Two liminal texts place Octave Mirbeau's Journal d'une femme de chambre under the sign of a particular kind of realism. One is a traditional "editor's" notice claiming authority for the book: "Ce livre a et veritablement ecrit par Mlle Celestine R … femme de chambre. Une premiere fois, je fus prie de revoir le manuscrit, de le corriger, d'en recrire quelques parties. Je refusai d'abord.… Mais Mlle Celestine R… etaitfortjolie… Elle insista. Je finis par ceder, car je suis homme, apres tout … j'ai bien peur … d'avoir remplace par de la simple litterature ce qu'ily avait dans ces pages d'emotion et de vie." The other is Mirbeau's dedicatory letter to the journalist Jules Huret: "C'est un livre sans hypocrisie, parce que c'est de la vie, et de la vie comme nous la comprenons, vous et moi."

Both texts insist on the authentic life of the diary to follow. The editor's humble concerns "bring to life" a timehonored convention; in this instance, not only is the author real, but also desirable (fort jolie). She brings her charms with her into the literary marketplace and what follows should seem all the more real for it. Mirbeau inherited the subject of lower-class sexuality and its economics, treated as a slice of life, from the Goncourts, Huysmans and Zola, and the idea of "life as we understand it," in the dedication to Huret, is but a rephrasing of Zola's concession that literature necessarily filters reality through "temperament." By the publication of Le Journal d'une femme de chambre in 1900, however, the doctrines of naturalism were no longer law. Mirbeau's prefatory remarks locate his book in a subjectivist and decadent corner of late naturalism. The letter to Huret points to a postromantic aesthetics of the grotesque, of tragicomedy and the rire en pleurs: "c'est que nul mieux que vous, et plus profondement que vous, n'a senti, devant les masques humains, cette tristesse et ce comique d'étre un homme … tristesse qui fait rire, comique qui fait pleurer les ames hautes." Despite the novel's satirical references to Bourgetian elitism, Mirbeau's realism is understood to be of the standardly "artistic" sort, fully accessible only to superior souls who can perceive genuine emotion behind literary smoothness and the truths of human existence behind social postures.

These rhetorical principles take Maupassant's definition of realists as "illusionists" one step further toward expressionism, toward Cocteau's "mentir pour dire vrai." Mirbeau himself says elsewhere: "En l'art l'exactitude est la deformation et la verite est le mensonge." As they are generally understood, Mirbeau's novels testify to the manipulation of outmoded naturalist conventions by a late romantic, decadent sensibility. The artist accentuates, exaggerates nature to express what he sees there and creates a romantic grotesque. In other words, the text holds the mask of realism up to its face: Larvatus prodeo. Paul Ricoeur glosses the Latin phrase as "comme homme de desir je m'avance masque," and Le Journal d'une femme de chambre can be discussed in view of the three terms of that gloss: desire, mask and progression.

The thematically decadent, "black" realism of Le Journal d'une femme de chambre corresponds to the representation of a world of desire and the masking of desire. Mirbeau gives over a good half of the novel to an episodic collection of spicy tales and satirical portraits that tend toward the morbid: the writer's snobbish wife who sells her body for good reviews; the bien pensant fund raiser who delights in obscene magazines; the saintly spinster who finds and adores as a holy relic the phallus chipped off a statue; the well-kept old gentleman who dies with his teeth clenched on his maid's leather shoes; the honest gardener brought almost to murder because he is denied the right to have children; the consumptive youth exhausted and driven to death by love. Celestine's "petites histoires," as she calls them, are less exotic, less specific and milder than the horrors—the Wildean "wounds … like red roses"—detailed in Mirbeau's other, contemporaneous novel, Le Jardin dès supplices, but the aesthetics of horror, the association of desire with death and corruption, is equally in evidence in both cases. Celestine's anecdotes, which are told in flashback, center on moments of violence, death, sexual obsession, degradation, humiliation, guilt and revenge. And so does the story of her own life, which serves to link together her rogue's gallery of funny and sad stories. Her own tale, which becomes a Cinderella romance in an ironic mode, a romantic quest perverted by neo Bovarysme, is first of all predicated on a fall.

At the beginning of the narrative, Celestine, a young, blond, svelte and attractive femme de chambre, declares herself fallen upon hard days. "Ah oú, je suis bien tombee." Previously, she had been employed in fashionable Parisian homes where countesses and barons, poets and musicians were received, where she knew Paul Bourget and Jules Lemaitre, where she was given splendid dresses and chic, tight uniforms to wear, where she read Baudelaire and Verlaine with romantic young lovers. Now her health is bad and she has left Paris to work in the squalid provinces. She has had a dozen places in two years, and in each of them she has been subjected to some "salete," some ignominious humiliation indicative of the "debraillement moral" of contemporary society. She has now been washed away in a flood, "un flot ignoble et fetide," to a world of primeval chaos and decay. In her new job, the smart elegance and sharpness of her Parisian milieu has been replaced by the grotesque bestiality of Marianne, the cook, and "la grosse Rose," the neighbor's servant. The one is "grosse, molle, flasque, etalee, le cou sortant en triple bourrelet d'un fichu sale avec quoi l'on dirait qu'elle essuie ses chaudrons, les deux seins enormes et difformes roulant sous une sorte de camisole en cotonnade bleue plaquee de graisse, sa robe trop courte decouvrant d'epaisses chevilles et de larges pieds chausses de laine grise"; the other, "courte, grosse, rougeaude, asthmatique et qui semble porter peniblement un immense ventre sur dès jambes ecartees en treteau … un sourire epais, visqueux, sur dès levres de vieille licheuse … son corps tangue et roule, comme un vieux bateau sur une forte mer." This must be, Celestine muses, "le pays dès grosses femmes."

She goes with Rose to meet the town's epiciere, whose body, too, rolls like a liquid in a bottle, and there listens to the talk of the local domestic servants in a scene marked by its demonic imagery and its Sartrian/Hugolian evocation of primordial ooze:

C'est un flot ininterrompu d'ordures vomies par ces tristes bouches, comme d'un egout.. Il semble que l'arriere-boutique en est empestee … Je ressens une impression d'autant plus penible que la piece où nous sommes est sombre et que les figures y prennent dès deformations fantastiques.… Elle n'est eclairee, cette piece, que par une etroite fenetre qui s'ouvre sur une cour crasseuse, humide, une sorte de puits forme par dès murs que ronge la lepre dès mousses … Une odeur de saumure, de legumes fermentes, de harengs saurs … Alors, chacune de ces creatures, tassees sur leur chaise comme dès paquets de linge sale, s'acharne a raconter une vilenie, un scandale, un crime … j'eprouve quelque chose d'insurmontable, quelque chose comme un affreux degout … Une nausee me retourne le coeur … ces voix aigres me font l'effet d'eaux de vaisselle, glougloutant et s'égouttant par les eviers et par les plombs.

Celestine may tell herself that she has nothing in common with these women, but nonetheless their stories are nothing but unshaped versions of her own anecdotes.

The epiciere's importance in this circle stems from the fact that she is the local abortionist. The implicit theme of abortion, which leads nowhere in terms of dramatic development, ties into the principal event that interests the town gossips: the rape, mutilation, and murder of a child in the neighborhood, which follows upon previous incidents of the kind. "Tiens! … encore une femme coupee en morceaux," says M. Lanlaire, Celestine's employer, while reading the newspaper. We can associate this image with a distinct constellation of themes in the text. First, there is Celestine's definition of a servant as "quelqu'un de disparate, fabrique de pieces et de morceaux … un monstrueux hybride humain." The servant is a deracine, uprooted from his class to live in bourgeois homes and breathe "l'odeur mortelle qui monte de ces cloaques." Secondly, the remorse, guilt and regret that Celestine feels is actualized in an interior pain, in "une douleur si aigiue que c'etait a croire qu'une b&e (lui) dechirait, avec ses dents, avec ses griffes, l'interieur du corps."

Celestine thinks of herself as a child destroyed, and the source of that feeling is sexual: her mother and sister were sailors' sluts; she herself was already a "woman" and no longer a virgin at 12. She also pictures herself as a deep, open wound, and the violence of her history finds its correlate in the rape of the child: "Elle etait un peu innocente, mais douce et gentille … et elle n'avait pas douze ans! … D'apres Rose, toujours mieux informee que les autres, la petite Claire avait son petit ventre ouvert d'un coup de couteau, et les intestins coulaient par la blessure.… La nuque et la gorge gardaient, visibles, les marques dès doigts etrangleurs … Ses parties, ses pauvres petites parties, n'etaient qu'une plaie affreusement tumefiee, comme si elles eussent ete forcees—une comparaison de Rose—par le manche trop gros d'une cognée de bficheron."

The association of violence, death and sexual desire extends throughout the novel. The other servant in the Lanlaire household is Joseph, the gardener and coachman. Joseph exerts a sexual fascination on Celestine that grows in the measure that she considers him dangerous. He is a violent antisemite and patriot, bloodthirsty, cruel, ugly, sensual and menacing. To the moment of the murder of little Claire, he has represented only danger, but the rape triggers a new response in Celestine. The attack on Claire acts as a rape of the feminine consciousness of the community; it excites even the admiration of the police. So, too, does Joseph begin to fascinate Celestine. She assumes that he is the rapist. As he evokes more and more for her the devil, a wolf or wild beast, so he becomes increasingly endowed with mystery, with a "grande beauté horrible et meurtriere" and "une sorte d'atmosphere sexuelle, acre, terrible ou grisante, dont certaines femmes subissent, meme malgré elles, la forte hantise." Celestine imagines herself the plaything of his ferocious passions, the instrument of his crimes, and becomes obsessed by him: "Outre cet attrait de l'inconnu et du mystere, il exerce sur moi ce charme apre, puissant, dominateur, de la force. Et ce charme … conquiert ma chair passive et soumise … C'est en moi un desir plus violent, plus sombre, plus terrible meme que le desir qui, pourtant, m'emporta jusqu'au meurtre, dans mes baiser avec M. Georges."

Celestine's relation to Joseph develops coherently from the role she has been given in society. Her stories of her career cast her quite lucidly as the passive object of sexual degradation. As a servant, she defines herself as the slave of democratic society, the legalized prostitute characterized by her thing-like, alienated status. Her loss of identity is captured by her employers' mania for calling all their chambermaids "Marie"; she embodies what Sartre would call "matiere oeuvree," the essential passivity of the feminine condition in an unliberated society. Joseph, then, begins to possess her as she is possessed by the demon of revenge. Celestine, the Persecuted Maiden, that poor innocent from Richardson and the Gothic novels, thinks she feels the teeth of the decadent Fatal Woman growing within her. After almost every one of her humiliations, Celestine takes a verbal revenge, in a requisitoire that humiliates the master, that ravages the icons of her society: politics, religion, art, etc. But Joseph's frightening, bulging muscles represent for Celestine the possibility of real, criminal revenge: the "rape" of the masters' goods, as Celestine calls it. When the Lanlaire's valuable silver service finally is stolen—by Joseph, it would seem—the "caisses eventrees," the "silence de mort" and the "visages morts" all bear witness to a nexus of crime, death and violation that constitutes the climax of this aspect of the novel:

Le crime a quelque chose de violent, de solennel, de justicier, de religieux, qui m'epouvante certes, mais qui me laisse aussi—je ne sais comment exprimer cela—de l'admiration. Non, pas de l'admiration, puisque l'admiration est un sentiment moral, une exaltation spirituelle, et ce que je ressens n'influence, n'exalte que ma chair.… C'est comme une brutale secousse, dans tout mon etre physique, a la fois penible et delicieuse, un viol douloureux et pame de mon sexe.… C'est curieux … mais chez moi, tout crime—le meurtre principalement,—a dès correspondances secretes avec l'amour … un beau crime m'empoigne comme un beau male.…

… Mais la gaiete, je l'eprouvai plus directe et plus intense et plus haineuse, a considerer Madame, affalee pres de ses caisses vides.… Cette douleur honteuse, ce crapuleux abattement, c'etait aussi la revanche dès humiliations, dès duretes que j'avais subies.… J'en goutai, pleinement, la jouissance delicieusement farouche.

Celestine will never really know, however, if it was Joseph who organized the theft, if it was Joseph who murdered little Claire. The danger in Joseph will never become tangible. After the theft, Joseph and Célestine leave the Lanlaires; they marry and invest Joseph's mysterious fortune in a banal seaport cafe in Cherbourg. There Joseph, in his new role as patron, seems to become a new man. His once dangerous and violent patriotism turns into a tamed, commercial posture, a rightist enthusiasm that brings in a rowdy anti-Dreyfusard crowd. As for Celestine, the move to Cherbourg, in the spring, is a return to her origins:

"N& de la mer, je suis revenue a la mer." In her bourgeois triumph, we can see the basic closural devices of comic form—marriage and reintegration into society—as well as a parody of Disney's Cinderella after her marriage to the Prince: "Voila enfin une partie de mon reve qui se realise.… Moi, je tiens la caisse, tronant au comptoir."

This pseudo-heroic story of upward social mobility, of ritual purification and rebirth, strikes a distinct false note. Celestine is still a passive object, there to flirt with the customers, a decoration at the bar in Alsatian costume, an instrument in Joseph's financial schemes. The honest social outrage that burned within her had opened up for her transcendent possibilities and given her life as an independent subject. But in her submission to Joseph it is revealed that her hopes were fed on the illusory fires of "des histoires romanesques," "des jolies romances qu'on chante au cafe-concert," as she says. Like Emma Bovary, she has read too much, and there seems to be little actual correlation between her sanguinary imagination and dull reality. "Chaque fois que je vois (Joseph) songeur, mes idees s'allument tout de suite. J'imagine dès tragedies, dès gens qui ralent sur la bruyere dès forts … Et voila qu'il ne s'agissait que d'une reclame, petite et vulgaire."

The last line of the novel continues to assert passive aggressivity, potential revolution and an ascensional force toward an open future: "Je sens que je ferai tout ce qu'il voudra que je fasse, et que j'irai toujours où il me dira d'aller … jusqu'au crime!.…" The contractual syntagm and the three dots of ellipsis that end the text point in themselves to a "Pourrait etre continue" that would build on the episodic and therefore additive aspect of the narrative. But at the same time Celestine is planning to add a cafe'-concert to their establishment: formal openness is countered by ideological closure and narrative irony. The force forward toward crime and anarchy has already been undermined by Joseph's trivialization and by the specific admission of Celestine's romanticizing. Even more, Celestine's exchange of roles in life marks the completion of her sentimental education and underscores an aspect of narrative development that is not progressive and synthetic, but circular and chiastic. Throughout the novel Célestine's view of her employers as exploiters has been convincingly consistent—from the first page: "A la facon, vraiment extraordinaire, vertigineuse, dont j'ai roule, ici et la, successivement … sans pouvoir me fixer nulle part, faut-il que les maitres soient difficiles a servir maintenant!… C'est a ne pas croire." But in the closing pages of the text she has become an employer herself and her attack on them is devastatingly unmasked as mere rhetoric by a conventional "good help is hard to find" that reverses her earlier position: "II est vrai qu'en trois mois nous avons change quatre fois de bonne … Ce qu'elles sont exigeantes, les bonnes a Cherbourg, et chapardeuses, et devergondees!… Non, c'est incroyable, et c'est degouitant." She is only repeating, of course, what has been said of her often enough; this is not revenge, but blindness.

Celestine has deserted her class. Without a viable social base, she no longer has an authentic claim to revolutionary fervor, and her criminal imagination is reduced to a case of right-wing feminine hysteria, from which the author takes his distance. Joseph and Celestine (or Joseph and Marie, if we accept the masters' name for her and define the pair as emblems of the servant class) can be taken for heralds of the new age only by a large stretch of the imagination; to a much larger degree, they form a society at the end that is only a parody of the old one.

The possibility of verbal revenge develops in the first place from Celestine's consistent role as revealer. The Balzacian observer was a lawyer, artist or author who perceived hidden beauty and horror, poems and dramas beneath banal appearances. Celestine inherits both this role and Zola's nose for dirty linen. As much as she has the recording eye of the journalist, she also has the roving satirical eye of the picaro. The picaresque model plays its traditional part here as the mirror image and deconstruction of the forms of romance; Don Quixote, Moll Flanders, and Le Paysan parvenu all form part of the background of this novel. We are invited to understand Celestine as the product of specific social forces in 19th century France, but she is nonetheless a typical literary picaro: a rogue or orphan, cut off from his roots and native city, originally naturally innocent but now determined to be as cruel to others as they have been to him, who drifts from place to place and from one level of society to another as he rises in it toward respectability. The picaro reveals the corruption of society in a series of disconnected portraits; he also reveals himself for what he is.

As she moves from one home to another, Celestine functions as the perfect revealer of society because she has access to its inner truths. The chambermaid sees things in their nudity and squalor, from the inside, and smells out corruption everywhere. "Ah! dans les cabinets de toilette, comme les masques tombent!… Comme s'effritent et se lezardent les facades les plus orgueilleuses!" The principal metaphorical system of the novel is thus that of exterieur and interieur, visage and dme, voile or masque and concealed pourriture:

Je connais ces types de femmes et je ne me trompe point á l'éclat de leur teint. C'est rose dessus, oú, et dedans c'est pourri… quand on va au fond dès choses, quand on retourne leurs jupes et qu'on fouille dans leur linge … ce qu'elles sont sales!.…

Je ne suis pas vieille, pourtant, mais j'en ai vu dès choses, de pres … j'en ai vu dès gens tout nus … Et j'ai reniflé I'odeur de leur linge, de leur peau, de leur ame.… Malgré les parfums, ca ne sent pas bon.… Tout ce qu'un intórieur respecté, tout ce qu'une famille honnete peuvent cacher de saletés, de vices honteux, de crimes bas, sous les apparences de la vertu… ah! je connais ca … ils ont beau se laver dans dès machins d'argent et faire de la piaffe … je les connais! … Ca n'est pas propre … Et leur coeur est plus dégoutant que n'était le lit de ma mere.

Celestine is an eye that sees, a surgical "regard" that penetrates through external facade into real corruption. But the masters are also eyes that watch and wound. Madame Lanlaire is a pure, objectified "regard" that seems to bore into Célestine's flesh and soul, a Medusean gaze that dehumanizes the servant. Thus Celestine also acts as a focal point for the eyes of others. She further exposes the souls of the Lanlaires because each of them reacts to her in a way that defines them: "Ils m'observaient, chacun, selon les idees qui les menent, conduits, chacun, par une curiosite differente." In some cases, her employers project selfimages through the manipulation of Celestine as a prop or fetish in their particular fantasy. Celestine reveals desire because she is its object. The masters see only what they want to see, and nothing below the surface but reflections of their own desire. The dialectical relationship of master and slave shapes itself here in the interplay of masking and unveiling, projecting and interpreting. To look within, in Mirbeau's novel, is to dominate and to violate.

Joseph's mystery, then, is one with his impenetrability. His relation to Celestine is always that of subject to object, master to slave, force to instrument, because Celestine can never see past his mask. Concomitant to the murder and theft, there exists a substantial tendency in Le Journal toward a detective form, that in the end will be entirely frustrated. The interpreting eye is first an inquiring eye. In order to discover Joseph's secrets, Celestine steals into his room. But where all the other household objects have spoken to her of their owners, Joseph's possessions reveal nothing. "Rien n'est mysterieux dans cette chambre, rien ne s'y cache. C'est la chambre nue d'un homme qui n'a pas de secrets … Les objets qu'il possede sont muets, comme sa bouche, intraversables comme ses yeux et comme son front." Joseph is nothing but mask and surface, nothing but a power that reduces Celestine to passivity. It is his eyes, not hers, that dominate: "ses yeux parlent, a defaut de sa bouche.… Et ils rédent autour de moi, et ils m'enveloppent, et ils descendent en moi, au plus profond de moi, afin de me retourner l'ame, et de voir ce qu'il y a dessous."

What Joseph claims to see in her is Evil: "Vous &es comme moi, Celestine … Ah! pas de visage, bien sur … mais nos deux ames sont pareilles … nos deux ames se ressemblent." All this is pure Genet, of course, as read by Sartre—Les Bonnes and Le Balcon in period dress. Joseph claims to reveal to her her essential and unchangeable character—what Sartre speaks of in Saint Genet as an essentialism rooted in negation and passivity. On this premise, the circular aspect of the novel would be built into Celestine's static nature. Her return is to her true self, to the world of sailors and sailors' bars to which she belongs through her mother. Her new-found appreciation of authority and the rights of property, at the end, is neither a conversion nor a betrayal but a self-recognition as a negative, passive, "relative" being, who cannot exist outside a system of social hierarchy. And it is true that Celestine does seem to recognize herself—or what she has been made into—best in moments of degradation and futile rage. From the deathbed of poor M. Georges, her beautiful, consumptive lover, she throws herself into the arms of a brutal and vulgar companion: "Pour tout dire, je me reconnus, je reconnus ma vie et mon ame en ces paupieres fripees, en ce visage glabre, en ces levres rasees qui accusent le meme rictus servile, le meme pli de mensonge, le meme gofit de l'ordure passionnelle, chez le comedien, le juge et le valet.…"If what she is is mirrored in Joseph's eyes, then we are to understand her in terms of the desires she imagines in him and a masochistic identification with evil. The affirmation of dissonance between the protagonist and his world that Lukacs speaks of in his Theory of the Novel would thus be dissolved at the close of this novel. In her final role, exterior Celestine and interior Celestine are one; her soul is no bigger than her society.

Joseph's reading of Celestine is not the only possible one, however. Celestine's impulse toward self-punishment does hold her back from realizing her modest dreams of happiness here and there in the text: she turns down the rich old man who would have left her everything in a few months; she insults the only mistress to offer her love. But aside from these moments and her intermittent identification with evil, Celestine portrays herself as engaged in an affirmative existential quest. She pursues the positive image of what she could have been, an innocent girl open to Nature and poetic inspiration, kind of heart despite the corruption of her world. Her frequent moves from one job to another are explained as a search for an identity and an ideal: "j'ai toujours eu la hate d'étre 'ailleurs,' une folie d'esperance dans chimeriques ailleurs, que je parais de la poesie vaine, du mirage illusoire dès lointains … ce que je cherche, je l'ignore… etj'ignoreaussiquijesuis." In this light, she casts herself as romantic heroine to the very end of the book. Admittedly, she accepts herself as a passive symbol of romantic disillusionment and nostalgia, in sorrow over a decomposing world, who looks forward to the barbarian rape of her society—"Avec quelle hate j'attends Joseph!"—but still, in her romance, she remains to the last an unintegrated element of society, greater in spirit than the role she plays, and it is through her that a new society will be formed.

One can easily exaggerate the tone here, but clearly Mirbeau's satire plays off a similar model. Mirbeau is not Flaubert, and his novel does not dissolve into infinitesimal ironies of meaning. He is much more a journalist, and his text realizes, instead, two complete interpretative schemes, both of which are accessible to the reader. In fact, the novel has to be read in two ways. On the one hand, the text can be seen as dominated by structural closure, by a satirical and parodic tone, by a static main character, by its ideological inspiration as a roman d antithese. In this light, the satirist's smile lies close to the surface of Celestine's prose; neither she nor her society are capable of redemption.

To reverse this reading is as simple as reading the fable of The Grasshopper and the Ant with sympathy for the grasshopper. A standard and not incorrect interpretation of the novel portrays it as a "cri d'angoisse et de douleur pour les victimes de la societe," in which Celestine plays a heroic role as the author's porte-parole. Le Journal d'une femme de chambre would seem to recount, then, the desperate and foredoomed struggles of a working-class heroine toward self-realization; despite the oppressive nature of her society, she passes through a world of darkness to emerge partially in the light. The text marries a formal openness to a prophetic tone, latent social optimism, and mythical resonance.

In either of these versions, there is no doubt that Celestine is a victim; the question remains whether she transcends her condition, even in part, and if not, whether she shares society's guilt. Recourse to information about Mirbeau's Dreyfusard and anarchist position in the nineties would serve to separate the author from his main character to some degree, since Celestine half-heartedly shares Joseph's political prejudices, and thus to confirm a belittling view of her as a revolutionary manque, but it would not eliminate the presence of an alternative and prior system of interpretation within the body of the text. To understand both that Celestine's posture and rhetoric comport elements of excess and inappropriateness that devalorize them and that they are markedly conventional to begin with, the reader must be aware at some level of the models and sub-texts inscribed within Le Journal. Mirbeau's novel elaborates elements of the quest romance, the epic, the picaresque tale, the detective story, the Bildungsroman, the naturalist novel, and the decadent conte cruel (all of which might be said to share common factors, to be sure). On the most basic level, Celestine's diary recreates the myth of a sun hero, who returns to life after a sojourn in the land of death: "Ce ne sont plus les paysages desoles d'Audierne, la tristesse infinie de ses cétes, la magnifique horreur de ses greves qui hurlent a la mort. Ici, rien n'est triste; au contraire, tout porte a la gaiete.… C'est le bruit joyeux d'une ville militaire, le mouvement pittoresque, 1'activite bigaree d'un port de guerre. L'amour y roule sa bosse.…" But that myth has been recast in an decadent mold: at Cherbourg Celestine is as much a prisoner as ever and as blind as ever. Or, at the least, these are the possible frameworks within which one can read the text, and to be aware of the full depth of an ironic, negative reading one has first to realize the text on a naively uncritical and sentimental level.

Parody, like irony, is a game of absence and presence. To create a parody of a specific text, I am obliged to recreate the elements that marked it as a recognizable senseproducing system. To make that parody accessible as parody, I have to negate the system of the original text and reverse its individual elements. In my parody, the reconstituted text functions as affirmation and negation; in its own repetition, it speaks against itself. It functions both as container and contained, figure and ground, and it produces meaning in the fullfillment of expectations and the reversal of expectations.

Models of interpretation and master-slave power relations are intimately bound together in Mirbeau's novel, as we have seen above. If the epic and romance forms behind Le Journal d'une femme de chambre may be heuristically subsumed under the heading of the quest for meaning and identity, then Celestine's story can be seen as the parodic revision of that quest, as an epic form in a fallen world, in which no self-creation or coherence is possible. The detective form, itself a derivation from romance, may be used as an example as it functions in the text. In a number of Celestine's anecdotes, she confronts enigmatic behavior on the part of her employers. In her first story, the entire household shows a peculiar interest in her footwear; in another, the mistress seems strangely concerned with Celestine's figure, her personal hygiene and the condition of her underclothes. In both cases, Celestine is puzzled and intrigued, and only gradually does she fit the clues together. "Je ne saisissais pas le lien qu'il y avait entre mon service et la forme de mon corps… je me demandais si Madame n'etait point un peu loufoque, ou si elle n'avait point dès passions contre nature." The reader makes much more rapid progress in discovering what particular humiliation awaits Celestine; he or she experiences a mildly delicious thrill of sadistic anticipation or masochism, depending on the nature of his or her investment in the character. On occasion, the reader may be surprised, but the clues hold together nonetheless; the picture is all of a piece. On a larger scale, however, the model breaks down. We are given a sufficiency of clues in regard to the murder of little Claire—M. Lanlaire serves as a possible suspect as well as Joseph—and the theft of the silver service, but there will be no ultimate revelation, no unmasking of secrets and no resolution of enigma. Celestine simply cannot put the pieces together. She accepts a basic identity as an adjunct to Joseph, but neither she nor the reader will ever know what Joseph really is.

If Celestine cedes political and sexual power to Joseph, there is still one aspect in which she attempts to retain control. Desire, the will to domination, channels itself into her role as author. It is as author that she can be most powerful and take her revenge the most thoroughly:

Je me souviens de cette aventure comme si elle etait d'hier.… Bien que les détails en soient un peu lestes et meme horribles, je veux la conter … mon intention, en ecrivant ce journal, est de n'employer aucune reticence, pas plus vis-a-vis de moi-meme que vis-a-vis dès autres.… J'entends y mettre au contraire toute la franchise qui est en moi et toute la brutalite qui est dans la vie.…

J'adore servir a table. C'est la qu'on surprend ses maitres dans toute la salete, dans toute la bassesse de leur nature intime. Prudents, d'abord, et se surveillant l'un l'autre, ils en arrivent, peu a peu, a se reveler, a s'etaler tels qu'ils sont, sans fard et sans voiles oubliant qu'il y a autour d'eux quelqu'un qui rode et qui ecoute et qui note leurs tares, leurs bosses morales, les plaies secretes de leur existence, tout ce que peut contenir d'infamies et de reves ignobles le cerveau respectable dès honnetes gens. Ramasser ces aveux, les classer, les etiqueter dans notre memoire, en attendant de s'en faire une arme terrible, au jour dès comptes a rendre, c'est une dès grandes et fortes joies de metier, et c'est la revanche la plus precieuse de nos humiliations.

The prevalent experience of Celestine's life in the Lanlaire household is boredom, which both acts as a setting for her naughty tales and concentrates her desire to talk and to write. Because all the days, all the tasks and all the faces have the same shapeless aspect, the stories she writes down serve to emphasize difference and to give form to her existence. In writing she attains the grammatical status of subject. To the degree that recounting her past gives it shape, Celestine's life begins to have a sense for her. To the degree that she can cast Joseph as a robber-hero of romance, she can deal with his mystery.

Each of Celestine's stories is coherent, complete and closed. Each is told in a tightly controlled and selfconscious style, which may vary with the nature of the anecdote: the simple, poignant story of the gardener is told "sous forme de recit impersonnel"; the lilial and neurasthenic mode of a decadent dinner party is reproduced in Celestine's own discourse: "un fremissement courut autour de la table, et les fleurs elle-memes, et les bijoux sur les chairs, et les cristaux sur la nappe, prirent dès attitudes en harmonie avec l'etat dès ames." However, this demonstration of authorial control, with the fact that Celestine usually has the last word, is all there is to her stories that constitutes a victory. Celestine's eventual rise in society is otherwise not foretold in her stories; in general, they recount moments of defeat and relapse. Her exercises in literary control, in subject status and in revenge are exercises in masochism as well. Within the story of her present progress, the episodic flashback of anecdotes outlines a series of symbolic falls, symbolic deaths. Prospectively, from the moment her desire transforms Joseph into a hero and she accepts a subordinate role as object, she begins to rise, and when she is finally enthroned at Cherbourg, her good health is no longer in question.

In the measure that Celestine imitates the gestures of the romantic hero she meets defeat. She gives way to thefatalite she feels hanging over her and to the sweep of greater forces: "ce qui devait arriver, arriva … et la vie me reprit." As a whole, the text gives evidence of a basic psychological conservatism. It effects a symmetrical return to equilibrium and to established hierarchical power patterns; it submerges anarchism under paternalistic power. It undercuts Celestine's role as formgiver and delegates authority to the Other. Celestine's individual stories created sense in the manipulation of symmetrical patterns, too, but they opened onto a psychological anarchism oriented toward defeat, masochism and death. They were keyed to the terms of sexuality and desire, which function in this text as disruption of given power patterns. The characters in her stories, Celestine says, only have life for her in their vices: "Enlevez-leur les vices qui les soutiennent comme les bandelettes soutiennent les momies … et ce ne sont meme plus dès fantémes, ce n'est plus que de la poussiere, de la cendre … de la mort." Like the "bandages hypogastriques" that hold together Madame's corrupt flesh, vice—as a form of desire—is but a mask for interior rot and death, and life is synonymous with stagnation. Desire, seen as progression and intentional structure, is a movement toward death; life, as the distortion of desire, is the degradation of progression. The desire to control, in C& lestine, to speak and to follow a sentence through to its end, masks an underlying impulse toward the explosion of form and control, but life, as she experiences it, means submission to an exterior force that diverts desire and denies ending.

Joseph Halpern, "Desire and Mask in 'Le journal d'une femme de chambre'," in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1980, pp. 313-26.