The Diary of a Chambermaid Read Online Free PDF Page A

distance, so much hatred, between us and our mistresses. After all, I don’t call her ‘my good woman.’ And then this beastly habit she has of insisting that everything is ‘very expensive.’ It’s infuriating. Everything that belongs to her, even the most miserable tuppenny-ha’penny things, is ‘very expensive.’ These women are so houseproud, you never know what they will find to boast about next … It’s pitiful … After explaining to me how an oil lamp worked, just an ordinary lamp like any other, she insisted:
    ‘You know, my girl, this lamp cost a great deal of money, and if it needs repairing it has to be sent to England. So treasure it like the apple of your eye.’
    I should like to have replied: ‘So what, old girl? How about your chamber-pot? Did that cost a great deal? Do you have to send that to London when it gets cracked?’
    No, really, they’ve got a nerve, making such a fuss about nothing. And when I think that it’s simply to humiliate and impress you!
    After all, the house isn’t all that grand … nothing to write home about, really. From the outside, standing amongst big clumps of trees and with the garden sloping gently down to the river and laid out in huge rectangular lawns, it does have a certain distinction. But inside … it’s old and rickety and gloomy, and smells as though the windows were never opened. I can’t understand how anybody can live in it. Nothing but poky little rooms, awkward wooden stairs that shake and creak when you tread on them and where you could easily break your neck, and long dark passages where, instead of fine, thick carpets, there are only badly-laid red tiles, polished again and again till they’re as slippery as ice. The walls between the rooms are too thin, made of wood so dried out that the rooms echo like the inside of a violin. Proper country style. And the furniture certainly isn’t up to Paris standards. Room after room filled with old mahogany, old moth-eaten curtains, old worn-out, faded carpets, ridiculously uncomfortable armchairs and old worm-eaten sofas with no springs. How they must make your shoulders ache and take the skin off your backside! Just imagine, and me so fond of bright colours, and huge, springy divans where you can stretch out voluptuously on piles of cushions, and all the pretty furniture you can get nowadays, so luxurious and rich and gay. All this dreary gloom makes me feel melancholy. I’m afraid I shall never get used to such a lack of comfort and elegance, to all these crumbling antiques and old-fashioned designs …

    The mistress doesn’t exactly dress in Parisian style, either. She just doesn’t know the meaning of chic, and has certainly never been near a decent dressmaker … A proper sight. Although she has certain pretensions about her clothes, she’s at least ten years behind the fashion … and what a fashion! Mind you, she might not be so bad if she tried, at least not too bad. But what’s really wrong with her is that she arouses no sympathy, there’s nothing feminine about her. Yet she has regular features, pretty, naturally fair hair, and a good skin; though her colouring’s a bit on the high side, as if she had some serious internal illness … I know her type only too well, and I’m never taken in by the brilliance of their complexion. Pink and white on the surface all right, but underneath it, rotten. They can’t stand up to anything, and only keep going with girdles and medical bandages and pessaries, and every kind of secret horror and complicated mechanism. Of course, that doesn’t prevent them putting on airs in public. Oh yes, if you please, very charming … flirting in corners, showing off their made-up skin, making eyes, waggling their bottoms, when all they’re really fit for is to be preserved in spirits … A miserable lot. It’s almost impossible to get on with them, I assure you, and there’s no pleasure at all in working for them …
    Whether by temperament or because of