Throwback Thursday: ‘The Shepherdess’ by JM Landels

I was born in a small hameau near Paris. Maman was a bergère — a shepherdess, is what you’d say. I suppose Papa was a shepherd too, once, but he died when I was very young. The stories and paintings, they make the life of a shepherdess seem quaint and romantic, lolling about the hills all day, shepherd boys and noblemen alike lying at your feet and making cow eyes, with the sun shining and the meadows all in bloom.

It’s nothing like that, let me tell you. It’s trudge, trudge, trudge up the bloody hills all day, knee-deep in briars, mud, and cow shit, looking for one lost animal too stupid to stick with the rest. Or shearing time, when you stink of sweat and lanolin, and get butted, stepped on, and kicked by the ungrateful creatures for your troubles. 

When the daily toil of chasing shit-for-brains moutons had worn her down to nothing but a handful of bones strung together with sinew and bad temper, Maman decided it was time for me to find work. Not that I hadn’t been working — looking after mes petites sœurs, and Maman, and the sheep when Maman fell sick, which was often enough to be more often than not — but it was outside work that was needed, to bring new coins into the family purse.

Maman didn’t have enough money to pay for an apprenticeship, so I took on unskilled labour, carrying laundry from the house of the bourgeois to the laundress, and delivering the back-breaking bundles of clean, starched garments back again. Then I found a seamstress, and instead of laundry delivered bolts of cloth and new shirts, and when her assistant became heavy with the baker’s whelp, I took over cutting bolts of cloth — easier than shearing sheep, since cloth seldom fights back — working the iron, sewing straight seams, and eventually measuring gentlemen and ladies for their underthings.

And so it was, as I took the side seam of the Marquise de Gentilly, that she noted how very soft my hands were for a tailor. For I still helped my mother and sisters at shearing time each spring, and the fat in the wool still worked its magic. I even kept a little pot of lanolin, scented with lilies of the valley, to ease my fingers after a day at the irons and needle. I showed the stuff to the marquise, who bought the half-used pot for two sols and asked me to make another pot for her in time for next week’s fitting.

I soon took regular orders from all the bourgeoisie and noble ladies for the grease. I scented it with whatever fruits and flowers I could find in season: lilac and pear blossom in the spring; peonies and roses in the summer; and rosemary, balsam, and pine in the cold months. I saved my sols to buy costly oranges and lemons, drying the precious peel and storing it with rare herbs, like lavender and jasmine.

When I realized I made more money from a single pot of cream than from an entire day of stabbing myself with a needle and ruining my eyes by candlelight, I packed up my second skirt, my linens, and my stock of creams and dried plants, rented a handcart for far more than it was worth, and set off on the long road through the faubourgs towards Paris.