Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (40 page)

During the New Year holidays in 1926 [Zaza wrote] I was allowed to spend a single day here to see André and to tell him that all was over between us. But despite all the cruel things I had to say, I couldn't help letting him see how dear he was to me, and this final parting bound us closer than ever to one another.

She added, a little further on:

When they forced me to break with André, I suffered so much that several times I was on the verge of committing suicide. I remember how one evening, watching the train come into the Métro station, I nearly threw myself on the rails in front of it. I no longer had the slightest desire to go on living.

Since then eighteen months had gone by; she had not seen André again, and they had not written to one another. Suddenly, on returning to Laubardon, she had met him again.

For the last twenty months we had known nothing of one another, and our paths had been so different that in our sudden coming together there was something quite baffling, almost painful. I see with great clarity all the difficulties and all the sacrifices which must result from a love between two such ill-assorted people as he and I, but I can't act in any other way, I can't give up the dream of my youth and all its cherished memories, I cannot let down someone who has need of me. André's family and my own are as dead-set as possible against our coming to an understanding of this nature. He is leaving in October to spend a year in the Argentine, and then will return to France to do his military service. So there are still many difficulties ahead of us, and a long separation; and if our plans succeed we shall have to live at least ten years in South America. So you see it's a rather gloomy prospect. I am going to have to speak to Mama this evening; two years ago, she gave her refusal in the most uncompromising terms, and already I feel upset at the thought of the conversation I must have with her. You see, I love her so much that the hardest thing of all for me is to cause her all this pain and to go against her wishes. When I was little, I always used to say in my prayers: ‘Let no one ever suffer on my account.' Alas! What an impossible wish!

I read this letter ten times at least, with a lump in my throat. Now I understood the change that had come over Zaza at the age of fifteen – her air of not always being with us, her romanticism, and also her strange precognition of what love must be: she had already felt the pulse of love in her body, and this was why she had laughed when someone had claimed that the love of Tristan and Iseult was ‘platonic', why the thought of an ‘arranged' marriage filled her with such horror. How little I had known of her! ‘I'd like to go to sleep and never wake up again,' she had said, and I had taken no notice; yet I knew only too well into what depths of black despair the heart can be plunged. I couldn't bear to think of Zaza neatly dressed in her hat and coat and gloves standing on the edge of a platform in the Métro and fixing a fascinated gaze on the gleaming rails.

I received another letter a few days later. The talk with Madame Mabille had gone off very badly. She had again forbidden Zaza ever to see her cousin. Zaza was too much of a Christian to dream of disobeying her mother: but never had this prohibition seemed more
frightful than then, with only half a mile separating her from the boy she loved. The thing that tormented her more than anything was the thought that he was suffering because of her, when night and day she was thinking of no one but him. I was stunned by this unhappiness which surpassed anything I had ever known. It had been agreed that I would spend three weeks with Zaza that year in the Basque country, and I was impatient to be with her.

*

When I arrived at Meyrignac, I felt ‘calmer than I've ever been during the last eighteen months'. All the same, a comparison with Pradelle did not favour Jacques, and I was able to think of him without trying to excuse his lapses: ‘Ah! all that frivolity, that lack of seriousness, all that talk about bars, bridge, and money! There are fine things in him, finer than in anyone else I know: but there is also something pitiful, a failure . . .' I felt detached from him, and just sufficiently attached to Pradelle for his existence to irradiate my days without their being darkened by his absence. We wrote often to one another. I also wrote frequently to Riesmann, Blanchette Weiss, Mademoiselle Lambert, Suzanne Boigue and Zaza. I had set up a table in the attic under a skylight, and in the evenings, by the light of a small oil lamp I would cover page after page. Thanks to the letters I was receiving – particularly Pradelle's – I no longer felt lonely. I also had long conversations with my sister; she had just passed her school-leaving certificate in philosophy, and all that year we had been very close to one another. I told her about everything, excepting my attitude to religion. She looked up to Jacques as much as I did, and she had adopted my myths. Detesting, as I had done, the majority of her schoolfellows and the Cours Désir, as well as the prejudices current in our environment, she had gleefully taken up arms against ‘the Barbarians'. Perhaps because she had not had such a happy childhood as mine, she rebelled much more boldly than I had done against the conventions that lay so heavily upon our spirits. ‘It's silly of me, I know,' she told me one evening with an embarrassed look, ‘but I don't like Mama to open the letters I receive: I no longer have any pleasure in reading them.' I told her that this bothered me, too. We took our courage in our hands: after all, we were seventeen and nineteen; we went and begged our
mother not to censor our correspondence. She replied that it was her duty to watch over the safety of our souls, but in the end she gave in. It was an important victory.

The tensions between my parents and myself had on the whole slackened a little. I spent my days in peace and quiet. I was studying philosophy and thinking of writing something. I hesitated a long time before deciding what to do. Pradelle had convinced me that my first task was to search for the truth: would not the writing of books be an escape from that task? And wasn't there a fundamental contradiction in my enterprise? I wanted to write about the vanity of things; but the writer is a traitor to his despair as soon as he writes a book: perhaps it would be better to imitate the silence of Monsieur Teste. I was afraid, also, if I started to write, that I would be driven to wish for success, fame, things I despised. These abstract scruples did not carry enough weight to make me stop writing. I consulted many of my friends by letter, and, as I had hoped, they encouraged me to begin. I started a vast novel; the heroine was to live through all my own experiences: she was to be awakened to the meaning of ‘the true life', enter into conflict with her environment, then be disillusioned by everything: action, love, knowledge. I never knew what the ending was because I hadn't the time and I gave up halfway through.

The letters I was then receiving from Zaza didn't strike the same note as those of July. She had noticed, she told me, that in the course of the last two years her intellectual development had been considerable; she had matured, she had changed. During her brief meeting with André she had got the impression that he had not made any progress; he was still very young, and a little frustrated. She was beginning to wonder if her love wasn't just ‘an obstinate pursuit of dreams which one doesn't wish to see vanish away, a lack of sincerity and courage'. She had surrendered, probably too completely, to the influence of
Le Grand Meaulnes.
‘I found in it a love, a cult of the dream which has no basis in reality and which perhaps put me well out of my course, far away from my real self.' She certainly did not regret her love for her cousin: ‘This emotion, experienced at the age of fifteen, was my real awakening to life; from the day I fell in love, I understood at once an infinity of things; nothing, or almost nothing, seemed to be ridiculous any more.' But she had to admit that after the parting in January 1926 she had artificially prolonged this past existence ‘by will-power and the power of the
imagination'. In any case, André had to go and spend a year in the Argentine: it would be time to make a decision when he returned. For the moment, she was sick and tired of thinking about it all; she was spending a very lively and sociable holiday at Laubardon, and at first she had found it terribly exhausting; but now, she wrote, ‘all I want to do is amuse myself'.

This sentence astonished me and in my reply I reproached her gently for taking this attitude. Zaza put up a spirited defence: she knew that a feverish search for amusement doesn't solve anything:

Not long ago [she wrote] a great excursion to the Basque country was organized among our friends; I had such a longing for solitude that I cut my foot open with an axe in order to get out of the expedition. I had a week lying on a chaise-longue and a great deal of commiseration, but at least I had a little time to myself, and the right not to talk and not to amuse myself.

I was staggered. I knew only too well how desperately one can long for solitude and ‘the right not to talk'. But I should never have had the courage to cut my foot. No, Zaza was neither half-hearted nor resigned to her fate: there was a hidden violence in her which frightened me. Not one of her words was to be taken lightly, for she was much more sparing of them than I was. If I hadn't made her tell me, she wouldn't even have mentioned this incident to me.

I didn't want to keep anything more from her: I confessed to her that I had lost my faith; she had suspected it, she replied; she, too, during the past year, had gone through a religious crisis.

