Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (21 page)

On the other hand, I had to admit that the brute fact of wealth should not be allowed to confer special rights or any extrinsic credit upon its possessor. The Gospel exalts poverty. I respected Louise far more than many a rich lady. I was indignant that Madeleine refused to say good morning to the bakers who came in their carts to deliver bread at La Grillière. ‘It is up to them to address me first,' she declared. I believed in the absolute equality of human beings. One summer at Meyrignac I read a book which recommended universal suffrage. Up went my head: ‘But it's shameful that poor people should not be allowed to have the vote!' I cried. Papa smiled. He explained to me that a nation is a collection of private properties; and it is those who own them who naturally have the task of administering them. He ended by quoting Guizot's maxim: ‘Get rich!' His exposition of the problem puzzled me. Papa had not succeeded in getting rich: would he have been willing to be deprived of his rights as a voter? If I protested against this particular injustice, it was in the name of the very set of values which he himself had taught me to observe. He did not hold that a man's qualities can be measured by the amount of money he has in the bank; he was always making fun of the ‘new rich'. No, according to him, the élite were those who had intelligence, culture, and a sound education; they should be able to spell correctly and have ‘the right
ideas'. I readily agreed with him when he said his objection to universal suffrage was based upon the fact that the majority of the electorate were stupid and ignorant: only ‘enlightened' people ought to have a say in the matter. I bowed to his logic which was supported by an empirical truth: ‘enlightenment' is the prerogative of the bourgeoisie. Certain individuals from the lower classes might perform feats of intellectual prowess, but they would always retain something of their original lowly condition, and they are usually, in any case, people with ‘wrong' ideas. On the other hand, every man who came from a good family had ‘that certain something' which distinguished him from the common herd. I was not too shocked at the idea that personal merit depended on the chance of birth, since it was the will of God that decided what our fate would be. But in any case it seemed obvious to me that morally, and therefore absolutely, the class to which I belonged was far superior to the rest of society. Whenever I went with Mama to call on grandfather's tenant-farmers, the stink of manure, the dirty rooms where the hens were always scratching and the rusticity of their furniture seemed to me to reflect the coarseness of their souls; I would watch them labouring in the fields, covered in mud, smelling of sweat and earth, and they never once paused to contemplate the beauty of the landscape; they were ignorant of the splendours of the sunset. They didn't read, they had no ideals; Papa used to say, though quite without animosity, that they were ‘brutes'. When he read me Gobineau's
Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races,
I promptly adopted his idea that the brains of the lower classes were made differently from ours.

I loved the country so much that the farmer's life seemed to me a very happy one. If I had ever had a glimpse into the labourer's way of life, I could hardly have failed to doubt the correctness of my assumptions; but I knew nothing of it. Before her marriage, Aunt Lili, with no work of her own, occupied her time with ‘good works'. She sometimes took me with her to give toys to specially chosen under-privileged children; the poor did not seem to me to be very unhappy. There were many kindly souls who gave them charity and the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul devoted themselves especially to their service. There were a few discontented ones among the poor: they were the would-be poor, who stuffed themselves with roast turkey at Christmas, or wicked ones who drank. Some books – Dickens's novels and Hector Malot's
Sansfamille
-
described the hard life of the poor; I thought the miner's lot, cooped up all day in dark pits, and at the mercy of any sudden fall of rock, was terrible. But I was assured that times had changed. The workers worked much less, and earned much more; since the advent of trade unions, the real victims had been the employers. The workers, who were much luckier than we were, didn't have to ‘keep up appearances' and so they could treat themselves to roast chicken every Sunday; their wives bought the best cuts in the markets and could even afford silk stockings. They were used to hard work and squalid homes: these things did not distress them as they would us. Their recriminations were not justified by the facts. ‘Besides,' my father would say, raising his shoulders, ‘they're not dying of starvation!' No, if the workers hated the bourgeoisie, it was because they were conscious of our superiority. Communism and socialism were the results of envy. ‘And envy,' my father would add, ‘is not a pretty thing.'

I only once came in contact with real destitution. Louise and her husband, the slater, lived in a room in the rue Madame, a garret right at the top of the house; she had a baby and I went to visit her with my mother. I had never set foot in a sixth-floor back before. The dreary little landing with its dozen identical doors made my heart sink. Louise's tiny room contained a brass bedstead, a cradle, and a table on which stood a small oil stove; she slept, cooked, ate, and lived with her husband and child between these four walls; all round the landing there were families confined to stifling little holes like this; the comparative promiscuity in which I myself had to live and the monotony of bourgeois life oppressed my spirits. But here I got a glimpse of a universe in which the air you breathed smelt of soot, in which no ray of light ever penetrated the filth and squalor: existence here was a slow death. Not long after that, Louise lost her baby. I cried for hours: it was the first time I had known misfortune at first hand. I thought of Louise in her comfortless garret without her baby, without anything: such terrible distress should have shaken the world to its foundations. ‘It's not right!' I told myself. I wasn't only thinking of the dead child but also of that sixth-floor landing. But in the end I dried my tears without having called society in question.

It was very difficult for me to think for myself, for the standard of values I was taught was both monolithic and incoherent. If my parents had had differences of opinion, I could have compared those
opinions. Or one firm line of argument would have given me something to get my teeth in. But brought up as I was on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was always getting bogged down in contradictions. Neither my mother nor my teachers doubted for a moment that the Pope was elected by the Holy Spirit; yet my father thought His Holiness should not interfere in world affairs and my mother agreed with him; Pope Leo XIII, by devoting encyclicals to ‘social questions' had betrayed his saintly mission; Pius X, who had not breathed a word about such things, was a saint. So I had to swallow the paradox that the man chosen by God to be His representative on earth had not to concern himself with earthly things. France was the elder daughter of the Roman Catholic Church; she owed obedience to her mother. Yet national values came before Catholic virtues; when a collection was being made at Saint-Sulpice for ‘the starving children of Central Europe', my mother was indignant and refused to give anything for ‘the Boche'. In all eventualities, patriotism and concern for maintaining the established order of things were considered more important than Christian charity. Telling lies was an offence against God; yet Papa could claim that in committing a forgery Colonel Henry had acted like an upright man. Killing was a crime, but the death-penalty must not be done away with. At an early age I was indoctrinated in the compromises of casuistry and sophistry, to make a clear distinction between God and Caesar and to render unto each his due; all the same, it was most disconcerting to find that Caesar always got the better of God. When we view the world at the same time through the verses of the Gospel and through the columns of the daily press, the sight tends to get blurred. There was nothing else I could do but to take refuge, with lowered head, under the wing of authority.

It was a blind submission. A dispute had broken out between
L'Action Française
and
La Démocratie Nouvelle
; having first made sure that they were ten to one, the royalists had attacked the supporters of Marc Sangnier and forced them to drink whole bottles of castor oil. Papa and his friends were highly amused by this episode. When I was very small I had learnt to laugh when the evil are discomfited; without really giving it a thought, I agreed with my father that the whole thing had been a most diverting lark. I made a laughing reference to it as I was walking up the rue Saint-Benoît with Zaza. Her face hardened: ‘What a filthy thing to do!' she said
disgustedly. I didn't know what to answer. Crestfallen, I realized that I had thoughtlessly copied my father's attitude and that I hadn't an idea of my own in my head. Zaza, too, was expressing her family's opinion. Her father had belonged to the democratic Catholic group
Le Sillon
before it had been denounced by the Church; he still thought that Catholics have social obligations and rejected the theories of Maurras; his was a fairly coherent position, one that a fourteen-year-old girl could rally round with a clear conscience; Zaza's indignation and her horror of violence was sincere. I, who had repeated my father's opinion parrot-fashion, hadn't a leg to stand on. I was hurt by Zaza's scorn, but what worried me much more was the difference of opinion between her father and mine. I didn't like to think that one of them might be wrong. I talked about it to Papa, but he merely shrugged his shoulders and said Zaza was only a child; this reply did not satisfy me. For the first time, I was driven to take sides: but I didn't know anything about the matter and I couldn't make a decision. The one conclusion I drew from this incident was that it was possible to be of another opinion than my father. One could not even be sure of what the truth was any more.

It was Vaulabelle's
History of the Two Restorations
which inclined me towards liberalism; I spent two summer holidays reading the seven volumes in grandfather's library. I wept over the defeat of Napoleon; I developed a hatred of monarchy, conservatism, obscurantism. I wanted men to be governed by reason and I was enthusiastic about democracy which I thought would guarantee them all equal rights and liberty of conscience. That was as far as I went.

But I was much less interested in remote political and social questions than in the problems that concerned me personally: morals, my spiritual life, my relationship with God. I began to think very deeply about these things.

*

All nature spoke to me of God's presence. But it seemed to me quite definitely that He was a total stranger to the restless world of men. Just as the Pope, away inside the Vatican, hadn't to bother his head about what was going on in the world, so God, high up in
the infinity of heaven, was not supposed to take any interest in the details of earthly adventures. I had long since learnt to distinguish His law from secular authority. My insolence in class, and my furtive reading of banned books did not concern Him. As year followed after year, my growing piety was purified and I began to reject dry-as-dust morality in favour of a more lively mysticism. I prayed, I meditated, I tried to make my heart aware of the divine presence. About the age of twelve I invented mortifications: locked in the water-closet – my sole refuge – I would scrub my flesh with pumice-stone until the blood came, and fustigate myself with the thin golden chain I wore round my neck. My fervour did not bear fruit. In my books of piety there was much talk about spiritual progress and exaltation; souls were supposed to stagger up rugged paths and overcome obstacles; at one moment, they would be trudging across barren wildernesses and at another a celestial dew would fall for their refreshment: it was quite an adventure; in fact, whereas intellectually I felt I was moving ever onward and upward in my quest for knowledge, I never had the impression that I was drawing any closer to God. I longed for apparitions, ecstasies; I yearned for something to happen inside or outside me: but nothing came, and in the end my spiritual exercises were more and more like make-believe. I exhorted myself to have patience and looked forward to the day when, miraculously detached from the earth, I would find myself ensconced at the heart of eternity. Meanwhile I was able to go on living unconstrainedly on earth because my efforts set me up on spiritual peaks whose serenity could not be troubled by worldly trifles.

My complacency received a nasty shock. For the last seven years I had been making my confession to Abbé Martin twice a month; I would expatiate upon the state of my immortal soul; I would accuse myself of having taken Holy Communion without any true religious fervour, of not having thought often enough of God, and of having paid Him lip-service only in my prayers; he would reply to these ethereal shortcomings with a sermon couched in very elevated terms. But one day, instead of going through the usual rigmarole, he began to speak to me in a more familiar tone of voice: ‘It has come to my ears that my little Simone has changed . . . that she is disobedient, noisy, that she answers back when she is reprimanded. . . . From now on you must be on your guard against these things.' My cheeks were aflame; I gazed with horror upon the
impostor whom for years I had taken as the representative of God on earth; it was as if he had suddenly tucked up his cassock and revealed the skirts of one of the church-hens; his priest's robe was only a disguise for an old tittle-tattle. With burning face I left the confessional, determined never to set foot in it again: from that moment on, it would have been as repugnant to me to kneel before the Abbé Martin as before ‘the old scarecrow', Whenever I caught a glimpse of his black skirts swishing along a school corridor, my heart would begin to thump and I would run away: they made me feel physically sick, as if the Abbé's deceit had made me his accomplice in some obscene act.