Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (27 page)

Not for anything in the world would I have indulged in even
the most harmless experiment. The behaviour which Madeleine described I found revolting. Love, in my view, had nothing to do with the body; but I would not allow that the body should find release in furtive fumblings from which all love was absent. I didn't take my intransigence in this matter as far as Antoine Redier, the editor of the
Revue Française
where my father worked, who had in one of his novels drawn the touching portrait of a really young woman: she had once allowed a man to steal a kiss, and, rather than tell her fiancé of this dastardly act, she gave him up. I thought this story was a scream. But when one of my friends, the daughter of a general, told me, not without a certain sadness, that every time she went out dancing at least one of her partners kissed her, I blamed her for letting him. I thought it was sad, incongruous, and after all quite wrong to surrender one's lips to just anybody. Doubtless one of the reasons for my prudery lay in the disgust, mingled with terror, that the grown male usually inspires in virgins; above all I dreaded my own feelings and their unpredictable caprices; the disturbance I had felt during the dancing class exasperated me because it had come on without my wanting it to; I couldn't allow myself to think that by a mere contact, a pressure, a squeeze, I could be bowled over by the first man who wanted to take advantage of me. The day would come when I would swoon in the arms of a man: but I would choose the moment and my decision would be justified by the violence of my love. On this rationalist self-sufficiency were superimposed the myths I had been taught. I had cherished that immaculate host, my soul; my memory was still full of images of mud-stained ermine, of trampled lilies; if physical pleasure was not transmuted by the fires of passionate love, it was a defilement. On the other hand, I was an extremist; with me, it had to be ‘all, or nothing'. If I loved a man, it would be for ever, and I would surrender myself to him entirely, body and soul, heart and head, past, present, and future. I refused to tamper with emotions and sensations which had no place in this scheme. To tell the truth I had no opportunity to test the firmness of these principles, because no seducer came along to try to get round them.

My behaviour conformed to the morality implicit in my environment; but with one important exception; I insisted that men should be subject to the same laws as women. Aunt Germaine had complained to my parents, in veiled terms, that Jacques knew too much about life. My father, the majority of writers, and the universal
consensus of opinion encouraged young men to sow their wild oats. When the time came, they would marry a young woman of their own social class; but in the meanwhile it was quite in order for them to amuse themselves with girls from the lowest ranks of society – women of easy virtue, young milliners' assistants, work-girls, sewing-maids, shop-girls. This custom made me feel sick. It had been driven into me that the lower classes have no morals: the misconduct of a laundry-woman or a flower-girl therefore seemed to me to be so natural that it didn't even shock me; I felt a certain sympathy for those poor young women whom novelists endowed with such touching virtues. Yet their love was always doomed from the start; one day or other, according to his whim or convenience, their lover would throw them over for a well-bred young lady. I was a democrat and a romantic; I found it revolting that, just because he was a man and had money, he should be authorized to play around with a girl's heart. On the other hand, I was up in arms in defence of the pure-hearted fiancée with whom I identified myself. I saw no reason why my future partner in life should permit himself liberties which I wouldn't allow myself. Our love would only be inevitable and complete if he had saved himself for me as I had saved myself for him. Moreover, our sexual life, and that of the whole world, should be in its very essence a serious affair; otherwise I should be forced to change my own attitude, and as I was at the moment unable to do so, I should have been thrown into the greatest confusion. Therefore, despite public opinion, I persisted in my view that both sexes should observe the same rules of chastity and continence.

