As to Monsieur de Tarves, somehow he managed to pick his way about amongst all these excitements, all this hidden family drama, alert, busy, cynical and infinitely comical. Every morning he would disappear like some pink-faced, clean-shaven, little faun, with his files under his arm and a brief-case stuffed with religious pamphlets and obscene literature, returning in the evening clothed in respectability and bursting with socialism and Christianity, but his step a little slower, his gestures not quite so unctuous, and his back slightly bowed from the burden of good works that he had performed during the day … And regularly every Friday the same ridiculous scene would be enacted between us.
‘And what do you think I’ve got here?’ he would say, pointing to his brief-case.
‘Some kind of smut,’ I would reply, laughing.
‘No, no, not smut, just spicy …’
And he would give me a paper to read, hoping to bring me to the point where he could declare himself, content meanwhile just to smile at me with the air of an accomplice, chucking me under the chin and saying, as he licked his lips with the tip of his tongue:
‘Well, well, well, she’s a funny little thing … she certainly is …’
This ridiculous little game used to amuse me, and, without seeking to discourage his attentions, I made up my mind that at the first suitable opportunity I would give him a good dressing-down.
One afternoon, I was surprised to see him come into the linen-room, where I was listlessly day-dreaming over my work, for only that morning I had had a distressing scene with him and had not yet got over it … Monsieur de Tarves quietly closed the door, put his brief-case on the table near a pile of sheets and, coming up to me, took one of my hands and began patting it. Beneath their fluttering lids, his eyes were flickering like those of an old hen suddenly exposed to the sun, and, it was all I could do not to laugh.
‘Célestine,’ he began. ‘I’d rather call you Célestine, if you don’t mind …’
‘Of course not, sir,’ I replied, still struggling to keep a straight face, and rather on the defensive.
‘Well, Célestine, I think you’re charming … There!’
‘Really, sir?’
‘Quite adorable, as a matter of fact … adorable!’
‘Oh, really, sir!’
And his fingers, trembling with desire as they traced the curve of my breast, began softly caressing my neck as though he were playing the piano.
‘Adorable, adorable,’ he murmured.
He tried to embrace me, but I pulled myself away to prevent him from kissing me.
‘Don’t go, Célestine. Please, please don’t go! You don’t mind me calling you
tu
?’
‘No, sir … though I must say it rather surprises me.’
‘Surprises you, you little flirt? Surprises you? … Oh, but you just don’t know me!’
His voice was no longer dried up, and there was a trace of spittle at the corners of his mouth.
‘Listen, Célestine, next week I am going to Lourdes … I shall be in charge of a pilgrimage … How would you like to come with me? I’ve got it all worked out. Would you like to? Nobody will find out … You can stay at an hotel, go for walks or whatever you like, and at night I’ll come to you in your room, in your bedroom, in your bed, my little beauty. Oh, but you don’t know me yet. You don’t know what I’m capable of. I’m still as strong as a young man, and with all the experience of an old one … You’ll see, you’ll see … Oh, those great big naughty eyes!’
What surprised me was not so much the proposal itself—I’d been expecting it for a long time—but the unexpected form it had taken. However, I remained quite calm; and wanting to humiliate the old lecher, to show him that I hadn’t been fooled by all the filthy tricks of himself and his family, I spat out:
‘And what about Monsieur Xavier? It seems you’re forgetting Monsieur Xavier. What’s he going to do, while we’re enjoying ourselves at Lourdes at the church’s expense?’
A worried, sidelong expression, like the look of a wild animal that has been surprised, lit up in the depth of his eyes …
‘Monsieur Xavier?’ he stammered, ‘why are you talking about Monsieur Xavier? It’s nothing to do with him. It’s none of his business.’
I returned to the charge, speaking even more insultingly:
‘Oh, hasn’t he indeed! Then just you tell me this, and I don’t want any of your monkey tricks, am I or am I not paid to sleep with Monsieur Xavier? You know very well the answer is “yes”. Well, I do sleep with him … But you? … Oh no, no, that’s not part of the agreement … And shall I tell you something else, my little man? You’re just not my type.’ And I burst out laughing, straight in his face.
He turned absolutely purple and his eyes flashed with anger, but he decided it was best not to become involved in an argument in which I held all the trumps. He hurriedly picked up his brief-case and slipped out of the room, pursued by my laughter. Next day, without the slightest provocation, he addressed a filthy remark to me. I flared up … Madame arrived … and I completely lost my temper. The scene that ensued between the three of us was so terrifying, so utterly ignoble, that I won’t attempt to describe it. I accused them, in unmistakable terms, of all the filthy, infamous tricks they had been guilty of, and demanded that they should repay me the money I had lent to Monsieur Xavier. At this, they began foaming at the mouth. Whereupon, I picked up a cushion and, hurling it as hard as I could at Monsieur de Tarves’ head, shouted at the top of my voice:
‘Clear off with you! Get out of here immediately!’
Madame began screaming and threatening to scratch my eyes out, while Monsieur de Tarves, hammering his briefcase with his fist, yelled:
‘I expel you from my society … You are no longer a member … You fallen woman! You prostitute!’
But the end of it was that Madame kept back a week’s money that was due to me, refused to pay me the ninety francs I had lent Monsieur Xavier, and insisted upon my returning all the cast-off clothes she had given me.
‘You’re nothing but a bunch of thieves,’ I screamed, ‘Thieves and ponces! So you want a row, do you? Right you are, then! Just you get on with it, you rotten bunch!’
And off I went, threatening to call in the police …
Alas, at the police station they pretended that it was nothing to do with them, and when I spoke to a magistrate about it he advised me to forget all about it, because, as he explained:
‘To start with, Mademoiselle, nobody is going to believe you. And quite right, too, I assure you. For whatever would become of society if servants started getting the better of their masters? It would mean the end of society, Mademoiselle … It would be complete anarchy.’
I consulted a lawyer: he wanted a fee of two hundred francs in advance. I wrote to Monsieur Xavier: he did not answer … Then I added up my resources. All I had left was three francs fifty, and apart from that, the street …
And so I found myself at Neuilly, with the Sisters of Our Lady of the Thirty-six Sorrows, a kind of almshouse and registry office for servants combined. It was a fine, white building at the bottom of a huge garden, and in the garden, where there were statues of the Virgin Mary every fifty feet or so, was a little chapel, quite new and very handsomely appointed, that had been paid for by the alms of the faithful. It was surrounded by tall trees, and at all hours of the day you could hear the bells ringing … I like the sound of church bells … They remind you of things that happened long ago, that you’ve forgotten all about! … Whenever I hear them, I have only to close my eyes and I can see pictures of gentle landscapes, places I’ve never actually been to, perhaps, but which nevertheless call up memories of childhood and youth … the sound of Breton bagpipes … and across the heath, stretching away to the sea, crowds of people on holiday slowly winding their way … Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong! … Not a very cheerful sound and in fact it has nothing to do with cheerfulness. Actually, it’s rather sad … like love. But I love listening to it … In Paris, all one ever hears is the bugles of the turn-cocks and the deafening hooting of the trams.
At the Convent of Our Lady of the Thirty-six Sorrows they give you a bed in an attic dormitory, high up under the roof; and all you get to eat is meat that’s been thrown out by the butchers and stale vegetables—and for that you have to pay twenty-five sous a day. That is to say, when they find you a place, they deduct the money due to them from your wages … And they pretend that’s not charging anything for finding you work! Yet, on top of that, they expect you to work from six in the morning till nine o’clock at night, like the prisoners in a county jail. Never a day off, and the only recreation, meal-times and religious services. Oh, these good nuns certainly don’t put themselves out much, as Monsieur Xavier would say … Their so-called charity is just a swindle … a proper have-on! But there it is—I’ve been a fool all my life, and I always shall be … All the bitter lessons I’ve had, all the misfortunes I’ve suffered, haven’t been the slightest use to me. I have never learnt anything from them. For all my shouting and carrying on, in the end it always boils down to the same thing … I’m swindled by everyone.
Friends had often told me about these particular Sisters … ‘Oh yes, my dear, you’ll find plenty of really smart people there … countesses … duchesses … With any luck, they’ll find you a marvellous situation.’
I thought it was true … And then I was so wretched that, like the fool I am, I kept thinking of the happy times I had spent with the Little Sisters of Pont-Croix … In any case, I had to find somewhere … and when you are broke it is no use being choosy.
When I got there, there were already some forty women and girls hoping to find jobs. Many of them had come from places as far away as Brittany, Alsace and the Midi, and had never previously been in service … awkward, clumsy creatures, with dirty complexions and a sly expression on their faces, who used to peer out over the walls of the convent at the mirage of Paris stretching away in the distance. But there were others, like me, who already knew their way around and just happened to be out of a job.
The Sisters asked me where I came from, what I could do, if I had good references, and whether I had any money left. I just codded them along, and they took me in without any further enquiries …
‘Poor child, we shall have to see if we can’t find her a good place.’
We were all their ‘dear children’. And while we were waiting for the good situations they promised to find us, we ‘dear children’ were set to work according to our aptitudes. Some did all the cooking and housework … others worked in the garden, where they were expected to dig away like navvies .. . while as for me, I was immediately given some sewing to do, because, as Sister Boniface said, ‘I had supple fingers and an air of distinction’. My first job was patching the almoner’s trousers, and darning a pair of underpants that belonged to a kind of friar, who happened to be in charge of a retreat in the Chapel … Oh, those trousers and pants! A very different cup of tea from Monsieur Xavier’s, I don’t mind telling you … Later on, the tasks I was entrusted with were not quite so ecclesiastical—like embroidering exquisite underclothes, which was much more up my street, or helping to prepare the elegant wedding trousseaux and expensive layettes that had been ordered by the rich and charitable ladies who supported the convent.
At first, after all I had just been through, there was something very comforting about the peace and silence of the place, despite the wretched food, and the almoner’s trousers, and the lack of freedom, and the harsh exploitation that I was already beginning to suspect … I made little attempt to reason things out. I just wanted to pray. Remorse for my past behaviour or, rather, the feeling of exhaustion it had left me with, had aroused a fervent longing for repentance and forgiveness. Several times I made my confession to the almoner, yet though my intentions were quite sincere, when I thought of having to mend his filthy trousers, I couldn’t help having the most irreverent and ridiculous ideas … He was a funny character, this almoner, round as a barrel, very red in the face, rather coarse in speech and manners, and smelling like an old sheep. He used to ask me the strangest questions, especially about the kind of books I liked reading.
‘Armand Silvestre? Well, yes … I suppose so … Pretty smutty of course … I wouldn’t exactly swop him for the
Imitation of Christ
… Still, he’s not dangerous … What you mustn’t read are blasphemous books … books against religion … Voltaire, for example. Never read Voltaire—that would be a mortal sin—nor Renan, nor Anatole France either … They are the kind of writers that are really dangerous.’
‘What about Paul Bourget, Father?’
‘Bourget? Well, he’s certainly turned over a new leaf … I wouldn’t say no, I wouldn’t say no. But he’s not a genuine Catholic, not yet at least … He’s still very muddled … He seems to me, this Bourget, rather like a wash-basin … Yes, that’s it … a wash-basin that all sorts of people have been washing in, where you’re apt to find olives from Mount Calvary floating about amongst bits of soap and hair … It would be better to wait a bit… And Huysmans? Well, he’s a bit steep … Still, he’s quite orthodox.’
Another time he said to me: ‘Yes, I see … So you commit sins of the flesh. Well, that’s certainly not right. Indeed, it’s very wicked of you … Still, if you’ve got to sin, it’s better you should do so with your employers—provided, of course, they’re really religious people—than by yourself or with people of your own station in life. Sins of that kind aren’t so serious … they don’t upset God so much. Besides, people like that may very well have a dispensation … they often do, you know.’
But directly I mentioned the names of Monsieur Xavier and his father, he cut me short:
‘Oh, no names, no names. I must ask you never to mention anybody by name … After all I am not a policeman. Besides, these people you refer to are rich and respectable, and extremely devout. By naming them, it is you who are committing a sin, because it means that you are rebelling against morality and against society.’
These ridiculous discussions, and especially the nagging all too human memory of his trousers, which I simply couldn’t get out of my mind, considerably damped down my religious enthusiasm and longing for forgiveness. The work I had to do also got on my nerves. It made me feel a nostalgia for my proper job. I longed to escape from this prison, and to return to the intimacies of the boudoir. I yearned for cupboards full of perfumed underclothes, for wardrobes filled with taffetas and satins, for the soft feel of velvet and the sight of white bodies, relaxing in luxurious baths and half hidden by the soapy water. I missed all the gossip of the servants’ hall, all the unexpected adventures that he in wait in every bedroom, on every staircase … It’s strange, because, when I am actually in a situation, such things disgust me, yet, as soon as I’m out of work, I miss them … And another thing—I was absolutely fed up with the jam we’d been getting for the last week … always the same, made of overripe gooseberries, simply because the Sisters had managed to buy a cheap lot at the Levallois market … Anything that could be saved from the garbage pail was good enough for us.