Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (26 page)

My school life was coming to an end, and something else was going to begin: what would it be? In
Les Annales
I read a lecture which set me day-dreaming; a former student at the teachers' training college for women at Sèvres was recalling her experiences there: she described the gardens in which beautiful young women, athirst for knowledge, went walking by moonlight, the sound of their voices mingling with the murmur of fountains. But my mother didn't like the idea of the École Normale Supérieure at Sèvres. And when I came to think about it, I hardly wanted to shut myself up with a lot of women away from Paris. So what should I do? I dreaded the arbitrary side of any choice. My father, who at the age of fifty had the painful prospect of an uncertain future ahead of him, wanted me to have some sort of security above everything else; he thought I should go into the Civil Service, which would provide me with a fixed salary and a pension on retirement. Someone recommended the School of Palaeography and Librarianship – l'École des Chartes. I went with my mother to an interview with a lady behind the scenes at the Sorbonne. We went along seemingly endless corridors lined with books; here and there were doors leading to offices full of filing cabinets. As a child I had always dreamed of working in this dusty ante-room of learning, and today I felt as
if I were penetrating into the Holy of Holies. The lady we went to see described to us the attractions and also the difficulties of librarianship; I was put off by the thought of having to learn Sanskrit; I wasn't interested in dry-as-dust erudition. What I should have liked was to continue my study of philosophy. I had read in an illustrated magazine an article about a woman philosopher who was called Mademoiselle Zanta: she had taken her doctorate; she had been photographed, in a grave and thoughtful posture, sitting at her desk; she lived with a young niece whom she had adopted: she had thus succeeded in reconciling her intellectual life with the demands of feminine sensibility. How I should love to have such flattering things written one day about
me
! In those days the women who had a degree or a doctorate in philosophy could be counted on the fingers of one hand: I wanted to be one of those pioneers. From a practical point of view, the only career that would be open to me if I had a degree in philosophy was teaching: I had nothing against that. My father did not object to this plan; but he wouldn't hear of my giving private tuition in pupils' homes: I would have to get a post in a
lycée.
Why not? This solution was very much to my taste, and also set his mind at rest. My mother went in fear and trembling to tell my teachers of my decision; their faces went rigid with disapproval. They had given their lives to combating secular institutions and to them a state school was nothing better than a licensed brothel. In addition, they told my mother that the study of philosophy mortally corrupts the soul: after one year at the Sorbonne, I would lose both my faith and my good character. Mama felt worried. As a degree in classics held out greater possibilities – or so my father thought – and as there was a possibility that Zaza might be allowed to follow a few of the courses, I agreed to sacrifice philosophy for literature. But I was still determined to teach in a
lycée.
How scandalous! Eleven years of sermons, careful grooming, and systematic indoctrination, and now I was biting the hand that had fed me! It was with complete unconcern that I read in my teachers' eyes their opinion of my ingratitude, my unworthiness, my treachery: I had fallen into the hands of Satan.

In July, I passed in elementary mathematics and philosophy. The Abbé's teaching had been so feeble that my dissertation, which he would have marked at 16, only scraped through with 11. I made up for this in my science papers. On the eve of the oral, my father took me to the Théâtre de Dix-Heures, where I saw Dorin, Colline, and
Noël-Noël; I enjoyed myself immensely. How glad I was that I had finished with the Cours Désir! Yet a few days later, finding myself alone in the apartment, I was overcome by a strange uneasiness; I stood planted in the middle of the hall, feeling as utterly lost as if I had been transported to another planet! No family, no friends, no ties, no hope. My heart had died and the world was empty: could such an emptiness ever be filled? I was afraid. And then time started to flow again.

*

There was one respect in which my education had failed completely: despite all the books I had read, I was the most awful greenhorn. I was about sixteen when an aunt took my sister and me to the Salle Pleyel to see a film called
La Croisière jaune.
The house was full, and we had to stand at the back. I was surprised when I began to feel hands fumbling round my thin woollen coat, feeling me through the material; I thought somebody must be trying to pick my pockets or steal my handbag; I held on tightly to it; the hands continued to rub against me: it was absurd. I didn't know what to do or say: I just let them go on. When the film was over and the lights went up, a man wearing a brown trilby sniggered and pointed me out to a friend of his, who also started to snigger. They were laughing at me: why? I couldn't make it out at all.

