Not so M. Jules Lemaitre, also a familiar of the house.
When I asked him the same question, he answered, prettily catching me about the waist:
"Well, charming Celestine, your friend is a good girl, that is all.
And, if she resembles you, I would say a couple of words to her, you know,—hey! hey! hey!"
He, at least, with his face of a little humpbacked and merry-making faun, put on no airs; and he was good-natured. What a pity that he has fallen among the priests! _____
With all that, I know not what would have become of me in that hell of an Audierne, if the Little Sisters of Pont-Croix, finding me intelligent and pretty, had not taken me in, out of pity.
They did not take advantage of my age, of my ignorance, of my trying and despised situation, to make use of me, to secrete me for their benefit, as often happens in such establishments, which carry human exploitation to the point of crime.
They were poor, candid, timid, charitable little beings, who were not rich, and who did not even dare to extend their hands to passers-by or to beg at the doors of houses.
There was sometimes much poverty among them, but they got along as best they could. And, amid all the difficulties of living, they continued none the less to be gay, and to sing continually like larks. Their ignorance of life had something touching about it, something which brings the tears to my eyes to-day, now that I can better understand their infinite and pure kindness.
They taught me to read, to write, to sew, to do housework; and, when I had become almost expert in these necessary things, they got me a place as a little housemaid in the house of a retired colonel, who came every summer, with his wife and his two daughters, to occupy a sort of dilapidated little chateau near Comfort.
Worthy people, certainly, but so sad, so sad! And maniacs, too! Never a smile on their faces, never a sign of joy in their garments, which were always black. The colonel had had a lathe put in at the top of the house, and there, all day long, he turned egg cups out of box-wood, or else those oval balls, called "eggs," which housewives use in mending stockings.
Madame drew up petition after petition, in order to obtain a tobacco-shop.
And the two daughters, saying nothing, doing nothing, one with a duck's beak, the other with a rabbit's face, yellow and thin, angular and faded, dried up on the spot, like two plants lacking everything,—soil, water, sunshine. They bored me enormously. At the end of eight months I left them, in a moment of rashness which I have regretted.
But then!
I heard Paris breathing and living around me. Its breath filled my heart with new desires.
Although I did not go out often, I had admired with a prodigious astonishment the streets, the shop-windows, the crowds, the palaces, the brilliant equipages, the jeweled women. And, when, at night, I went to bed in the sixth story, I envied the other domestics of the house, and their pranks which I found charming, and their stories which left me in a state of marvelous surprise. Though I remained in the house but a short time, I saw there, at night, in the sixth story, all sorts of debaucheries, and took my part in them with the enthusiasm and emulation of a novice.
Oh! the vague hopes and the uncertain ambitions that I cherished there, in that fallacious ideal of pleasure and vice!
Alas! yes, one is young, one knows nothing of life, one entertains imaginations and dreams.
Oh! the dreams!
Stupidities! I have supped on them, in the words of M. Xavier, a prettily perverted boy, of whom I shall have something to say later.
And I have rolled. Oh! how I have rolled! It is frightful when I think of it.
Yet I am not old, but I have had a very close view of things; I have seen people naked. And I have sniffed the odor of their linen, of their skin, of their soul. In spite of perfumes, they do not smell good. All that a respected interior, all that a respectable family, can hide in the way of filth, shameful vices, and base crimes, beneath the appearance of virtue,—ah!
I know it well.
It makes no difference if they are rich, if they have rags of silk and velvet and gilded furniture; it makes no difference if they wash in silver tubs and make a great show,—I know them.
They are not clean.
And their heart is more disgusting than was my mother's bed.
Oh! how a poor domestic is to be pitied, and how lonely she is!
She may live in houses full of joyous and noisy people, but how lonely she is always!
Solitude does not consist in living alone; it consists in living with others, with people who take no interest in you, with whom you count for less than a dog gorged with goodies, or than a flower cared for as tenderly as a rich man's child,—people of whom you have nothing but their cast-off garments or the spoiled remains of their table.
"You may eat this pear; it is rotten.
Finish this chicken in the kitchen; it smells bad."
Every word is contemptuous of you, every gesture disparaging of you, placing you on a level lower than that of the beasts.
And you must say nothing; you must smile and give thanks; unless you would pass for an ingrate or a wicked heart. Sometimes, when doing my mistresses' hair, I have had a mad desire to tear their neck, to scratch their bosom with my nails.
Fortunately one is not always under the influence of these gloomy ideas.
One shakes them off, and arranges matters to get all the fun one can, by himself. _____
This evening, after dinner, Marianne, seeing that I was utterly sad, was moved to pity, and tried to console me.
She went to get a bottle of brandy from the depths of the sideboard, where it stood among a heap of old papers and dirty rags.
"You must not grieve like that," she said to me; "you must shake yourself a little, my poor little one; you must console yourself."
And, having poured me out a drink, she sat for an hour, with elbows on the table, and, in a drawling and lamenting voice, told me gloomy stories of sickness, of child-birth, of the death of her mother, of her father, and of her sister. With every minute her voice became thicker; her eyes moistened; and she repeated, as she licked her glass:
"You must not grieve like that.
The death of your mamma,—oh! it is a great misfortune! But what do you expect?
We are all mortal. Oh! my God!
Oh! my poor little one!"
Then she suddenly began to weep and weep, and, while she wept and wept, she did not cease to wail:
"You must not grieve; you must not grieve."
At first it was a plaint; but soon it became a sort of frightful bray, which grew louder and louder. And her big belly, and her big breasts, and her triple chin, shaken by her sobs, heaved in enormous surges.
"Be still, then, Marianne," I said to her;
"Madame might hear you, and come."
But she did not listen to me, and, crying louder than ever, exclaimed:
"Ah! what a misfortune! what a great misfortune!"