The Diary of a Chambermaid (43 page)

Immediately after that terrible scene I went downstairs to the pantry, where I found William, lazily polishing the silver and smoking a Russian cigarette.

‘What’s up with you then?’ he asked me, as calm as you like.

‘I’ve got to leave … I’m giving up the job this evening,’ I panted, scarcely able to speak.

‘You don’t say! … What on earth do you want to leave for?’ said William without the slightest trace of emotion.

I described the scene with Madame in short, breathless sentences, trying to imitate the way she spoke, but William remained completely indifferent. He merely shrugged his shoulders and said:

‘But this is absolutely ridiculous … No one can be as stupid as that.’

‘Is that all you can find to say to me?’

‘And what else do you expect me to say? I tell you, it’s silly, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘And what about you? What are you going to do?’

He glanced at me from under his eyebrows, and there was a mean sneer on his lips. Oh how ugly he looked now that I was in trouble! What a hideous, cowardly expression he had!

‘Me?’ he said, pretending not to understand that my question was an appeal to him.

‘Yes, you … I asked you what you’re going to do …’

‘Nothing … there’s nothing I can do … I shall just go on as I am … But you’re mad, my girl. You should never have done it!’

I burst out: ‘So you’re prepared to stay on with these people when they’ve given me the sack?’

He got up, relit his cigarette which had gone out, and said coldly:

‘Oh, we won’t have any scenes, if you don’t mind! I’m not your husband you know … If you’ve chosen to make a fool of yourself, that’s your look out. It’s not my fault … What d’you expect? You’ll just have to put up with the consequences … That’s life!’

‘So you’re going to let me down?’ I said indignantly. ‘Then you’re a miserable swine, like all the rest of them … Do you hear? … A miserable swine!’

William merely smiled in his superior manner.

‘Don’t start talking a lot of nonsense … When you and I got together, I never made any promises and nor did you . .. We just happened to meet, and we just fell for each other … Very good. Now you’ve got to go, so we break it off … and that’s all right, too. That’s life.’

And he added, sententiously: ‘You see, Célestine, in real life, you have to learn to behave … You need what I call organization. You don’t know how to behave, you can’t organize … You let yourself be carried away by your feelings, and in our job we can’t afford feelings … Just you remember what I’ve told you … That’s life.’

I could have thrown myself on him and scratched his face with my nails—his unfeeling, cowardly, flunkey’s face —if a sudden burst of tears had not brought relief to my exhausted nerves. My anger disappeared, and I implored him:

‘Oh, William, William, my dear little William, if only you knew how miserable I feel!’

He made some attempt to restore my morale, and, I must say, he employed all his powers of persuasion and philosophy. For the rest of that day he overwhelmed me with noble thoughts and grave, consoling aphorisms, in which the same alternatively irritating and soothing phrase continually recurred … ‘But that’s life …’

I must, however, do him justice. That last day he was charming, though rather pompous, and he did things handsomely. In the evening, when we had had dinner, he loaded my trunks on to a cab and took me to a lodging house that he knew, where he paid a week in advance for me and told them they must look after me properly. I wanted him to spend the night with me, but he had an appointment with Edgar.

‘I can’t very well let him down, you know … And now I come to think of it, perhaps he may know of a situation for you … If Edgar was to find you a place, that would be marvellous.’

As he was leaving, he said:

‘I’ll come and see you tomorrow. So be a good girl, and don’t get up to any more of your nonsense … That get’s you nowhere … The one thing you have got to get into your head, Célestine, is that life’s like that …’

The next day I waited for him in vain. He never came. ‘I suppose,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s life.’

The following day, however, as I was still anxious to see him, I went back to the house. There was no one in the kitchen, except a tall, fair-haired girl, extremely cheeky and a bit wild, and prettier than me.

‘Isn’t Eugenie about?’ I asked.

‘No, she’s gone out,’ the tall girl replied drily.

‘And William?’

‘He’s not in, either.’

‘Where is he?’

‘How should I know?’

‘I want to see him … Go and tell him I’m here.’

The tall girl looked at me disdainfully:

‘What’s that? … I’m not paid to wait on you, you know.’

