The Diary of a Chambermaid (2 page)

Struggling not to become a victim, Célestine defends herself with what weapons she can lay her hands on: her sexual power over men, her intelligence, her bitter humour, her knowledge of the foibles of her employers. The price she pays is loneliness and a restless search for a better life: ‘I have always been in a hurry to be somewhere else.’ She can be perverse but she excites our sympathy to the end because we identify with her disgust - which is Mirbeau’s as well - and with her love for life, which is thwarted at almost every turn by the relentless animosity of the ruling class. Only in the poignant episode with ‘Monsieur George’ does Célestine glimpse what could be. The cruel trick played on these lovers, when what should give life ends it, closes that avenue for ever. There are few options for women in Célestine’s position.

Célestine’s sensuality only came home to Luis Buñuel after he had cast Jeanne Moreau in the role for his 1964 film adaptation of Mirbeau’s novel. ‘When she walks,’ he recalled, ‘her foot trembles just a bit on its high heel, suggesting a certain tension and instability.’ It is easy to understand Buñuel’s interest in
The Diary of a Chambermaid,
looking over his career as one of the great moralists of the twentieth century. Buñuel used surrealism to disturb and provoke, not simply to amuse. His translation of the novel’s action to the 1920s drew conscious parallels between the dark side of the Belle Epoque and sinister rise of Fascism in the later period: from Dreyfus to Vichy. Like Mirbeau, Buñuel was an anarchist and delighted in satirizing the bourgeoisie. He too found sexual metaphors for repression - he makes a classic sequence out of Monsieur Rabour’s foot fetish. Where Buñuel differs is in his transformation of Célestine into a moral avenger, secretly betraying Joseph to the police for his savage rape and murder of a young girl. Although the film ends with her marriage to an older, buffoonish version of Joseph - Captain Mauger - and Joseph’s reported acquittal, Buñuel’s conclusion is less bleak than Mirbeau’s, evoking as it does the survival of the moral impulse.

In Jean Renoir’s version, premiered in 1946, the moral heroism of Célestine is never in doubt. While Buñuel thrust doomed innocents into the den of bourgeois iniquity in films like The Diary of a Chambermaid and Viridiana, Renoir in the forties was focusing on how individuals defined themselves against, even outside the social order. Renoir’s Célestine is an observer of corruption, not Mirbeau’s participant. The fatal attraction of evil is replaced by moral repugnance. The Lanlaires’ household is a trap - a ‘tyranny of the enclosed’, as one critic has it. The cathartic moment, when Célestine’s sweetheart smashes a window to let symbolic light in, is matched by the mob celebrating Bastille Day, who settle accounts with Joseph. News of the liberation of Paris was coming in during filming and this might explain the optimistic interpretation Renoir makes of Mirbeau’s much darker vision.

Mirbeau has been unjustly neglected. In France, his letters, plays and newspaper articles are now being reprinted. There are the beginnings of a reappraisal of his literary achievements and his influence on the shaping of modern French politics. It is intriguing to discover that he was hailed at the time as France’s ‘greatest secular writer’ by no less a figure than Leo Tolstoy. Laurent Tailharde, an anarchist poet, memorialised his old friend’s writing as ‘chaotic, smouldering, fiery, maledictory, nothing less than an appeal for justice, a long cry for pity, gentleness and love’.

Like Shelley, whose radicalism is likewise underplayed today, Mirbeau was an impassioned artist, seeking to change the world through his writing. He used powerful exaggerations to illustrate the grotesqueries of Western civilisation, which was based, in his view, on an inversion of moral values. His purpose in laying bare the sick organism of French society was not to titillate, but to evoke in the reader a sense of outrage, a necessary impetus for change.

Richard Ings

This book, which I have called
The Diary of a Chambermaid,
was in fact written by a chambermaid, a certain Mademoiselle Célestine R … When I was asked to revise the manuscript, to correct and re-write parts of it, I at first refused, for it seemed to me that, just as it was, with all its ribaldry, the manuscript had an originality, a special flavour, that any ‘touching up’ by me would only render commonplace. But Mlle Célestine R … was a very pretty woman. She insisted, and, being only a man, eventually I gave in.

