me into the meaning of sex; and, already perverted by all the games I’d been up to with boys, I had developed physically very early. Despite all the privations and beatings, the wonderful sea air had made me healthy and strong, and I had grown so fast that, by the time I was eleven, I had experienced the first shock of puberty. Though I still looked like a girl, I was almost a woman.
At twelve I was so completely, and no longer a virgin. Violated? Well, not exactly. Willingly? Yes, more or less … at least to the extent that the ingenuousness of my vice and the candour of my depravity permitted it … One Sunday, after high mass, the foreman at one of the sardine factories, an old man who stank like a billygoat and had filthy, shaggy hair all over his head and face, took me down to the shore by Saint-Jean. And there, beneath the cliffs, hidden in a dark cleft in the rocks where the seagulls used to make their nests and sometimes the sailors hid the flotsam they rescued from the sea, there, on a bed of stagnant seaweed, and without any attempt on my part to stop him, he seduced me … for an orange! He had a funny name: Cléophas Biscouille.
And here is something that I have never been able to understand, and have never found explained in any novel. Monsieur Biscouille was ugly, brutal and repulsive, moreover on the four or five occasions that he persuaded me to go with him to this black hole in the rocks, he never once gave me the slightest pleasure—on the contrary. Why is it then, that when I think of him—and I often do—I never feel like loathing or cursing him? I take pleasure in recalling him, and I experience an extraordinary sense of gratitude … a great tenderness … and, at the same time, a genuine regret, when I realize that never again, shall I see this disgusting creature, as he was then, beside me on that bed of seaweed …
While I am on this subject, despite my humble position, perhaps I may be allowed to make a personal contribution to the life story of the great …
Monsieur Paul Bourget, the famous novelist, was the intimate friend and spiritual guide of Countess Fardin, where, last year, I was employed as housemaid. I was always hearing it said that he was the only man who really understood women’s complex nature to its very depths, and many a time I had the idea of writing to him, in order to lay before him this particular example of passionate psychology … There is no reason for being too surprised at the seriousness of these preoccupations. They are not usual among servants, I agree. But, in the countess’s drawing-room, everybody was for ever discussing psychology … It is generally accepted that our minds are influenced by those of our employers, and that what is said in the drawing-room will be repeated in the servants’ hall. The only trouble was that, in the servants’ hall there was no Paul Bourget capable of elucidating and resolving the feminine problems that we used to discuss there. Even the explanations of Monsieur Jean himself did not satisfy me.
One day, however, my mistress sent me with an urgent letter for the illustrious master, and he himself brought me the reply. This emboldened me to lay before him the problem that was tormenting me; though, of course, I attributed the scabrous story to one of my friends. Monsieur Bourget asked me. ‘And what kind of a woman is your friend? A woman of the people? One of the poorer classes?’
‘A maid like myself, sir.’
Monsieur Bourget assumed a most superior and disdainful expression. Heavens! He certainly doesn’t Like poor people!
‘I’m not really concerned with such people,’ he said … ‘They are too small-minded, completely lacking in soul … They do not fall within the scope of my psychology.’
I realized at once that, in the circles in which he moved, no one with an income of less than 100,000 francs a year was expected to have a soul.
Monsieur Jules Lemaitre, on the other hand, another frequent visitor to the house, was quite different. When I put the same question to him, he replied with a friendly dig in the ribs: ‘Well, Célestine my dear, all I can say is, your friend must be a nice girl, and if she’s anything like as charming as you, I know precisely what I should say to her … Ha, ha!’
With his humorous expression, looking like a little hunchbacked faun, at least he didn’t attempt to put on any airs. But there, he was really a decent sort. It’s just too bad that now he’s gone all religious!
With all this, I don’t know what would have become of me in this hellish existence at Audierne, if the Little Sisters of Poncroix, finding me intelligent and pretty, had not taken charge of me out of pity. They made no attempt to take advantage of my youth and ignorance, nor of my difficult and shameful position, by shutting me away from the world so that I could look after them, as happens in so many convents of this kind, where human exploitation is carried to criminal lengths. They were poor, artless little creatures, timid and charitable; and, though they were certainly not rich, they were much too scared to beg in the street or to call upon the wealthy for subscriptions. Sometimes they were reduced to extreme poverty, but they just carried on as best they could, and amid all the hardships of their existence they always managed to keep cheerful, twittering away like so many little birds. There was something touching about their complete ignorance of life, which, today, when I understand their infinite goodness and purity better, moves me to tears.
They taught me to read and write, to sew and do housework, and when I was more or less properly trained they found me a place with a retired colonel, who used to spend every summer with his wife and two daughters at a shabby little country house near Comfort. They were good people, I admit, but so sad! Oh, so sad! And crazy! Never a smile on their faces, nor a trace of gaiety in their clothes, which were always the most sombre black. The colonel had built himself a room under the rafters, and there he would stay all day by himself, turning boxwood eggcups on a lathe, or those ‘darning eggs’ that women use for mending their stockings. His wife was forever writing letters and petitions in the hope of getting a licence to sell stamps and tobacco, and the two daughters never seemed to do anything at all, hardly even speaking. One looked like a duck, and the other like a rabbit, and both of them were pale and thin, angular, like two wilting plants that were drying up under your eyes for lack of the sun and moisture and soil that they needed. Oh, how they bored me! … After sticking it for eight months, I just walked out on them one day, on a sudden impulse which I later regretted.
But all the same, this meant that now, for the first time, I was to know what it was to feel around me the seething life of Paris and the warmth of its breath, which filled my heart with new longings. Though I did not often go out, I was overwhelmed by admiration, and the streets, the shop windows, the crowds, the palaces, the dazzling carriages and elegantly dressed women entranced me. And, at night, when I climbed up to the sixth floor to go to bed, I used to envy the other servants in the house, enthralled by all the pranks they got up to and the marvellous tales I heard them telling each other. During the short time that I stayed in this job I was to see every kind of debauchery, as it was practised up there on the sixth floor … and, before long, I was playing my part in it, with all the competitive enthusiasm of a novice … Seduced by that deceptive ideal of vice and pleasure, what vague hopes I fed on, what dubious ambitions …
But there it is! When you’re young, and know nothing of life, what else can you do but live on your imagination, on your dreams? … Dreams, indeed … stupidities! Oh, I drank my fill of them all right, as Monsieur Xavier used to say, a really perverted little rascal of whom I shall have more to say later on … And how I knocked about in those days—I was a regular rolling stone. It’s frightening to think of it.
