Sad, timid, bent, although young, he seemed, not happy, but resigned.
He never dared to speak to us, or even to look at us, for the madame was very jealous.
When he came in, with his bag of papers under his arm, he contented himself with slightly lifting his hat in our direction, without turning his head toward us, and, with a dragging step, glided into the hall, like a shadow.
And how tired the poor fellow was!
At night M. Louis attended to the correspondence, kept the books,... and did the rest.
Mme. Paulhat-Durand was named neither Paulhat or Durand; these two names, which go so well together, she acquired, it seems, from two gentlemen, dead to-day, with whom she had lived, and who had supplied her with funds to open her employment-bureau.
Her real name was Josephine Carp.
Like many keepers of employment-bureaus, she was an old chambermaid.
That was to be seen, moreover, in her pretentious bearing, in her manners, modeled upon those of the great ladies in whose service she had been, and beneath which, in spite of her gold chain and black silk dress, one could see the filth of her inferior origin.
She showed all the insolence of an old domestic, but she reserved this insolence for us exclusively, showing her customers, on the contrary, a servile obsequiousness, proportioned to their wealth and social rank.
"Oh! what a set of people, Madame the Countess," said she, with an air of affectation.
"Chambermaids de luxe,—that is, wenches who are unwilling to do anything, who do not work, and whose honesty and morality I do not guarantee,—as many of those as you want!
But women who work, who sew, who know their trade,—there are no more of them; I have no more of them; nobody has any more of them. That's the way it is."
Yet her bureau was well patronized.
She had the custom especially of the people in the Champs-Elysees quarter, consisting largely of foreigners and Jewesses. Ah! the scandals that I know about them!
The door opens into a hall leading to the salon, where Mme. Paulhat-Durand is enthroned in her perpetual black silk dress.
At the left of the hall is a sort of dark hole, a vast ante-room with circular benches, and in the middle a table recovered with faded red serge.
Nothing else.
The ante-room is lighted only by a narrow strip of glass set in the upper part of the partition which separates the room from the employment-bureau, and running its entire length.
A bad light, a light more gloomy than darkness, comes through this glass, coating objects and faces with something less than a twilight glimmer.
We came there every morning and every afternoon, heaps of us,—cooks and chambermaids, gardeners and valets, coachmen and butlers,—and we spent our time in telling each other of our misfortunes, in running down the masters, and in wishing for extraordinary, fairy-like, liberating places.
Some brought books and newspapers, which they read passionately; others wrote letters.
Now gay, now sad, our buzzing conversations were often interrupted by the sudden irruption of Mme. Paulhat-Durand, like a gust of wind.
"Be silent, young women," she cried.
"It is impossible to hear ourselves in the salon." Or else she called in a curt, shrill voice:
"Mademoiselle Jeanne!"
Mlle. Jeanne rose, arranged her hair a little, followed the madame into the bureau, from which she returned a few moments later, with a grimace of disdain upon her lips.
Her recommendations had not been found sufficient. What did they require then?
The Monthyon prize?
A maiden's diploma?
Or else they had been unable to agree upon wages.
"Oh! no, the mean things!
A dirty dance hall ... nothing to pinch.
She does her own marketing. Oh! la! la!
Four children in the house!
Think of it!"
The whole punctuated by furious or obscene gestures.
We all passed into the bureau by turns, summoned by Mme. Paulhat-Durand, whose voice grew shriller and shriller, and whose shining flesh at last became green with anger. For my part, I saw directly with whom I had to deal, and that the place did not suit me.
Then, to amuse myself, instead of submitting to their stupid questions, I questioned the fine ladies themselves.
"Madame is married?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Ah!
And Madame has children?"
"Certainly."
"Dogs?"
"Yes."
"Madame makes the chambermaid sit up?"
"When I go out in the evening ... evidently."
"And Madame often goes out in the evening?"
Pursing up her lips, she was about to answer; but I, casting a contemptuous glance at her hat, her costume, and her entire person, said, in a curt and disdainful voice: