Film adaptation

The Maids was adapted for screen by Christopher Miles in 1974. The film stars Glenda Jackson as Solange, Susannah York as Claire, Vivien Merchant as Madame, and Mark Burns as Monsieur.

Before it was filmed for the American Film Theatre, it ran at the Greenwich Theatre, London, with the same principal cast later used for the film version. The cinematographer Douglas Slocombe deliberately implemented many of Genet's theatrical devices for the film. The camera was often static, the settings lush and extravagant.

The film was shown at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, but was not entered into the main competition.


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The man behind "The Maids"

Jean Genet (December 19, 1910 – April 15, 1986) was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Miracle of Rose, The Thief's Journal, and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids, Deathwatch and The Screens.(1910-12-19)

Jean Genet

Genet's mother was a young prostitute who raised him for the first year of his life before putting him up for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provinces by a carpenter and his family, who according to Edmund White's biography, were loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft (although White also suggests that Genet's later claims of a dismal, impoverished childhood were exaggerated to fit his outlaw image).

After the death of his foster mother, Genet was placed with an elderly couple but remained with them less than two years. According to the wife, "he was going out nights and also seemed to be wearing makeup." On one occasion he squandered a considerable sum of money, which they had entrusted him for delivery elsewhere, on a visit to a local fair. For this and other misdemeanors, including repeated acts of vagrancy, he was sent at the age of 15 to Mettray Penal Colony where he was detained between 2 September 1926 and 1 March 1929. In The Miracle of Rose (1946), he gives an account of this period of detention, which ended at the age of 18 when he joined the Foreign Legion. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency (having been caught engaged in a homosexual act) and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe— experiences he recounts in The Thief's Journal (1949). After returning to Paris, France in 1937, Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage, lewd acts and other offenses. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem, "Le condamné à mort," which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944). In Paris, Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published, and in 1949, when Genet was threatened with a life sentence after ten convictions, Cocteau and other prominent figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet would never return to prison.

Jean Genet and Michel Foucault

By 1949 Genet had completed five novels, three plays and numerous poems. His explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality was such that by the early 1950s his work was banned in the United States. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer) entitled Saint Genet (1952) which was anonymously published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the next five years. Between 1955 and 1961 Genet wrote three more plays as well as an essay called "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet", on which hinged Jacques Derrida's analysis of Genet in his seminal work "Glas". During this time he became emotionally attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker. However, following a number of accidents and Abdallah's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression, even attempting suicide.

From the late 1960s, starting with a homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970 the Black Panthers invited him to the USA, where he stayed for three months giving lectures, attending the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and publishing articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in Jordan and the USA, Genet wrote a final lengthy memoir about his experiences, A Prisoner of Love, which would be published posthumously. Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackso, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine. In September 1982 Genet was in Beirut when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published "Quatre heures à Chatila" ("Four Hours in Shatila"), an account of his visit to Shatila after the event. In one of his rare public appearances during the later period of his life, at the invitation of Austrian philosopher Hans Koechler he read from his work during the inauguration of an exhibition on the massacre of Sabra and Shatila organized by the International Progress Organization in Viena, Austria, on 19 December 1983.


Extract from celebrated confrontation between Genet and his interviewers ("vous êtes comme le flic") in BBC Arena documentary 'Saint Genet' (1985).

"An exclusive interview with Jean Genet (1910-1986), one of the great figures of 20th century literature. His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, written in prison, moved Jean-Paul Sartre to declare him a saint and a martyr. Genet's plays, including The Maids and The Balcony, revolutionized post-war theatre while savagely attacking every conceivable bourgeois assumption. His novels, explicit and passionate celebrations of homosexual love, were widely banned. Genet remains a self-declared outcast, unrepentant about his past as a thief and prostitute, still questioning society's expectations. In an impassioned outburst, he denounces even the interview itself as a "piece of bad theatre" and turns the tables on his interrogators, asking them some uncomfortable questions of his own." - FIFA film festival web site

Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead on April 15, 1986 in a hotel room in Paris. Genet may have fallen on the floor and fatally hit his head. He is buried in the Spanish Cemetery in Larache, Morocco.

The true story of the Papin sisters

The Maids is a play inspired by the true story of the infamous Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933.

Christine and Léa had grown up in villages south of Le Mans. They had another sister, Emilia, who became a nun. Both of them spent time in institutions as a result of the breakdown of their parents' marriage. As they grew older, they worked as maids in various Le Mans homes, preferring, whenever possible, to work together.

From about 1926, they worked as live-in maids in the home of Monsieur Rene Lancelin, a retired solicitor, in Rue Bruyere, Le Mans. The family was also made up of his wife and adult daughter, who was still living with her parents (another daughter was married). The two maids were extremely quiet and retiring young women, who kept to themselves and appeared to have no interest but each other.

Christine (right) and Lea (left) Papin

On 2 February 1933, Monsieur Lancelin was supposed to meet his wife and daughter for dinner at the home of a friend. When they did not turn up, he was concerned and went back to their home. He was unable to get into the house because the doors were locked on the inside, but he could see the glow of a candle through the window of the maids' room. He then went to the police and one of them got into the house by climbing over the back wall. Inside, he found the bodies of Madame Lancelin and her daughter. They had both been beaten to the point of being unrecognisable, and one of the daughter's eyes was on the floor nearby. Madame Lancelin's eyes had been gouged out and were found in the folds of the scarf around her neck. The two maids were found in their room upstairs, naked in bed together. They confessed to killing the two women. The weapons used had been a kitchen knife, a hammer and a pewter pot that had stood at the top of the stairs.

The sisters were placed in prison and separated from each other. Christine became extremely distressed because she could not see Léa, but at one stage the authorities relented and let her see her sister. She threw herself at Léa and spoke to her in ways that suggested a sexual relationship. In July 1933, Christine experienced a kind of "fit", or episode, in which she tried to gouge her own eyes out and had to be put in a straitjacket. She then made a statement to the investigating magistrate, in which she said that on the day of the murders she had experienced an episode like the one she had just had in prison, and this was what precipitated the murders.

The Papin sisters during the trial

The case had a huge impact on the public and was debated furiously by the intelligentsia. Some people considered that the murders had been the result of "exploitation of the workers", which would be unsurprising considering that the maids worked fourteen-hour days, with only half a day off each week.
The women went on trial in September 1933. Crowds gathered outside Le Mans courthouse and police had to be brought in to control them. During the trial, the girls stated that an argument had developed between Christine and the Lancelin women. Léa had then joined in the fray, and Christine had yelled at her to "tear her eyes out" in reference to Madam Lancelin. The daughter had received similar treatment, and Christine had then gone to the kitchen to get weapons that were used to finish the women off. The blows and hacks were directed almost entirely to their heads, virtually obliterating their faces. The maids gouged the eyes out with their fingers.

 Medical testimony given during the trial was that Christine, who was of average intelligence, was completely the dominant person in the relationship. Léa, who was of low intelligence, had been dominated to the point where her personality had virtually disappeared into Christine's personality. There was also a history of mental illness in the family, and their father was alleged to have raped the other sister, Emilia. The two girls were inevitably found guilty and Christine was sentenced to death. Léa was given a sentence of ten years imprisonment because she had been so dominated by Christine.

Christine's death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, which was normal in the case of women. While in prison, she showed acute signs of madness and an intense longing for her sister. She became severely depressed because of being separated from Léa, and frequently would not eat. Before long, she was transferred to a mental asylum at Rennes, where she died of cachexia on 18 May 1937.

Léa Papin was released from prison in 1941, her sentence having been reduced to eight years because of good behaviour. She then lived in the town of Nantes, where she was joined by her mother and earned her livelihood as a hotel maid under a false name. She was thought to have died in 1982, but this was questioned in 2000 by the French filmmaker Claud Ventura. Ventura made a documentary film, En Quete des Soeurs Papin (In Search of the Papin Sisters), in which he claimed to have found Léa alive in a hospice in France. She was partly paralysed as the result of a stroke and could not speak, though she was shown in the film. This Léa died in 2001. It is not known if Ventura had documentation to prove the identity of his Léa.

The Papin sisters became an inspiration for a number of books and films:



Trailer for "Sister My Sister", a 1994 film, with Joely Richardson as Christine and Jodhi May as Lea.





Trailer for "Murderous Maids", a French 2000 film ("Les blessures assassines"), with Sylvie Testud as Christine and Julie-Marie Parmentier as Lea.