Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (13 page)

On fine summer evenings he would sometimes take us for a walk after dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens; we would have ices on the terrace of a café in the place Médicis, then we would stroll back through the gardens as the bugle call warned us that the gates were about to be closed. I envied the Senators their nocturnal reveries in the deserted avenues. My daily routine was as inalterable as the rhythm of the seasons: the slightest deviation transported me almost into the realms of fantasy. To be walking in the tranquil twilight, at a time when Mama was usually bolting the front door for the night, was as startling and as poetical as finding a hawthorn in flower in the middle of winter.

There was one quite extraordinary evening when we were drinking hot chocolate on the terrace of the Café Prévost, near the offices of
Le Matin.
An electric sign on the top of the building was giving the progress of the fight between Dempsey and Carpentier in New York. The street corners were black with people. When Carpentier was knocked out, men and women burst into tears; I went home filled with pride at having been the witness of such a great event. But I was no less happy when we spent the evening at home in Papa's cosy study while he read us
Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrickon
; or we would each read our own book. I would look at my parents and my sister, and feel my heart flood with affectionate warmth. ‘Us four!' I would say to myself, in silent rapture. And I would think: ‘How happy we are.'

There was only one thing that sometimes cast a shadow on this happy state: I knew that one day this period in my life would come to an end. It seemed unbelievable. When you have loved your parents for twenty years or so, how can you leave them to live with a stranger, without dying of unhappiness? And how, when you have done without him for twenty years, can you up and love a man who is nothing to you? I asked Papa about it. ‘A husband is something different,' he replied, with a little smile that did nothing to enlighten me. I always looked upon marriage with disfavour.
I didn't look upon it as servitude, for my own mother had nothing of the slave about her; it was the promiscuity of marriage that repelled me. ‘At night when you go to bed, you won't be able to have a good cry in peace!' I would tell myself in horror. I don't know if my happiness was broken by fits of sadness, or whether I used to weep in the night for the sheer pleasure of it; I rather think that my tears were a borderline case: if I had forced myself to restrain them, I should have been denying myself that minimum of personal liberty which I needed so badly. All day long, I felt that people's eyes were upon me; I liked and even loved the people around me, but when I went to bed at night I felt a sharp sense of relief at the idea of being able to live at least for a little while without being watched by others; then I could talk to myself, remember things, allow my emotions a free rein and hearken to those tender inner promptings which are stifled by the presence of grown-ups. I should have felt it quite unbearable to be deprived of this respite. I needed to escape at least for a few moments from all parental solicitude and talk quietly to myself without interruptions from anyone.

*

I was very pious; I made my confession twice a month to Abbé Martin, received Holy Communion three times a week and every morning read a chapter of
The Imitation of Christ
; between classes, I would slip into the school chapel and, with my head in my hands, I would offer up lengthy prayers; often in the course of the day I would lift up my soul to my Maker. I was no longer very interested in the Infant Jesus, but I adored Christ to distraction. As supplements to the Gospels, I had read disturbing novels of which He was the hero, and it was now with the eyes of a lover that I gazed upon His grave, tender, handsome face; I would follow, across hills covered with olive groves, the shining hem of His snow-white robe, bathe His naked feet with my tears; and He would smile down upon me as He had smiled upon the Magdalen. When I had had my fill of clasping His knees and sobbing on His blood-stained corpse, I would allow Him to ascend into heaven. There He became one with that more mysterious Being to whom I owed my existence on earth, and whose throne of glory would one day, and for ever, fill my eyes with a celestial radiance.

How comforting to know that He was there! I had been told that He cherished every single one of His creatures as if each were the one and only; His eye was upon me every instant, and all others were excluded from our divine conversations; I would forget them all, there would be only He and I in the world, and I felt I was a necessary part of His glory: my existence, through Him, was of infinite price. There was nothing He did not know: even more definitely than in my teachers' registers my acts, my thoughts, and my excellences were inscribed in Him for eternity; my faults and errors too, of course, but these were washed so clean in the waters of repentance that they shone just as brightly as my virtues. I never tired of admiring myself in that pure mirror that was without beginning or end. My reflection, all radiant with the joy I inspired in God's heart, consoled me for all my earthly shortcomings and failures; it saved me from the indifference, from the injustice and the misunderstandings of human nature. For God was always on
my
side; if I had done wrong in any way, at the very instant that I dropped upon my knees to ask His forgiveness He breathed upon my tarnished soul and restored to it all its lustre. But usually, bathed as I was in His eternal radiance, the faults I was accused of simply melted away; His judgement was my justification. He was the supreme arbiter who found that I was always right. I loved Him with all the passion I brought to life itself.

Each year I went into retreat for several days; all day long, I would listen to my priest's instructions, attend services, tell my beads and meditate; I would remain at school for a frugal repast, and during the meal someone would read to us from the life of a saint. In the evenings, at home, my mother would respect my silent meditations. I wrote down in a special notebook the outpourings of my immortal soul and my saintly resolutions. I ardently desired to grow closer to God, but I didn't know how to go about it. My conduct left so little to be desired that I could hardly be any better than I already was; besides, I wondered if God was really concerned about my general behaviour. The majority of faults that Mama reprimanded my sister and me for were just awkward blunders or careless mistakes. Poupette was severely scolded and punished for having lost a civet-fur collar. When, fishing for shrimps in ‘the English river', I fell into the water, I was overcome with panic at the thought of the telling-off I felt was in store for me; fortunately I was let off that time. But these misdemeanours had nothing to do
with Sin, and I didn't feel that by steering clear of them I was making myself any more perfect. The embarrassing thing was that God forbade so many things, but never asked for anything positive apart from a few prayers or religious practices which did not change my daily course in any way. I even found it most peculiar to see people who had just received Holy Communion plunging straight away into the ordinary routine of their lives again; I did the same, but it embarrassed me. Taken all in all, it seemed to me that believers and non-believers led just the same kind of life; I became more and more convinced that there was no room for the supernatural in everyday life. And yet it was that other-worldly life that really counted: it was the only kind that mattered. It suddenly became obvious to me one morning that a Christian who was convinced of his eternal salvation ought not to attach any importance to the ephemeral things of this world. How could the majority of people go on living in the world as it was? The more I thought about it, the more I wondered at it. I decided that I, at any rate, would not follow their example: my choice was made between the finite and the infinite. ‘I shall become a nun,' I told myself. The activities of sisters of charity seemed to me quite useless; the only reasonable occupation was to contemplate the glory of God to the end of my days. I would become a Carmelite. But I did not make my decision public: it would not have been taken seriously. I contented myself with the announcement that I did not intend to marry. My father smiled: ‘We'll have plenty of time to think about that when you're fifteen years old.' In my heart of hearts I resented his smile. I knew that an implacable logic led me to the convent: how could you prefer having nothing to having everything?

This imaginary future provided me with a convenient alibi. For many years it allowed me to enjoy without scruple all the good things of this world.

*

My happiness used to reach its height during, the two and a half months which I spent every summer in the country. My mother was always more relaxed there than in Paris; my father devoted more time to me then; and I enjoyed a vast leisure for reading and playing with my sister. I did not miss the Cours Désir: that feeling
of necessity which study gave my life spilled over into the holidays My time was no longer strictly measured by the exigencies of a timetable; but its absence was largely compensated for by the immensity of the horizons which opened themselves before my curious eyes. I explored them all unaided: the mediation of grownups no longer interposed a barrier between the world and myself. The solitude and freedom which were only rarely mine during the course of the year were now almost boundless, and I had my fill of them. In the country all my aspirations seemed to be brought together and realized; my fidelity to the past and my taste for novelty, my love for my parents and my growing desire for independence.

At first we usually spent a few weeks at La Grillière. The castle seemed to me to be vast and very old; it had been built barely fifty years ago, but none of the objects – furniture or ornaments – that had been brought there half a century ago were ever changed or taken away. No hand ventured to sweep away the relics of the past: you could smell the odour of vanished lives. A collection of hunting horns hanging in the tiled hall, all of them made of shining copper, evoked – erroneously, I believe – the magnificence of bygone stag-hunts. In what was called the ‘billiard room', which was where we usually foregathered, stuffed foxes, buzzards, and kites perpetuated this bloodthirsty tradition. There was no billiard table in the room, but it contained a monumental chimney-piece, a bookcase, always carefully locked, and a large table strewn with copies of hunting magazines; there were pedestal tables laden with yellowing photographs, sheaves of peacock feathers, pebbles, terracotta ornaments, barometers, clocks that would never go and lamps that were never lit. Apart from the dining-room, the other rooms were rarely used: there was a drawing-room, embalmed in the stink of moth balls, a smaller drawing-room, a study and a kind of office whose shutters were always closed and that served as a kind of lumber room or glory-hole. In a small box-room filled with a pungent smell of old leather lay generations of riding boots and ladies' shoes. Two staircases led to the upper storeys where there were corridors leading to well over a dozen rooms,' most of them disused and filled with dusty bric-à-brac. I shared one of them with my sister. We slept in fourposter beds. Pictures cut out of illustrated magazines and amateurishly framed decorated the walls.

The liveliest place in the house was the kitchen, which occupied
half the basement. I had my breakfast there in the mornings:
café au lait
and wholemeal bread. Through the window high in the wall you could see hens parading; guinea-fowl, dogs, and sometimes human feet passed by. I liked the massive wood of the table, the benches and the chests and cupboards. The cast-iron cooking range threw out sparks and flames. The brasses shone: there were copper pots of all sizes, cauldrons, skimming ladles, preserving pans, and warming pans; I used to love the gaiety of the glazed dishes with their paint-box colours, the variety of bowls, cups, glasses, basins, porringers, hors d'œuvre dishes, pots, jugs, and pitchers. What quantities of cooking pots, frying pans, stock pots, stewpans,
bains-marie,
cassolettes, soup tureens, meat dishes, saucepans, enamel mugs, colanders, graters, choppers, mills, mincers, moulds, and mortars – in cast-iron, earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, aluminium, and tin! Across the corridor, where turtle doves used to moan, was the dairy. Here stood great vats and pans of varnished wood and glazed earthenware, barrel-churns made of polished elm, great blocks of pattern-patted butter, piles of smooth-skinned cheeses under sheets of white muslin: all that hygienic bareness and the aroma of breast-fed babies made me take to my heels. But I liked to visit the fruit loft, where apples and pears would be ripening on wicker trays, and the cellar, with its barrels, bottles, hams, huge sausages, ropes of onions, and swags of dried mushrooms. Whatever luxury there was at La Grillière was to be found down there in the nether regions. The grounds were as dull as the upper parts of the house: not a single bed of flowers, not one garden seat, not even a sunny comer to sit and read in. Opposite the great central flight of stone steps there was a fishing stream where servants often did the household wash with a great whacking of wooden beaters; a lawn fell steeply away to an edifice even older than the château itself: the ‘back place', as it was called, full of old harness and thick with spiders' webs. Three or four horses could be heard whinnying in the adjacent stables.

My uncle, my aunt, and my cousins led an existence which fitted this setting very well. Starting at six o'clock in the morning, Aunt Hélène would make a thorough inspection of all the cupboards. With so many servants at her disposal, she didn't have to do any housework; she rarely did any cooking, never sewed, and never read a book, and yet she always complained of never having a minute to herself: she never stopped poking about, from the cellars
to the attic. My uncle would come downstairs about nine o'clock; he would polish his leggings in the harness-room, and then go off to saddle his horse. Madeleine would look after her pets. Robert stayed in bed. Lunch was always late. Before sitting down to table, Uncle Maurice would season the salad with meticulous care and toss it with wooden spatulas. At the beginning of the meal there would be a passionate discussion about the quality of the cantaloups; at its end, the flavours of different kinds of pears would be thoroughly compared. In between, much would be eaten and but few words spoken. Then my aunt would go back to her cupboard inspection, and my uncle would stump off to the stables, laying about him with his hunting-crop. Madeleine would join Poupette and me in a game. Robert usually did nothing at all; sometimes he would go trout-fishing; in September he would hunt a little. A few elderly, cut-rate tutors had tried to din into him the rudiments of arithmetic and spelling. Then an oldish lady with yellowed skin devoted herself to Madeleine, who was less of a handful and the only one in the family ever to read a book. She used to gorge herself on novels, and had dreams of being very beautiful and having lots of loving admirers. In the evenings, everyone would gather in the billiard room; Papa would ask for the lamps to be lit. My aunt would cry out that it was still quite light, but in the end would give way and have a small oil lamp placed on the centre table. After dinner, we would still hear her trotting about in the dark corridors. Robert and my uncle, with glazed eyes, would sit rigidly in their armchairs waiting silently for bed-time. Very occasionally one of them would pick up a sporting magazine and flick desultorily through it for a few minutes. The next morning, the same kind of day would begin all over again, except on Sundays, when, after all the doors had been locked and barred, we would all climb into the dog-cart and go to hear Mass at Saint-Germain-les-Belles. My aunt never had visitors, and she never paid visits herself.