Part 4

All that the haberdasher told me, Mademoiselle Rose tells me again, with more disagreeable variations. So violent is this woman's passion for chattering that she finally forgets her suffering. Her malice gets the better of her asthma. And the scandal of the house goes its course, mingled with the private affairs of the neighborhood. Although already I know them all, Rose's stories are so black, and her words are so discouraging, that again I am thoroughly saddened. I ask myself if I had not better go away at once. Why try an experiment in which I am conquered in advance?

Other women have overtaken us, curious, nosy, accompanying with an energetic "For sure" each of the revelations of Rose, who, less and less winded, continues to jabber:

"M. Mauger is a very good man, and all alone, my little one. As much as to say that I am the mistress. Why! a former captain; it is natural, isn't it? He is no manager; he knows nothing of household affairs; he likes to be taken care of and coddled, have his linen well kept, his caprices respected, nice dishes prepared for him. If he had not beside him a person in whom he had confidence, he would be plundered right and left. My God, there is no lack of thieves here!"

The intonation of her spasmodic utterances, and her winks, clearly revealed to me her exact situation in Captain Mauger's house.

"Why, you know, a man all alone, and who still has ideas. And besides, there is work to do all the same. And we are going to hire a boy to assist."

This Rose is lucky, I, too, have often dreamed of entering an old man's service. It is disgusting. But at least one is tranquil, and has a future.

We traverse the entire district. Oh! indeed, it is not pretty. It in no way resembles the Boulevard Malesherbes. Dirty, narrow, winding streets, and houses that stand neither square or straight,--dark houses, of old, rotten wood, with high, tottering gables, and bulging stories that project one past the other, in the olden fashion. The people who pass are ugly, ugly, and I have not seen a single handsome fellow. The industry of the neighborhood is the manufacture of list-shoes. Most of the shoemakers, having been unable to deliver a week's product at the factory, are still at work. And behind the window-panes I see poor sickly faces, bent backs, and black hands hammering leather soles.

That adds still further to the dismal sadness of the place. It seems like a prison.

But here is the haberdasher, who, standing at her threshold, smiles at us and bows.

"You are going to eight o'clock mass? I went to seven o'clock mass. You have plenty of time. Will you not come in, a moment?"

Rose thanks her. She warns me against the haberdasher, who is a malicious woman and speaks ill of everybody, a real pest! Then she begins again to boast of her master's virtues and of her easy place. I ask her:

"Then the captain has no family?"

"No family?" she cries, scandalized. "Well, my little one, you are not on. Oh! yes, there is a family, and a nice one, indeed! Heaps of nieces and cousins,--loafers, penniless people, hangers-on, all of whom were plundering him and robbing him. You should have seen that. It was an abomination. So you can imagine whether I set that right,---whether I cleared the house of all this vermin. Why, my dear young woman, but for me, the captain now would be on his uppers. Ah! the poor man! He is well satisfied with the way things are now."

I insist with an ironical intention, which, however, she does not understand:

"And, undoubtedly, Mademoiselle Rose, he will remember you in his will?"

Prudently, she replies:

"Monsieur will do as he likes. He is free. Surely I do not influence him. I ask nothing of him. I do not ask him even to pay me wages. I stay with him out of devotion. But he knows life. He knows those who love him, who care for him with disinterestedness, who coddle him. No one need think that he is stupid as certain persons pretend,--Madame Lanlaire at the head, who says things about us. It is she, on the contrary, who is evil-minded, Mademoiselle Célestine, and who has a will of her own. Depend upon it!"

Upon this eloquent apology for the captain, we arrive at the church.

