 Title Page. 1915 Bibliothèque-Charpentier edition. | |
| Author | Octave Mirbeau |
|---|---|
| Original title | Le Journal d'une femme de chambre |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Decadent movement |
| Publisher | Fasquelle |
Publication date | 1900 |
| OCLC | 5323544 |
The Diary of a Chambermaid (French: Le Journal d'une femme de chambre) is a 1900 decadent novel by Octave Mirbeau, published during the Dreyfus Affair. First published in serialized form in L’Écho de Paris from 1891 to 1892, Mirbeau’s novel was reworked and polished before appearing in the Dreyfusard journal La Revue Blanche in 1900.
The novel presents itself as the diary of Mademoiselle Célestine R., a chambermaid. Her first employer fetishizes her boots, and she later discovers the elderly man dead, with one of her boots stuffed into his mouth. Later on, Célestine becomes the maid of an upper class couple, Lanlaire, and is perfectly aware that she is entangled in the power struggles of their marriage. Célestine ends by becoming a café hostess, who mistreats her servants in turn.
As a libertarian writer, Octave Mirbeau gives voice to a maidservant, Célestine: that is already subversive in itself. Through her eyes, which perceive the world through keyholes, he shows us the foul-smelling hidden sides of high society, the 'moral bumps' of the dominating classes, and the turpitudes of the bourgeois society that he assails. Mirbeau's story undresses the members of high society of their superficial probity, revealing them in the undergarments of their moral flaws: their hypocrisy and perversions.[1]
Ending up in a Norman town at the home of the Lanlaires,[2] with their grotesque family name, who owe their unjustifiable wealth to their respective 'honourable' parents' swindlings, she evokes, as she recalls her memories, all the jobs that she has done for years in the swankiest households, and draws a conclusion that the reader is invited to make his own: «However vile the riff-raff may be, they are never as vile as decent people.» (« Si infâmes que soient les canailles, ils ne le sont jamais autant que les honnêtes gens. »)[3]
Octave Mirbeau denounces domestic service as a modern form of slavery. However, he offers no sentimentalised image of the underclass, as servants exploited by their masters are ideologically alienated themselves: « D'être domestique, on a ça dans le sang... ».[4]
With its fractured exposition, its temporal dislocations, its clashing styles, and varying forms, Mirbeau's novel breaks with the conventions of the realistic novel and relinquishes all claims to documentary objectivity and narrative linearity.[5]
The novel has been loosely adapted for cinema four times:
