Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (14 page)

This way of life suited me very well. I used to spend the best part of my days on the croquet lawn with my sister and cousin, and the rest of the time I would read. Sometimes we would all three of us set off to look for mushrooms in the chestnut plantations. We ignored the insipid meadow varieties, the tawny
grisettes
and the tough, crinkled
chanterelles
as well as the clumps of wild chicory: we studiously avoided the lurid Devil's Boletus with its
red-veined stem and the sham flap-mushroom which we recognized by their dull colour and their rigid look. We despised mature
ceps
whose flesh was beginning to go soft and produce greenish whiskers. We only gathered young ones with nicely curved stalks and caps covered with a fine nigger-brown or blueish nap. Rummaging in the moss and parting fans of bracken and ferns, we would kick to pieces the puff-balls, which when they burst gave off clouds of filthy dust. Sometimes we would go with Robert to fish for fresh-water crayfish; or in order to get food for Madeleine's peacocks we would dig up ant-hills and wheel away barrow-loads of whiteish eggs.

The big waggonette was no longer allowed to leave the coachhouse. In order to get to Meyrignac we had to spend an hour sitting in a little train that stopped every ten minutes, pile our luggage on a donkey cart and then walk over the fields to the house: I couldn't imagine any more agreeable place on earth to live. In one sense, our life there was an austere one. Poupette and I had no croquet or any other kind of outdoor amusement; my mother had refused, I don't know why, to let my father buy us bicycles. We couldn't swim, and besides the River Vézère was some distance away. If occasionally we heard the sound of a motor-car coming up the drive, Mama and Aunt Marguerite would hurriedly leave the garden to go and tidy themselves up; there were never any children among the visitors. But I could do without frivolous distractions. Reading, walking, and the games I made up with my sister were all I wanted.

The chief of my pleasures was to rise early in the morning and observe the awakening of nature; with a book in my hand, I would steal out of the sleeping house and quietly unlatch the garden gate: it was impossible to sit down on the grass, which would be all white with hoar-frost; I would walk along the drive, beside the meadow planted with specially chosen trees that my grandpapa called ‘the landscape garden'; I would read a little from time to time, enjoying the feeling of the sharp air softening against my cheeks; the thin crust of rime would be melting on the ground; the purple beech, the blue cedars, and the silvery poplars would be sparkling with the primal freshness of the first morning in Eden: and I was the only one awake to the beauty of the earth and the glory of God, which mingled agreeably deep inside me with a dream of a bowl of hot chocolate and warm buttered toast. When
the bees began to hum and the green shutters were opened on the sunny fragrance of wistaria, I felt I was already sharing a secret past with the day that for the others was only just beginning. After the round of family greetings and breakfast, I would sit at a metal table under the catalpa tree and get on with my ‘holiday tasks'. I liked those moments when, pretending to be busied with some easy exercise, I let my ear be beguiled by the sounds of summer: the fizzing of wasps, the chattering of guinea-fowls, the peacocks' strangulated cry, the whisperings of leaves; the scent of phlox mingled with the aromas of caramel and coffee and chocolate that came wafting over to me from the kitchen; rings of sunlight would be dancing over my exercise book. I felt I was one with everything: we all had our place just here, now, and for ever.

Grandpapa would come down about noon, his chin freshly shaven between his white side-whiskers. He would read the
Écho de Paris
until lunch-time. He liked good solid food: partridge with crisply steamed cabbage, chicken vol-au-vent, duck stuffed with olives, saddle of hare, pâtés, flans, tarts, marzipans, shapes, and trifles. While the ancient horned gramophone played a selection from
Les Cloches de Corneville,
he would be joking with Papa. They would chaff each other all through the meal, laughing, declaiming, singing even; again and again they would trot out the memories, anecdotes, quotations, witticisms, and nonsense-talk of the family folk-lore. After that, I usually went walking with my sister; scratching our legs on gorse and our arms on brambles, we would explore for miles around the chestnut groves, the fields, the moors. We made great discoveries: ponds; a waterfall; at the centre of a lonely heath, blocks of grey granite which we climbed to get a glimpse of the blue line of the Monédières. As we rambled along, we would sample the hazelnuts and brambleberries in the hedges, arbutus berries, cornel berries, and the acid berries of the berberis; we had bites out of apples from every orchard; but we were careful not to suck the milk of the wild-spurge or to touch those handsome bright-red spikes which are the proud bearers of the enigmatic name ‘Solomon's Seal'. Drowsy with the scent of freshly mown hay, with the fragrance of honeysuckle and the smell of buckwheat in flower, we would lie down on the warm moss or the grass and read. I also sometimes used to spend the afternoons on my own in the landscape garden, when I would read and read to my heart's
content as I watched the trees' shadows lengthening and the butterflies tumbling over and over one another.

On rainy days, we stayed in the house. But while I chafed at restraints imposed by other people's wills, I felt no resentment at those inflicted on me by things like the weather. I liked being in the drawing-room with its armchairs upholstered in green plush, its french windows draped with yellowed muslin; on the marble chimneypiece, on the occasional tables and sideboards, quantities of dead things were slowly mouldering away; the stuffed birds were moulting, the everlasting dried flowers were crumbling to dust and the sea-shells were turning a dull, lifeless grey. I would climb on a stool and ransack the library shelves; there I could always find some novel by Fennimore Cooper or some
Pictorial Magazine,
its pages badly foxed, which I had not seen before. There was a piano, several of whose notes did not play or were completely out of tune; Mama would prop up on the music-stand the vocal score of the
Grand Mogul
or the
Noces de Jeannette
and warble grandfather's favourite airs: he would join in all the choruses with us.

When the weather was fine, I would go for a walk in the gardens after dinner; with the Milky Way overhead, I would smell the heart-stirring fragrance of the magnolias and keep an eye open for shooting stars. Then, a lighted candle in my hand, I would go up to bed. I had a room to myself; it gave on to the yard, overlooking the wood-shed, the laundry, and the coach-house which sheltered a victoria and a berlin, as out-of-date to me as the carriages of olden times. I was charmed by the smallness of the room: there was a bed, a chest of drawers, and, standing on a sort of locker, the wash bowl and water jug. It was a cell, made to my own measure, like the little niche under Papa's desk where I once used to hide myself away. Although my sister's company did not weigh upon me in any way, solitude exalted me. When I was going through one of my saintly periods, a room to myself allowed me to enjoy the mortifying bliss of sleeping on the bare floor. But above all, before going to bed I would stand a long time at my casement, and often I would rise in the middle of the night to look out upon the night breathing softly in its sleep. I would lean out and plunge my hands in the fresh leaves of a clump of cherry laurels; the water from the spring would be gurgling over a mossy stone; from time to time a cow would kick her hoof against the
door of the byre: I could almost smell the odour of straw and hay. Monotonous and dogged as the beat of the heart would sound the stridulations of a grasshopper; against the infinite silence and the sky's infinities I used to feel that the earth itself was echoing that voice within me which kept on whispering: ‘Here I am.' My heart oscillated between its living warmth and the frigid blazing of the stars. There was God up there, and He was watching me; under the breeze's soft caress I was intoxicated by the heady perfumes of the night, by this celebration in my blood that brought eternity within my reach.

*

There was one phrase grown-ups were always using: ‘It's not proper!' I was rather uncertain as to what the true significance of this expression could be. At first I had taken it to have a scatological connotation. In Madame de Ségur's
Les Vacances
, one of the characters told a story about a ghost, a nightmare ending in soiled sheets which shocked me as much as it did my parents. It was not proper. At that period of my life I associated indecency with the baser bodily functions; then I learnt that the body as a whole was vulgar and offensive: it must be concealed; to allow one's underclothes to be seen, or one's naked flesh – except in certain well-defined zones – was a gross impropriety. Certain vestimentary details and certain attitudes were as reprehensible as exhibitionist indiscretions. These prohibitions were aimed particularly at the female species; a real ‘lady' ought not to show too much bosom, or wear short skirts, or dye her hair, or have it bobbed, or make up, or sprawl on a divan, or kiss her husband in the underground passages of the Métro: if she transgressed these rules, she was ‘not a lady'. Impropriety was not altogether the same as sin, but it drew down upon the offender public obloquy that was infinitely worse than ridicule. My sister and I felt very strongly that something of importance was being concealed behind a blandly deceptive front, and in order to protect ourselves against this mysterious something, we would promptly ridicule it. In the Luxembourg Gardens, we would nudge each other if we passed a pair of lovers. Impropriety to my way of thinking was related, though only extremely vaguely, to another enigma: ‘unsuitable' reading matter. Sometimes, before giving me a book to read, my mother would pin
a few pages together; in Wells's
The War of the Worlds
I found a whole chapter had been placed under the ban. I never took the pins out, but I often wondered: what's it all about? It was strange. Grown-ups talked freely in front of me; I went about the world without encountering any insurmountable obstacles; and yet under this surface transparency something was hidden; what? where? In vain my troubled gaze would ransack my expanding horizons, trying to seek out the occulted zone that was not masked by any screen and that yet remained invisible.

One day as I was working at my father's desk, I noticed at my elbow a novel with a yellow paper cover:
Cosmopolis.
I was tired and quite unthinkingly, with a purely mechanical gesture, I opened it; I had no intention of reading it, but it seemed to me that even without having consciously to connect the words and make them into phrases I could, at a quick glance, discover the flavour of its secret contents. Mama was suddenly towering over me. ‘What are you doing?' I stammered something. ‘You
must not
!' she cried, ‘you
must not touch
books that are not meant for you.' Her voice had a pleading note and in her face I could read an anxiety which convinced me more than any reprimand could have done: a terrible danger was lying in wait between the pages of
Cosmopolis,
ready to spring out at me. I promised fervently never to do such a thing again. My memory has linked this episode indissolubly with a much earlier incident: when I was very tiny, sitting in that very same armchair, I had shoved my finger in the black hole of the electric point; the shock had made me cry out with surprise and pain. While my mother was talking to me did I look at the black circle in the middle of the porcelain plug, or did I not make the connexion until later? In any case, I had the impression that any contact with the Zolas and the Bourgets in the library would subject me to an unforeseeable and thundering shock. Just like the ‘live' rail in the Métro which used to fascinate me because the eye slid along its burnished surface without being able to detect the least sign of its murderous energy, old books with illegible spines filled me with trepidation because there was nothing to give me warning of their baleful influence.

During the retreat I made before making my First Communion, the man of God, in order to put us on our guard against the temptations of curiosity, told us a story which only succeeded in stimulating my own inquisitiveness. A little girl, remarkably
precocious and intelligent, but brought up by parents who had not been sufficiently vigilant, had one day come to make her confession: she had read so many bad books that she had lost her faith and grown utterly weary of existence. He tried to give her hope again, but she was too seriously contaminated: a few days later, he heard that she had committed suicide. My first reaction was a wave of jealous admiration for this little girl, only a year older than myself, who had known so much more than I. Then I found myself bogged down by perplexities. Faith was my insurance against hell: I dreaded it too much ever to commit a mortal sin; but if you ceased to believe, then all the infernal regions lay gaping at your feet: could such a terrible misfortune happen to you if you had not deserved it? The little girl who had committed suicide had not even been guilty of the sin of disobedience; she had simply exposed herself very carelessly to obscure forces that had played havoc with her tender soul; why had God not come to her aid? And how was it that words manipulated by mortal men were able to destroy the manifestations of the supernatural? The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life; if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn't going to kill
me
: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense.