Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (39 page)

I went again. I don't know on what pretexts I got hold of the money, but in any case it was always the Groups which furnished me with alibis. I went back twice to the Russian Ballet: I was surprised to hear gentlemen in evening dress singing Stravinsky's
Oedipus
with words by Cocteau. Mallet had talked to me about Damia's snow-white arms, and about her voice: I went to hear her at the Bobino. Singers, conjurers, acrobats – everything was new to me and I applauded everything.

On the days preceding the exams, between papers, and while we
were waiting for the results, certain of my fellow-students – among them Jean Mallet and Blanchette Weiss – used to while away the time in the courtyard of the Sorbonne. We would play ball, perform charades, and ‘Chinese portraits'; there would be gossip and discussion too. I joined this little band. But I felt ill at ease with the majority of the students I came in contact with: the looseness of their morals scared me. Though in theory I was inured to every kind of depravity, in reality I was still extremely prudish. If I was told that so-and-so and someone else were ‘going together' I used to shrivel up. Whenever Blanchette Weiss, pointing out to me a student from the Normale, confided in me that he was ‘that way inclined', I shuddered. Bachelor-girl students – above all those who were ‘like that' – filled me with horror. I had to admit that these reactions were the result of my upbringing, but I refused to fight against them. Coarse jokes, rude words, free-and-easy behaviour, and bad manners disgusted me. Yet I felt no sympathy at all for a little male coterie to which I was introduced by Blanchette Weiss; she had a certain tact, and knew a few students of good family who, reacting against the lack of tone in the Normale, had acquired affected and stilted manners. They used to invite me to tea in the back rooms of cake-shops: they did not frequent the cafés, and in any case would never have been seen there with young women. I was flattered by their interest in me, but I quelled this surge of vanity, because I classed them among the Barbarians; they were only interested in politics, in social success, and in their future careers. We would sit sipping tea, as if we were in a drawing-room, and the conversation would oscillate disagreeably between pedantry and the latest society news.

One afternoon in the courtyard of the Sorbonne I vehemently contradicted on some subject or other a young man with a long, dark face: he looked at me in surprise and declared that he couldn't find an answer to my objection. From then on he used to come every day to carry on our argument. He was called Michel Riesmann and was finishing his second year in the
khâgne.
*
His father was an important person in the official art world. Michel claimed to be a disciple of Gide, and paid homage to Beauty. He believed in literature and was busy finishing a short novel. I scandalized him by professing a great admiration for surrealism. I thought he was
moth-eaten and boring, but perhaps there was a sensitive soul hidden away behind his pensive ugliness; besides, he used to urge me to write and I needed encouragement. He sent me a ceremonious and artistically handwritten letter, proposing that we should correspond during the holidays. I agreed. Blanchette Weiss and I also arranged to write to one another. She took me home to tea. I had strawberry tarts in a luxurious apartment in the avenue Kléber, and she lent me collections of poems by Verhaeren and Francis Jammes magnificently bound in leather.

I had spent the year moaning over the vanity of human aims: but I had pursued my own with tenacious zeal. I passed in general Philosophy. Simone Weil headed the list followed by me, and then by a student from the Normale called Jean Pradelle. I also passed my certificate in Greek. Mademoiselle Lambert was exultant, my parents smiled upon me; at the Sorbonne, at home, everyone congratulated me. I was very happy. These successes confirmed the good opinion I had of myself, they assured me a brilliant future, I attached great importance to them and not for anything in the world would I have thrown them away. Nevertheless I didn't forget that all success cloaks a surrender, and I thought my tears were justified. I kept repeating to myself with furious intensity the phrase which Martin du Gard puts into the mouth of Jacques Thibault: ‘
This
is what they've brought me to!' I had been reduced to the
persona
of a brilliant, gifted student, when I was really only the pathetic absence of the Absolute! There was a certain self-deception in my tears; yet I don't think they were just play-acting. In the hurly-burly accompanying the end of the summer term, I was bitterly conscious of the emptiness in my heart. I went on longing passionately for that something else which I couldn't put a name to because I refused to give it the only name I knew for it: happiness.

*

Jean Pradelle, who was pretending to be vexed at being beaten by a couple of girls, said he wanted to meet me. He was introduced to me by a fellow-student whom I had got to know through Blanchette Weiss. He was a little younger than me, and he had already spent a year at the Normale as a day-student. He too looked as if he came from a good family, though he wasn't at all stuck-up. He had a
limpid, rather beautiful face, with thick, dark lashes, and the gay, frank laugh of a schoolboy; I liked him at once, and I met him a fortnight later at the rue d'Ulm where I had gone to see the results of the entrance examination for the Normale: some friends of mine, among them Riesmann, had sat for it. Pradelle took me into the gardens of the Normale. For a mere student from the Sorbonne it was a rather awe-inspiring place and as I chatted with him I had a good look round me. I met Pradelle there again the next morning. We listened to a few of the philosophy orals, then went for a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. We were on holiday; all my friends, and almost all of his, had already left Paris: we got into the habit of meeting one another every day beside the statue of some queen or other. I would always arrive on the dot: it gave me so much pleasure to see him running towards me, laughing, pretending to be embarrassed, that I was almost grateful to him for being late.

Pradelle was a good listener; he had a meditative air and would reply in a grave voice: what a find! I hastened to lay bare my soul to him. I made an aggressive attack upon the Barbarians, and he surprised me by refusing to agree with me; he had lost his father, and got on perfectly well with his mother and sister and did not share my horror of family life. He was not averse to parties and sometimes went dancing: why not? he asked me with an innocent air which disarmed me. My manichaeism postulated a small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration; according to him, there was some good, some evil in everyone: there wasn't all that much difference between people. He disapproved of my uncompromising attitude, and his indulgence offended me. Apart from this, we had many views in common. Brought up, like myself, in a pious home, and now an unbeliever, he had been branded by Christian morality. At the École Normale he was classed among the
talas
*
(Holy Willies). He disapproved of his fellow-students' coarse manners, their indecent songs, rude jokes, brutality, debauchery, and cynical dissipations. His taste in books was almost the same as mine, with a predilection for Claudel and a certain disdain for Proust whom he didn't consider to be ‘essential'. He lent me Jarry's
Ubu-Roi,
which I couldn't really appreciate because I couldn't find in it a trace of my own obsessions. What I thought was most important was that he, too, was anxiously seeking for the truth: he believed that one day it would be revealed
to him through the medium of philosophy. We discussed this hotly for a whole fortnight. He told me that I had been too eager to choose despair and I reproached him with grasping at straws: all the systems had something wrong with them. I demolished them one after the other; he finally gave in on every point, but retained his confidence in rational humanity.

In fact, he wasn't as rationalist as all that. Much more than I did, he still felt a nostalgia for his lost faith. He considered that we had not studied Catholicism sufficiently deeply to have the right to reject its claims: they ought to be re-examined. I objected that we knew even less about Buddhism; why should we be prejudiced in favour of the religion of our mothers? He quizzed me with a critical eye and accused me of preferring the search for truth to the truth itself. As I was fundamentally very self-willed, but superficially very suggestible, his objurgations, added to those which Mademoiselle Lambert and Suzanne Boigue had discreetly loaded upon my head, gave me a pretext for getting myself worked up. I went to see a certain Abbé Beaudin, whom even Jacques had spoken of with admiration, and who specialized in the refloating of intellectuals marooned on the rocks of perdition. I happened to be carrying a copy of a book by Julien Benda and the Abbé began with a brillant attack on it which left me completely indifferent. Then we exchanged a few guarded words. I left him, feeling ashamed of my conduct, which I knew to be pointless from the start, for I knew that my unbelief was as solid as a rock.

I soon realized that despite our affinities there were wide divergencies between Pradelle and myself. I could not recognize my personal anguish in his purely cerebral disquiet. I summed him up pretty quickly as ‘uncomplicated, un-mysterious, a well-behaved scholar'. Because of his seriousness and philosophical earnestness I admired him more than Jacques; but Jacques had something that Pradelle hadn't got. Wandering in the Luxembourg Gardens, I told myself that after all if one of them had wanted to marry me, neither would have suited my requirements. The thing which still made me feel attached to Jacques was that flaw which split him apart from his environment, but nothing solid could be built on a flawed personality, and I wanted to construct a system of thought, a work of art. Pradelle was, like me, an intellectual: but he had remained perfectly adapted to his class and its way of life, and accepted bourgeois society with an open heart; I could no more accommodate
myself to his sunny optimism than I could to Jacques' nihilism. Besides, they were both, though for different reasons, a bit scared of me. ‘Do men marry women like me?' I used to wonder with a tinge of melancholy, for in those days I made no distinction between love and marriage. ‘I'm so sure that the one who would really be all to me, who would understand the whole of me, and be fundamentally the brother and the equal of myself, simply doesn't exist.' What was cutting me off from other people was a certain violence of temperament which only I seemed to possess. This set-to with Pradelle strengthened me in my conviction that I was destined to a life of solitude.

Yet as far as just being friends was concerned, we got on well together. I appreciated his love of truth, his honesty; he didn't get feelings mixed up with ideas and under the influence of his impartial attitude I realized that with me states of mind and moods had very often been substitutes for thought. He forced me to think hard, to keep to the point; I no longer felt proudly that I knew everything; on the contrary: ‘I know nothing, nothing; I not only have no answer to give, but I haven't even found a satisfactory way of propounding the question.' I promised myself that I would practise no more self-deceit, and I begged Pradelle to help me guard against all falsehood; he was to be ‘my living conscience'. I decided that I would consecrate the years to come to an unrelenting search for truth. ‘I shall work and slave till I find it.' Pradelle performed a valuable service for me in reviving my interest in philosophy. And perhaps an even more valuable one in teaching me how to be gay again: I knew no one else from whom I could have learnt the art of gaiety. He bore so lightly the weight of the whole world that it ceased to weigh upon me, too; in the Luxembourg Gardens, the blue of the morning sky, the green lawns and the sun all shone as they used to in my happiest days, when it was always fine weather. ‘The branches just now are growing thick and putting out new shoots; they mask completely the abyss, the void which lies beneath.' This meant that I was taking a joy in living and that I was forgetting my metaphysical anxieties. As Pradelle was walking back home with me one day, we met my mother; I introduced him to her; she liked him: people always liked him. This set a seal on our friendship.

*

Zaza had got her certificate in Greek. She left for Laubardon. At the end of July I received a letter from her which took my breath away. She was desperately unhappy and told me why. Only now did she speak of that adolescence which she had lived through with me and of which I had known nothing at all. Twenty-five years ago, a cousin of her father's, faithful to the Basque tradition, had gone to seek his fortune in the Argentine; he had amassed a considerable amount of wealth there. Zaza had been eleven when he had returned to his native hearth, about half a mile from Laubardon; he had married, and had a son of the same age as Zaza; this was a ‘sad, lonely, shy little boy' who had taken a great liking to her. His parents sent him to a boarding-school in Spain; but in the holidays the two friends would meet again and it was then that they had gone on those rides through the pine forests about which Zaza used to speak with such enthusiasm. When they were fifteen, they realized that they were in love with one another; André, lonely, exiled from the land of his birth, only had her in all the world; and Zaza, who thought herself ugly, ungraceful, unwanted, threw herself into his arms; they exchanged kisses that bound them passionately to one another. From then on, they had written to each other every week, and in the physics lessons and under the jovial eye of Abbé Trécourt she had dreamed only of André. The parents of the two children had quarrelled – André's were much richer than Zaza's – though they had never interfered with the friendship between them; but when the parents realized that the children were growing up, they intervened. There was no question of André and Zaza ever being able to marry, so Madame Mabille decided that they must stop seeing one another.