Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (37 page)

And yet I loved life passionately. It needed very little to restore my confidence in it, and in myself: a letter from one of my pupils at Berck, the smile of a Belleville working girl, the confidence of a fellow-student at Neuilly, a look from Zaza, a thank-you, a kind word. As soon as I felt I was useful and loved, the horizon brightened and again I would begin to make fresh resolutions: ‘Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.' I was more and more certain that I had ‘masses of things to say': and I would say them. On my nineteenth birthday, I wrote in the library at the Sorbonne a long dialogue between two voices, both of which were mine: one spoke of the vanity of all things, of disgust and weariness; the other affirmed that life, even a sterile existence, was beautiful. From day to day, from one hour to the next I would pass from depression to exaltation. But all through that autumn and winter the dominating thing in me was an anguished fear that one day I would again find myself ‘broken by life'.

These oscillations of mood and all these doubts filled me with terror; I was bored to suffocation and my heart was sore. Whenever I cast myself into despair, it was with all the violence of my youth and strength, and moral pain could rack my body with as much
savagery as physical suffering. I wandered around Paris, mile after mile after mile, staring at unknown vistas through eyes swimming in tears. Made hungry by my long tramp, I would go into a cake shop, eat a bun, and recite in an ironic tone Heine's famous line: ‘Whatever tears one may shed, in the end one always blows one's nose.' On the
quais
of the Seine I would try to rock away my misery by sobbing out the lines by Laforgue:

   
‘O, well-belovèd, it's too late now, my heart is breaking,

   
A break too deep for bitterness, and I have wept so long . . .'

I liked to feel the tears singeing my eyes. But at certain moments, with all my defences down, I would seek refuge in the side-aisles of a church in order to be able to weep in peace; there I would prostrate myself with my head in my hands, suffocated by the bitter-smelling dark.

*

Jacques returned to Paris at the end of January. The day after his return he came to see us. My parents had had photographs taken of me for my nineteenth birthday, and he asked me for one; never had I heard such tender inflexions in his voice. I was trembling when, a week later, I rang at his door, for I was dreading some brutal relapse into indifference. I was enchanted by our meeting. He had started a novel, which he was calling
Les Jeunes Bourgeois
, and he told me: ‘It's because of you I'm writing it.' He also told me that he would dedicate it to me: ‘I feel I owe it to you.' For the next few days, I was walking on air. The week after, I talked to him about myself; I described my boredom, and told him how I could no longer see any meaning in life. ‘There's no need to look so hard,' he told me gravely. ‘One must simply live from day to day.' A little later, he added: ‘One must have the humility to recognize that one can't face life alone; it's easier to have someone else to live for.' He smiled at me: ‘The solution would be to cultivate our egos together.'

I kept dwelling on that phrase, that smile; I was no longer in any doubt: Jacques loved me; we would be married. But there was something very wrong: my happiness didn't last any longer than three days. Jacques came back to see us; I spent a very happy evening with him, and after he had left I broke down: ‘I've got every
thing a girl could want to make her happy, yet I feel I want to die! Life is here, waiting for me, waiting for us to seize it with both hands. I'm frightened: I am alone, I shall always be alone. . . . If only I could run away – where to? Anywhere. It would be like a terrible cataclysm, sweeping us away.' For Jacques, marriage was obviously an end in itself, and I didn't want to put an end to anything, at least not so soon. For another month I tussled with my feelings. At moments I was able to persuade myself that I could live alongside Jacques without mutilating myself; and then terror would seize me again: ‘What? Imprison myself in the limitations of another human being? I would feel only horror for a love that held me prisoner, and would not let me go. I have a longing to snap this link between us, to forget it all, to start a fresh life all over again. . . . Not yet; I'm not ready: I don't want to sacrifice myself, the whole of myself.' Yet I kept feeling great surges of love for Jacques, and it was only occasionally and briefly that I admitted to myself: ‘He's not the one for me.' I preferred to protest that I was not made for love or for happiness. I wrote about it in my journal, in a queer way, as if the facts were inescapable and unalterable, as if I were at liberty to reject or accept them, but incapable of modifying their application. Instead of telling myself: ‘Every day I feel less certain of being able to find happiness with Jacques,' I wrote: ‘I dread happiness more and more,' and ‘The prospect of saying yes or no to happiness causes me equal distress.' Again: ‘It's when I feel I love him most that I hate all the more the love I have for him.' I was afraid that my affection for him would trap me into becoming his wife, and I savagely rejected the sort of life that awaited the future Madame Laiguillon.

