The Diary of a Chambermaid

by Octave Mirbeau

  Contents

  Title

  The Diary of a Chambermaid - An Introduction

  Foreword

  14 September

  15 September

  18 September

  26 September

  28 September

  1 October

  6 October

  27 October

  28 October

  3 November

  10 November

  12 November

  13 November

  18 November

  20 November

  24 November

  Copyright

  The Diary of a Chambermaid - An Introduction

  ‘What filth and decay there is under the pretty surface of our society!’

  Jean Grave, editor of the leading anarchist journal, Le Révolté, on reading The Diary of a Chambermaid.

  The Diary of a Chambermaid is probably the best known novel by the French writer, Octave Mirbeau. This is largely due to the interest of two giants of the cinema, Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel, who based films on Mirbeau’s popular and controversial satire. Both directors felt, in their own, very individual ways, a special affinity with this picaresque story of Célestine, a spirited chambermaid who keeps a diary charting her career in service. For the modern reader too, Mirbeau’s tale is more than a confessional romp. It exposes the seamier aspects of an over-romanticised period in French history, the Belle Epoque, the era of the can-can, the Impressionists and high Parisian fashion, through the gradual corruption of its innocent heroine.

  In Mirbeau’s portrait of France at the end of the nineteenth century we can see a society at root not so different from our own. The gap between rich and poor - the central theme of this novel - is now writ large across the globe. The callousness of those who hold economic power is as vicious as ever. The earth itself seems consumed by a chemical rottenness that matches the human pollution Mirbeau exposed in his fiction and polemical journalism. The difference lies not in the problems, but in the poignant hopes and beliefs of Mirbeau and many of his contemporaries which it is almost impossible for us to share: hopes of revolution, beliefs that society can be remade through political action.

  Mirbeau’s life spans a crucial seventy years, from the ‘year of revolutions’ across Europe in 1848 to the unimagined horror of the Great War. The issues that concerned Mirbeau throughout his maturity - state authoritarianism, militarism, anti-semitism, the powers of the Catholic Church - continued into the Vichy period and are alive today. For Mirbeau, anarchism - the philosophy developed by thinkers like Prince Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy - provided the clearest analysis of social ills. Its visionary espousal of individual liberty spurred him politically and artistically. What George Woodcock has called ‘a system of social thought, aiming at … the replacement of the authoritarian state by some form of non-governmental co-operation between free individuals’ became a lifelong credo.

  In the thirty years between the founding of the Third Republic and 1900, when The Diary of a Chambermaid was published, France was convulsed by scandals that exposed tensions in society that remained unresolved well into the twentieth century. The most well known is the arrest and conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 on charges of passing secrets to the German military attaché in Paris. The subsequent discovery that Dreyfus was innocent and that the army had attempted a cover-up might have been less significant had Dreyfus not been a Jew, the first to enter the General Staff. The stage was set for conflict between the republican supporters of Dreyfus - the so-called dreyfusards - and an alliance of dissidents dominated by Catholic royalists and anti-semitic ‘patriots’. It is these latter elements that frequent Joseph’s Cherbourg café at the end of Mirbeau’s novel, which draws a disturbing picture of violent racism. For Joseph, the only good Jew is a dead one - and that goes for Protestants and free-thinkers too. He carves his racist and patriotic slogans everywhere, ‘even on the handles of the brooms’. This attitude resurfaced in the 1930’s, when the French fascists vilified Leon Blum, the Jewish socialist leader of the Popular Front, with the slogan ‘Rather Hitler than Blum’.

  What is remarkable in an age that celebrates writers without taking them seriously is the vigorous engagement and influence of authors like Octave Mirbeau and Emile Zola in the thick of this political controversy. Zola’s open letter to the President, ‘J’accuse’, has been called the prime catalyst in the whole affair, leading to the retrial and acquittal of Captain Dreyfus. Mirbeau consistently championed artists and writers whose work was attacked or suppressed by the authorities.

  The battlelines evident in the Dreyfus affair had been drawn up much earlier, in the aftermath of the Revolution. On one side stood the republicans who wanted to consolidate their political victory by secularising the state, especially education. On the other side stood monarchists, Catholics threatened by the anti-clericalism of the Republic, and militarists who flocked to Boulanger’s failed attempt to challenge the Republic in 1889. The revelations of government corruption in the Panama scandal in 1892 exposed another powerful and unpleasant trait of those opposed to the republic. Because the Panama Canal Company’s Jewish financiers had bribed Republican officials to offer a large public loan to their ailing business, Jews became targets of a vitriolic campaign designed to discredit the ‘patriotism’ of the republican government. The fact that the vast majority of Jews belonged to the same working class as everyone else escaped the anti-semitic ideologues, who were later to claim that the Dreyfus affair had been a Jewish plot. This prejudice against the Jews puzzles Célestine, the heroine of Mirbeau’s novel, even as she publicly affirms it: after all, whether Jews or Catholics, as masters and mistresses they have ‘the same beastly natures, the same nasty minds’. If anything, Jews were more ‘free and easy’ with their servants.

  Célestine often acts as Mirbeau’s mouthpiece for his acid observations on the status quo. All his fiction is autobiographical, drawing on his development from the rural middle-class boy, educated by the Jesuits, who went on to study law in Paris, serve in the Army of the Loire and write for the monarchist press to the radical anarchist and best-selling novelist that he had become.

