A French chambermaid, who has served in Paris, in the houses ofthe nobility, the bourgeois, and professional people, finallyenters the service of a rich couple living in the country,and there begins to keep a diary. In describing the events ofher daily life and the people about her, she is frequentlyreminded of episodes in her past, and digresses to relate them.Thus her diary becomes a piquant panorama of social life andinstitutions. It is a terrific social exposure, a grim socialsatire, crammed with humor, bitterness, and truth. It has beendescribed by a French critic as "an attempt to show that nearlyall the masters are low-lived wretches, and that nearly all theservants are as near like them as they know how to be."
I offer you my sincere apology for mutilating your brave and admirablework. In publishing it in English, I have omitted certain portions,much against my inclination. Perhaps you, who live in a land thatenjoys a greater freedom of the press than we know in the UnitedStates, will wonder why I was forced to do this. Let me, then, explainto you that the men whose ugly souls your Célestine does not hesitateto lay bare are types, to a greater or less extent, of most of the menwhom we place in our halls of legislation to make our laws, in ourhalls of administration to execute them, and in our halls of so-calledjustice to interpret and enforce them, and that among the laws whichthey have made are some, aimed ostensibly at the suppression of obsceneliterature, that are really intended to protect from exposure their ownobscene lives and those of others of their ilk, and to protect fromattack the social evils and political institutions upon which theythrive. These lawless law-givers hope, by obscuring the sufficientlysharp line that divides the vulgar appeal to eroticism from theearnest narrative of the honest thinker and the truthful picture ofthe conscientious artist, to brand both with the same condemnation,and thus secure immunity for those who, by all the various forms ofexploitation, deal, as Célestine bluntly says, in human meat. This iswhy it is unsafe to publish in the English language those portions ofher diary which I have omitted. But, if, as I hope and believe, theportions that are here printed shall do something to change the publicopinion that sanctions the claim of these law-givers to legislativepower, I am sure that you will excuse a liberty which under othercircumstances would be an inexcusable act of vandalism.
BENJ. R. TUCKER.
My dear friend:
For two reasons, very strong and very precise, it is my wish toinscribe your name at the head of these pages. First, that you may knowhow dear your name is to me. Second,—and I say it with a tranquilpride,—because you will like this book. And you will like it, in spiteof all its faults, because it is a book free from hypocrisy, becauseit portrays life, life as you and I understand it. I have always in mymind's eye, my dear Huret, many of the faces, so strangely human, whichyou have arrayed in procession in a long series of social and literarystudies. They haunt me. It is because no one better than you, and moreprofoundly 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 againin these pages that sadness which makes lofty souls laugh, thatcomicality which makes them weep.
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