The fat Rose does not leave me. She obliges me to take a chair near hers, and begins to mumble prayers, to make genuflections and signs of the cross. Oh! this church! With its rough timbers that cross it and sustain the staggering vault, it resembles a barn; with the people in it, coughing, hawking, running against benches, and dragging chairs around, it seems also like a village wine-shop. I see nothing but faces stupefied by ignorance, bitter mouths contracted by hatred. There are none here but wretched creatures who come to ask God to do something against somebody. It is impossible for me to concentrate my thoughts, and I feel a sort of cold penetrating me and surrounding me. Perhaps it is because there is not even an organ in this church. Queer, isn't it? but I cannot pray without an organ. An anthem on the organ fills my chest, and then my stomach; it completely restores me, like love. If I could always hear the strains of an organ, I really believe that I should never sin. Here, instead of an organ, there is an old woman, in the choir, with blue spectacles, and a poor little black shawl over her shoulders, who painfully drums on a sort of piano, wheezy and out of tune. And the people are always coughing and hawking, the droning of the priest and the responses of the choristers being drowned by a sound of catarrh. And how bad it all smells,--mingled odors of the muck-heap, of the stable, of the soil, of sour straw, of wet leather, of damaged incense. Really, they are very ill-bred in the country.

The mass drags along, and I grow weary. I am especially vexed at finding myself among people so ordinary and so ugly, and who pay so little attention to me. Not a pretty spectacle, not a pretty costume with which to rest my thought or cheer my eyes. Never did I better understand that I am made for the joy of elegance and style. Instead of being lifted up, as at mass in Paris, all my senses take offence, and rebel at once. For distraction, I follow attentively the movements of the officiating priest. Oh! thank you! he is a sort of tall, jovial fellow, very young, with an ordinary face, and a brick-red complexion. With his dishevelled hair, his greedy jaw, his gluttonous lips, his obscene little eyes, and his eyelids circled with black, I have sized him up at once. How he must enjoy himself at the table! And at the confessional, too,--the dirty things that he must say! Rose, perceiving that I am watching him, bends toward me, and says, in a very low voice:

"That is the new vicar. I recommend him to you. There is no one like him to confess the women. The curate is a holy man, certainly, but he is looked upon as too strict. Whereas the new vicar...."

She clacks her tongue, and goes back to her prayer, her head bent over the prie-Dieu.

Well, he would not please me, the new vicar; he has a dirty and brutal air; he looks more like a ploughman than a priest. For my part, I require delicacy, poetry, the beyond, and white hands. I like men to be gentle and _chic_, as Monsieur Jean was.

After mass Rose drags me to the grocery store. With a few mysterious words she explains to me that it is necessary to be on good terms with the woman who keeps it, and that all the domestics pay her assiduous court.

Another little dump,--decidedly, this is the country of fat women. Her face is covered with freckles, and, through her thin, light, flaxen hair, which is lacking in gloss, can be seen portions of her skull, on top of which a chignon stands up in a ridiculous fashion, like a little broom. At the slightest movement her breast, beneath her brown cloth waist, shakes like a liquid in a bottle. Her eyes, bordered with red circles, are bloodshot, and her ignoble mouth makes of her every smile a grimace. Rose introduces me:

"Madame Gouin, I bring you the new chambermaid at the Priory."

The grocer observes me attentively, and I notice that her eyes fasten themselves upon my waist with an embarrassing obstinacy. She says in a meaningless voice:

"Mademoiselle is at home here. Mademoiselle is a pretty girl. Mademoiselle is a Parisienne, undoubtedly?"

"It is true, Madame Gouin, I come from Paris."

"That is to be seen; that is to be seen directly. One need not look at you twice. I am very fond of the Parisiennes; they know what it is to live. I too served in Paris, when I was young. I served in the house of a midwife in the Rue Guénégaud,--Madame Tripier. Perhaps you know her?"

"No."

"That makes no difference. Oh! it was a long time ago. But come in, Mademoiselle Célestine."

She escorts us, with ceremony, into the back shop, where four other domestics are already gathered about a round table.

"Oh! you will have an anxious time of it, my poor young woman," groaned the grocer, as she offered me a chair. "It is not because they do not patronize me at the château; but I can truly say that it is an infernal house, infernal! Is it not so, Mesdemoiselles?"

"For sure!" answer in chorus, with like gestures and like grimaces, the four domestics thus appealed to.