*

At the end of September, I spent a week with a friend. Zaza had occasionally invited me to Laubardon; the difficult journey and my tender age had always militated against accepting. But now I was seventeen, and Mama agreed to put me on a train which would take me from Paris direct to Joigny, where my hosts would come to meet me. It was the first time I had travelled alone; I had put my hair up, I was wearing a little grey felt hat, I was proud of my independence, and slightly worried: at every station I was on the lookout: I should not have liked to find myself alone in a compartment with a strange man. Thérèse was waiting for me on my arrival. She
was a melancholy adolescent who had lost her father and led an existence of perpetual mourning with her mother and half a dozen elder sisters. Pious and sentimental, she had decorated her room with yards and yards of billowing white muslin; Zaza hadn't been able to suppress a smile when she saw it. Thérèse envied me my comparative freedom and I believe that to her I was the incarnation of the gay outside world. She spent the summer in a huge brick château, rather grand, but very gloomy, surrounded by magnificent forests. In the high timber and on the flanks of hills covered with vineyards I discovered an entirely new kind of autumn: violet, orange, scarlet, with great splashes of gold all over it. When we went for walks, we talked about our studies and the new academic year that was about to begin: Thérèse had obtained permission to attend a few lectures on Latin and literature with me. I was determined to work hard. Papa would have liked me to take both literature and law, ‘which would always come in useful', but I had skimmed through the Napoleonic Code at Meyrignac and this had put me off the study of law. Then my science teacher was urging me to try for the general mathematics paper, and I liked the idea: I would prepare for this certificate at the Institut Catholique. As for literature, it had been decided, at the instigation of Monsieur Mabille, that we would follow lectures in a college at Neuilly run by Madame Daniélou; in this way our connexions with the Sorbonne would be reduced to the minimum. Mama had had a talk with Mademoiselle Lambert, Madame Daniélou's principal assistant: if I went on working hard, I could easily go on to take my degree. I received a letter from Zaza: Mademoiselle Lejeune had written to her mother, warning her of the frightful crudities in the Greek and Latin classics; Madame Mabille had replied that she was more afraid of the influences that unbridled romanticism might have upon a young girl's imagination than of the healthy realism of the classics. Robert Garric, who was to be our literature professor, an ardent Catholic of a spiritual probity that was above suspicion, had assured Monsieur Mabille that it was possible to take a degree without being damned eternally. And so all my dearest wishes were being realized: a new life was opening out before me, but I would still be sharing it with Zaza.

A new life; a different life: I was even more excited than on the eve of my first day at school. Lying on dead leaves, my eyes dazed by the passionate colours of the vineyards, I kept repeating those
austere words: degree, doctorate. And all barriers, all prison walls were being broken down. I was moving forwards, under an open sky, across the reality of life. The future was no longer just an impossible dream: I was touching it now. There would be four or five years of study, and then a whole way of life which I would build up with my own hands. My life would be a beautiful story come true, a story I would make up as I went along.

I
INAUGURATED
my new existence by ascending the stairs to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. I took my seat, in the section reserved ‘for ladies only', at a large table covered, like those in the Cours Désir, with black imitation leather, and I plunged straight into
The Human Comedy
and
The Memoirs of a Man of Quality.
Opposite me, her face shadowed by a huge hat covered with birds, a middle-aged lady was looking through old volumes of
The Official Gazette
; she was muttering and laughing to herself. In those days, anyone could use the library; all kinds of queer people and near-tramps used to take refuge there; they would talk to themselves, hum snatches of song, and gnaw at dry crusts of bread; there was one who used to walk up and down wearing a paper hat. I felt very far removed from the ‘lecture-study room' at my old school: at last I had flung myself into the hurly-burly of real life. ‘This is it! I'm a student now!' I gleefully kept reminding myself. I was wearing a tartan dress; it was new and made to measure, but I had taken up the hem myself; as I went about the library consulting the catalogue I felt I must be looking simply stunning.

On the syllabus that year were Lucretius, Juvenal, the Heptameron, and Diderot; if I had still been as ignorant as my parents would have liked on certain matters, the shock would have been a brutal one: they realized this. One afternoon, when I was alone in the study, my mother came in and sat down opposite me; she hesitated, blushed, and then said: ‘There are certain things you ought to know!' I blushed too: ‘I know all about that,' I hurriedly replied. She displayed no curiosity as to where I had obtained my knowledge, and to our mutual relief the conversation was not pursued any further. A few days later she called me into her room and asked me, with some embarrassment, ‘how I stood from the religious point of view'. My heart began to pound: ‘Well,' I said, ‘for some time now I haven't believed in God.' Her face fell: ‘My poor darling!' she said. She went to shut the door, so that my sister might
not overhear the rest of our conversation; in a pleading voice she embarked on a demonstration of the truth of God's existence; then, with a helpless gesture, her eyes full of tears, she stopped suddenly. I was sorry to have hurt her, but I felt greatly relieved: at last I would be able to live without a mask.

