CRITIQUE – The novelist orchestrates, in verse and prose, the poignant confrontation between a broken face and her domestic worker.
The “masters” have their whims, the mother had warned. They like to talk, read, write, the girl quickly noticed. Both mother and daughter are good. Or rather bonniches, as the one who gives her voice to Bérénice Pichat’s novel reminds us. She says it without resentment, it’s not like her. She is rather philosophical, of a busy and pragmatic nature. That’s how it is. There are people we call Madam and Sir and there are those who are in that gray zone, interchangeable shadows slipping into homes early in the morning to rekindle the embers of the fire, prepare breakfast and polish the furniture. She is one of them.
The little maid, in the eponymous book by Bérénice Pichat, speaks in verse. A way of scrolling through words like those that describe everything she takes in her household basket from everyone: broom, mops, rags, vinegar, brush. They burst forth as she trots from house to house, while she bricks floors in…
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