I admit that this was a mistake. By undertaking what she asked of me, that is to say by modifying here and there the tone of the book, I am very much afraid that I may have diluted its almost corrosive elegance, weakened its melancholy power, and above all, transformed the emotion and life of the original into mere literature.

I say this in order to meet in advance the objections that certain grave and learned—and of course high-minded—critics will certainly not fail to make.

O.M.

14 September.

Today, 14 September, at three o’clock in the afternoon of a mild, grey, rainy day, I have started in a new place, the twelfth in two years. Of course that’s not counting all the jobs I’ve had previously. That would be impossible. Oh, I don’t mind telling you I’ve seen the inside of a few houses in my time, and faces, and nasty minds … And there’s more to come. Judging from the really extraordinary, crazy way that I’ve knocked about so far, from houses to offices and offices to houses, from the Bois de Boulogne to the Bastille, from the Observatoire to Montmartre, from the Ternes to the Gobelins, without ever managing to settle down anywhere, anyone might think employers were difficult to please these days … It’s incredible.

This time everything was fixed up through the small ads in the
Figaro,
without my having set eyes on my future mistress. We wrote to each other, and that was all: a risky business, which often holds surprises in store for both parties. True, Madame’s letters were well-written, but they revealed a touchy, over meticulous nature. All the explanations she asked for, all the whys and wherefores … I don’t know whether she’s really a miser, but she certainly doesn’t spend much on notepaper … She buys it at the Louvre. Poor as I am, that wouldn’t suit me. I use fine scented paper, pink or pale blue, that I have knocked up at various places I’ve been in. I have even got some with a countess’s coronet on it—that ought to have made her sit up.

Anyway, here I am in Normandy, at Mesnil-Roy. The house, which is not far from the village, is called The Priory. And that’s about all I know of my future home.

Now that I find myself, as a result of a sudden impulse, living here at the back of beyond, I cannot help feeling both anxiety and regret. What I’ve seen of it frightens me a bit, and I wonder what is going to become of me. Nothing good, you may be sure; and, as usual, plenty of worries. Worry, that’s the one perquisite we can always count on. For every one of us who is successful, that is to say marries a decent chap or manages to get herself an old one, how many of us are destined to misfortune, to be swept away into the whirlpool of misery? In any case, I had no choice; and this is better than nothing.

It isn’t the first time I’ve taken a place in the country. Four years ago I had one, though not for long … and in quite exceptional circumstances. I can remember it as though it were yesterday. The details of what happened may be rather sordid, even horrible, but I am going to describe them. And here I may as well warn anybody who thinks of reading this diary that, in writing it, I don’t intend to hold anything back, either as regards myself or other people. On the contrary, I mean to put into it all the frankness that is in my nature and, where necessary, all the brutality that exists in life. It is not my fault if, when one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people’s souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.

This is what happened then:

I had been engaged at a registry office, by a kind of housekeeper, as chambermaid for a certain Monsieur Rabour who lived in Touraine. Having come to terms, it was agreed that I should take the train at a certain time on a certain day for a certain station; and this was done as arranged. Having given up my ticket at the barrier, outside the station I found a coachman of sorts, a man with a red, loutish face, who asked me if I was M. Rabour’s new chambermaid.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Have you got a trunk?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Then give me the ticket for it and wait for me here.’

He went on to the platform where the porters treated him with considerable respect, addressing him in a friendly way as ‘Monsieur Louis’. He found my trunk amongst a pile of baggage and got one of the porters to put it into the dogcart which was standing in the station yard.

‘Aren’t you going to get up then?’

I took my place beside him on the driving seat, and we set off. The coachman began looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and I did the same. I could see straight away that he was nothing but a country bumpkin, little better than a peasant; a fellow without the slightest style, who had certainly never seen service in a decent establishment. This was a bore for I love fine liveries—there’s nothing I find more exciting than a pair of well-shaped thighs in close-fitting, white breeches. But this Louis just didn’t know what elegance means. He had no driving gloves, and was wearing a suit of grey-blue serge, much too big for him, with a flat patent leather cap decorated with gold braid. Really, they’re all behind the times in this part of the world. To crown everything he had a scowling brutal expression, though maybe he was not such a bad chap at heart. I know the type. When there’s a new maid they start by showing off, but later on things get fixed up between them—often a good deal better fixed than they intended.

