Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (11 page)

My sister benefited, as a humble vassal, from the supreme sovereignty which I conferred upon myself: she never disputed my divine right. I used to think that if I had to share that regal authority, my life would lose all meaning. In my class there were twins who understood one another in a way that was almost miraculous. I used to wonder how one could resign oneself to living with a double; I should have been, it seemed to me, only half a person; and I even had the feeling that my experiences, repeated identically in another would have ceased to be my own. A twin would have deprived my existence of the very thing that gave it value: its glorious singularity.

During my first eight years, I knew only one child for whom I had any respect: luckily for me, he did not turn up his nose at me. My bewhiskered great-aunt often used her grandchildren as models for her heroes in
La Poupée Modèle.
Their names were Titite and Jacques; Titite was three years older than me, Jacques only six months. They had lost their father in a motoring accident; their mother, who had married again, lived at Châteauvillain. During my eighth summer, we paid a rather long visit to my Aunt Alice. The two houses were almost next to one another. I attended the lessons given to my cousins by a sweet, blonde-haired young lady; not as advanced as they were, I was dazzled by Jacques' brilliant compositions, by his knowledge, his assurance. With his rosy cheeks, his amber eyes, his curly hair bright as freshly fallen horse-chestnuts, he was a very good-looking little boy. On the first floor landing there was a bookcase from which he would select books for me; sitting on the stairs, we would read side by side, I
Gulliver's Travels
and he
Popular Astronomy.
When we went down into the garden, it was always he who invented our games. He had begun the construction of an aeroplane which he had already baptized
Old Charlie,
in honour of Guynemer; in order to keep him supplied
with materials, I collected all the empty tins I could find in the streets.

The aeroplane had not even begun to take shape, but Jacques' prestige did not suffer. When in Paris, he did not live in an ordinary building, but in an old house on the boulevard Montparnasse where stained-glass windows were made; on the street level were the offices, and above them the flat; the workshops occupied the next floor and the display rooms were at the very top; it was his house, and he did the honours when I visited him with all the authority of a master of men. He would explain to me the processes in the making of stained glass, and point out the differences between stained glass and ordinary vulgar painted stuff; he used to talk to the workmen in a kindly, concerned tone of voice, and I would listen open-mouthed to this little boy who already seemed to have a whole team of grown-ups under his authority: he inspired me with awe. He treated grown-ups as if he were on an equal footing with them, and he even shocked me a little when he treated his grandmother rather roughly. He usually despised girls, and so I valued his friendship all the more. ‘Simone is a precocious child,' he had declared. The word pleased me vastly. One day with his own hands he made a real stained-glass window whose blue, red, and white lozenges were framed in lead; on it, in black letters, he had inscribed a dedication: ‘For Simone.' Never had I received such a flattering gift. We decided that we were ‘married in the sight of God' and I called Jacques ‘my fiancé'. We spent our honeymoon on the merry-go-round's painted horses in the Luxembourg Gardens. I took our engagement very seriously. Yet when he was away I hardly ever thought about him. I was glad to see him when he came back, but I never missed him at all.

And so the picture I have of myself round about the years of discretion is of a well-behaved little girl, happy and somewhat self-opinionated. I remember one or two things which do not fit into this portrait and lead me to suppose that it wouldn't have taken very much to upset my self-assurance. When I was eight, I was no longer as hale and hearty as I had been when younger, but had become sickly and timorous. During the classes in gymnastics which I have talked about, I was togged out in a horrid skimpy pair of tights, and I had overheard one of my aunts saying to Mama: ‘She looks like a little monkey.' Towards the end of the course, the teacher made me join a large mixed class, a group of boys and girls
accompanied by a governess. The girls wore pale blue jersey costumes, with short skirts, elegantly pleated; their shining hair, their voices, their manners, everything about them was impeccable. Yet they ran and jumped and laughed and somersaulted with the freedom and daring which I had always associated with street-urchins. I suddenly felt I was clumsy, ugly, a milksop: a little monkey; that was certainly how those children must have looked upon me; they despised me; even worse, they ignored me. I was the helpless witness of their triumph and of my own extinction.

A few months later, a friend of my parents, whose children I didn't care for very much, took me with them to Villers-sur-Mer. It was the first time I had been away from my sister and I felt mutilated. I found the sea boring; the baths filled me with horror: the water took my breath away; I was terrified. One morning I lay weeping in my bed. Madame Rollin, in some embarrassment, took me on her knees and asked me why I was crying; it seemed to me that we were both acting in a play, and I didn't know my lines: no, no one had been bullying me, everyone was very nice. The truth was that, separated from my family, deprived of those affections which assured me of my personal worth, cut off from the familiar routine which defined my place in the world, I no longer knew where I was, nor what my purpose was here on earth. I needed to be confined within a framework whose rigidity would justify my existence. I realized this, because I was afraid of changes. But I suffered neither bereavement nor removal from familiar surroundings, and that is one of the reasons why I persisted so long in my childish pretensions.

But my equanimity was sadly disturbed during the last year of the war.

It was bitterly cold that winter and coal was unobtainable; in our ill-heated apartment I would vainly press my chilblained fingers on the tepid radiator. The period of restrictions had begun. Bread was grey, or else suspiciously white. Instead of hot chocolate in the mornings we had insipid, watery soups. My mother used to knock up omelettes without eggs and cook up ‘afters' with margarine and saccharine, as there was very little sugar; she dished up chilled beef, horse-meat steaks, and dreary vegetables: ‘Chinese' and ‘Jerusalem' artichokes, ‘Swiss' chard and other obscure members of the beet, turnip, and parsnip families. To make the wine pan out, Aunt Lili fabricated an abominable fermented beverage from figs,
which was known as ‘figgy-wiggy'. Meals lost all their old gaiety. The sirens often started wailing during the night; street lamps would go out and windows would be blacked-out; we would hear people running and the irritable voice of the air-raid warden, Monsieur Dardelle, crying: ‘Put that light out!' My mother made us go down to the cellar once or twice; but as my father obstinately refused to leave his bed, she, too, finally decided not to bother. A number of tenants from the upper storeys used to come and take shelter in our hall; we put out armchairs for them in which they fitfully dozed. Sometimes friends of our parents, held up by the raid, would prolong a bridge party into the small hours of the morning. I enjoyed all this disorder, with the silent city lying behind the blacked-out windows suddenly coming to life again after the ‘all clear'. The annoying thing was that my grandparents, who had a fifth-floor flat near the Lion de Belfort, took the alerts seriously; they used to rush down to the cellar, and the next morning we had to go and make sure they were safe and sound. At the first boom from Big Bertha, grandpapa, convinced that the Germans were about to arrive at any moment, dispatched his wife and daughter to Charité-sur-Loire: when the fatal moment came, he himself was to fly on foot to Longjumeau. Grandmama, exhausted by her husband's panic-stricken activity, fell ill. She had to be brought back to Paris for medical attention: but as she would no longer have been able to leave her fifth-floor flat during a bombardment, she was installed in our apartment. When she arrived, accompanied by a nurse, her flushed cheeks and empty stare frightened me: she could not speak and did not recognize me. She was given my room, and Louise, my sister, and I camped out in the drawing-room. Aunt Lili and grandpapa took their meals with us. Grandpapa, in his booming voice, would prophesy disaster or else would announce that he'd had a sudden stroke of good fortune. His catastrophism was in fact paralleled by an extravagant optimism. He had large banking interests in Verdun, and his speculations had ended in bankruptcy in which his capital and that of a good number of his clients had been swallowed up. But he still continued to have the utmost confidence in his lucky star and in his financial acumen. At the moment, he was running a boot and shoe factory which, thanks to army orders, was going fairly well; but this modest enterprise did not satisfy his passion for making business deals, considering offers, and thinking up new ways of getting rich
quick. Unfortunately for him, he could no longer play about with adequate sums of money without the consent of his wife and children: he used to try to enlist my father's support. One day grandpapa brought him a small gold bar which an alchemist had made from a lump of lead before his very eyes: the secret of this astounding process was to make millionaires of us all, if only we would guarantee an advance to the inventor. Papa gave a disbelieving smile, grandpapa went purple in the face, Mama and Aunt Lili took sides, and everybody started shouting. This sort of scene often happened. Overwrought, Louise and Mama quickly ‘got on their high horse'; they would ‘have words'; it even used to come to the point where Mama quarrelled with Papa; she would scold my sister and me and box our ears for the slightest thing. But I'd grown a little older: I was no longer five years old, and the days were past when a row between my parents seemed to be the end of the world; nor did I fail to distinguish between impatience and injustice. All the same, at night, when through the glass door separating the dining-room from the drawing-room I heard the cries of hatred and anger, I hid my head under the bedclothes, and my heart would grow heavy. I would think of the past as a long-lost paradise. Would we ever find it again? The world no longer seemed the safe place I had once thought it to be.

It was my gradually developing powers of imagination that made the world a darker place. Through books, communiqués, and the conversations I heard, the full horror of the war was becoming clear to me: the cold, the mud, the terror, the blood, the pain, the agonies of death. We had lost friends and cousins at the front. Despite the promises of heaven, I used to choke with dread whenever I thought of mortal death which separates for ever all those who love one another. People said sometimes in front of my sister and myself: ‘They are lucky to be children! They don't realize. . . .' But deep inside I would be shouting: ‘Grown-ups don't understand anything at all about us!' Sometimes I would feel overwhelmed by something so bitter and so very definite that no one, I was sure, could ever have known distress worse than mine. Why should there be so much suffering? I would ask myself. At La Grillière, German prisoners and a young Belgian refugee who had been excused army service on the grounds of obesity supped their broth in the kitchen side by side with French farm labourers: they all got on very well together. After all, the Germans were
human beings; they, too, could be wounded and bleed to death. Why should things be like this? I began praying desperately for an end to our misfortunes. Peace was to me more important than victory. I was going upstairs with Mama one day, and talking to her: she was telling me that the war would probably be over soon. ‘Oh, yes!' I cried, ‘let it be over soon! No matter how it ends as long as it's over soon!' Mama stopped and gave me a startled look: ‘Don't you say things like that! France must be victorious!' I felt ashamed, not just of having allowed such an enormity to escape my lips, but even of having thought of it. All the same, I found it hard to admit that an idea or an opinion could be ‘wrong'. Underneath our flat, opposite the peaceful Dôme where Monsieur Dardelle played dominoes, a rowdy café had just opened, called La Rotonde. You could see short-cropped, heavily made-up women going in, and curiously dressed men. ‘It's a joint for wogs and defeatists,' declared my father. I asked him what a defeatist was. ‘A bad Frenchman who hopes for the defeat of France,' he replied. I couldn't understand: thoughts come and go in our heads after their own fashion; you don't believe what you do
on purpose.
But my father's outraged tones and my mother's scandalized face left me in no doubt that it doesn't always do to say aloud those disquieting words which you find yourself whispering below your breath.

My hesitant pacifism did not prevent me from being proud of my parents' patriotism. Alarmed by the bombs and by Big Bertha, the majority of the pupils in my school left Paris before the end of the academic year. I was left alone in my class with a great silly twelve-year-old girl; we would sit at the big table facing Mademoiselle Gontran; she paid special attention to me. I took particular pleasure in those classes, which were as solemn as public lectures and as intimate as private lessons. One day, when I arrived with my sister and Mama at the school, we found the building empty: everyone had dashed dowṅ into the cellars. We were highly amused. Our own courage and spirit in the face of danger showed plainly that we were beings apart.

Grandmama recovered her wits and went back to her own house. During the holidays and when we returned to school I heard a lot about two traitors who had tried to betray France to Germany: Malvy and Caillaux. They should have been shot but weren't; anyhow, their plans were foiled. On the 11th of November
I was practising the piano under Mama's supervision when the bells rang out for the Armistice. Papa put on his civilian clothes again. Mama's brother died, shortly after being demobilized, of Spanish influenza. But I had hardly known him, and when Mama had dried her tears, happiness returned – for me at any rate.