For two reasons, very strong and very precise, it is my wish to inscribe your name at the head of these pages. First, that you may know how dear your name is to me. Second,--and I say it with a tranquil pride,--because you will like this book. And you will like it, in spite of all its faults, because it is a book free from hypocrisy, because it portrays life, life as you and I understand it. I have always in my mind's eye, my dear Huret, many of the faces, so strangely human, which you have arrayed in procession in a long series of social and literary studies. They haunt me. It is because no one better than you, and more profoundly than you, has felt, when surveying these human masqueraders, how sad and how comical a thing it is to be a man. May you find again in these pages that sadness which makes lofty souls laugh, that comicality which makes them weep. OCTAVE MIRBEAU. May, 1900. _The book that I publish under this title, "A Chambermaid's Diary," was really written by Mlle. Célestine R------, chambermaid. When I was asked to revise the manuscript, to correct it, and to rewrite some parts of it, I refused at first, thinking, not without reason, that, just as it was, in all its disorder, this diary had a certain originality, a special savor, and that I could only render it commonplace by putting into it anything of myself. But Mlle. Célestine R------ was very pretty. She insisted. I finally yielded, for, after all, I am a man._ _I confess that I was wrong. In doing this work which she asked of me,--that is, in adding here and there some accents to this book,--I am very much afraid that I have impaired its somewhat corrosive grace, diminished its sad power, and, above all, substituted simple literature for the emotion and life which these pages contained._ _I say this to answer in advance the objections which certain grave and learned, and how noble, critics will not fail to raise._ _O. M._ A CHAMBERMAID'S DIARY I _September 14._ To-day, September 14, at three o'clock in the afternoon, in mild, gray, and rainy weather, I have entered upon my new place. It is the twelfth in two years. Of course I say nothing of the places which I held in previous years. It would be impossible for me to count them. Ah! I can boast of having seen interiors and faces, and dirty souls. And the end is not yet. Judging from the really extraordinary and dizzy way in which I have rolled, here and there, successively, from houses to employment-bureaus, and from employment-bureaus to houses, from the Bois de Boulogne to the Bastille, from the Observatory to Montmartre, from the Ternes to the Gobelins, everywhere, without ever succeeding in establishing myself anywhere, the masters in these days must be hard to please. It is incredible.