_October 28._
At last I have received a letter from Monsieur Jean. It is very dry,
this letter. From reading it, one would think that there never had been
any intimacy between us. Not a word of friendship, not a particle of
tenderness, not a recollection! He tells me only of himself. If he is
to be believed, it seems that Jean has become an important personage.
That is to be seen and felt from the patronizing and somewhat
contemptuous air which he assumes toward me at the beginning of his
letter. In short, he writes to me only to astonish me. I always knew
that he was vain,--indeed, he was such a handsome fellow!--but I never
realized it so much as to-day. Men cannot stand success or glory.
Jean is still first _valet de chambre_ in the house of the Countess
Fardin, and at this moment the countess is perhaps the most-talked-of
woman in France. To his capacity of _valet de chambre_ Jean adds
the _role_ of a participant in political manifestations and of
royalist conspirator. He manifests with Coppée, Lemaitre, Quesnay de
Beaurepaire; he conspires with General Mercier,--and all to overturn
the republic. The other evening he accompanied Coppée to a meeting of
the "Patrie Française." He strutted on the platform, behind the great
patriot, and held his overcoat all the evening. For that matter, he can
say that he has held all the overcoats of all the great patriots of
this time. That will count for something in his life. Another evening,
at the exit of a Dreyfusard meeting, to which the countess had sent him
to "smash the jaws of the cosmopolitans," he was arrested and taken to
the station-house for having spat upon these people without a country,
and shouted at the top of his voice: "Death to the Jews! Long Live
the King! Long Live the Army!" The countess threatened the government
with an interpellation in the chamber, and Monsieur Jean was at once
released. His mistress even added twenty francs a month to his wages,
in compensation for this lofty feat of arms. M. Arthur Meyer printed
his name in the "Gaulois." His name figures also opposite the sum of a
hundred francs in the "Libre Parole," among the subscribers to the fund
for a monument for Colonel Henry. Coppée inscribed it there officially.
Coppée also made him an honorary member of the "Patrie Française,"--an
astonishing society. All the servants in the great houses belong to it.
There are also counts, marquises, and dukes. On coming to breakfast
yesterday, General Mercier said to Jean: "Well, my brave Jean?" My
brave Jean! Jules Guérin, in the "Anti-Juif," has written, under the
heading, "Another Victim of the Sheenies!" an article beginning: "Our
valiant anti-Semitic comrade, M. Jean," etc. And finally, M. Forain,
who now is always at the house, has had Jean pose for a design, which
is to symbolize the soul of the country. M. Forain thinks that Jean
has "just the mug for that." He receives at this moment an astonishing
number of illustrious decorations, of serious tips, and of honorary and
extremely flattering distinctions. And if, as there is every reason to
believe, General Mercier decides to summon Jean for the coming Zola
trial, to give false testimony,--the nature of which the staff will
decide upon soon,--nothing will be lacking to complete his glory. This
year, in high society, there is nothing so fashionable and effective
as false testimony. To be selected for a perjurer, besides bringing
certain and swift glory, is as good as winning the capital prize in
a lottery. M. Jean clearly perceives that he is making a greater and
greater sensation in the neighborhood of the Champs-Elysées. When, in
the evening, he goes to the café in the Rue Francois I. to play pool
for a turkey, or when he takes the countess's dogs out for an airing,
he is the object of universal curiosity and respect; so are the dogs,
for that matter. That is why, in view of a celebrity which cannot
fail to spread from the neighborhood over Paris, and from Paris over
France, he has become a subscriber to a clipping-bureau, just as the
countess has done. He will send me the smartest things that are written
about him. This is all that he can do for me, for I must understand
that he has no time to attend to my affairs. He will see, later,--"when
we shall be in power," he writes me, carelessly. Everything that
happens to me is my fault; I have never known how to conduct myself;
there has never been any sequence in my ideas; I have wasted the best
places, without profit. If I had not been such a hot-head, I, too,
perhaps, would be on the best terms with General Mercier, Coppée,
Déroulède; and perhaps, although I am only a woman, I should see my
name sparkling in the columns of the "Gaulois," which is so encouraging
for all sorts of domesticity. Etc., etc.
To read this letter almost made me cry, for I felt that Monsieur Jean
is quite gone from me, and that I can no longer count on him,--on him
or on anybody! He does not tell me a word of my successor. Ah! I see
her from here, I see them from here, both of them, in the chamber
that I know so well, kissing and caressing each other, and making the
round of the public balls and the theatres together, as we used to do
so prettily. I see him, in his putty-colored overcoat, returning from
the races, after having lost his money, and saying to her, as so many
times he has said to me: "Lend me your jewels and your watch, that I
may hang them up." Unless his new _role_ of participant in political
manifestations and of royalist conspirator has filled him with new
ambitions, and he has abandoned the loves of the servants' hall for the
loves of the _salon_. He will come back to them.
Is all that happens to me really my fault? Perhaps. And yet it seems to
me that a fatality of which I have never been the mistress has weighed
upon my entire existence, and has prevented me from ever staying more
than six months in the same place. When they did not discharge me, I
left, disgusted beyond endurance. It is funny, and it is sad,--I have
always been in a hurry to be "elsewhere," I have always entertained a
mad hope of "those chimerical elsewheres," which I invest with the vain
poesy, the illusory mirage of far-away distances, especially since my
stay at Houlgate with poor M. Georges. That stay has left me with a
certain anxiety, a certain torturing necessity of reaching fruitlessly
after unattainable ideas and forms. I really believe that this too
short and sudden glimpse of a world which I had better never have
known at all, being unable to know it better, has been very harmful to
me. Oh! how disappointing are these ways leading to the unknown! One
goes on and on, and it is always the same thing. See that sparkling
horizon yonder. It is blue, it is pink, it is fresh, it is as light
and luminous as a dream. It must be fine to live there. You approach,
you arrive. There is nothing. Sand, pebbles, hills as dismal as walls.
There is nothing else. And above this sand, these pebbles, these hills,
there is a gray, opaque, heavy sky,--a sky which kills the day, and
whose light weeps dirty tears. There is nothing,--nothing of that which
one is looking for. Moreover, I do not know what I am looking for; and
neither do I know who I am.
A domestic is not a normal being, a social being. He is an incongruous
personage, made up of pieces and bits that cannot fit into one another,
that can only lie next one another. He is something worse,--a monstrous
human hybrid. He is no longer of the people, whence he came; neither
is he of the _bourgeoisie_, among whom he lives and toward whom he
tends. He has lost the generous blood and the artless strength of the
people that he has denied, and has gained the shameful vices of the
_bourgeoisie_, without having succeeded in acquiring the means of
satisfying them,--the vile sentiments, the cowardly fears, the criminal
appetites, without the setting, and consequently without the excuse, of
wealth. With a soiled soul, he traverses this respectable _bourgeois_
world, and, simply from having breathed the mortal odor that rises
from these putrid sinks, he loses forever the security of his mind,
and even the very form of his personality. At the bottom of all these
recollections, amid this host of figures among whom he wanders, a
phantom of himself, he finds nothing to work upon but filth,--that is,
suffering. He laughs often, but his laugh is forced. This laugh does
not come from joy found or from hope realized, and it shows the bitter
grimace of rebellion, the hard and contracted curve of sarcasm. Nothing
is more sorrowful and ugly than this laugh; it burns and withers. It
would have been better, perhaps, if I had wept. And then, I do not
know. And then, _zut!_ Come what will.
But nothing comes at all,--never anything. And I cannot accustom myself
to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the
hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go
away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.
Madame is always the same; distrustful, methodical, severe, rapacious,
without an impulse, without a caprice, without a particle of
spontaneity, without a ray of joy upon her marble face. Monsieur has
resumed his habits, and I imagine, from certain sullen airs, that he
has a spite against me because of my severity; but his spites are not
dangerous. After breakfast, armed and gaitered, he starts off on a
hunting expedition, returns at night, asks me only to help him in
taking off his boots, and goes to bed at nine o'clock. He is still
awkward, comical, and irresolute. He is growing fat. How can people as
rich as they are be resigned to so dismal an existence? Sometimes I
question myself regarding Monsieur. What should I have done with him?
He has no money, and would have given me no pleasure. And especially as
Madame is not jealous!
The terrible thing about this house is its silence. I cannot get used
to it. Yet, in spite of myself, I am beginning to glide, to "walk in
the air," as Joseph says. Often in these dark passage-ways, alongside
these cold walls, I seem to myself like a spectre, like a ghost. And I
am stifling in it all. And I stay.
My sole diversion is to go on Sunday, after mass, to call on Mme.
Gouin, the grocer. Disgust holds me back, but ennui, stronger than
disgust, takes me there. There at least we are ourselves again,--all of
us together. We gossip, we laugh, we tell stories as we sip our little
black-currant cocktails. There we find a little of the illusion of
life. The time passes. A few Sundays ago I missed a little woman, with
running eyes and a rat-like nose, whom I had seen there previously. I
inquire about her.
"It is nothing; it is nothing," said the grocer, in a tone to which
she tried to impart a certain mystery.
"She is sick, then?"
"Yes, but it is nothing. In two days it will be all gone."
And Mam'zelle Rose looks at me with confirmatory eyes, which seem to
say:
"Ah, you see, this is a very skilful woman."
To-day I have learned at the grocer's that a party of hunters found
yesterday, in the forest of Raillon, among the briers and dead leaves,
the body of a little girl, horribly outraged. It seems that she was the
daughter of a road-laborer. She was known in the neighborhood as the
little Claire. She was a little bit simple, but sweet and pretty, and
she was not twelve years old! A rich windfall, as you can imagine, for
a place like the grocer's shop, where they had to content themselves
with telling the same stories week after week. Consequently the tongues
rattled famously.
According to Rose, always better informed than the others, the
little Claire had been cut open with a knife, and her intestines
were protruding through the wound. Her neck and throat still bore
visible marks of strangling fingers. There was still to be seen in the
short heather the trampled and trodden spot where the crime had been
committed. It must have happened at least a week ago, for the body was
almost entirely decomposed.
The assembled domestics relate a heap of things; they remember that
the little Claire was always in the woods. In the spring she gathered
there jonquils and lilies of the valley and anemones, of which she made
pretty bouquets for the ladies of the town; she also went there to look
for morels, which she sold on Sunday at the market. In summer there
were mushrooms of all sorts, and other flowers. But at this time of
year why did she go to the woods, where there was nothing left to pick?
One says, discreetly:
"Why had the father shown no anxiety regarding the child's
disappearance? Perhaps he did it himself?"
To which another no less discreetly replies:
"But, if he had wanted to do it himself, he had no need to take his
daughter to the woods; come now."
Mlle. Rose intervenes:
"It all looks very suspicious to me."
With knowing airs, the airs of one who is in possession of terrible
secrets, she goes on in a lower voice, a voice of dangerous confidence:
"Oh! I know nothing about it; I make no assertions. But...."