One evening as I got off the bus I saw Jacques' car in front of the house; he had bought a small one a few months before. I took the stairs four at a time. Jacques was coming to see us less frequently than he used to do; my parents couldn't forgive his literary tastes, and probably he was rather sick of their heavy banter. According to my father, it was only the idols of his youth who had any talent; only intellectual snobbery could explain the success of modern French and foreign authors. He put Alphonse Daudet far above Dickens; whenever there was talk of the Russian novel he would despairingly shrug his shoulders. One evening, a student from the Conservatoire who was rehearsing with him a play by Monsieur Jeannot entitled
Return to Earth
impetuously declared: ‘One must bow very low to the genius of Ibsen!' My father burst out laughing: ‘You won't get
me
bowing to him!' Whether English, Slav, or Scandinavian, he thought all works of art from abroad were boring, badly constructed, and childish. As for the
avantgarde
writers and painters, they were cynical speculators in human folly. My father appreciated the naturalism of certain young actors like Gaby Morlay, Fresnay, Blanchard, and Charles Boyer. But he thought the experiments of Copeau, Dullin, and Jouvet were quite uncalled-for, and he detested ‘those Bolshies', the Pitoëffs. He thought that anyone who didn't share his opinions was un-French and unpatriotic. So Jacques steered clear of discussion and argument; he was talkative, and a great charmer; he would exchange light banter with my father, and pay court to my mother in the gayest fashion: but he took care never to say anything important. I regretted this very much, because whenever by chance he dropped his guard he would say things that intrigued and interested me; I no longer found him at all pretentious; he knew far more than I did about the world, about human affairs, painting, and literature; I should have liked him to give me the benefit of his experience. That evening, as usual, he treated me like a little girl; but there was such kindness in his voice and in his smiles that I felt very glad simply to have seen him again. When I laid my head on my pillow that night, my eyes filled with tears. ‘I weep, therefore I love,' I told
myself, with rapturous melancholy. I was seventeen: it was the age for that sort of thing.

I thought I saw a way of raising myself in Jacques' esteem. He knew Robert Garric, who lectured on French literature at the Institut Sainte-Marie. Garric was the founder and director of a movement called Les Équipes Sociales whose aim was to bring culture to the lower social classes: Jacques was one of his adherents, and admired the man very much. If I could succeed in making my new professor take notice of me, he might praise me to Jacques, who might then stop regarding me only as an insignificant schoolgirl. Garric was just over thirty; he had thinning blond hair and spoke in a lovely manner; his voice had just a trace of Auvergne accent; his lecture-commentaries on Ronsard left me spellbound. I took infinite pains over my first essay for him, but only a Dominican nun, who wore ordinary clothes when she attended lectures, was complimented on her work; Zaza and I barely distinguished ourselves from the rest of the class: we both got eleven minus. Thérèse came a long way behind us.

The intellectual level at the Institut Sainte-Marie was much higher than that of the Cours Désir. Mademoiselle Lambert, who was in charge of the advanced students, filled me with respect. She had a degree in philosophy and was about thirty-five; a fringe of black hair gave a severe look to her face, in which her blue eyes had a piercing glitter. But I never had anything to do with her. I was a mere beginner in Greek, and I soon found out that my knowledge of Latin was very small: my professors took no notice of me. As for my fellow-students, I didn't find them any gayer than my former school companions. They got free board and lodging in return for teaching and keeping order in the secondary classes. The majority of them, already rather long in the tooth, were bitterly aware that they would never marry; their only chance of one day leading a decent existence was to pass their examinations: this became an obsession with them. I tried to talk to one or two of them but they had nothing to say.

In November I began to prepare for the general mathematics paper at the Institut Catholique; the girls sat in the front rows, the boys at the back; to me they all seemed to have the same narrow-minded look on their faces. I was bored by the literature lectures at the Sorbonne; the professors merely repeated in a flat voice the facts they had long ago written in their doctoral theses; Fortunat
Strowski would tell us about the plays he had seen during the past week; his jaded animation soon ceased to amuse me. To while away the time I would observe the young men and women students seated all round me on the amphitheatre benches: some of them intrigued and attracted me; when the lecture was over I would often follow with my eyes some unknown young woman whose elegance and grace astounded me: to whom was she going to offer that smile painted on her lips? Brushed in passing by these strange lives, I felt once more the intimate, obscure happiness that I had known as a child on the balcony of our flat in the boulevard Raspail. Only I didn't dare speak to anyone, and nobody spoke to me.

Grandpapa died at the end of the autumn, after lingering on interminably; my mother shrouded herself in black crêpe and had all my clothes dyed black. This funereal get-up did not improve my appearance; it set me apart, and I felt it condemned me to an austere way of life that was beginning to weigh heavily upon my spirits. The students, both boys and girls, used to parade up and down the boulevard Saint-Michel in laughing gangs; they went to cafés, theatres, cinemas. As for me, after reading learned tomes and translating Catullus all day, I would spend the evenings doing mathematical problems. My parents, by helping to push me, not into marriage, but into a career, were breaking with tradition; nevertheless they still made me conform to it; there was never any question of letting me go anywhere without them, nor of releasing me from family duties.

During the past year, my principal amusement had been my meetings and my conversations with my friends; but now, apart from Zaza, they all bored me stiff. I went three or four times to the study-circle they attended under the supervision of the Abbé Trécourt, but the dreary inanity of the discussions drove me away. My old schoolmates hadn't changed all that much; I hadn't either; but before, we had been bound by a common endeavour: our studies; while now our lives were going separate ways; I was pushing forward and developing all the time, whereas they, in order to adapt themselves to their role of marriageable young girls, were beginning to grow dull and stupid. From the outset, I was being separated from them by the diverse paths our future was taking.

