Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (4 page)

This ability to pass over in silence events which I felt so keenly is one of the things which strike me most when I remember my childhood. The world around me was harmoniously based on fixed coordinates and divided into clear-cut compartments. No neutral tints were allowed: everything was in black and white; there was no intermediate position between the traitor and the hero, the renegade and the martyr: all inedible fruits were poisonous; I was told that I ‘loved' every member of my family, including my most ill-favoured great-aunts. All my experience belied this essentialism. White was only rarely totally white, and the blackness of evil was relieved by lighter touches; I saw greys and half-tones everywhere. Only as soon as I tried to define their muted shades, I had to use words, and I found myself in a world of bony-structured concepts. Whatever I beheld with my own eyes and every real experience had to be fitted somehow or other into a rigid category: the myths and the stereotyped ideas prevailed over the truth: unable to pin it down, I allowed truth to dwindle into insignificance.

As I had failed in my efforts to think without recourse to language, I assumed that this was an exact equivalent of reality; I was encouraged in this misconception by the grown-ups, whom I took to be the sole depositaries of absolute truth: when they defined a thing, they expressed its substance, in the sense in which one expresses the juice from a fruit. So that I could conceive of no gap into which error might fall between the word and its object; that is why I submitted myself uncritically to the Word, without examining its meaning, even when circumstances inclined me to doubt its truth. Two of my Sirmione cousins were sucking sticks of candy-sugar: ‘It's a purgative', they told me in a bantering tone: their sniggers warned me that they were making fun of me; nevertheless the word they had used incorporated itself in my mind with the sticks of candy-sugar; I no longer liked them because they now seemed to me a dubious compromise between sweets and medicine.

Yet I can remember one case in which words did not override my reason. During our holidays in the country I was often taken
to play with a little cousin; he lived in a beautiful house in vast grounds and I rather enjoyed playing with him. ‘The boy's half-witted,' my father remarked one evening. Cendri, who was much older than myself, seemed to me to be quite normal, because he was someone I knew well. I don't know if I had ever been shown what a half-wit was, or had an idiot described to me: I imagined idiots as having a slobbery mouth, a vacant smile, and a blank stare. The next time I saw Cendri, I tried in vain to apply this image to his own face, but the mask wouldn't stick; perhaps without showing it on the outside his essential nature resembled that of an idiot, but I couldn't bring myself to believe it. Driven by a desire to clear the matter up, and also by an obscure resentment against my father for having insulted my playmate, I asked Cendri's grandmother: ‘Is it true that Cendri is a half-wit?' ‘Of course not!' she retorted with some indignation. She knew her grandson well enough. Could it be that Papa had made a mistake? It was very puzzling.

I wasn't terribly attached to Cendri, and the incident, though it astonished me, didn't particularly upset me. I could perceive the sinister effect of words only when their black magic clutched at my heart.

Mama had just been wearing for the first time an orange-yellow dress – tango-coloured, we called it. Louise said to the housemaid from over the road: ‘Did you see the way Madame was got up today? Proper eccentric she looked!' Another day, Louise was gossiping in the hall with the caretaker's daughter: two storeys up Mama was accompanying herself at the piano: ‘Oh!' said Louise. ‘There's Madame at it again, screaming like a macaw!' Eccentric. Macaw. These words sounded awful to me: what had they to do with Mama, who was beautiful, elegant, and sang and played so well? And yet it was Louise who had used them: how could I counter their sinister power? I knew how to defend myself against other people: but Louise! She was justice in person; she was truth itself, and my respect for her forbade me to pass judgement on anything she said. It would not have been sufficient to question her good taste; in order to neutralize her malevolence, I should have had to put it down to bad temper, and therefore to admit that she did not get on well with Mama; in which case, one of them must be in the wrong about something! No. I wanted to have them both perfect. I endeavoured to drain Louise's words of their mean
ing: certain strange sounds had issued from her mouth, for reasons which were beyond my ken. I was not altogether successful. From then on, whenever Mama wore a new dress or sang at the top of her voice, I always felt a certain uneasiness. Moreover, knowing now that it wouldn't do to attach too much importance to what Louise had to say, I no longer listened to her with quite the same docility as before.

I was always quick to turn a blind eye on anything that seemed to threaten my security, and so I preferred to dwell on ‘safe' questions. The problem of birth did not bother me very much. At first I was told that parents bought their children in a shop; well, the world was so vast and so full of unknown wonders that there might well be stores selling babies somewhere. Gradually this idea was forgotten, and I contented myself with a vaguer solution: ‘It is God who makes children.' He had created the earth out of chaos, and shaped Adam out of clay: so there was nothing unusual in the idea that He could produce a baby from an empty cradle. Submission to the divine will satisfied my curiosity: in the end, it could explain everything. As for the details of this divine operation, I was sure that I should gradually get to know them. What did intrigue me very much was the great care my parents sometimes took to prevent my overhearing certain conversations: as I drew near, they would lower their voices or stop talking altogether. So there were things that I could understand but that I was not intended to hear! Whatever could they be? Why were they kept from me? Mama forbade Louise to read me one of Madame de Ségur's fairy-tales: she said it would give me nightmares. What eventually became of that boy clothed in the skins of wild animals – for that was how the pictures showed him? My inquiries were fruitless.
Ourson
– the bear-cub – appeared to me to be the very incarnation of secrecy.

The great mysteries of religion were much too remote and too difficult to cause me any surprise. But the familiar miracle of Christmas often set me wondering. I thought it was quite incongruous that the all-powerful Christ-child should prefer to come down the chimney like a common sweep. I pondered this problem for a long time and finally appealed to my parents for enlightenment; they confessed their deception. I was stupefied to think that I could have believed so firmly in something that wasn't true, to realize that what one had accepted as the truth could be untrue. I didn't learn
from experience, either. I didn't tell myself that my parents had deceived me, and that they might deceive me in other ways. Probably I could not have forgiven them for telling me a lie which was intended to frustrate my own desires or which pained me deeply; I should have revolted, and become suspicious. But in fact I was no more put out than someone to whom a conjurer explains how his tricks are performed. Indeed I was so delighted to find my doll Blondine sitting on her little trunk beside my Christmas stocking that I was rather grateful to my parents for such an amiable deception. Perhaps too I would have held it against them if I hadn't learnt the truth from their own lips: by admitting that they had been playing a trick on me, they convinced me of their sincerity. They were treating me now, I thought, as a grown-up; proud of my new dignity, I happily accepted the fact that they had had to indulge their baby, because I was a baby no longer: it seemed to me perfectly natural that we should continue to hoax my little sister. I was now on the side of the adults, and I presumed that henceforward I should always be told the truth.

My parents were very willing to answer my questions; my ignorance was dissipated as soon as I gave voice to it. But there was, I realized, a gap which couldn't be bridged: to the eyes of an adult, the black marks in books were words; I would look at them: I could see them too, but I couldn't make them out at all. I had been taught to play with letters from an early age. When I was three I knew that ‘o' is called ‘o', and that ‘s' is ‘s', just as a table is a table; I knew the alphabet fairly well, but the printed page remained a closed book to me. One day, it all seemed to click into place. Mama had opened on the dining-room table the Regimbeau reading-book for infants; I was looking at the picture of a cow, and the letters
C
and
H
which are pronounced
CH
in the word
VACHE
. I suddenly understood that they didn't have names, as objects do, but that they represented sounds: I understood now that they were symbols. After that, I soon learnt to read. Even afterwards, however, some blocks remained in my brain. I felt that the printed letter
was
the sound it corresponded to; they both proceeded from the thing they expressed, and were so closely linked that no arbitrary constants were possible in their fixed equation. The understanding of the symbol did not necessarily pre-suppose an understanding of its conventional application. This is why I put up such a strong resistance when grandmama wanted
to teach me the notes of the scale. Using a knitting needle, she pointed to the notes on the stave; this line, she tried to explain, corresponded to that note on the pianoforte. But why? How could it possibly do that? I could see nothing in common between the ruled manuscript paper and the keys of the instrument. Whenever people tried to impose on me such unjustified compulsions and assumptions, I rebelled; in the same way, I refused to accept truths which did not have an absolute basis. I would yield only to necessity; I felt that human decisions were dictated more or less by caprice, and they did not carry enough weight to justify my compliance. For days I persisted in my refusal to accept such arbitrary regulations. But I finally gave in: I could finally play the scale; but I felt I was learning the rules of a game, not acquiring knowledge. On the other hand I felt no compunction about embracing the rules of arithmetic, because I believed in the absolute reality of numbers.

In October 1913 – I was five and a half years old – it was decided to send me to school, a private institution with the alluring name of Le Cours Désir. The head of the elementary classes, Mademoiselle Fayet, received me in an awe-inspiring study with padded doors. All the time she was talking to my mother, she kept stroking my hair. ‘We are not governesses,' she explained, ‘but educators.' She wore a high-necked dress with a long skirt and I found her manner revoltingly suave; I preferred something more severe. Nevertheless on the eve of my first day under her tutelage, I jumped for joy in the hall: ‘I'm going to school tomorrow!' ‘You won't always feel so happy about it,' Louise assured me. I was quite sure that for once she was mistaken. The idea of entering upon a life of my own intoxicated me. Until now I had been growing up as it were on the fringe of adult life; from now on I should have my satchel, my books, my exercise books, and my homework: my days and weeks would be arranged according to my own timetable; I had glimpses of a future which, instead of keeping me away from myself would leave its cumulative deposits in my memory: every year I would become more and more myself, and at the same time remain faithful to the schoolgirl whose birth I was celebrating at this very moment.

I was not disappointed. Every Wednesday and Saturday I participated in an hour-long ceremony whose almost religious pomp transfigured the whole week. The pupils took their places round a
large oval table; the gathering was presided over by Mademoiselle Fayet, enthroned in a sort of professorial chair; from the rarefied heights of her gilded frame, Adeline Désir, our foundress, a stony-faced lady with slightly hunched shoulders who was in the process of beatification, gazed down upon us. Our mothers, installed on black imitation leather settees, did their embroidery or their knitting. According to whether we had been more or less well-behaved they bestowed good-conduct notes upon us which we had to give out at the end of the lesson. Mademoiselle entered them in her register. Mama always gave me ten out of ten: to give me only nine would have brought, we felt, disgrace upon us both. Then Mademoiselle would distribute ‘Excellent' or ‘Satisfactory' tokens to the righteous; at the end of each term we exchanged these for gilt-edged prize books. Then Mademoiselle took up her position at the door: she placed a kiss upon our foreheads, and whispered a word or two of good advice. I could read and write already, and count a little: I was the star turn of the ‘O' class. Towards Christmas, I was garbed in a white robe bordered with gold braid and represented the Infant Jesus: all the other little girls had to come and bend the knee before me.

Mama helped me with my homework, and heard my lessons with the utmost care. I loved learning. The gospel story seemed to me much more amusing than Perrault's fairy-tales because the miracles it related had really happened. The maps in my atlas enchanted me. I was moved by the solitude of islands, by the boldness of promontories, by the fragility of those tenuous strips of land that connect peninsulas to continents. I was to experience that ecstasy again when I was grown-up and saw from an aeroplane the islands of Corsica and Sardinia etched on the blue of the Mediterranean, and when, at Kolkhis, illumined by a real sun, I saw an ideal isthmus choked between two seas. The world of severe and unimaginable shapes, of stories firmly carved in the marble of the centuries, was an album of brilliantly coloured pictures that I looked at with rapturous delight.

If I took so much pleasure in study, it was perhaps because my daily life no longer satisfied me. I lived in Paris, in man-made surroundings in which everything had been completely domesticated; streets, houses, tramways, street lamps, kitchen utensils: things, as flat as pure concepts, were reduced to their material functions. The Luxembourg Gardens with its clumps of untouch
able shrubs and acres of forbidden lawns was to me no more than a common playground. Sometimes a rent in the canvas gave a glimpse, beyond the surface paint, of confused, gloomy depths. The tunnels of the underground railway stretched infinitely away towards the earth's secret core. In the boulevard Montparnasse, on the site where the Coupole now stands, was the Juglar coal depot out of which came black-faced men with coal sacks on their heads; among the piles of coke and anthracite, like wisps of charred paper in the sooty limbo of a chimney, those creatures whom God had cast out of the kingdom of light could be seen creeping about their daily tasks. But I had no hold on them. In the police state in which I was imprisoned, few things surprised me, because I did not know where the power of man began and ended. The aeroplanes and dirigibles that from time to time moved across the skies of Paris were a source of much greater wonder to adults than they were to me. Distractions were few. My parents took me to see the king and queen of England on their processional route along the Champs-Élysées; I attended some of the Lenten processions, and later the funeral of Gallieni. I followed in the wake of processions and visited the resting-places of great men. I hardly ever went to the circus, and very rarely to a Punch and Judy show. I had a few toys that amused me, but only one or two that I really loved. I enjoyed very much squinting through the lenses of a stereoscopic toy which transformed two photographic plates into a single, three-dimensional scene. I loved to rotate the strip of pictures in my kineoscope and watch the motionless horse begin to gallop. I was given tiny books which could be turned into moving pictures by flicking their pages: the little girl began to jump, the boxer to box. Shadow theatres, magic lanterns: what interested me in all these optical illusions was that they were the product of my own eyes, like the mirages which haunt the traveller in the desert. Altogether, the scanty resources of my city childhood could not compete with the riches to be found in books.