Madame Gouin continues:

"Oh! thank you, I would not like to sell to people who are continually haggling, and crying out, like pole-cats, that they are being robbed, that they are being injured. They may go where they like."

The chorus of servants responds:

"Surely they may go where they like."

To which Madame Gouin, addressing Rose more particularly, adds, in a firm tone:

"They do not run after them, do they, Mam'zelle Rose? Thank God! we have no need of them, do we?"

Rose contents herself with a shrug of her shoulders, putting into this gesture all the concentrated gall, spite, and contempt at her command. And the huge musketeer hat emphasizes the energy of these violent sentiments by the disorderly swaying of its black plumes.

Then, after a silence:

"Oh! well, let us talk no more about these people. Every time that I speak of them it turns my stomach."

Thereupon the stories and gossip begin again. An uninterrupted flow of filth is vomited from these sad mouths, as from a sewer. The back-shop seems infected with it. The impression is the more disagreeable because the room is rather dark and the faces take on fantastic deformities. It is lighted only by a narrow window opening on a damp and filthy court,--a sort of shaft formed by moss-eaten walls. An odor of pickle, of rotting vegetables, of red herring, persists around us, impregnating our garments. It is intolerable. Then each of these creatures, heaped up on their chairs like bundles of dirty linen, plunges into the narration of some dirty action, some scandal, some crime. Coward that I am, I try to smile with them, to applaud with them; but I feel something insurmountable, something like frightful disgust. A nausea turns my stomach, forces its way to my throat, leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and presses my temples. I should like to go away. I cannot, and I remain there, like an idiot, heaped up like them on my chair, making the same gestures that they make,--I remain there, stupidly listening to these shrill voices that sound to me like dish-water gurgling and dripping through sinks and pipes.

I know very well that we have to defend ourselves against our masters, and I am not the last to do it, I assure you. But no; here, all the same, that passes imagination. These women are odious to me. I detest them, and I say to myself, in a low voice, that I have nothing in common with them. Education, contact with stylish people, the habit of seeing beautiful things, the reading of Paul Bourget's novels, have saved me from these turpitudes. Ah! the pretty and amusing monkey-tricks of the servants' halls in Paris,--they are far away!

As we are leaving, the grocer says to me, with an amiable smile:

"Pay no attention to the fact that your masters do not patronize me; you must come and see me again."

I go back with Rose, who finishes familiarizing me with the daily doings of the neighborhood. I had supposed that her stock of infamies was exhausted. Not at all. She discovers and invents new and more frightful ones. In the matter of calumny her resources are infinite. And her tongue goes on forever, without stopping. It does not forget anybody or anything. It is astonishing how, in a few minutes, one can dishonor people, in the country. Thus she escorts me back to the Priory gate. Even there she cannot make up her mind to leave me; talks on, talks incessantly, tries to envelop and stun me with her friendship and devotion. As for me, my head is broken by all that I have heard, and the sight of the Priory fills me with a feeling of discouragement. Ah! these broad, flowerless lawns! And this immense building, that has the air of a barrack or a prison, and where, from behind each window, a pair of eyes seems to be spying you.

The sun is warmer, the fog has disappeared, and the view of the landscape has become clearer. Beyond the plain, on the hills, I perceive little villages, gilded by the light, and enlivened by red roofs. The river running through the plain, yellow and green, shines here and there in silvery curves. And a few clouds decorate the sky with their light and charming frescoes. But I take no pleasure in the contemplation of all this. I have now but one desire, one will, one obsession,--to flee from this sun, from this plain, from these hills, from this house, and from this fat woman, whose malicious voice hurts and tortures me.

At last she gets ready to leave me, takes my hand, and presses it affectionately in her fat fingers gloved with mittens. She says to me:

"And then, my little one, Madame Gouin, you know, is a very amiable and very clever woman. You must go to see her often."

She lingers longer, and adds more mysteriously:

"She has relieved many young girls. As soon as they are in any trouble, they go to her. Neither seen or known. One can trust her, take my word for it. She is a very, very expert woman."

With eyes more brilliant, and fastening her gaze on me with a strange tenacity, she repeats:

"Very expert, and clever, and discreet. She is the Providence of the neighborhood. Now, my little one, do not forget to come to see us when you can. And go often to Madame Gouin's. You will not regret it. We will see each other soon again."

She has gone. I see her, with her rolling gait, moving away, skirting first the wall and then the hedge with her enormous person, and suddenly burying herself in a road, where she disappears.

I pass by Joseph, the gardener-coachman, who is raking the paths. I think that he is going to speak to me; he does not speak to me. He simply looks at me obliquely, with a singular expression that almost frightens me.

"Fine weather this morning, Monsieur Joseph."

Joseph grunts I know not what between his teeth. He is furious that I have allowed myself to walk in the path that he is raking.

What a queer man he is, and how ill-bred! And why does he never say a word to me? And why does he never answer when I speak to him?

In the house I find Madame by no means contented. She gives me a very disagreeable reception, treats me very roughly:

"I beg you not to stay out so long in future."

I desire to reply, for I am vexed, irritated, unnerved. But fortunately I restrain myself. I confine myself to muttering a little.

"What's that you say?"

"I say nothing."

"It is lucky. And furthermore, I forbid you to walk with M. Mauger's servant. She is very bad company for you. See, everything is late this morning, because of you."

I say to myself:

"_Zut! zut!_ and _zut!_ You make me tired. I will speak to whom I like. I will see anyone that it pleases me to see. You shall lay down no law for me, camel!"

I need only to see once more her wicked eyes, and hear her shrill voice and her tyrannical orders, in order to lose at once the bad impression, the impression of disgust, that I brought back from the mass, from the grocer, and from Rose. Rose and the grocer are right; the haberdasher also is right; all of them are right. And I promise myself that I will see Rose; that I will see her often; that I will return to the grocer's; that I will make this dirty haberdasher my best friend,--since Madame forbids me to do so. And I repeat internally, with savage energy:

"Camel! Camel! Camel!"

But I would have been much more relieved if I had had the courage to hurl and shout this insult full in her face.

During the day, after lunch, Monsieur and Madame went out driving. The dressing-room, the chambers, Monsieur's desk, all the closets, all the cupboards, all the sideboards, were locked. What did I tell you? Ah, well, thank you! no means of reading a letter, or of making up any little packages.

So I have remained in my room. I have written to my mother and to Monsieur Jean, and I have read "En Famille." What a delightful book! And how well written! It is queer, all the same; I am very fond of hearing dirty things, but I do not like to read them. I like only the books that make me cry.

For dinner they had boiled beef and broth. It seemed to me that Monsieur and Madame were very cool toward each other. Monsieur read the "Petit Journal" with provoking ostentation. He crumpled the paper, rolling all the time his kind, comical, gentle eyes. Even when he is in anger, Monsieur's eyes remain gentle and timid. At last, doubtless to start the conversation, Monsieur, with his nose still buried in his paper, exclaimed:

"Hello! another woman cut to pieces!"

Madame made no answer. Very stiff, very straight, austere in her black silk dress, her forehead wrinkled, her look stern, she did not cease her dreaming. About what?

It is, perhaps, because of me that Madame is sulky with Monsieur.

IV

_September 26._

For a week I have been unable to write a single line in my diary. When it comes night, I am tired, exhausted, at the end of my strength. I think of nothing but going to bed and to sleep. To sleep! If I could always sleep!

Oh! what a shabby place, My God! You can have no idea of it!

For a yes, for a no, Madame makes you run up and down the two cursed flights of stairs. One has not even time to sit down in the linen-room and breathe a little, when ... drinn!... drinn!... drinn!... one has to get up and start again. It makes no difference if one is not feeling well, drinn!... drinn!... drinn! In these days I have pains in my loins that bend me in two, and gripe my stomach, and almost make me cry out. That cuts no figure; drinn!... drinn!... drinn!... One has no time to be sick; one has not the right to suffer. Suffering is a master's luxury. We, we must walk, and fast, and forever; walk at the risk of falling. Drinn!... drinn!... drinn!... And if one is a little slow in coming at the sound of the bell, then there are reproaches and angry scenes.

"Well, what are you about? You do not hear, then? Are you deaf? I have been ringing for three hours. It is getting to be very provoking."

And this is what generally happens.

"Drinn!... drinn!... drinn!..."

That throws you from your chair, as if impelled by a spring.

"Bring me a needle."

I go for the needle.

"All right! Bring me some thread."

I go for the thread.

"Very good! Bring me a button."

I go for the button.

"What is this button? I did not ask for this button. You never understand anything. A white button, number four. And be quick about it."

And I go for the white button, number four.

You can imagine how I storm, and rage, and abuse Madame, within myself. During these goings and comings, these ascents and descents, Madame has changed her mind. She wants something else, or she wants nothing at all.

"No, take away the needle and the button. I have no time."

My back is broken, my knees absolutely stiff, I can do no more. That suffices for Madame; she is satisfied. And to think that there is a society for the protection of animals!

In the evening, when making her examination of the linen-room, she storms:

"What! you have done nothing? What do you do all day long, then? I do not pay you to be idle from morning till night."

I reply rather curtly, for this injustice fills me with rebellion:

"Why, Madame has been interrupting me all day."

"I have been interrupting you, I? In the first place, I forbid you to answer me. I want no remarks, do you understand? I know what I am talking about."

And she goes away, slamming the door, and grumbling as if she would never stop. In the corridors, in the kitchen, in the garden, her shrill voice can be heard for hours. Oh! how tiresome she is!

Really one knows not how to take her. What can she have in her body that keeps her always in such a state of irritation? And how quickly I would drop her, if I were sure of finding a place directly!

Just now I was suffering even more than usual. I felt so sharp a pain that it seemed as if a beast were tearing the interior of my body with its teeth and claws. Already, in the morning, on rising, I had fainted because of loss of blood. How have I had the courage to keep up, and drag myself about, and do my work? I do not know. Occasionally, on the stairs, I was obliged to stop, and cling to the banister, in order to get my breath and keep from falling. I was green, with cold sweats that wet my hair. It was enough to make one scream, but I am good at bearing pain, and it is a matter of pride with me never to complain in presence of my masters. Madame surprised me at a moment when I thought that I was about to faint. Everything was revolving about me,--the banister, the stairs, and the walls.

"What is the matter with you?" she said to me, rudely.

"Nothing."

And I tried to straighten up.

"If there is nothing the matter with you," rejoined Madame, "why these manners? I do not like to see funereal faces. You have a very disagreeable way of doing your work."

In spite of my pain, I could have boxed her ears.

Amid these trials, I am always thinking of my former places. To-day it is my place in the Rue Lincoln that I most regret. There I was second chambermaid, and had, so to speak, nothing to do. We passed the day in the linen-room, a magnificent linen-room, with a red felt carpet, and lined from ceiling to floor with great mahogany cupboards, with gilded locks. And we laughed, and we amused ourselves in talking nonsense, in reading, in mimicking Madame's receptions, all under the eye of an English governess, who made tea for us,--the good tea that Madame bought in England for her little morning breakfasts. Sometimes, from the servants' hall, the butler--one who was up to date--brought us cakes, caviare on toast, slices of ham, and a heap of good things.

I remember that one afternoon they obliged me to put on a very swell costume belonging to Monsieur,--to Coco, as we called him among ourselves. Naturally we played at all sorts of _risqués_ games; we even went very far in our fun-making.

Ah! that was a place!

I am beginning to know Monsieur well. They were right in saying that he is an excellent and generous man, for, if he were not, there would not be in the world a worse rascal, a more perfect sharper. The need, the passion that he feels for being charitable, impel him to do things that are not very admirable. His intention is praiseworthy, but the result upon others is often disastrous, all the same. It must be confessed that his kindness has been the cause of dirty little tricks, like the following: