A CHAMBERMAID'S DIARY by Octave Mirbeau
Jan. 14th, 2014 04:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blueinkedfrostTantalisingly, this English translation is said to have been censored and abbreviated to avoid contemporary moral guardians. ('Everybody ought to have a maid' by John Baxter' is a link that provides a few quotes of salacious detail not in the Project Gutenberg version.) This novel is detailed enough even with the censorship - something is definitely rotten in the state of domestic service! The book was published in 1900.
The book is set up as a non-fiction autobiography, as a genuine chambermaid's diary sent to the author, but it's clear from the convenient melodrama that this is only a framing device. But there's a ring of verisimiltude about it anyway - as per the approach of too many grimdark fantasy novels to count, there's enough emphasis on blood and phlegm and saliva and pus and assorted other bodily fluids to make the gist seem true. A chambermaid's life is not pleasant and this book illustrates it vividly, in a way that makes the author seem an excellent observer.
Celestine tells her story in achronic order, writing a diary of her time with the deeply unpleasant Lanlaires in the country and comparing it to her previous employment in Paris. This postmodern perspective lends interest to the reader, representing life as a confused jumble where cause and effect do not always run as expected. In real life we recall our past as we experience our present, thinking back to past moments connected even by the most trivial reminder - a scent, a shape, a sound. Celestine recounts her beginning as a fisherman's orphaned daughter, her places of employment, her experiences of abuse and consensual sex, her time with exploitative nuns abusing her labour, an oppressive employment bureau, and her daily life with the Lanlaires - where the murder of a little girl in the neighbourhood adds a macabre touch to her story.
The Lanlaires, Isidore and Euphrasie, are supposed to have absolutely hilarious names in the original French. (Unrelated note: Euphrasie is Cosette's inconvenient real name.) Lanlaire is similar to 'en l'air', or 'in the air'. Perhaps the English equivalent would be Eustace and Iphigenia Airyfairy?
The novel's partly in the genre of erotica as written by men, but it is also a frank expose of the power employers have over their domestic servants and the ways they can abuse this power. In turn, the servants are not idealised: this isn't Dickens by a long shot. Celestine says that however vile the riffraff, they are never as vile as the decent people - but the servants have a realistic level of self-interest even when they're unable to be as cruel as their employers.
It makes an extremely interesting case study to compare and contrast this novel with a non-fiction book published four years later, in the United States, by Christine Terhune Herrick: The Expert Maid-Servant.
Mirbeau's Mlle Celestine R-- is a lively writer who keeps a voluminous tell-all diary of her employment. The first place she writes about is her employment in the household of a shoe fetishist - who has a heart attack with a shoe pressed between his teeth.
"You have other [shoes]?" he asked, after a short silence, during which it seemed to me that his eyes became strangely brilliant. ..."[You have shoes] of yellow leather?"
"I have none of that kind, Monsieur."
"You will have to have some; I will give you some."
"Thank you, Monsieur."
I was frightened, for dull gleams had just passed over his eyes, and drops of sweat were rolling down his forehead. Thinking that he was about to faint, I was on the point of shouting, of calling for help. But the crisis quieted down, and, after a few minutes, he continued in a calmer voice, though a little saliva still foamed at the corner of his lips.
"It is nothing. It is over. Understand me, my child. I am a little of a maniac. At my age that is allowed, is it not? For instance, I do not think it proper that a woman should black her own shoes, much less mine. I have a great respect for women, Marie, and cannot endure that. So I will black your shoes, your little shoes, your dear little shoes. I will take care of them. Listen to me. Every evening, before going to bed, you will carry your shoes into my room; you will place them near the bed, on a little table, and every morning, on coming to open my windows, you will take them away again."
And here is Terhune Herrick's views on the love affairs of servants. The master of the house is mentioned only 3 times in the book, two out of the three with reference to the master's carving duties. (Terhune Herrick's book could be said to be female centric: it's all about mistress and maids with barely a mention of male servants or men of the household! Celestine's book includes many men who are a part of her life, whether she wants them to be or not.) In other words, Terhune Herrick completely ignores sexual harassment of servants as something that just never happens.
The social relations of servants is a matter with which some mistresses exercise themselves over-much, while others, perhaps, give too little attention to it. According to the ideas of some persons, the affairs of a maid outside of working hours concern no one but herself. So long as she conforms to certain rules of the household, her coming and going, her associates and habits, are no one's business but her own, unless they interfere with the proper performance of her work. In a way this is entirely true, and a mistress has no more right to pry into the affairs of her maid than the maid has to be overcurious about the business of the mistress. But there is something to be said on the other side. Look at it in as matter-of-fact fashion as one will, relations of domestic service are different from any other business association. The mistress and maid do not only meet in the morning and part again at night, after having been together simply in the way of their work during the day; they eat and sleep under the same roof. Often they work side by side for an hour at a time. They see each other in bodily and mental dishabille. They are by way of asking or granting little kindly services that were never nominated in the bond. Without bringing too much sentiment into the relation, it may yet be asserted that it is next to impossible for them to meet on purely business terms.
In fact Celestine experiences a great amount of intimacy as a servant with her employers.
To dress and undress my mistresses and to do their hair is the only part of my work that I like. I like to play with night-gowns, with dresses and ribbons, to dabble among the linens, the hats, the laces, the furs, to rub my mistresses after the bath, to powder them, to rub their feet with pumice-stone, to perfume their breasts, to oxygenize their hair, to know them, in short, from the tips of their slippers to the peak of their chignon, to see them all naked. In this way they become for you something else than a mistress, almost a friend or an accomplice, often a slave. One inevitably becomes the confidant of a heap of things, of their pains, of their vices, of their disappointments in love, of the inner secrets of the household, of their diseases. To say nothing of the fact that, when one is adroit, one holds them by a multitude of details which they do not even suspect.
Due to the closeness of the servant relationship, Terhune Herrick believes that just a little bit of a show of friendly interest will result in the servant becoming desperate to do all sorts of extra things for mistress.
Again I feel I must defend myself against a charge of sentimentality. But I have seen these experiments tried with success. I do not mean by this that the maids were models of unending devotion and fidelity. We seldom find this sort of thing without flaw among our chosen associates. But I have known instances where the casual friendliness of the mistress was repaid tenfold in times of sickness or trouble by offices which could not be compensated for in money. And it was done freely and gladly, with no thought of anything out of the ordinary, with no hint that sacrifices were being made.
In contrast, Celestine responds with what some servants really feel about their employers. The novel is vicious about the expectation that the employers constantly order their servants around, pay them minuscule wages, distrust them by locking drawers, describe 'the soul of a servant' as something disgusting, and yet expect to be loved. This is the discussion in the servants' quarters when a marriage takes place:
"Well, Baptiste, and you? What is your present?"
"My present?" exclaimed Baptiste, with a shrug of his shoulders.
"Yes, tell me, what is it?"
"A can of petroleum lighted under their bed. That is my present."
It was a smart answer. Moreover, this Baptiste was an astonishing man in politics.
"And yours, Célestine?" he asked, in his turn.
"Mine?"
I contracted my two hands into the shape of talons, and, pretending to claw a face ferociously, I answered:
"My nails, in their eyes!"
The butler, without being asked, remarked quietly, while arranging flowers and fruits in a glass dish with his fastidious fingers:
"I would be satisfied to sprinkle their faces in church with a bottle of good vitriol."
And he stuck a rose between two pears.
Oh! yes, how we love them!
Terhune Herrick makes it understood that the employer must constantly oversee the servant and inspect all that they do.
From the first the mistress should have it clearly understood that there is no place in the house into which she may not penetrate. Her daily inspection of the refrigerator and the pantries should be a matter of course. Her presence in the kitchen should never excite surprise or provoke criticism...
The maid should have a pad and pencil hanging in the kitchen. With these she should keep a list of what is wanted in the line of household supplies. When she takes the last of any kind of provision from its receptacle she should make a note of it on the pad. By this method there is never a discovery at the last moment that a supply of some desired grocery is exhausted. This memorandum the mistress must go over every morning
Celestine trenchantly observes the inhumane practices that can result from this principle.
Madame said to me, very severely:
"If you like prunes, you have only to ask me for them; I will see if I can give you any; but I forbid you to take them."
I answered:
"I am not a thief, Madame, and I do not like prunes."
