People have no idea of all the annoyances to which domestics are subjected, or of the fierce and eternal exploitation under which they suffer. Now the masters, now the keepers of employment-bureaus, now the charitable institutions, to say nothing of the comrades, some of whom are capable of terrible meanness. And nobody takes any interest in anybody else. Each one lives, grows fat, and is entertained by the misery of some one poorer than himself. Scenes change, settings are shifted, you traverse social surroundings that are different and even hostile, but everywhere you find the same appetites and passions. In the cramped apartments of the _bourgeois_ and in the elegant mansion of the banker you meet the same filth, and come in contact with the inexorable. The result of it all, for a girl like me, is that she is conquered in advance, wherever she may go and whatever she may do. The poor are the human manure in which grow the harvests of life, the harvests of joy which the rich reap, and which they misuse so cruelly against us. They pretend that there is no more slavery. Oh! what nonsense? And what are domestics, then, if not slaves? Slaves in fact, with all that slavery involves of moral vileness, inevitable corruption, and hate-engendering rebellion. Servants learn vice in the houses of their masters. Entering upon their duties pure and innocent,--some of them,--they are quickly made rotten by contact with habits of depravity. They see nothing but vice, they breathe nothing but vice, they touch nothing but vice. Consequently, from day to day, from minute to minute, they get more and more used to it, being defenceless against it, being obliged, on the contrary, to serve it, to care for it, to respect it. And their revolt arises from the fact that they are powerless to satisfy it, and to break down all the obstacles in the way of its natural expansion. Oh! it is extraordinary. They demand of us all the virtues, complete resignation, all the sacrifices, all the heroisms, and only those vices that flatter the vanity of the masters, and which yield them a profit. And all this in return for contempt and wages ranging from thirty-five to ninety francs a month. No, it is too much! Add that we live in perpetual distress of mind, in a perpetual struggle between the ephemeral semi-luxury of the places that we fill, and the anguish which the loss of these places causes us. Add that we are continually conscious of the wounding suspicions that follow us everywhere,--bolting doors, padlocking drawers, marking bottles, numbering cakes and prunes, and continually putting us to shame by invasive examination of our hands, our pockets, and our trunks. For there is not a door, not a closet, not a drawer, not a bottle, not an article, that does not cry out to us: "Thief! thief! thief!" And also the continuous vexation caused by that terrible inequality, that frightful disproportion in our destinies, which,