Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

With her, there was no shrinking from the workhouse, as with the respectable poor, "Ce n'est pas fait pour les chiens," she reasoned, and looked upon it as an asylum held in reserve.

Her boast that she had seen everything was no exaggeration, her everything meaning the hideous side of life which those who see only the other try so hard to shut their eyes to. "What would you have?" she asked me more than once, "I was a bastard and a foundling"; as if with such a beginning, it would have been an inconsistency on her part to turn out any better than she was. That she had started life as a little lost package of humanity, left at the door of a house for les enfants trouvés not far from Boulogne, never caused her shame and regret. From a visit paid by her mother to the Institution during her infancy, there could remain no doubt of her illegitimacy, but it was a source of pleasure to her, and also of much agreeable speculation.

"How can I be sure," she said to me, "that, though my mother was a cook, my father might not have been a préfet, or even a prince?"

For practical purposes she knew no parents save the peasants who brought her up. The State in France, thrifty as the people, makes the children abandoned to it a source of profit to the hard-working poor. Clémentine was put out to nurse. The one spark of genuine affection she ever showed was for the woman to whose care she fell, and of whom she always spoke as ma mère, with a tenderness very different from her giggling adoration of the little Ernest. Incessant labour was the rule in ma mère's house, and food was not too abundant, but of what there was Clémentine had her share, though I fancy the scarcity then was the origin of the terrible hunger that consumed her throughout her life. About this hunger her story revolved, so that, while she talked of the past, I could seldom get far away from it. She recalled little else of the places the Institution found for her as servant. The State in France is as wise as it is thrifty, and does not demoralize its foundlings by free gifts, but, when the time comes, makes them work, appropriating their wages until it has been paid back the money they have cost it.

Clémentine went into service young. She also went into it hungry, and life became a never-ending struggle for food. In one place she was reduced to such straits that she devoured a dish of poisoned meat prepared for the stray cats of the neighbourhood, and, though it brought her almost to death's door, she could still recall it as a feast. In another, a small country grocery store, she would steal down in the night, trembling with fear, to hunt for bits of candy and crackers, and, safe in bed again, would have to fight for them with the rats that shared her garret. And her tale of this period grew more miserable and squalid with every new stage, until she reached the dreadful climax when, still a child herself, she brought a little girl into the world to share her hunger. She had the courage to laugh when she told me of her wandering, half-starved, back to la bonne mère, who took her in when her time came, and kept the baby. She could laugh, too, when she recalled the wrath of M. le Directeur at the Institution, who sent for her, and scolded her, giving her a few sharp raps with his cane.

If to Clémentine her tragedy was a laughing matter, it was not for me to weep over it. But I was glad when she got through with this period and came to the next, which had in it more of pure comedy than enlivened most of her confidences. For once she was of age, and her debt to the Institution settled in full, she was free not only to work for herself, but to claim a percentage of the money she had been making during the long years of apprenticeship; and this percentage amounting to five hundred francs, and Clémentine never having seen so much money before, her imagination was stirred by the vastness of her wealth, and she insisted on being paid in five-franc pieces. She had to get a basket to hold them all, and with it on her arm she started off in search of adventure. This, I think, was the supreme moment in her life.

Her adventures began in the third-class carriage of a train for Boulogne, which might seem a mild beginning to most people, but was full of excitement for Clémentine. She dipped her hands into the silver, and jingled it, and displayed it to everybody, with the vanity of a child showing off its new frock. The only wonder was that any of the five-franc pieces were still in the basket when she got to Boulogne. There they drew to her a group of young men and women who were bound for England to make their fortunes, and who persuaded her to join them. Her head was not completely turned by her wealth, for she crossed with them on the bâteau aux lapins, which she explained as the cheapest boat upon which anything but beasts and vegetables could find passage. At Folkestone, where they landed, she had no difficulty in getting a place as scullery maid. But washing up was as dull in England as in France, a poor resource for anybody with a basketful of five-franc pieces. One of the young men who had crossed with her agreed that it was a waste of time to work when there was money to spend, and they decided for a life of leisure together. The question of marriage apparently did not enter into the arrangement. They were content to remain des unis, in M. Rod's phrase, and their union was celebrated by a few weeks of riotous living. The chicken their own Henry IV wished for all his subjects filled the daily pot, beer flowed like water, they could have paid for cake had bread failed; for the first time in her life Clémentine forgot what it was to be hungry.

It was delightful while it lasted, and I do not believe that she ever regretted having had her fling when the chance came. But the basket grew lighter and lighter, and all too soon barely enough five-franc pieces were left in it to carry them up to London. There, naturally, they found their way to the Quartier. The man picked up an odd job or two, Clémentine scrubbed, washed, waited, did any and everything by which a few pence could be earned. The pot was now empty, beer ceased to flow, bread sometimes was beyond their means, and she was hungrier than ever. In the course of the year her little Ernest was added to the family, and there was no bonne mère in London to relieve her of the new burden. For a while Clémentine could not work; when she could, there was no work to be had. Nor could the man get any more jobs, though I fancy his hunt for them was not too strenuous. Life became a stern, bread-hunting sort of business, and I think at moments Clémentine almost wished herself back in the garret with the rats, or in the garden where dishes of poisoned meat were sometimes to be stolen. The landlord threatened, starvation stared them in the face. Hunger is ever the incentive to enterprise, and Ernest's father turned Clémentine on the streets.

I must do her the justice to say that, of all her adventures, this was the one least to her liking. That she had fallen so low did not shock her; she looked upon it as part of the inevitable scheme of things: but left to herself, she would have preferred another mode of earning her living. After I had been told of this period of horrors, I could never hear Clémentine's high, shrill treble and giggle without a shudder, for they were then part of her stock-in-trade, and she went on the streets in short skirts with her hair down her back. For months she wallowed in the gutter, at the mercy of the lowest and the most degraded, insulted, robbed, despised, and if she attempted to rebel, bullied back to her shameful trade by a man who had no thought save for the few pitiful pence she could bring to him out of it. The only part of the affair that pleased her was the ending—in prison after a disgraceful street brawl. She was really at heart an adventuress, and the opportunity to see for the first time the inside of the panier à salade, as she called the prison van, was welcomed by her in the light of a new and exciting adventure. Then, in prison itself, the dress with the arrows could be adjusted becomingly, warders and fellow prisoners could be made to laugh by her antics, and if she could have wished for more to eat, it was a great thing not to have to find the means to pay for what she got.

She was hardly out of prison when Ernest's father chanced upon a woman who could provide for him more liberally, and Clémentine was again a free agent. The streets knew her no more, though for an interval the workhouse did. This was the crisis when, with the shrewdness acquired in the London slums, she learned something of the English law to her own advantage, and through the courts compelled the father to contribute to the support of his son. The weekly three shillings and sixpence paid for a room. For food she had to work. With prison behind her, she was afraid to ask for a place in respectable houses, and I should not care to record the sinks of iniquity and squalid dens where her shrill treble and little girl's giggle were heard. Ernest was dumped down of a morning upon any friendly neighbour who would keep an eye on him, until, somehow or other, la vieille grandmère appeared upon the scene and Clémentine once more had two to feed and the daily problem of her own hunger to face.