Madame insisted:
"I tell you that you have taken some prunes."
I replied:
"If Madame thinks me a thief, Madame has only to pay me and let me go."
Madame snatched the plate of prunes from my hand.
"Monsieur ate five this morning; there were thirty-two; now there are but twenty-five; then you have taken two. Don't let that happen again."
It was true. I had eaten two of them. She had counted them!
Did you ever in your life?
Bigotry is more honestly acknowledged by Mirbeau's novel than by Terhune Herrick, even though four years before Terhune Herrick's book came the segregation case of Plessy and in the year that Terhune Herrick's book is published one hundred and six African American men were lynched. The violent anti-Semitism of Joseph, the gardener-coachman of the Lanlaires and a creepy and possibly sociopathic suitor of Celestine, is an important part of Mirbeau's story. (It's set around the time of the Dreyfus affair.) Joseph belongs to many anti-Semitic societies and expresses these sentiments:
"As long as there is a Jew left in France, there is nothing done."
And he adds:
"Ah! my God! if I were in Paris, I would kill and burn and gut these cursed sheenies. There is no danger that the traitors will come to live at Mesnil-Roy. They know very well what they are about, these mercenaries!"
Celestine, who eventually becomes Joseph's wife and lives to treat her own servants poorly, cares little for the consequences of his hatred. This is what she thinks about Jewish people:
I do not know why I am against the Jews, for I used to serve in their houses in the days when one could still do so with dignity. I find that at bottom the Jews and the Catholics are very much alike. They are equally vicious, have equally vile characters, equally ugly souls.
Joseph is a probable sociopath who likes to kill animals slowly when he has to prepare them as part of his duties, and a likely candidate for the murder and rape of the little girl; the narrative implicitly connects his anti-Semitism to these negative traits. (Celestine is more or less in the position of those who write love letters to jailed serial killers. Or, alternatively, she's in the position of choosing between moderate respectability as Joseph's wife or drifting along as a servant until her health fails.)
In contrast, Terhune Herrick seems to simply assume that maidservants are white in her time, although perhaps I'm misreading her. Her only reference to foreignness places Japanese and Chinese maidservants on a level with male servants:
In a book that deals with the work of the maid-servant it is not worth while to go into the duties of the man-servant or to touch upon the possibilities of change latent in the introduction of Japanese and Chinese service. That all has its part in the domestic labor problem, but this is not the opportunity for discussing this phase of the servant question.
Terhune Herrick does not discuss tragedies of domestic service. Illness of servants is depicted as only an inconvenience for the employer - for which it's prescribed that the employer's main concern should be to avoid paying extra money! From employer to servant, casual friendliness is to be repaid by loyal overtime without pay when the employer is ill; from servant to employer, when the servant is ill the employer's main concern is how to get the work done without paying extra.
But there are times in nearly every family when some accident or set of unavoidable occurrences renders it necessary to ask one maid to do the work of another. Sudden illness, the departure of one maid before it is possible to engage another, the descent of unexpected guests—any one of these things may make it needful for the housekeeper to request a servant to do something besides her regular work...it is not a good principle for the mistress to fall into the habit of bestowing tips for any extra service.
A side story of Celestine's particularly affected me: Celestine witnesses an example of a gardener and his wife, who are desperate for employment and accept a job where they're not allowed to bear children. The Countess, the mistress of the home, doesn't allow her servants to have children even though she is a loving mother of three herself. The gardener's wife hides her pregnancy by painful means, but three months later she and the child are dead of perionitis. Celestine says frankly that the Countess has made either sterility or infanticide a condition of employment.
Nothing like this abuse is covered by Terhune Herrick.
Mirbeau makes Celestine's journey end full circle. When she marries Joseph and moves to an inn of their own, she becomes a demanding mistress in her own right. We have three waiters to serve the customers, a maid-of-all-work for the kitchen and the household, and everything goes as to the beat of a magic wand. It is true that in three months we have changed our servant four times. How exacting these Cherbourg servants are! how thieving, and how shameless! No, it is incredible, and it is disgusting. It's a sidelight of Mirbeau's general cynical portrait of human nature in this novel. The system of domestic labour is desperately broken and open to abuse; even the abused will become the abusers.
