The Diary of a Chambermaid
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 and 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.’