EMILIE IN MONOLOGUE
"Carrots cost money!"
"Yes, Emilie?"
"I had to throw several sous' worth at your window before you got awake
this morning, and when they rolled back some of them fell in the gutter.
Old Sempé saw me take them, and I'm sure he'll ask you to pay for them,"
said Emilie, nodding her round head with its well-oiled straight black
hair. Emilie was no more gifted hirsutely than in other feminine
adornments. Since the day we found her cleaning our apartment, at the
request of the Sempés, I had been studying her carefully to decide
whether new clothes and soap would help her appearance. Clean and togged
out in some of my things, she was not radically changed. But her heart
of gold shone in her eyes, and I was not long in learning to love her.
"You never hear that bell," continued Emilie. "What a conscience you
must have to sleep that way. The carrots are cheaper than paying me from
eight o'clock when you sleep on."
"Never mind about the carrots," I laughed. "We need you for an alarm
clock, and we did not wake up until one fell on the bed."
Emilie was my first servant, and I did not have her all the time. All my
life I had been demanding things from servants, but I had never bossed
one in her housework. I dreaded tackling the problem. Emilie was the
easy solution. The _femme de ménage_ system is one of the advantages of
life in Paris. You do not have to house your servant, and she is not in
the way in a small apartment when you do not want her there. You can
have as much or as little of the _femme de ménage_ as you like, or (as
was more often the case in my first year of Paris housekeeping) as you
can afford to pay for. I put Emilie out of the house when the clock
showed the number of times forty centimes per hour that I could spare.
Forty centimes per hour, did I say? Yes, and that was ten centimes more
than others paid in our street. Now it is a franc per hour, and the
_femmes de ménage_ of 1919 growl most of the time and stop work when
they want to whether your house-cleaning or laundry is finished or not.
Emilie set in deliberately to attach herself to me and accepted all my
vagaries. I flatter myself that it was not so much for the extra two
sous per hour as for the fact that she liked me. My queer ways
interested her. She could never understand why I washed Scrappie's
silk-and-wool undershirts myself, but was willing to pay her several
francs for sitting on the coal-box reading a newspaper or dozing for
hours while I went to the opera.
Emilie was a vaudeville singer and dancer who had lost her figure and
most of her teeth before the bi-decennial of her stage career.
"To think, Madame, that a few years ago the posters on the _Kiosque_ at
the corner of this street used to announce my number at the music-halls,
and to-day I'm down on the floor washing your tiles!"
I was pulling the baby's wool stockings on drying-boards.
"You say you used to be on the stage?" I led on sociably.
"Yes, Madame, _comique excentrique_. That is why I cannot cook. My
profession required me always to eat in restaurants, but I can wash
dishes, clean rooms and build fires. Thanks to God, for the service you
need, I know how to mind babies. I never had anyone to help me with
Marcelle."
Marcelle was a fifteen year old girl, hare-lipped and cross-eyed, but
her mother loved her dearly. Emilie did not say who Marcelle's father
was. But she was not as reticent as the woman of Samaria, and would have
scorned to come to me under false pretenses. _Tout savoir est tout
pardonner._ If you cannot live up to the spirit of that motto, do not
plan a life without worry for yourself in Paris.
"Last year, before I found you, Madame, Marcelle and I were out of
work. When you came in here in July we had earned only fifty francs in
two months. Marcelle did not get her job as laundry apprentice until
October. Oh no, we didn't exactly starve. You can get cold-boiled
potatoes and they sell bits of bread and left over coffee very cheap at
night when the restaurants close."
Here she sat up to wring her floor-rag into the brown water of the pail.
"I hope you'll not regret spoiling me the way you do. You let me talk,
but you can trust me not to forget myself. Take this afternoon when
those ladies are coming for tea. You know how I wait on the table. That
is a rôle. I get my happiness in considering everything a rôle. I play
at being _femme de ménage_. These dirty old clothes are my costume: the
bucket and mop are stage properties."
"Do you like having company at tea?" I broke in.
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On who they are." Here Emilie made up her mind to speak with firmness.
"Now, without indiscretion, Madame, the ladies you asked for this
afternoon are not interesting. I was here when two of them called and
you told them to come to tea."
"Why not?"
"The Latin Quarter is full of women like that. I know. I have worked for
them. I have been cleaning at studios and apartments like yours in this
neighborhood ever since I left the stage. I have seen what these women
paint. Oh la! la! Sometimes you cannot tell the canvas from the palette,
Cubism they call it, to hide the fact that they cannot draw and could
not reproduce a figure or any recognizable object to save their lives.
No, I'm not talking of beginners. I'm talking about the old ones, the
women, Americans and English, who do not know how to paint kitchen
chairs or carry a tune, and yet art schools and music academies flourish
on their fees. They were misfits where they came from. It pays their
relatives to send them money every month so they won't come home. But
why should Paris--that is, our part of Paris--be the dumping ground? You
say that there are more men of that kind than women? Yes, oh yes, many
more. But then, after a certain time men give up posing. They do not
mind being taken at their real value. When they are failures, they admit
it. The women keep on pretending."
Emilie was as good as her word. With a shining face and hair well
slicked back from her ears she appeared at tea time. The ample front was
covered by a clean white apron. She stood at my elbow, her black beady
eyes keen to see what I needed before I asked for it. _Oui, Madame_ and
_voilà, Madame_ came as softly as though, born in a pantry, she had
always served tea. But she could not keep up the play without the
relief of an occasional entr'acte. When she brought me a pot of fresh
tea and guests happened to be looking the other way, she would give a
broad wink and bolt from the room. When the guests left, the kitchen
door was closed.
"I ought to have made one more appearance, Madame," said Emilie a few
moments later as she settled herself comfortably in the steamer-chair
and took a pinch of snuff. "The model servant would have helped them on
with their coats. But I had all I could stand."
"But you did very well, Emilie."
"I got more fun out of it than you did. I said that you were wasting
your time on those people. What did they do? Told you you looked badly.
Asked why you were so tired. Advised you to get a doctor for the baby's
cough. And you think they meant well? That it was solicitude?"
Here Emilie laughed heartily and wiped the snuff off her hands with the
greasy blue apron that now replaced the white one.
"You are _naïve_, dear Madame. Women love to tease each other that way,
especially those who are not well or strong themselves. They hate you
for not having ills. If you told them that you had a physical
examination last week and the doctor said you were in perfect condition,
they would shake their heads gravely and warn you that you are
underweight for your height."
"They did make me mad, I confess, when they volunteered advice about
Scrappie. They used to scold me for nursing my baby and they scolded me
to-day when they heard I had stopped nursing her."
"That's it! That's it!" cried Emilie. "Next time they talk like that,
show them the little thing, beautiful _rose de mai_ that she is, and ask
them in what way she looks badly."
Throughout the year at Twenty-One, Emilie was a tower of strength to me.
When we sent our pitchpine back to William Shakespeare and packed our
rugs and brasses, she was on hand as she had been the day we set up our
Lares and Penates in the Rue Servandoni. She urged that we take her to
Constantinople with us. We did, and never regretted it--if only for her
comments on the Turks and Greeks and Armenians. When she realized that
we needed other care than she could give us, Emilie quietly dismissed
herself and went back to France to live in Bordeaux. We see her there
occasionally. She still wears my old hats and blouses. She is still a
_femme de ménage_. And Marcelle has continued to wield the flat-iron.