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attentively, while Marianne, mollified by the two full carafes of cider she had drunk, became more agreeable. Sprawled in her chair, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her cap askew on her tousled hair, she asked me where I came from, where else I had been in service, whether they had been decent jobs, and whether I was anti-Jewish. For a time we chatted away almost like friends. When it was my turn I asked her to give me some details about the household. Were there often visitors? And, if so, what kind? Did the master run after the maids? Had the mistress got a lover?
    But heavens above! You should just have seen their faces, for Joseph’s reading had been interrupted by my questions. They were utterly and completely shocked … One simply has no idea how backward these country people are. They know nothing, see nothing, understand nothing, and the most natural thing in the world absolutely flabbergasts them … Yet, despite his loutish respectability and the virtuous airs the cook gives herself, nobody is going to convince me that they don’t sleep together. For my part, I must say, I should have to be really hard up to put up with a type like him.
    ‘It’s easy to see you’re from Paris,’ the cook sourly reproached me.
    To which Joseph, nodding his head, briefly added:
    ‘Sure enough.’
    Then he turned to his paper again, while Marianne got up heavily from her chair and took the saucepan off the fire. Our conversation had come to an end.
    My thoughts turned to the last place I had been in, and to Monsieur Jean, the footman, so distinguished with his black side whiskers and white skin, as carefully tended as a woman’s. Oh, he was so nice and gay, Monsieur Jean, so natty, so refined, reading bits from the Fin de siècle to us of an evening, or telling us naughty stories, or giving us the latest news from the master’s correspondence … Things are going to be very different here. How on earth did I manage to land up in a place like this, among such awful people, and miles from everything I like? … I could almost cry.

    I am writing this in my bedroom, a filthy little room under the rafters, exposed to every wind, freezing in winter and stifling in summer. The only furniture is a wretched iron bedstead and a miserable unpainted wardrobe with a door that doesn’t shut and no room to put all my things; and all the light I’ve got is a smoking candle that drips into a copper candlestick. It’s pitiful! If I want to go on keeping this diary, or to read the novels I brought with me, or to tell my fortune with the cards, I shall have to buy candles with my own money. For as to pinching any from Madame, nothing doing, as Monsieur Jean used to say. She keeps them locked up.
    Tomorrow I must try to sort things out a bit. If I nail my little gilt crucifix over my bed, and put the coloured china statue of the Virgin on the mantelpiece, with all my little boxes and trinkets and the photographs of Monsieur Jean, maybe it will make this garret seem a bit more cheerful and homely.
    Marianne’s room is next to mine, with only a thin partition between us, so that one can hear everything that is going on. I thought Joseph, who sleeps in the stables, might perhaps be paying her a visit. But no. For ages I had to listen to Marianne moving about her room, coughing and spitting, dragging chairs about, turning everything upside down … And now she’s snoring. They must make love in the daytime. Far away in the country a dog is barking. It’s almost two o’clock in the morning, and my candle is almost burnt out. It’s time I got into bed, but I feel I shan’t be able to sleep. Oh, I feel as though this miserable dump is going to turn me into an old woman before my time! And that’s the truth!

15 SEPTEMBER
    So far I haven’t mentioned the name of my employers. It’s a quite ridiculous name: Lanlaire … Monsieur and Madame Lanlaire … Monsieur and Madame Head-in-air Lanlaire! The sort of name you can’t help