For a long time neither of us said a word. He was pretending to be a real coachman, holding the reins high in the air and flourishing his whip. Oh, he was a scream! As for me, I just sat there in a dignified way looking at the countryside, though there was nothing very special about it—fields, trees, houses, like anywhere else. When we came to a hill, he pulled up the horse to a walk and, with a mocking smile, suddenly asked me: ‘Well, I suppose you’ve brought a good supply of boots with you!’

‘Naturally,’ I replied, surprised by such a pointless question, and even more by the curious tone of his voice.

‘Why should you want to know? It’s rather a stupid question to ask, my man, isn’t it?’

He nudged me lightly in the ribs and, running his eyes over me with a strange expression on his face, a mixture of acute irony and jovial obscenity that puzzled me, he said with a sneer: ‘Get along with you! As if you didn’t know what I was talking about, you blooming humbug, you!’

Then he clicked his tongue and the horse broke into a trot once more. I was intrigued. What could all this mean? Maybe nothing at all. I decided the fellow must be a bit of a booby, who just didn’t know how to talk to a woman and thought this was a way of starting a conversation. However, I felt it best not to pursue the matter.

M. Rabour’s property was a fine big place, with a pretty house, painted light green and surrounded by huge flowerbeds, and a pinewood that scented the air with turpentine. I adore the country—though the funny thing is, it always makes me sad and sends me to sleep. I was more or less dopey by the time I reached the hall, where I found the housekeeper waiting for me. It was the woman who had engaged me at the registry office in Paris, after God alone knows how many indiscreet enquiries as to my intimate habits and tastes, which ought to have been enough to put me on my guard. But it is no use. Though every time you have to put up with some fresh imposition, you never learn from it. I hadn’t taken to the housekeeper when I first met her; here I felt an immediate dislike for her, for there was something about her that reminded me of an old bawd. She was a big woman, not tall, but with lots of puffy, yellowish fat. Her greying hair was done in plaits, and she had a huge, bulging bosom and soft, moist hands, transparent like gelatine. Her grey eyes had a spiteful expression, cold, deliberate and vicious, and she looked at you in a cruel, unemotional way, as though trying to strip you body and soul, that was enough to make you blush.

She took me into a small sitting-room, and almost immediately left me there, saying she would let Monsieur Rabour know that I had arrived, as he wanted to see me before I started work.

‘The master hasn’t seen you yet,’ she added. ‘It’s true I engaged you, but unless the master takes to you …’

I inspected the room. It was kept extremely clean and tidy. Brasses, furniture, floors, doors, were all scrubbed, waxed, polished till they shone like glass. Nothing trashy, no heavy embroidered curtains and hangings like one sees in some Paris houses, but a general air of wealth and solid comfort, of the regular, tranquil, well-to-do life they lived in the country. Crikey! How unutterably boring such an existence must be!

Monsieur Rabour came into the room, such an odd creature I could scarcely help laughing. Just imagine a little old man dressed up to the nines, freshly shaven and with pink cheeks like a doll’s, very upright, very much alive, very attractive even, and skipping about like a grasshopper. He bowed to me and, with the greatest politeness, asked: ‘What is your name, my dear?’

‘Célestine, sir.’

‘Célestine?’ he repeated. ‘Célestine? Bless me! A pretty name and no mistake … But too long, my child, much too long. If you have no objection I shall call you Marie. That’s also a very nice name, and shorter. Besides, I always call the maids who work here Marie. It’s become a habit that I should hate to give up. I would rather find somebody else.’

They’ve all got this strange mania of never calling you by your own name. So I was not really surprised, having in my time been called after every saint in the calendar. He went on:

‘You don’t mind if I call you Marie? That’s agreed?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Pretty girl … and good character. Excellent, excellent.’

He said all this in a spritely, extremely respectful way, and without putting me out of countenance by staring at me as though he were trying to see through my blouse and skirt as men usually do. Indeed, he had scarcely been looking at me. Since the moment he came into the room his eyes had remained obstinately fixed on my boots.