in spite of familiarities, smiles, and presents, places between our mistresses and ourselves an impassable abyss, a whole world of sullen hatreds, suppressed desires, and future vengeances,--a disproportion which is rendered every minute more perceptible, more humiliating, more disgracing, by the caprices, and even by the kindnesses, of those beings that know no justice and feel no love,--the rich. Did you ever think for a moment of the mortal and legitimate hatred, of the murderous--yes, murderous--desires with which we must be filled when we hear one of our masters, in trying to describe something base and ignoble, cry out in our presence, with a disgust that casts us so violently outside the pale of humanity: "He has the soul of a domestic; that is the sentiment of a domestic." Then what do you expect us to become in these hells? Do these mistresses really imagine that I should not like to wear fine dresses, ride in fine carriages, have a gay time with lovers, and have servants of my own? They talk to us of devotion, of honesty, of fidelity. Why; but it would choke you to death, my little chippies! Once, in the Rue Cambon ... how many of these places I have had!... the masters were marrying their daughter. They gave a grand reception in the evening, at which the wedding-presents were exhibited,--enough of them to fill a furniture-van. By way of jest I asked Baptiste, the _valet de chambre:_ "Well, Baptiste, and you? What is your present?" "My present?" exclaimed Baptiste, with a shrug of his shoulders. "Yes, tell me, what is it?" "A can of petroleum lighted under their bed. That is my present." It was a smart answer. Moreover, this Baptiste was an astonishing man in politics. "And yours, Célestine?" he asked, in his turn. "Mine?" I contracted my two hands into the shape of talons, and, pretending to claw a face ferociously, I answered: "My nails, in their eyes!" The butler, without being asked, remarked quietly, while arranging flowers and fruits in a glass dish with his fastidious fingers: "I would be satisfied to sprinkle their faces in church with a bottle of good vitriol." And he stuck a rose between two pears. Oh! yes, how we love them! The extraordinary thing is that these revenges are not taken more frequently. When I think that a cook, for instance, holds her masters' lives in her hands every day; a pinch of arsenic instead of salt, a little dash of strychnine instead of vinegar, and the thing is done. Well, no, it must be that we have servitude in our very blood! I have no education, and I write what I think and what I have seen. Well, I say that all this is not beautiful. I say that from the moment when any one installs another under his roof, though he were the last of poor devils, or the lowest of disreputable girls, he owes them protection, he owes them happiness. I say also that, if the master does not give it to us, we have a right to take it, even from his strong-box, even from his blood.