Jacques for his part was often capricious. He would turn on ingratiating smiles for me; he would tell me: ‘There are some people who are quite irreplaceable,' looking at me with eyes full of meaning; he would ask me to come back and see him soon: then he would receive me very coldly. At the beginning of March he fell ill. I paid him several visits: there were always uncles, aunts, and grandmothers round his bed. ‘Come back tomorrow and we'll be able to talk in peace,' he told me once. I felt even more worked-up than usual that afternoon as I made my way towards the boulevard Montparnasse. I bought a bunch of violets which I pinned on the collar of my dress; I had some difficulty in getting them fixed, and in my distraction I lost my purse. There was nothing much in it,
but it was enough to make me arrive at Jacques' in a very nervous state. I had been thinking all day of the heart-to-heart talk we would have in his shaded room. But when I got there he was not alone: Lucien Riaucourt was sitting at his bedside. I had already met him. he was an elegant casual young man, a good talker. They went on chatting together about the bars they frequented and the people they met there; they arranged to go out together during the coming week. I felt I was completely superfluous and unwelcome: I didn't have money, I didn't go out in the evenings; I was only a poor little student, quite incapable of taking any part in Jacques real existence. Besides, he was not in the best of humours; he was sarcastic towards me, almost aggressive; I made my escape as soon as possible and he was obviously relieved to see me go. I was shaking with fury; I hated him. What was there so very special about him after all? There were hosts of other men who were just as good as he. I had been badly mistaken in thinking he was a sort of Grand Meaulnes. He was fickle, egotistical, and only out for his own enjoyment. I stormed along the boulevards, telling myself I would cut myself off from his life completely. The next day I relented: but I had made up my mind not to set foot in his house for a good long time. I kept my word, and six weeks went by before I saw him again.

*

Philosophy had neither opened up the heavens to me nor anchored me to earth; all the same, in January, when I had mastered the first difficulties, I began to take a serious interest in it. I read Bergson, Plato, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Hamelin, and, with passionate enthusiasm, Nietzsche. I was excited by a host of problems: the values of science; life, matter, time, art. I had no fixed ideas of my own, but at least I knew that I rejected Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas, Maritain, and also all empirical and materialist doctrines. In the main, I favoured critical idealism of the kind expounded to us by Brunschvig, although on certain points he left me far from satisfied. I acquired a taste for reading again. In the boulevard Saint-Michel, students found a happy hunting-ground in the Librairie Picard: I would stand there looking through the
avant-garde
magazines which in those days came and went like the flowers that bloom in the spring. I spent hours there reading Aragon and Breton; sur
realism bowled me over. All this ‘disquiet' had got a little stale in the end; I preferred the outrageous jokes of pure negation. The destruction of art, morals, language; the systematic derangement of the senses, suicidal despair – I was delighted by all these excesses.

I wanted to talk about these things; I wanted to talk about all sorts of things with people who, unlike Jacques, wouldn't let their sentences trail away at the ends. I was eager to find new acquaintances. At the Institut Sainte-Marie, I sought the confidences of my fellow-students: but quite definitely there was not one of them who interested me. At Belleville, I began to take much greater pleasure in talking to Suzanne Boigue. She had chestnut-coloured hair, very severely cut, a broad forehead, very light blue eyes, and she had a certain dashing air. She earned her living as director of the centre I have been talking about; her greater age, her independence, her responsibilities, and her authority all contributed to her importance. She was a believer, but she gave me to understand that the relations she had with her Maker were not altogether satisfactory. We had almost the same taste in books. And I was gratified to observe that she, too, was not taken in by the Groups, nor by the idea of ‘action' in general. She confessed to me that she, too, wanted to live her life to the full; she, too, despaired of ever finding more than a drug in the activities of daily life. As we were both hale and hearty young women, our disillusioned conversations, far from depressing, re-invigorated me. On leaving her, I would stride purposefully through the Buttes Chaumont park. Just as I did, she wanted to find her rightful place in the world. She went to Berck to meet a sort of female saint who had devoted her life to ‘the bedridden ‘. On her return, she declared forcefully: ‘I'm not cut out to be a saint.' At the beginning of the spring, she was smitten with a young and pious fellow-worker in the Groups; they decided to get married. Circumstances would compel them to wait two years; but, as Suzanne Boigue informed me, when you're in love, time doesn't count. She was radiant. I was stupefied when, a few weeks later, she announced that she had ‘broken it off ‘with her fiancé. The physical attraction between them was too strong, and the young man was scared by the intensity of their kisses. He had asked Suzanne not to see him any more, in order to preserve their chastity; they would keep themselves for one another, but at a distance. She had preferred to call the whole thing off. I thought it was all very queer, and I was never able to discover the ins and outs of the affair. But
I was touched by Suzanne's disappointment, and by her efforts to overcome it.

The students I tried to get friendly with at the Sorbonne were all, I thought, both male and female, without any interest: they kept rushing about in noisy groups, laughing their heads off; they weren't interested in anything and were quite complacent about their indifference. But in the history and philosophy lectures I noticed a young man, much older than myself, who had very serious blue eyes; dressed entirely in black, and wearing a black felt hat, he never spoke to anyone excepting a little thin-faced dark girl; he was always smiling at her. One day in the library he was translating some of Engel's letters when some students at his table began to kick up a disturbance; his eyes flashed, and in a curt voice he asked for silence in such an authoritative manner that he was instantly obeyed. ‘He must be somebody!' I told myself, highly impressed. I managed to get into conversation with him, and after that, whenever the little dark girl wasn't there, we would talk together. One day I walked a little way with him along the boulevard Saint-Michel: that evening, I asked my sister if I had acted improperly; she reassured me that I hadn't and I did it again. Pierre Nodier was a member of the ‘Philosophies' group to which belonged Mohrange, Friedmann, Henri Lefebvre, and Politzer; thanks to a generous subsidy from the father of one of the group, a rich banker, they had started a magazine; but their patron, infuriated by an article in it against the war in Morocco, had withdrawn his support. A little later the magazine was revived under a new name,
L'Esprit.
Pierre Nodier brought me two numbers: it was my first contact with left-wing intellectuals. But I didn't feel at all out of my depth: I could recognize the idiom to which the literature of the period had accustomed me; these young men, too, were talking about soul, salvation, joy, eternity; they declared that all thought should be ‘concrete' and ‘carnal', but they said so in abstract terms. According to them, philosophy could not be distinguished from revolution, in which lay humanity's final hope; but in those days Politzer believed that ‘in the interests of truth, historical materialism is not inseparable from revolution': he believed in the value of the idealist Idea, on condition that it was apprehended in its concrete totality, with no intermediary stage of abstraction. They were interested above all in the manifestations of the Spirit; economy and politics to their mind could only play subordinate
roles. They condemned capitalism because it had destroyed ‘the sense of being' in man; they considered that through the uprisings of the peoples of Asia and Africa ‘History is coming to be the servant of Wisdom'. Friedman pulled to pieces the ideology of the young bourgeois intellectuals; their disquiet and lack of responsibility were puerile: but he wanted a new mystique to take its place. It was a question of giving back to men ‘the eternal part of themselves'. They didn't look upon life from the point of view of necessity or labour; they were turning it into a romantic dream. ‘There
is
life, and all our love goes out to it,' wrote Friedmann. Politzer defined it in a phrase which caused a sensation: ‘The triumphant, brutal life of the sailor who stubs out his cigarette on the Gobelins tapestries in the Kremlin terrifies you, and you don't want to hear about it: and yet
that
is life!' They weren't far removed from the surrealists, many of whom were in fact being converted to the Revolution. It attracted me, too, but only from a negative point of view; I began to hope that society would be turned topsy-turvy, but I didn't understand the workings of society any better than before. And I remained indifferent to the great events which were taking place in the world. All the newspapers – even
Candide
– were devoting columns and columns to the revolution that had broken out in China: it didn't make me bat an eyelid.