I soon had to admit that this year was not bringing me all I had banked on getting. Cut off from my past, I felt out of place; my life seemed out of joint, and I had still not discovered any really
broad new horizons. Up to now, I had made the best of living in a cage, for I knew that one day – and each day brought it nearer – the door of the cage would open; now I had got out of the cage, and I was still inside. What a let-down! There was no longer any definite hope to sustain me; though this prison was one without bars, I couldn't see any way out of it. Perhaps there
was
a way out; but where? And when would I find it? Every evening I carried the rubbish bin downstairs; as I emptied out the peelings, the ashes and waste paper into the communal refuse bin, I would look up inquiringly at the patch of sky above the little yard; I would pause at the entry; shop-windows were ablaze with light, cars were dashing along the street, passers-by were passing by; outside, the night was alive. Then I would go back upstairs, loathing the greasy feel of the empty rubbish bin's handle. Whenever my parents went out to dinner, I would rush down into the street with my sister; we would wander aimlessly around, trying to catch an echo or a reflection of the brilliant festivities from which we were shut out.

My captivity seemed all the more unbearable because I no longer felt happy at home. Her eyes raised imploring heavenwards, my mother would pray for my salvation; she was always moaning about the error of my ways: we had completely lost touch with one another. At least I knew the reasons for her distress. But my father's reticence astonished and wounded me much more. He should have been taking some interest in my work, in the progress I was making; he might, I thought, have talked to me in a friendly way about the authors I was studying: but he was merely indifferent, and even vaguely hostile, in his attitude towards me. My cousin Jeanne was far from intelligent, but she was very amiable, always smiling and polite; my father never tired of telling everyone that his brother had a delightful daughter; then he would give a sigh. I was very put out. I couldn't understand what it was that had come between us and was to cast a heavy shadow over my youth.

*

In those days, people of my parents' class thought it unseemly for a young lady to go in for higher education; to train for a profession was a sign of defeat. It goes without saying that my father was a vigorous anti-feminist: I have already mentioned that he relished
the novels of Colette Yver; he considered that a woman's place was in the home, that she should be an ornament to polite society. Of course, he admired Colette's literary style and the acting of Simone, but in the same way as he appreciated the beauty of the great courtesans – from a distance; he would not have received them in his house. Before the war, his future had looked rosy; he was expecting to have a brilliant career, to make lucrative investments, and to marry off my sister and myself into high society. He was of the opinion that in order to shine in those exalted spheres a woman should not only be beautiful and elegant but should also be well-read and a good conversationalist; so he was pleased by my early scholastic successes. Physically, I was not without promise; if in addition I could be intelligent and cultured, I would be able to hold my own with ease in the very best society. But though my father liked intelligent and witty women, he had no time for bluestockings. When he announced: ‘My dears, you'll never marry; you'll have to work for your livings,' there was bitterness in his voice. I believed he was being sorry for us; but in our hard-working futures he only saw his own failure; he was crying out against the injustice of a fate which condemned him to have daughters who could not keep up the social position he had given them.

He gave way to the inevitable. The war had ruined him, sweeping away all his dreams, destroying his myths, his self-justifications, and his hopes. I was wrong to think he had resigned himself to the situation; he never stopped protesting against his changed condition. Above all else he prized good education and perfect manners; yet whenever I was with him in a restaurant, in the Métro, or in a train I always felt embarrassed by the loudness of his voice, his gesticulations, and his brutal indifference to the opinion of others; he was trying to show, by this aggressive exhibitionism, that he belonged to a superior class. In the days when he used to travel first class he used every refinement of politeness to prove how well-bred he was; but in third class he would go to the other extreme and ignore the most elementary rules of civility. Nearly everywhere he went he affected a manner that was both bewildered and aggressive, which was intended to signify that his true place was really elsewhere. In the trenches he had quite naturally spoken the same language as his fellows; he was always happy to remind us that one of them had said: ‘When Beauvoir says shit, it becomes a word fit for polite conversation.' In order to prove his distinction, he began to
say ‘shit' more and more often. Now he rarely associated with people other than those he considered to be ‘common', and indeed out-commoned the common; as he was no longer looked up to by his equals, he took a bitter pleasure in being looked down upon by his inferiors. On rare occasions – when we went to the theatre, and his friend from the Odéon introduced him to some well-known actress – he would recover all his old airs and graces. But for the rest of the time he succeeded so well in appearing a nonentity that in the end no one but himself could be expected to know he was anything else.