A quarter of all the women who died in Paris were maids

Statisticians were foxed by their observation that the highest death rates in the French capital were recorded in the wealthiest neighbourhoods, until they realised who was dying there. The ones coughing behind the grand Haussmannian facades weren’t the owners on the étage noble, but the servants in the chambres de bonne. As Theresa McBride explained in her book, The Domestic Revolution, ‘Close enough to their employers’ apartments on the floors below, the servants were segregated into a society of their own where they need not be seen but could be easily summoned.’ They worked fifteen-to-eighteen-hour days and often had to share their sleeping spaces with other servants. ‘The servant’s room was generally small, with sloping ceilings, dark, poorly ventilated, unheated, dirty, lacking privacy or even safety,’ wrote McBride. The flu may have been democratic, as one French historian pointed out, but the society it struck was not: a quarter of all the women who died in Paris were maids.

L. Spinney, Pale Rider (2017), loc.2,892