Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (25 page)

Just as I did every week, I made a careful word-for-word translation of my Latin text; I wrote it in a column opposite the original. Then I had to put it into ‘good French'. As it happened, this particular piece of prose had been translated in my text book on Latin literature, and with an elegance which I felt could not be equalled: in comparison, all the expressions which came to my mind seemed to be painfully clumsy. I had not made any mistake in the meaning; I was certain to get a good mark, and I had no ulterior motives; but the requirements of the object, the phrase itself, had to be satisfied: each sentence had to be perfect. It was repugnant to me to substitute my heavy-handed inventions for the ideal model furnished by the text book. There and then I copied it straight out of the book.

We were never left alone with the Abbé Trécourt; one of our old school-marms would sit at a little table near the window and supervise us; before he handed us back our translations, she entered our marks in a register. On that day the task had fallen to Mademoiselle Dubois, the one with the degree, whose Latin classes I would have normally attended the year before had not Zaza and I turned our noses up at them in favour of the Abbé's: she did not like me. I could hear her making a fuss behind my back; she was whispering furious protests. In the end she drafted a note which she placed on top of the pile of exercise books before giving them back to the Abbé. He wiped his eyeglasses, read the message, and smiled: ‘Yes,' he said mildly, ‘this passage from Cicero was already translated in your text books and many of you apparently noticed it. I have given the highest marks to those of you whose work showed the most originality.' Despite his indulgent tones, Mademoiselle Dubois' furious face, and the uneasy silence of my classmates filled me with terror. Whether through force of habit, absent-mindedness, or simple
affection, the Abbé had given me the best mark. I had got 17. In any case, no one had got less than 12. Doubtless in order to justify his partiality he asked me to construe the text word by word: I kept my voice steady and did so without a mistake. He congratulated me and the tension eased a little. Mademoiselle Dubois didn't dare ask me to read out my final version; Zaza, sitting next to me, didn't so much as glance at it: she was scrupulously honest and I think refused to entertain any suspicions about me. But when the lesson was over certain of my other classmates started whispering together and Mademoiselle Dubois took me to one side: she felt she would have to inform Mademoiselle Lejeune of my perfidy. And so the thing I had often dreaded was finally going to happen: an action performed innocently and in secret would, by being brought to light, disgrace me. I still felt some respect for Mademoiselle Lejeune: the idea that she would despise me was torture. It was impossible to turn back the clock, to undo what I had done: I was marked for life! I had had a presentiment of danger: the truth can be unjust, unfair; all that evening and part of the night I tried to fight a way out of the trap into which I had so thoughtlessly fallen and which would not let me go. Usually I got round difficulties by running away from them, or keeping silent, or forgetting them; I rarely took any initiative; but this time I decided to fight it out. Lies would be needed to cover up the circumstances which conspired against me; so lie I must. I went to see Mademoiselle Lejeune in her study and I swore to her, with tears in my eyes, that I hadn't copied my Latin translation: only some involuntary recollections of the text book version had slipped into mine. Convinced that I had done nothing wrong, I defended myself with all the fervour of an injured innocent. But my tactics were absurd: I was guiltless, I should have taken my work with me as the chief evidence in my defence; but I merely gave my word. The principal did not believe me, told me so, and added impatiently that the subject was now closed. She did not tell me off, and she did not reproach me for what I had done: this indifference, and the crisp tone of her voice made me realize that she hadn't an ounce of affection for me. I had been afraid that my mistake would ruin the good opinion she had of me: but for a long time now I had had nothing more to lose. I recovered my equanimity. She had so categorically withheld her respect that I no longer wished for it.

During the weeks preceding the examination, my happiness was
unalloyed. The weather was fine and my mother allowed me to go and study in the Luxembourg Gardens. I would sit in the ‘English gardens', at the edge of a lawn, or near the Medici fountain. I was still wearing my hair down my back, caught together with a slide, but my cousin Annie, who often made me a present of her cast-off clothes, had given me that summer a white pleated skirt with a blue cretonne bodice; in my sailor-hat I fancied myself to be a real young lady. I was reading Faguet, Brunetière, and Jules Lemaître; I would sniff the fragrance of the lawns and feel I was as emancipated as the university students who strolled through the gardens. I would pass through the gates and go and rummage round the arcades of the Odéon; I felt the same thrill of delight there as I had felt at the age of ten in my mother's circulating library, the Bibliothèque Cardinale. Here there were displayed rows of leather-bound books, gilt-edged; their pages had been cut, and I would stand there reading for two or three hours without ever being asked to buy anything. I read Anatole France, the Goncourts, Colette, and whatever I could lay my hands on. I told myself that as long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.

I had also been given permission to sit up late: when Papa had left for the Café Versailles where he played bridge nearly every evening, and when Mama and my sister had gone to bed I would be left alone in the study. I would lean out of the window; the wind would bring me gusts of fragrance from the leafy trees; across the way, windows would be lighted. I would get Papa's opera glasses, take them out of their case and spy on the lives of strangers, just as I had used to do; I didn't care how trivial were the things I saw; I was – I still am – very conscious of the fascination of these little peep-shows, these lighted rooms hanging in the night. My gaze would wander from house to house, and I would tell myself, deeply affected by the balmy airs of the summer evening: ‘Soon I'll be living my own life . . .
really
living.'

I enjoyed my examinations. In the amphitheatres of the Sorbonne I rubbed shoulders with boys and girls who had been educated in schools and colleges and
lycées
which I had never even heard of: I was struggling free from the Cours Désir and facing up to the realities of life. Having been assured by my teachers that I had done well in the written examination, I approached the oral with complete self-confidence and took a great fancy to myself in my unfashionably long dress of sky-blue voile. In front of those
important gentlemen who had gathered on purpose to evaluate my merits, I regained the self-conceit of childhood. The examiner in literature particularly flattered me by talking in quite a conversational manner; he asked me if I were a relative of Roger de Beauvoir; I told him that it was only a pseudonym; he questioned me about Ronsard; as I sat there displaying my learning I was admiring all the time the fine, thoughtful head which he inclined in my direction: at last, I was face to face with one of those superior men whose approbation I so earnestly desired! But in the Latin-modern languages oral the examiner gave me an ironic greeting: ‘Well, mademoiselle! Have you come to pick up a few more diplomas?' I was rather disconcerted, and I suddenly realized that my performances might have appeared somewhat comical; but I held my own. I was given a pass with ‘distinction', and my old school-marms, delighted to have this success to their credit, made much of me. My parents were over the moon. Jacques, peremptory as ever, had declared: ‘You must pass with distinction, or else not at all.' He gave me his warmest congratulations. Zaza passed also, but at that period I was too much occupied with myself to bother much about her.

Clotilde and Marguerite sent me affectionate letters; my mother rather spoilt my pleasure in them by bringing them to me already opened and regaling me with a full description of their contents; but this custom was so well-established that I made no protest. By then we were at Valleuse, in Normandy, staying with some very prim and proper cousins. I didn't like their place: it was too well-groomed; there were no sunken lanes, no woods; the meadows were surrounded by barbed wire. One evening I crawled under a fence and lay down in the grass: a woman came up to me and asked if I wasn't feeling well. I returned to the garden, but I felt stifled there. With my father away, Mama and my cousins were all together like birds of a feather, all professing the same highly devout principles without asking any dissident voice to disturb their perfect harmony; speaking freely of spiritual matters in my presence, they seemed to involve me in a complicity which I didn't dare to challenge: I had the feeling that they were doing violence to my soul. We went by car to Rouen; the afternoon was spent visiting churches, of which there were very many, each one unleashing delirious admiration; the stone tracery in Saint Maclou caused their enthusiasm to rise to a paroxysm of ecstasy: what wonderful work!
what skill! what delicacy! I kept my peace. ‘What! You don't think it's beautiful?' they asked me, scandalized. I found it neither beautiful nor ugly: I felt nothing at all. They urged me to look again. I gritted my teeth; I refused to let them thrust words into my mouth. All eyes were turned reproachfully upon my stubbornly silent lips; anger and distress had brought me to the verge of tears. In the end my cousin smoothed things over by explaining fatuously that at my age young people were often in a contrary mood; my torment was over.

Back in the Limousin, I found again the freedom I needed. When I had spent the whole day alone or with my sister, I was quite ready to play mah-jong with the family in the evening. I got my first real taste of philosophy by reading
Intellectual Life
, by Père Sertilanges, and Ollé-Laprune's
Moral Certainty
which bored me considerably.

My father had never tackled the study of philosophy; in my family, as in Zaza's, it was looked upon with suspicion. ‘What a shame! You talk such good sense, and now they're going to teach you to talk nonsense!' one of Zaza's uncles had told her. But Jacques had been very interested in it. As for me, my hopes were always raised by anything new. I awaited the return to school with impatience.

Psychology, logic, moral philosophy, metaphysics: this was Abbé Trécourt's programme, four hours a week. All he did was to hand us back our essays, dictate a fair copy, and make us recite the chapter we had been asked to learn in the text book. Whatever the problem was, the author, the Révérend Père Lahr, made a rapid summary of human errors and instructed us in the truth according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Nor did the Abbé himself bother much about the finer points of the subject. In order to confute idealistic theories he would cite the evidence of the sense of touch, and use this as an argument against the possibly illusory nature of human sight. He would pound on the table as he stated: ‘What is,
is
!' The reading list he gave us was quite unappetizing: Ribot's
Attention
, Gustave Lebon's
Crowd Psychology
, and Fouillée's
The Power of Ideas.
Nevertheless I conceived a passion for philosophy. I found the problems that had intrigued me in childhood treated in books by serious gentlemen; suddenly the grown-up universe was no longer indisputably the only one; there was another side to it, a shady side; doubts were allowed to creep in: if only we went far
enough, there'd be nothing left of it! We did not, of course, go too far, but even so it was rather extraordinary, after twelve years of dreary dogmatism, to find a discipline which asked questions and asked them of
me.
For suddenly it was I myself who was involved in these matters, and until then I had only been treated to commonplaces, as if I were a person of no account. Take my mind – where did it come from? Where did it get its powers? Condillac's statue made me pause, and gave me as dizzy flights of speculation as the old jacket I had when I was seven years old. I was flabbergasted to see the coordinates of the universe, too, begin to vacillate: Henri Poincaré's speculations on the relativity of space and time and measurement plunged me into infinities of meditation. I was deeply impressed by the pages in which he evokes the passage of mankind through the universe, the blind universe: no more than a flash in the dark, but a flash that is everything! For a long time I was haunted by the image of this great fire blazing down the sightless dark.

The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never liked fiddling detail; I perceived the general significance of things rather than their singularities, and I preferred understanding to seeing; I had always wanted to know
everything
; philosophy would allow me to appease this desire, for it aimed at total reality; philosophy went right to the heart of truth and revealed to me, instead of an illusory whirlwind of facts or empirical laws, an order, a reason, a necessity in everything. The sciences, literature, and all the other disciplines seemed to me to be very poor relations to philosophy.

Yet as day followed after day we did not seem to be learning anything very wonderful. But we managed to keep boredom at bay by the tenacity with which Zaza and I stated our opinions in class discussions. There was a particularly lively debate on the subject of the love which we call platonic and the love which we call – well, better just call it love. One of our classmates had cited Tristan and Isolde as platonic lovers. At this, Zaza burst out laughing: ‘Platonic! Tristan and Isolde! Not on your life!' she declared, with a knowing air that disconcerted the whole class. The poor Abbé brought the lesson to a close by exhorting us all to make a ‘sensible' match. ‘After all,' he argued, ‘you don't marry a young man simply because the colour of his tie suits him.' We decided to let him get away with that ridiculous remark. But we were not always quite so
accommodating; when a subject interested us we discussed it with great intensity. We respected things, and believed that words like patriotism, duty, good, and evil had a meaning; we were simply trying to define that meaning; we weren't trying to destroy anything, but we liked to argue in a rational way. We thought it was bad enough to be called ‘wrong-headed'. Mademoiselle Lejeune, who was present at all our philosophy lessons, declared that we were treading a dangerous and downward path. In the middle of our final year the Abbé had a little talk with each of us individually, and beseeched us not to let our hearts shrivel up; if we did, we would in the end resemble our schoolmistresses: they were saintly women, but it would be better if we did not follow in their footsteps. I was touched by his well-meant words, surprised by his aberration: I assured him that I had no intention of entering the religious confraternity. The thought of it filled me with a disgust which surprised even Zaza; despite her mockery, she still retained some affection for our old school-marms and I rather scandalized her when I told her that I would leave them without the slightest regret.