A little later, someone – I can't remember who – sent me to a religious book-shop near Saint-Sulpice to purchase an article for a church youth club. A timid young fair-haired shop-assistant, wearing a long black overall, came forward and politely asked what I required. He walked away towards the back of the shop, beckoning me to follow; I went and stood beside him. He opened his overall, exposing something pink and erect; his face was devoid of expression and for a moment I stood there nonplussed; then I turned on my heels and fled. His preposterous gesture bothered me less than Charles VI's display of madness on the stage of the Odéon, but it left me with the feeling that the oddest things could happen to me without any warning. After that, whenever I found myself alone with a strange man – in a shop or on a platform of the Métro – I always felt a little apprehensive.

At the beginning of my philosophy course, Madame Mabille
persuaded Mama to let me take dancing lessons. Once a week Zaza and I would go to a dancing academy where girls and boys, under the supervision of an elderly lady, practised dance-steps. In those days I used to get myself up in a dress of sky-blue silk stockinette handed down to me from my cousin Annie, which fitted where it touched. All make-up was forbidden me. In our family, only my cousin Madeleine defied this ban on cosmetics. When she reached the age of sixteen she began to tart herself up discreetly. Papa, Mama, and Aunt Marguerite would point scandalized fingers at her: ‘Madeleine! You've been putting powder on!' ‘No, Aunt, I swear I haven't!' she would protest coquettishly, in an affected, babyish tone of voice. Along with the grown-ups, I laughed at her: any kind of artifice was always ‘ridiculous'. Every morning they would harp on the same theme: ‘It's no use trying to deny it, Madeleine, you've been putting powder on again; you can see it a mile off.' One day – she was then eighteen or nineteen – she got fed-up and retorted: ‘Well, why shouldn't I?' She had finally admitted it: triumph for the grown-ups! But her reply gave me something to think about. In any case, we were far from living in a state of nature. In our family, the grown-ups claimed that ‘make-up spoils the complexion'. But my sister and I often remarked to one another when we saw our aunts' raddled features that their prudence had not brought them any great reward. But I didn't attempt to argue them into letting me use cosmetics. So I used to arrive at the dancing academy in a dowdy old frock, with badly brushed hair, well scrubbed cheeks, and a shiny nose. I couldn't do anything with my body; I couldn't even swim or ride a bicycle: I felt as awkward and self-conscious as the day I had tried to show off my charms in the role of a Spanish dancer. I began to detest those dancing lessons, but for another reason. When my partner held me in his arms and held me to his chest, I felt a funny sensation that was rather like having butterflies in the stomach, but which I didn't find quite so easy to forget. When I got back home, I would throw myself in the leather arm chair, overpowered by a curious languor that I couldn't put a name to and that made me want to burst into tears. On the pretext that I had too much work, I gave up going to the dancing class.

Zaza was rather more sophisticated. ‘When I think that our mothers are watching us dance, and never suspecting a thing, poor innocents!' she said to me one day. She used to tease her sister Lili
and her older girl cousins: ‘Go on! You're not going to tell me you'd enjoy it just as much if you were dancing among yourselves or with your brothers! ‘I thought she must connect the pleasure of dancing with something I had only the vaguest notions of – flirting. At the age of twelve, I had in my ignorance had an inkling of what physical desire and hugging and squeezing meant, but at seventeen, though in theory I was much better informed, I didn't even know what the trouble was all about.

I don't know whether there was a certain amount of self-deception in my ingenuousness: whatever it was, sexuality frightened me. Only one person, Titite, had ever made me realize that physical love may be enjoyed as the most natural thing in the world; her exuberant physique knew no shame, and when she used to recall the first night of her marriage, the desire that shone from her eyes made her even more beautiful. Aunt Simone insinuated that she had ‘gone too far' with her fiancé; Mama wouldn't hear of it; I found their arguments quite beside the point; whether married or not, the embraces of these two good-looking young people did not shock me at all: they loved one another, and that was enough. But this isolated example was not sufficient to break down the taboos that had been erected round me. Not only had I never – since our holiday at Villers-set my foot on a bathing-beach or entered a public swimming-bath or gymnasium, so that in my mind nudity was confused with indecency; but in the environment in which I lived no open reference to bodily functions and no untoward physical act was allowed to tear aside the veil drawn over sex by custom and convention. How could adults, who kept their bodies so carefully covered up, and who restricted themselves to a cautious public exchange of words and gestures, how could they suddenly abandon themselves to the crude indecency of animal instincts and pleasures? During my last year at school, Marguerite de Théricourt came to tell Mademoiselle Lejeune of her forthcoming marriage: she was marrying a rich titled business associate of her father's, a man much older than herself, whom she had known since she was a baby. Everyone congratulated her, and she radiated a candid happiness. The word ‘marriage' exploded in my brain and I was even more dumbfounded than the day when, in the middle of a lesson, a schoolmate had begun to bark like a dog. How could one superimpose the image of a pink, soft body lying with a naked man upon this well-behaved young lady with the studied smile standing there
in a smart hat and neatly buttoned gloves? I didn't go as far as to undress Marguerite in my mind's eye: but I saw her in a long, transparent nightdress, her hair spread out over the pillow, offering up her body. Such inconsequential immodesty verged on madness. Either sex was a brief disorder of the brain, or Marguerite was not the same well-bred young person who was escorted everywhere by a chaperone; appearances were deceptive, and the world I had been taught to believe in was a pack of lies. I was inclined to accept the latter hypothesis, but I had been deceived, and had deceived myself, too consistently and too long; my doubts could not disperse the illusion I had got so used to: the real Marguerite was the one before me wearing her hat and gloves. Whenever I imagined her half-naked and exposed to the eyes of a man, I felt myself whirled away in a hot storm of sensations which shattered every normal standard of morality and good sense.

At the end of July I went away on holiday. This time I discovered a new aspect of sexual life which was neither a calm sensual delight nor a disturbing deviation from common sense: it was more like childish depravity.

My Uncle Maurice, having existed entirely on fresh green salad for two or three years, had died of stomach cancer after the most atrocious sufferings. My aunt and Madeleine had mourned him long and loud. But eventually they found consolation and life at La Grillière became much gayer than it had been in the past. Robert was able to issue invitations freely to his friends. The scions of the local gentry had just discovered the motor-car and from as far as fifty miles away they would meet to go hunting and dancing. That year Robert was courting a young beauty of about twenty-five who was spending her holidays in a neighbouring town and was obviously dead-set on getting married; Yvonne came to La Grillière nearly every day; she rejoiced in a motley wardrobe; she had loads of hair, and such a fixed, unchanging smile that I was never quite able to decide whether she was deaf or daft. One afternoon in the drawing-room, where the dust-sheets had been removed at last from the furniture, her mother sat down at the piano, and Yvonne, dressed as a Spanish gipsy dancer, plied a fan and rolled her eyes and performed so-called Spanish dances surrounded by a circle of giggling young men and women. After this Andalusian idyll, there were more and more parties at La Grillière and at neighbouring houses. I enjoyed them like anything. Our parents did not take part
in them; we could laugh and make as much of a rumpus as we liked. There were parlour games, musical chairs, round dances, and farandoles: dancing became just a game like anything else and no longer upset me. I even found one of my partners very charming; he was a medical student in his last year. Once, in a near-by country house, we stayed awake until dawn; we concocted onion soup in the kitchen; we went in a motor-car to the foot of Mont Gargan which we climbed to see the sunrise; we drank bowls of fresh milk and coffee at an inn; it was my first all-night do. In my letters to Zaza I told her of all this debauchery and she seemed a little scandalized that I should be taking so much pleasure in it and that my mother should have allowed me to. Neither my own virginity nor that of my sister was ever in danger; we were known as ‘the babes'; obviously still a pair of innocents, sex-appeal was not our strong point. Yet the conversations that went on simply crackled with allusions and suggestions whose licentiousness shocked me. Madeleine told us that on our outings and at parties ‘all kinds of things' went on in motor-cars and behind bushes. The young ladies were careful to remain young ladies. But Yvonne neglected to take this elementary precaution, and Robert's friends, who one after the other had done what they liked with her, were obliging enough to warn my cousin, and the marriage did not take place. The other girls knew the rules of the game, and stuck to them; but their prudence did not mean that they were unable to enjoy some very agreeable interludes. Doubtless these were not altogether illicit: those girls who were over-scrupulous trotted off to confession next morning; then, their souls washed free of sin, they could go on being themselves again. I should have very much liked to find out how it was that when two mouths came in contact people got voluptuous feelings: often, looking at the lips of a young man or a young woman, I would feel amazed, just as when I used to gaze at the live rail in the Métro or at a forbidden book – what
could
it be? The information Madeleine proffered was always rather odd: she explained to me that physical pleasure depends on one's personal tastes: her friend Nini couldn't do anything unless her partner kissed or tickled the soles of her feet. I wondered, with sickening curiosity, whether my own body contained hidden springs from which one day unpredictable sensations would suddenly leap to life.