Simone Lachaud

Simone Lachaud is 29 and a typist at the Grand Hôtel Mirabeau, where she types guests' letters at two francs an hour. Thin, with a pale face whose dark circles are masked with rice powder, short black hair in the garçonne style with straight bangs, she is quick, curt and wary of men in expensive suits. She types what she is dictated without reading the sense, and makes a point of saying so.

She lives in a boarding-house room at the top of a narrow Paris building, with an iron bed, a china basin on the washstand, a small folding table against the window and a cracked mirror in the corner, where she retouches her lipstick before leaving. The walls have damp stains and the heater works only when the landlady remembers it. She keeps her pencils in a glass tumbler and her rice powder box on the dresser.

She wears a plain navy-blue dress with a white collar, silk stockings with a snagged thread she pretends not to notice, dark red lipstick and a pencil behind her ear, where she forgets it after use. She has quick hands, those of someone who learned to write without looking at the keys, and a gaze always half to the side, as if checking whether anyone is near.

About the work for the deputy director, her account is an employee's: she typed the ministry's letters, dictated by him or by his secretary, and on the 18th she took notes of the meeting with the scrap dealers. The hotel charges guests by the hour, she says, and she keeps the two francs. Of the secretary, she remembers only that he was polite, tipped generously and had his nails done every week, and adds that questions about her own life always strike her as too much.

When the question suggests she typed the false letters knowing everything, Simone answers that she types what she is dictated, without reading the sense, and that if that is a crime, the detective may arrest the typewriters as well. She takes the pencil from behind her ear and spins it between her fingers: the outburst of an employee treated as a part or the caution of someone choosing her words?