Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (17 page)

When I reached the age of puberty, this feeling grew stronger. At the end of my year in the third form from the top – which was called the sixth-first class – I was present at the solemn oral examination which the pupils who were about to enter their final year took in the school hall in order to acquire an ‘Adeline Désir Diploma'. Marguerite was wearing a very stylish gown of grey crêpe-de-chine; through its transparent sleeves could be seen her pretty, rounded arms and shoulders. This chaste nudity had a stunning effect on me. I was too ignorant and too respectful to allow myself even the slightest stirring of desire; I could not even imagine a human hand ever profaning those white shoulders; but all through the examination I couldn't take my eyes away from her and I felt a strange tightening of my throat.

My body was changing, and my life was changing too: my past was being left behind. We had moved house, and Louise had gone. I was looking at some old photographs with my sister when I realized suddenly that one of these days I would lose Meyrignac. Grandfather was very old; he would die. When the property belonged to my Uncle Gaston – who was already the virtual owner – I would no longer feel at home there; I would go there as a stranger, an outsider, and then I would never go back again. The thought filled me with consternation. My parents kept telling us – and their own example seemed to confirm what they said – that as life goes on, childhood friendships are forgotten: would I forget Zaza? Poupette and I would anxiously ask one another if our affection would last as we grew older. The grown-ups did not share our games or our pleasures. I didn't know a single grown-up who appeared to enjoy life on earth very much: life's no joke, life's not what you read about in novels, they all declared.

I had always been sorry for the grown-ups' monotonous existence: when I realized that, within a short space of time, it would be my fate too, I was filled with panic. One afternoon I was helping
Mama to wash up; she was washing the plates, and I was drying; through the window I could see the wall of the barracks, and other kitchens in which women were scrubbing out saucepans or peeling vegetables. Every day lunch and dinner; every day washing-up; all those hours, those endlessly recurring hours, all leading nowhere: could I live like that? An image was formed in my mind, an image of such desolate clarity that I can still remember it today: a row of grey squares, diminishing according to the laws of perspective, but all flat, all identical, extending away to the horizon; they were the days and weeks and years. Since the day I was born I had gone to bed richer in the evening than I had been the day before; I was steadily improving myself, step by step; but if, when I got up there, I found only a barren plateau, with no landmark to make for, what was the point in it all?

No, I told myself, arranging a pile of plates in the cupboard;
my
life is going to lead somewhere. Fortunately I was not dedicated to a life of toil at the kitchen sink. My father was no feminist; he admired the wisdom of the novels of Colette Yver in which the woman lawyer, or the woman doctor in the end sacrifice their careers in order to provide their children and husband with a happy home. But after all, necessity knows no law: ‘You girls will never marry,' he often declared, ‘you have no dowries; you'll have to work for a living.' I infinitely preferred the prospect of working for a living to that of marriage: at least it offered some hope. There
had
been people who had done things: I, too, would do things. I didn't quite know what; astronomy, archaeology, and palaeontology had in their turn appealed to me, and I was still toying vaguely with the idea of writing. But these projects were all in the air; I didn't believe enough in any of them to be able to face the future with confidence. Already I was in mourning for my past.

This refusal to make the final break with the past became very clear when I read Louisa M. Alcott's
Good Wives,
which is a sequel to
Little Women.
A year or more had passed since I had left Jo and Laurie together, smiling at the future. As soon as I picked up the little paper-backed Tauchnitz edition in which their story was continued I opened it at random. I happened on a page which without warning broke the news of Laurie's marriage to Jo's young sister, Amy, who was blonde, vain, and stupid. I threw the book away from me as if it had burned my fingers. For several days I was absolutely crushed by a misfortune which had seemed to strike at the
very roots of my being: the man I loved and by whom I had thought I was loved had betrayed me for a little goose of a girl. I hated Louisa M. Alcott for it. Later, I discovered that Jo herself had turned Laurie down. After remaining unmarried for a long time, and after many trials, many mistakes, she met a professor, much older than she was, and endowed with the highest qualities: he understood her, consoled her, advised her, and in the end married her. This superior individual, even better than Laurie, coming as it were from the outside and becoming part of Jo's life, was the incarnation of that supreme Judge by whom I hoped one day to be acknowledged: all the same his intrusion upset me. Earlier, when I had read Madame de Ségur's
Les Vacances
, I had deplored the fact that Sophie did not marry Paul, her childhood friend, but an ‘unknown', a young squire. Friendship, love – to my way of thinking that was something definite, eternal, and not a precarious adventure. I did not Want the future to bring upheavals and disruptions; I wanted it to embrace the whole of my past life too.

I had lost the sense of security childhood gives, and nothing had come to take its place. My parents' authority remained inflexible, but as my critical sense developed I began to rebel against it more and more. I couldn't see the point of visits, family dinners, and all those tiresome social duties which my parents considered obligatory. Their replies: ‘It's your duty', or ‘That just isn't done', didn't satisfy me either. My mother's eternal solicitude began to weigh upon me. She had her own ‘ideas' which she did not attempt to justify, and her decisions often seemed to me quite arbitrary. We had a violent argument about a missal which I wanted to give my sister for her First Communion; I wanted to choose one bound in pale fawn leather, like those which the majority of my school-fellows had; Mama thought that one with a blue cloth cover would do just as well; I protested that the money in my money-box was for me to do what I liked with; she replied that one should not pay out twenty francs for an object that could be bought for fourteen. While we were buying bread at the baker's and all the way up the stairs and in the house itself I held my own against her. But in the end I had to give in, with rage in my heart, vowing never to forgive her for what I considered to be an abuse of her power over me. If she had often stood in my way, I think she would have provoked me to open rebellion. But in the really important things – my
studies, and the choice of my friends – she very rarely meddled; she respected my work and my leisure too, only asking me to do little odd jobs for her like grinding the coffee or carrying the refuse bin downstairs. I had the habit of obedience, and I believed that, on the whole, God expected me to be dutiful: the conflict that threatened to set me against my mother did not break out; but I was uneasily aware of its underlying presence. My mother's whole education and upbringing had convinced her that for a woman the greatest thing was to become the mother of a family; she couldn't play this part unless I played the dutiful daughter, but I refused to take part in grown-up pretence just as much as I did when I was five years old. At the Cours Désir, on the eve of our First Communion, we were exhorted to go and cast ourselves down at our mothers' feet and ask them to forgive our faults; not only had I not done this, but when my sister's turn came I persuaded her not to do so either. My mother was vexed about it. She was aware of a certain reticence in me which made her bad-tempered, and she often rebuked me. I held it against her for keeping me so dependent upon her and continuing to impose her will upon me. In addition, I was jealous of the place she held in my father's affections because my own passion for him had continued to grow.

The more difficult life became for him, the more I was dazzled by my father's superior character; it did not depend on money or success, and so I used to tell myself that he had deliberately ignored these; that did not prevent me from being sorry for him: I thought he was not appreciated at his true value, that he was misunderstood and the victim of obscure cataclysms. I was all the more grateful to him now for his outbursts of gaiety, which were still quite frequent. He told stories, made wild fun of everybody, and said the wittiest things. When he stayed at home he read us Victor Hugo and Rostand; he talked about the writers he liked, about the theatre, great events of the past, and a host of other improving subjects which transported me far away from the everyday drabness of life. I couldn't imagine a more intelligent man than my father. In all the discussions at which I was present he always had the last word, and when he attacked people who were not present, he annihilated them. He admired passionately certain great men; but these belonged to such remote spheres that they seemed to me to be almost mythical beings, and in any case they were never absolutely irreproachable; the very excess of their genius condemned them to mistakes: they
were overcome by pride and their minds went. This was the case of Victor Hugo whose poems my father would enthusiastically declaim but whose overweening vanity had finally led him astray; it was the same with Zola, Anatole France, and many others. My father looked upon their aberrations with serene impartiality. Even the works of those he admired without reserve had their limits: but my father spoke with the voice of a living man, his thought was ungraspable and infinite. People and things were summoned before him: he was the sovereign judge.

As long as he approved of me, I could be sure of myself. For years he had done nothing but heap praises on my head. But when I entered the ‘difficult' age, he was disappointed in me: he appreciated elegance and beauty in women. Not only did he fail to conceal his disillusionment from me, but he began showing more interest than before in my sister, who was still a pretty girl. He glowed with pride when she paraded up and down dressed as the Queen of the Night. He sometimes took part in productions which his friend Monsieur Jeannot – a great advocate of religious drama – organized in the local church clubs; Poupette often acted with him. Her face framed in her long fair hair, she played the part of the little girl in Max Maurey's
Le Pharmacien.
He taught her to recite fables, putting in actions and expression. Though I would not admit it to myself, I was hurt by the understanding between them, and felt a vague resentment against my sister.

But my real rival was my mother. I dreamed of having a more intimate relationship with my father; but even on the rare occasions when we found ourselves alone together we talked as if she was there with us. When there was an argument, if I had appealed to my father, he would have said: ‘Do what your mother tells you!' I only once tried to get him on my side. He had taken us to the races at Auteuil; the course was black with people, it was hot, there was nothing happening, and I was bored; finally the horses were off: the people rushed towards the barriers, and their backs hid the track from my view. My father had hired folding chairs for us and I wanted to stand on mine to get a better view. ‘No!' said my mother, who detested crowds and had been irritated by all the pushing and shoving. I insisted that I should be allowed to stand on my folding chair. ‘When I say no, I
mean
no!' my mother declared. As she was looking after my sister, I turned to my father and cried furiously: ‘Mama is being ridiculous! Why can't I stand on my
folding chair?' He simply lifted his shoulders in an embarrassed silence, and refused to take part in the argument.

At least this ambiguous gesture allowed me to assume that as far as he was concerned my father sometimes found my mother too domineering; I persuaded myself that there was a silent conspiracy between us. But I soon lost this illusion. One lunch-time there was talk of a wild-living cousin who considered his mother to be an idiot: on my father's own admission she actually was one. Yet he declared vehemently: ‘A child who sets up as a judge of his mother is an imbecile.' I went scarlet and left the table, pretending I was feeling sick. I was judging my mother, and my father had struck a double blow at me by affirming their solidarity and by referring to me indirectly as an imbecile. What upset me even more is that I couldn't help passing judgement on the very sentence my father had just uttered: since my aunt's stupidity was plain to everyone, why shouldn't her son acknowledge it? It is no sin to tell oneself the truth, and besides, quite often, one tells oneself the truth unintentionally; at that very moment, for example, I couldn't help thinking what I thought: was that wrong of me? In one sense it was not, and yet my father's words made such a deep impression on me that I felt at once irreproachable and yet a monster of imbecility. After that, and perhaps partly because of that incident, I no longer believed in my father's absolute infallibility. Yet my parents still had the power to make me feel guilty; I accepted their verdicts while at the same time I looked upon myself with other eyes than theirs. My essential self still belonged to them as much as to me: but paradoxically the self they knew could only be a decoy now; it could be false. There was only one way of preventing this strange confusion: I would have to cover up superficial appearances, which were deceptive. I was used to keeping a guard on my tongue; I redoubled my vigilance. I took a further step. As I was not now admitting everything I thought, why not venture unmentionable acts? I was learning how to be secretive.

*

My reading was supervised with the same strictness as hitherto; apart from literature specially designed for children or else suitably bowdlerized, only a very small number of selected works were allowed to pass through my hands; passages even in these were
often censored by my parents; my father used to make cuts in
L'Aiglon
itself. Yet, convinced as they were that I would take no dishonest advantage of my freedom, they did not lock the bookcase; at La Grillière, they would allow me to carry off bound volumes of
La Petite Illustration
after having pointed out to me the ‘suitable' items. On holiday I was always short of reading matter; when I had finished
Primerose
or
Les Bouffons,
I would cast a greedy eye upon the mass of printed paper which lay beside me on the grass, within easy reach of hand and eye. For some time now I had been indulging in various kinds of harmless disobedience; my mother forbade me to eat between meals; but when we were in the country I would carry off a dozen apples in my apron every afternoon: no physical discomfort had ever punished me for these excesses. Ever since my conversations with Madeleine, I had begun to doubt whether Sacha Guitry, Flers and Callavet, Capus and Tristan Bernard would really do me any harm. I ventured on forbidden territory. I was reckless enough to sample Bernstein and Bataille; they didn't seem to have any harmful effect upon me. At home in Paris, pretending to limit my reading of Musset to his
Nuits,
I would install myself behind the huge volume of his collected works and read all his plays,
Rolla
and
Les Confessions d'un enfant du siècle.
From then on, every time I found myself alone in the house, I dipped quite freely into all the books in the bookcase. I spent wonderful hours curled up in the leather armchair, devouring the collection of paper-backed novels which had enchanted my father's youth: Bourget, Alphonse Daudet, Marcel Prévost, Maupassant, and the Goncourts. They completed, in a very inconsequential way, my sexual education. The act of love, it seemed, sometimes lasted a whole night, sometimes only a few minutes; sometimes it appeared to be flat and dull, at other times extraordinarily voluptuous; it comprised refinements and variations which remained a complete mystery to me. The obviously shady relationships between Farrère's male characters and their boy friends, between Colette's Claudine and her woman friend Rézi complicated the problem still further. Either because of lack of talent or because I knew at once too much and too little, no author succeeded in moving me as deeply as Canon Schmid had once done in his children's tales. On the whole, I rarely saw these stories in relation to my own experience; I realized that they evoked a way of life that was for the most part out of date; except for Claudine and
Farrère's Mademoiselle Dax, the heroines – inane young girls or frivolous ‘women of the world' – had very little interest for me; and I found the men a mediocre lot. Not one of these novels evoked an image of human love or of my own destiny which afforded me the slightest satisfaction; I did not look to them for a foretaste of my own future; but they gave me what I wanted: they took me out of myself. Thanks to them, I broke free from the bonds of childhood and entered a complicated, adventurous, and unpredictable world. When my parents went out in the evenings, I would prolong far into the night these surreptitious delights; while my sister slept, I, propped up on my pillow, would be reading; as soon as I heard the key turning in the front door, I would put out the light; in the morning, as I made my bed, I would slip the book under the mattress until I got the chance to put it back in its place on the bookshelf. It was impossible for Mama to catch me out; but at moments the mere thought that
Les Demi-vierges
or
La Femme et le pantin
was lying under my pillow made me shudder with fright. From my own point of view, there was nothing reprehensible in my conduct: I was being entertained and instructed; my parents were anxious about my well-being: I was not going against their wishes because my reading wasn't doing me any harm. But if my actions were once made public, they would automatically become criminal.