When I compared faith with the usages of my childhood, and the Catholic dogma with all my new ideas, there was such a disproportion, such a disparity between them that I felt I was standing on the edge of an abyss. Claudel was a great help to me and I can never tell you how much I owe to him. And I still believe in the way I did when I was six years old, with my heart far more than with my head, and by renouncing absolutely all rational ideas. Theological discussions nearly always seem to me to be absurd and grotesque. Above all, I believe that God cannot be apprehended, for He is hidden away from us, and that the faith He gives us is a supernatural gift, a grace accorded only by Him. That is why I cannot but pity with all my heart those who are deprived of this grace, and I believe that if they are sincere and athirst for the truth that truth will one day be revealed to them. . . .Moreover [she went on] faith does not bring eternal relief from spiritual hunger and thirst; it is as difficult to find peace of mind when one believes as when one does not believe; but one has the hope that one will know peace in another life.
So she not only accepted me as I was, but she took great care not to appear in the least way superior; if she could see a ray of hope in Heaven, that didn't prevent her, here on earth, from groping blindly in the same darkness as myself, and we still went on side by side towards the truth.

On the 10th of September I left in high spirits for Laubardon. I boarded the train at Uzerche, early in the morning, and got out at Bordeaux, for I had written to Zaza that ‘I couldn't ride through the Mauriac country without stopping'. For the first time in my life I found myself walking along in a strange town. There was a great river, misty quaysides, and the plane trees already smelt of autumn. In the narrow streets, there was a constant play of light and shade; and then the broad avenues, stretching out towards the Esplanades. I felt sleepy and enchanted as I went floating, light as a feather, through the autumn city. In the public park, among the clumps of scarlet cannas, I dreamed dreams of an adolescent disquiet. I had been given instructions: I was to have a cup of hot chocolate in a cake shop in the allée de Tourny. I had my lunch in a restaurant called Le Petit Marguery near the station: never before had I been in a restaurant without my parents. Then a train took me along a dead-straight line bordered with endless pine forests. I loved trains. Leaning out of the window, I surrendered my face to the wind and the flying cinders and swore never to be like travellers who always huddled together in the fug of their dusty compartments.

It was evening when I arrived. The park at Laubardon was much less beautiful than the one at Meyrignac but I thought the house was pleasant, with its tiled roof and its walls covered with Virginia creeper. Zaza took me to the bedroom which I was to share with her and Geneviève de Bréville, a blooming, well-behaved girl who according to Madame Mabille could do no wrong. I remained alone in the room for a moment to unpack and freshen up. Sounds of crockery and children's voices came from downstairs. I wandered aimlessly round the room. I saw an exercise book bound in shiny black cloth lying on a side table and I opened it out of idle curiosity; it was Geneviève's, and I read: ‘Simone de Beauvoir is arriving tomorrow. I must admit that the thought fills me with dismay, because frankly I do not like her.' I was taken aback; this was a new and disagreeable experience; I had never dreamt that anyone could feel an active dislike for me; this enemy face which Geneviève saw was mine, and it rather frightened me. I didn't have much time to think
about it, for there came a knock at the door: it was Madame Mabille. ‘I'd like to have a word with you, Simone dear,' she began; I was surprised by the friendly way she spoke to me, for of late she had hardly looked upon me with a kindly eye. With an air of embarrassment, she fingered the cameo on the velvet ribbon round her neck, and asked me if Zaza ‘had told me how things stood'. I said yes. She didn't seem to know that her daughter's feelings were changing, and began to explain to me why she was so much against them. André's parents were against the marriage, and besides they belonged to a very rich, dissipated and vulgar set which would not do at all for Zaza: it was absolutely essential for her to forget her cousin, and Madame Mabille was counting on me to help her to do so. I detested being involved in a conspiracy with her; yet her appeal touched me because it must have cost her a great deal to beg for my collaboration. I assured her, with some embarrassment, that I would do my best.