You Have the Day

Fanta Lezoualc'h, of Saint-Trémeur, hires herself out by the day to the farms around her to earn a few sous, so she can see to her own household only in the evening. One Saturday, coming home, she tells herself that she must wash her husband's shirt and her two children's: they will have time to dry before high mass, "car la nuit promet d'être belle," for the night promises to be fine. And there is indeed "un magnifique clair de lune," a magnificent moon. Fanta goes down to the river and sets to soaping, scrubbing and beating. She does not hear another washerwoman arrive, a woman slender as a doe, with a huge bundle of linen on her head. "Fanta Lezoualc'h, tu as le jour pour toi ; tu ne devrais pas me prendre ma place, la nuit." You have the day for yourself; you should not take my place at night.

The tale is called "Celle qui lavait la nuit," she who washed at night, and it is chapter LXVI of Anatole Le Braz's La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne, published in Paris in 1893. At the foot of it Le Braz names his teller: one Créac'h, at Plougastel-Daoulas, in October 1890. The stranger is a Maouès-noz, a "femme de nuit," a night woman. She says she was only joking, offers to help, and sends Fanta home to eat her supper: she will bring the washing back herself. Fanta's husband knows at once what she has met. He has her hang the trivet on its nail, sweep the house, stand the broom in a corner head down, wash her feet and throw the water on the doorstep. When the night woman knocks and no one answers, she calls on the objects one by one to open. The trivet says it is hanging up, the broom that it is upside down, the foot-water that it is now only a few splashes on the step. She goes off grumbling. In the new two-volume edition of 1902 the tale is reprinted with only minor variants.

The night washerwomen are among the most widespread legends in Brittany, and beyond it. Émile Souvestre was already telling of them in 1845, and in his notes to the 1893 edition Léon Marillier points to them in several French provinces and remembers hearing the story as a child in the Autunois. In 1996 the scholar Daniel Giraudon devoted a paper to them, "Lavandières de jour, lavandières de nuit," headed with the name of the CRBC, the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique, and built partly on testimony he collected in Brittany himself. It is Giraudon who sets the night woman's words beside a sentence recorded at Plourivo: "La nuit, le lavoir appartient à la lavandière de nuit." At night the wash-place belongs to the night washerwoman. In a footnote he adds an unpublished note by Le Braz, known to him through a private communication: "Il n'est pas permis de travailler au clair de lune. C'est le soleil qui est fait pour éclairer le travail et la lune pour veiller sur ceux qui dorment." Working by moonlight is not allowed: the sun is made to light work, the moon to watch over those who sleep.

A little earlier in the same paper there is another testimony, given in Breton and partly in French by the granddaughter of a woman from Yvias, with the Breton parts translated by Giraudon: "Ma grand-mère s'était levée, pensant que c'était le jour, car la lune était claire." My grandmother had got up thinking it was day, because the moon was bright. She went to wash at the Gwaz ar venek wash-place and found another woman already there. She had never seen her. The woman had no box, the wooden box washerwomen knelt in, but knelt on the stone, said nothing, and kept on scrubbing and rinsing. The grandmother took fright, picked up her box and went home, and, her granddaughter says, never went back. The granddaughter ends: "c'est vrai, c'est vrai, puisque c'est ma grand-mère elle même qui me l'a dit." It's true, it's true, because my grandmother told me so herself. Giraudon quotes the testimony for another purpose: for him, what arouses suspicion is the tireless zeal with which night washerwomen work, and the stranger keeps scrubbing without stopping or speaking. He does not dwell on the moonlight.

So much for the documents; from here on, this is our reading. In both stories what carries a living woman into the hour of the dead is not a place, since the wash-place is the same by day and by night, but light. Fanta washes at night because it is the only time she has, and the moon makes that night bright and fit for washing; the grandmother from Yvias, by the same light, mistakes the night for day. If the sun marks the boundary, as Le Braz's note has it, the moon imitates it well enough to deceive: there is light enough to work by, but it is not the light of work. And the night woman's line, "tu as le jour pour toi," said to a day labourer, sounds almost like mockery. Fanta's day belongs to the farms that pay her; the night is the only time she has left.

There is also a detail of form. The night woman addresses Fanta as tu when she claims her place, and still when she offers to help; while they wash side by side she switches to vous: "Vous avez dure vie, Fanta Lezoualc'h?" Yours is a hard life? Fanta says vous to her throughout. Le Braz collected his tales in Breton and published them in French, so we cannot tell whether the shift was in Créac'h's telling or is the translator's choice.

Nothing happened to the grandmother from Yvias: no linen to wring, no chase. She only saw, by the light of the moon, that at that hour the wash-place was already taken.