The position was only too obvious … And as I was tired of struggling, I took myself off … ‘That’s life …’

I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head. It went on and on, like the words of some popular song. As I turned away, I couldn’t help remembering how gaily I had first been made welcome in that house … The same scene must have taken place all over again … the uncorking of the champagne … William taking the fair girl on his knee, whispering in her ear: ‘You must always be nice to Bibi …’ all the same words, the same gestures, the same caresses … and Eugenie gazing adoringly at the porter’s son and taking him off into the next room …

For more than an hour I walked up and down outside the house, hoping to see William, either coming in or going out … And all the time the ridiculous little phrase kept running through my head … I saw the grocer’s boy go in, and the little dressmaker, with two big cardboard boxes, and the delivery man from the Louvre; and I saw the plumbers coming out, and all sorts of other people … ghosts, ghosts, ghosts … I was afraid to visit the porter’s lodge next door, in case she should be unpleasant to me. And, besides, what could she have told me? At last I decided to give up, and went away pursued by the irritating refrain: ‘That’s life.’

The streets seemed unbearably sad. The passers-by were like creatures from another world. When, in the distance, I caught sight of a man’s hat, shining like a beacon in the night, my heart suddenly leapt … But it was not William … In the heavy, leaden-coloured sky there was no gleam of hope.

I got back to my room, disgusted with everything … Oh men, men, men! They’re all the same … coachmen, footmen, toffs, parsons, poets … Nothing but a lot of swine!

Well, that’s the last of my memories I mean to write about. Not that I haven’t got plenty of others … I have. But they’re all so much alike, and I’m tired of continually describing the same events, the same monotonous succession of faces, hearts, phantoms. Besides, I am distracted from the ashes of the past by my preoccupation with the future … I could have told a good deal more about the time I was with the Countess Fardin … But what’s the use? I’m sick and tired of it all … It was there, that, for the first time I encountered the type of vanity that most disgusts me, literary vanity, and the lowest of all forms of stupidity, political stupidity …

It was there that I met Monsieur Paul Bourget, at the height of his fame—need I say more? … He is precisely the kind of philosophizing, poeticizing, moralizing writer that suits the pretentious nullity, the intellectual snobbery, the fundamental untruth of that social stratum for whom everything is artificial: elegance, love, cooking, religious feeling, patriotism, art, charity … yes, even vice itself, which, on the pretext of literature and good manners, decks itself out in tawdry mysticism and hides behind a mask of sanctity … A world in which there is but one genuine desire … the ruthless desire for money, a desire that adds an odious and savage quality to the absurdity of these puppets, and is the one indication that the pathetic phantoms are living human beings.

It was there, too, that I met Monsieur Jean, another psychologist and moralist: the psychologist of the pantry, the moralist of the backstairs, and, in his own way, scarcely more of an upstart and a simpleton that the one that rules the roost upstairs in the drawing-room. Monsieur Jean empties people’s chamber-pots, Monsieur Bourget their souls … In terms of servility, there is not so much difference between the kitchen and the drawing-room as is sometimes supposed! … But, since I have put Monsieur Jean’s photograph away at the bottom of my trunk, I may as well let the memory of him remain buried at the bottom of my heart, beneath a thick layer of oblivion …

It is two o’clock in the morning … The fire has gone out, the lamp is beginning to gutter, and I have no more wood or paraffin. I am going to bed … But my brain is too feverish to let me sleep. I shall dream of what is advancing to meet me, of what will happen tomorrow … Outside, the night is silent and tranquil. The earth lies frozen hard, beneath a sky glittering with stars. And, somewhere within that night, Joseph is on his way home … Through the darkness I can see him, yes, really see him, sitting in a third-class carriage, grave, thoughtful, huge. He is smiling at me, drawing closer to me, bringing me at last peace, freedom, happiness … Will it really be happiness? Tomorrow I shall know.