  Reg Parr, author of the only considerable study of Mirbeau in English, pinpoints 1885 as the year when the thirty-seven year old journalist discovered Kropotkin’s seminal anarchist work, Paroles d’un Révolté and Tolstoy’s Ma Religion. 1885 was also the year when the government attacked the stage adaptation of Germinal, Zola’s powerful novel about a miners’ strike. Already a supporter of the avant-garde in the art world - Monet was, for example, a lifelong friend - Mirbeau finally made connections between his unease at government power and his libertarian instincts. The catalyst was anarchism and Mirbeau became the leading literary voice of the anarchist movement. Even when anarchism was tainted by the spontaneous terrorist bombings and assassinations of 1892 to 1894 (the so-called ‘I’ère des attentats’), Mirbeau kept faith with its essential idealism and rationalism until the very end.

  In the same way as Lu Xün, China’s greatest modern writer, struggled for the same causes as the Chinese revolutionary leaders in the 1920s and 30s without compromising his independence, Mirbeau chose to speak the same language as many of the leading anarchists in France, people like Jean Grave and Sebastian Faure. His fiction and his newspaper articles were welcome barbs in the flanks of what they considered a repressive regime. Mirbeau embraced the whole anarchist philosophy and its practical implications. He argued cogently against universal suffrage as an elective dictatorship, a method for the ruling classes to retain their power over the masses. He railed against the death penalty. He attacked the use of charity to keep the poor in their place. He condemned the arbitrary violence of the police an
d the parallel atrocities committed abroad in the French colonies. He discovered that everywhere he looked evil was paraded as good. Hypocrisy was Mirbeau’s prime target; satire, sometimes so savage that it rebounded on him, was the chief string to his bow.

  Mirbeau wrote several novels in the first flush of this conversion to anarchism: Le Calvaire (1886), L’Abbé Jules (1888) and Sebastian Roch (1890), all placing the individual against an implacable social order. Sebastian Roch, for example, describes the unhappy fate of a young man entrusted as a child to the less than tender mercies of Father de Kern at the Jesuit College of Vannes. The conflict between the hero’s instinctive sense of justice and the religious and military indoctrination he is subjected to creates an unbearable tension that Mirbeau had only recently resolved for himself.

  In 1899 Mirbeau returned to fiction, after years of dissident journalism and political activism, again out of anger at injustice. The Dreyfus affair found its literary metaphor in Le Jardin des Supplices (The Torture Garden), a cruel tale that sets out to demonstrate Mirbeau’s thesis that ‘murder is the greatest obsession of mankind’. In this dystopian narrative Mirbeau links high society with depravity and torture, a theme he returned to in a more realistic vein in his following book The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), where Célestine, in one memorable comment on the upper class, says: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the main aim of its existence is to enjoy the filthiest of amusements.’

  Another link to the earlier novel is a disturbing emphasis on the darker sides of eroticism. While not taken to the logical extremes of de Sade or a later French writer, Georges Bataille, Mirbeau’s treatment of sex and its relationship to corruption, cruelty and death did create controversy (and no doubt helped sales of his books). Célestine’s vigorous sexual appetite - she admits, with typical candour, that she enjoys making love ‘too much to be able to make a living from it’ - seems healthier than the depraved tastes of her employers, with enough money and power to indulge their fetishes and fantasies. This makes her final capitulation all the more ironic, even tragic.

  For a modern reader, though, the misogyny that runs through Mirbeau’s writing must appear to weaken his reputation as a progressive radical thinker. Partly influenced by the fashionable symbolist cult of the femme fatale - Woman as evil seductress of Man’s best instincts - Mirbeau also had an unhappy experience with an unfaithful mistress that apparently soured his view of women. However, in the person of Célestine he has created, whether he intended to or not, a strong and compassionate social critic at war with her oppressors. The fact that she succumbs in the end to the evil around her does not weaken the overall effects of her scathing and often riotously funny diagnosis of the petty-minded inanity and callousness of the bourgeoisie. Her fatal attraction to evil, despite her awareness of its moral and personal implications, is psychologically convincing. Deflowered at the age of twelve by a brutish foreman, whom she remembers ‘with gratitude’, she is ultimately drawn to men like Joseph, a wolfish rapist and proto-fascist, almost as a revenge on a society that offers her nothing beyond degradation and contempt.

  The servant-master relationship and the scope it offers to an author to compare and contrast two classes runs through world literature and still fascinates: the Upstairs Downstairs school, one might call it. Seldom has the exploitation of the poor by the rich been explored as angrily as here: ‘Solitude is … living in other people’s houses, amongst people who have no interest in you, who regard you as being of less importance than the dogs they stuff with titbits … from whom all you get are, useless, cast-off clothes and left-over food, already going bad.’ Servants are ‘hybrid monsters’, torn from their roots and never able to rise above their situation. And money rules all, money earned from exploitation. Célestine’s last mistress owes her wealth to her father’s unscrupulous scheme to help rich men’s sons evade the draft by substituting the poor - a white version of the slave trade. As Célestine observes: ‘I’ve never seen any money that wasn’t dirty or any rich people who weren’t rotten.’

  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

  FOREWORD

  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.

  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.