Mirbeau's ghastly, riveting novel is a success. The first person tale of Celestine rings with a distinct, fascinating voice; the temporal dislocations are tantalising; and the scathing critique of human nature and society's flaws has strong verisimilitude and force.
Terhune Herrick's manual is less of a success.
The book is set up as a non-fiction autobiography, as a genuine chambermaid's diary sent to the author, but it's clear from the convenient melodrama that this is only a framing device. But there's a ring of verisimiltude about it anyway - as per the approach of too many grimdark fantasy novels to count, there's enough emphasis on blood and phlegm and saliva and pus and assorted other bodily fluids to make the gist seem true. A chambermaid's life is not pleasant and this book illustrates it vividly, in a way that makes the author seem an excellent observer.
Celestine tells her story in achronic order, writing a diary of her time with the deeply unpleasant Lanlaires in the country and comparing it to her previous employment in Paris. This postmodern perspective lends interest to the reader, representing life as a confused jumble where cause and effect do not always run as expected. In real life we recall our past as we experience our present, thinking back to past moments connected even by the most trivial reminder - a scent, a shape, a sound. Celestine recounts her beginning as a fisherman's orphaned daughter, her places of employment, her experiences of abuse and consensual sex, her time with exploitative nuns abusing her labour, an oppressive employment bureau, and her daily life with the Lanlaires - where the murder of a little girl in the neighbourhood adds a macabre touch to her story.
The Lanlaires, Isidore and Euphrasie, are supposed to have absolutely hilarious names in the original French. (Unrelated note: Euphrasie is Cosette's inconvenient real name.) Lanlaire is similar to 'en l'air', or 'in the air'. Perhaps the English equivalent would be Eustace and Iphigenia Airyfairy?
The novel's partly in the genre of erotica as written by men, but it is also a frank expose of the power employers have over their domestic servants and the ways they can abuse this power. In turn, the servants are not idealised: this isn't Dickens by a long shot. Celestine says that however vile the riffraff, they are never as vile as the decent people - but the servants have a realistic level of self-interest even when they're unable to be as cruel as their employers.
It makes an extremely interesting case study to compare and contrast this novel with a non-fiction book published four years later, in the United States, by Christine Terhune Herrick: The Expert Maid-Servant.
Mirbeau's Mlle Celestine R-- is a lively writer who keeps a voluminous tell-all diary of her employment. The first place she writes about is her employment in the household of a shoe fetishist - who has a heart attack with a shoe pressed between his teeth.
"You have other [shoes]?" he asked, after a short silence, during which it seemed to me that his eyes became strangely brilliant. ..."[You have shoes] of yellow leather?"
"I have none of that kind, Monsieur."
"You will have to have some; I will give you some."
"Thank you, Monsieur."
I was frightened, for dull gleams had just passed over his eyes, and drops of sweat were rolling down his forehead. Thinking that he was about to faint, I was on the point of shouting, of calling for help. But the crisis quieted down, and, after a few minutes, he continued in a calmer voice, though a little saliva still foamed at the corner of his lips.
"It is nothing. It is over. Understand me, my child. I am a little of a maniac. At my age that is allowed, is it not? For instance, I do not think it proper that a woman should black her own shoes, much less mine. I have a great respect for women, Marie, and cannot endure that. So I will black your shoes, your little shoes, your dear little shoes. I will take care of them. Listen to me. Every evening, before going to bed, you will carry your shoes into my room; you will place them near the bed, on a little table, and every morning, on coming to open my windows, you will take them away again."
And here is Terhune Herrick's views on the love affairs of servants. The master of the house is mentioned only 3 times in the book, two out of the three with reference to the master's carving duties. (Terhune Herrick's book could be said to be female centric: it's all about mistress and maids with barely a mention of male servants or men of the household! Celestine's book includes many men who are a part of her life, whether she wants them to be or not.) In other words, Terhune Herrick completely ignores sexual harassment of servants as something that just never happens.
The social relations of servants is a matter with which some mistresses exercise themselves over-much, while others, perhaps, give too little attention to it. According to the ideas of some persons, the affairs of a maid outside of working hours concern no one but herself. So long as she conforms to certain rules of the household, her coming and going, her associates and habits, are no one's business but her own, unless they interfere with the proper performance of her work. In a way this is entirely true, and a mistress has no more right to pry into the affairs of her maid than the maid has to be overcurious about the business of the mistress. But there is something to be said on the other side. Look at it in as matter-of-fact fashion as one will, relations of domestic service are different from any other business association. The mistress and maid do not only meet in the morning and part again at night, after having been together simply in the way of their work during the day; they eat and sleep under the same roof. Often they work side by side for an hour at a time. They see each other in bodily and mental dishabille. They are by way of asking or granting little kindly services that were never nominated in the bond. Without bringing too much sentiment into the relation, it may yet be asserted that it is next to impossible for them to meet on purely business terms.
In fact Celestine experiences a great amount of intimacy as a servant with her employers.
To dress and undress my mistresses and to do their hair is the only part of my work that I like. I like to play with night-gowns, with dresses and ribbons, to dabble among the linens, the hats, the laces, the furs, to rub my mistresses after the bath, to powder them, to rub their feet with pumice-stone, to perfume their breasts, to oxygenize their hair, to know them, in short, from the tips of their slippers to the peak of their chignon, to see them all naked. In this way they become for you something else than a mistress, almost a friend or an accomplice, often a slave. One inevitably becomes the confidant of a heap of things, of their pains, of their vices, of their disappointments in love, of the inner secrets of the household, of their diseases. To say nothing of the fact that, when one is adroit, one holds them by a multitude of details which they do not even suspect.
Due to the closeness of the servant relationship, Terhune Herrick believes that just a little bit of a show of friendly interest will result in the servant becoming desperate to do all sorts of extra things for mistress.
Again I feel I must defend myself against a charge of sentimentality. But I have seen these experiments tried with success. I do not mean by this that the maids were models of unending devotion and fidelity. We seldom find this sort of thing without flaw among our chosen associates. But I have known instances where the casual friendliness of the mistress was repaid tenfold in times of sickness or trouble by offices which could not be compensated for in money. And it was done freely and gladly, with no thought of anything out of the ordinary, with no hint that sacrifices were being made.
In contrast, Celestine responds with what some servants really feel about their employers. The novel is vicious about the expectation that the employers constantly order their servants around, pay them minuscule wages, distrust them by locking drawers, describe 'the soul of a servant' as something disgusting, and yet expect to be loved. This is the discussion in the servants' quarters when a marriage takes place:
"Well, Baptiste, and you? What is your present?"
"My present?" exclaimed Baptiste, with a shrug of his shoulders.
"Yes, tell me, what is it?"
"A can of petroleum lighted under their bed. That is my present."
It was a smart answer. Moreover, this Baptiste was an astonishing man in politics.
"And yours, Célestine?" he asked, in his turn.
"Mine?"
I contracted my two hands into the shape of talons, and, pretending to claw a face ferociously, I answered:
"My nails, in their eyes!"
The butler, without being asked, remarked quietly, while arranging flowers and fruits in a glass dish with his fastidious fingers:
"I would be satisfied to sprinkle their faces in church with a bottle of good vitriol."
And he stuck a rose between two pears.
Oh! yes, how we love them!
Terhune Herrick makes it understood that the employer must constantly oversee the servant and inspect all that they do.
From the first the mistress should have it clearly understood that there is no place in the house into which she may not penetrate. Her daily inspection of the refrigerator and the pantries should be a matter of course. Her presence in the kitchen should never excite surprise or provoke criticism...
The maid should have a pad and pencil hanging in the kitchen. With these she should keep a list of what is wanted in the line of household supplies. When she takes the last of any kind of provision from its receptacle she should make a note of it on the pad. By this method there is never a discovery at the last moment that a supply of some desired grocery is exhausted. This memorandum the mistress must go over every morning
Celestine trenchantly observes the inhumane practices that can result from this principle.
Madame said to me, very severely:
"If you like prunes, you have only to ask me for them; I will see if I can give you any; but I forbid you to take them."
I answered:
"I am not a thief, Madame, and I do not like prunes."
Madame insisted:
"I tell you that you have taken some prunes."
I replied:
"If Madame thinks me a thief, Madame has only to pay me and let me go."
Madame snatched the plate of prunes from my hand.
"Monsieur ate five this morning; there were thirty-two; now there are but twenty-five; then you have taken two. Don't let that happen again."
It was true. I had eaten two of them. She had counted them!
Did you ever in your life?
Bigotry is more honestly acknowledged by Mirbeau's novel than by Terhune Herrick, even though four years before Terhune Herrick's book came the segregation case of Plessy and in the year that Terhune Herrick's book is published one hundred and six African American men were lynched. The violent anti-Semitism of Joseph, the gardener-coachman of the Lanlaires and a creepy and possibly sociopathic suitor of Celestine, is an important part of Mirbeau's story. (It's set around the time of the Dreyfus affair.) Joseph belongs to many anti-Semitic societies and expresses these sentiments:
"As long as there is a Jew left in France, there is nothing done."
And he adds:
"Ah! my God! if I were in Paris, I would kill and burn and gut these cursed sheenies. There is no danger that the traitors will come to live at Mesnil-Roy. They know very well what they are about, these mercenaries!"
Celestine, who eventually becomes Joseph's wife and lives to treat her own servants poorly, cares little for the consequences of his hatred. This is what she thinks about Jewish people:
I do not know why I am against the Jews, for I used to serve in their houses in the days when one could still do so with dignity. I find that at bottom the Jews and the Catholics are very much alike. They are equally vicious, have equally vile characters, equally ugly souls.
Joseph is a probable sociopath who likes to kill animals slowly when he has to prepare them as part of his duties, and a likely candidate for the murder and rape of the little girl; the narrative implicitly connects his anti-Semitism to these negative traits. (Celestine is more or less in the position of those who write love letters to jailed serial killers. Or, alternatively, she's in the position of choosing between moderate respectability as Joseph's wife or drifting along as a servant until her health fails.)
In contrast, Terhune Herrick seems to simply assume that maidservants are white in her time, although perhaps I'm misreading her. Her only reference to foreignness places Japanese and Chinese maidservants on a level with male servants:
In a book that deals with the work of the maid-servant it is not worth while to go into the duties of the man-servant or to touch upon the possibilities of change latent in the introduction of Japanese and Chinese service. That all has its part in the domestic labor problem, but this is not the opportunity for discussing this phase of the servant question.
Terhune Herrick does not discuss tragedies of domestic service. Illness of servants is depicted as only an inconvenience for the employer - for which it's prescribed that the employer's main concern should be to avoid paying extra money! From employer to servant, casual friendliness is to be repaid by loyal overtime without pay when the employer is ill; from servant to employer, when the servant is ill the employer's main concern is how to get the work done without paying extra.
But there are times in nearly every family when some accident or set of unavoidable occurrences renders it necessary to ask one maid to do the work of another. Sudden illness, the departure of one maid before it is possible to engage another, the descent of unexpected guests—any one of these things may make it needful for the housekeeper to request a servant to do something besides her regular work...it is not a good principle for the mistress to fall into the habit of bestowing tips for any extra service.
A side story of Celestine's particularly affected me: Celestine witnesses an example of a gardener and his wife, who are desperate for employment and accept a job where they're not allowed to bear children. The Countess, the mistress of the home, doesn't allow her servants to have children even though she is a loving mother of three herself. The gardener's wife hides her pregnancy by painful means, but three months later she and the child are dead of perionitis. Celestine says frankly that the Countess has made either sterility or infanticide a condition of employment.
Nothing like this abuse is covered by Terhune Herrick.
Mirbeau makes Celestine's journey end full circle. When she marries Joseph and moves to an inn of their own, she becomes a demanding mistress in her own right. We have three waiters to serve the customers, a maid-of-all-work for the kitchen and the household, and everything goes as to the beat of a magic wand. It is true that in three months we have changed our servant four times. How exacting these Cherbourg servants are! how thieving, and how shameless! No, it is incredible, and it is disgusting. It's a sidelight of Mirbeau's general cynical portrait of human nature in this novel. The system of domestic labour is desperately broken and open to abuse; even the abused will become the abusers.
Mirbeau's ghastly, riveting novel is a success. The first person tale of Celestine rings with a distinct, fascinating voice; the temporal dislocations are tantalising; and the scathing critique of human nature and society's flaws has strong verisimilitude and force.
Terhune Herrick's manual is less of a success.