It is eight months since I last wrote anything in this diary, I have had so many other things to think about; and exactly three since Joseph and I left the Priory and settled at Cherbourg, in the little café near the harbour. We are married; business is good; I like the work; and I am happy. Born by the sea, now I have returned to it, and though I used not to miss it, I am glad to be back there all the same. Here, it is not like the desolate country at Audierne, the infinite sadness of the cliffs, the terrible splendour of those sombre, roaring beaches. There is nothing sad about Cherbourg, on the contrary, everything is full of gaiety … all the cheerful din of a military town, all the picturesque bustle and motley activity of a naval port. All around you are people making love, indulging in wild riotous sprees … crowds intent upon pleasure, between two spells of exile … an absorbing, ever-changing spectacle, and the smell of tar and seaweed that I have known and loved since childhood, though in those days, I must say, I never found it particularly sweet. Once again I meet lads from home, serving in the navy … not that we have much to say to each other, and I have never dreamt of asking them for news of my brother … That’s all so long ago. For me, it’s as though he were dead. Good morning … Good evening … How are you? … When they aren’t drunk they’re too stupid, and when they aren’t stupid, they’re too drunk … And they all look the same … heads like old fishes … and no more feeling for me than I for them. Besides, Joseph doesn’t like me being too familiar with ordinary sailors … lousy Bretons, who haven’t a penny to bless themselves with and get tight on cheap spirits.

But I must briefly describe what happened before we left the Priory. As you will remember, Joseph used to sleep in the stables, in a room over the saddle room; and every day, summer and winter, he used to be up at five o’clock in the morning. Well, on Christmas Eve, exactly a month after he got back from Cherbourg, the first thing he saw was that the kitchen door was wide open … ‘What?’ he thought. ‘Surely they aren’t up already? …’

Then he noticed that a square hole had been cut in the glazed panel of the door, near the lock, large enough for a man to get his arm through. The lock had been expertly forced, and a few bits of wood, tiny pieces of twisted iron and splinters of glass were scattered about on the ground … Inside, all the doors, so carefully bolted every evening under Madame’s personal supervision, were also open. It was obvious that something terrible had happened … By this time, feeling very worried—I am repeating exactly what Joseph told the examining magistrate—he hurried through the kitchen into the passage, which leads to the apple room, bathroom and hall on the right, and, on the left, to the pantry, dining-room, morning-room and, at the far end, the drawing-room. The dining-room was in a shocking state—furniture overturned, the sideboard ransacked from top to bottom, all its drawers, as well as those of the two dumb-waiters, emptied on to the floor, and, on the table, in the middle of a jumble of empty boxes and objects of no value, a candle, still burning in a copper candlestick. But it was when he got to the pantry that he realized how serious the situation was. There, as I think I mentioned earlier, there was a deep cupboard, fastened by a very complicated lock, the combination of which was only known to Madame. It was here that the famous silver was kept, in three heavy cases, protected by steel bands and corner-pieces, which were bolted to the bottom of the cupboard and secured to the walls by solid iron brackets. Well, these three cases had been wrenched from their mysterious and inviolable tabernacle, and were standing in the middle of the room, empty. Directly he saw this, Joseph raised the alarm, running to the bottom of the staircase and yelling with all the strength of his lungs:

‘Sir! Madame! Come on down, quick … We’ve been robbed, we’ve been robbed!’

There was an immediate rush, a terrifying avalanche of people. Madame in her nightdress, with only a light shawl round her shoulders; the master still trying to tuck the ends of his shirt into his trousers … and both of them, pale, dishevelled, with an expression of bewilderment on their faces as though they had been woken up in the middle of a nightmare, were shouting:

‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’

‘We’ve been robbed, we’ve been robbed!’

‘What’s been stolen? What’s been stolen?’

In the dining-room, Madame started wailing, ‘Oh my God, my God!’ While the master kept on bawling ‘What’s been stolen? What’s been stolen?’

Joseph led them to the pantry, and there, at the sight of the three open cases, Madame threw her arms in the air and shrieked:

‘It’s my silver! Oh my God! Is it possible? My silver!’

And, taking out the empty compartments, turning the cases upside down, bewildered, horrified, she sank to the ground … It was all she could do to mutter in a childish voice:

‘They’ve taken the lot! Everything, everything, everything —even the Louis Sieze cruet!’

She continued staring at the cases, as though she were gazing at her dead child, while the master, scratching the back of his neck and rolling haggard eyes, could only moan, in the obstinate, faraway voice of someone going out of his mind: