Célestine (Mirbeau)

Célestine
First appearance	The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900)
Created by	Octave Mirbeau
Information
Species	Human
Gender	Female
Occupation	Chambermaid
Nationality	France

Célestine is the main character and the narrator of the French novel by Octave Mirbeau, The Diary of a Chambermaid (fr. Le Journal d'une femme de chambre), 1900.

Célestine is a lively housemaid, born at Audierne, in Brittany, the daughter of a sailor. Orphaned at a very early age, she lost her virginity at the age of twelve at the hands of the repulsive Cléophas Biscouille, in return for an orange. The novelist leaves Célestine without a surname, just like Clara in The Torture Garden (Le Jardin des supplices, 1899). As a result of working in a succession of fashionable Parisian houses, Célestine has acquired a veneer of manners, she knows how to dress, and she handles the French language well. Above all, in the course of some twenty years of exploitation at the hands of various odious employers, her sharp sense of observation has equipped her to identify all the moral failings of the well-to-do, and she makes use of her personal diary to avenge herself of her humiliations by wrenching off their mask of respectability to expose their essential nastiness: "It's not my fault", she says, "if their souls, stripped naked of their veils, exhale such a strong odour of corruption".

As the novel opens, we find Célestine, bored to death, working in the home of the Lanlaires at Le Mesnil-Roy, a town on the river Eure, modelled on Pont-de-l'Arche. Her only distraction comes on Sundays, when she is able to listen to the village gossip in a ‘dirty little haberdasher's' house, where she can chat with Rose, the servant-cum-mistress of the Lanlaire's ridiculous neighbour, Captain Mauger. After Rose's death, the captain offers Célestine the opportunity to take her place; but she repels this grotesque puppet of a man, along with all his hateful and debauched habits.

By contrast, she is fascinated by the mysterious Joseph, the gardener-coachman – a notorious antisemite and an extreme antidreyfusard who, to begin with, disturbs and intrigues Célestine a great deal, and on whom she tries to spy for a while. She even gets it into her head that Joseph has violated and savagely killed a little girl, Claire, in the local woods. And yet, far from being horrified by this, she finds herself even more attracted to him, to the point where she is prepared to follow him "into crime" (these are the closing words of her diary). When Joseph manages to get away with stealing the Lanlaires' silver – which will set him up in his own business and help to make him well-off – she unhesitatingly accepts his invitation to follow him to Cherbourg, where she marries him and helps him to run the "little café of his dreams", which frequented by the town's nationalists. On becoming an employer in her own right, she misses no opportunity to bully her own serving-girls.

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