Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (41 page)

Zaza had put me in the picture; at the beginning of my stay, there were never-ending picnics, tea-parties, and dances; the house was thrown open to everyone; droves of cousins and friends came to lunch and tea, to play tennis or bridge. Or else we would go to dances at the big houses in the neighbourhood, driven in the Citroën by Madame Mabille, Lili, or Zaza. There were frequent festivities in the nearby country town; I attended pelota games, I went to watch young Basque farmhands, white-faced with fear, planting rosettes in the sweating hide of skinny cows: sometimes a steel-tipped horn would rip open their lovely tight white trousers, and everyone would laugh. After dinner, someone would sit down at the piano and the whole family would join in the singing; there were parlour games, too: charades and versifying to set rhymes (
bout rimés
). The mornings were taken up with domestic chores. Flowers were picked and arranged in vases, and everybody took a hand with the cooking. Lili, Zaza, and Bébelle would make cakes, buns, shortbread, and brioches for afternoon tea; they helped their mother and grandmother to bottle tons of fruit and vegetables; there were always peas to be shelled, French beans to be strung, nuts to be cracked and plums to be stoned. The provision of food-stocks became a harassing and lengthy business.

I hardly ever saw Zaza, and I felt rather bored. And although I was quite insensitive to other people's feelings about me, I realized that the Mabilles and their friends didn't think much of me. Badly
dressed, and caring little about my personal appearance, I couldn't bring myself to curtsy to the old ladies, I couldn't control the violence of my gestures or the pitch of my laughter. I hadn't a penny and was making plans for a career: that was shocking enough; but to make matters worse I was to be a teacher, in a
lycée,
too! For generations these people had been fighting a losing battle against undenominational education: in their eyes I was heading for an ignominious future. I held back my tongue as much as possible, and kept a check on myself, but in vain: every word I said, and even my silences, caused consternation. Madame Mabille forced herself to be friendly. Monsieur Mabille and old Madame Larivière politely ignored me. The eldest son had just entered a training college for the priesthood; Bébelle aspired to a religious vocation: they took no notice of me. But the youngest children found me vaguely odd, they had a vague grudge against me. Lili made no secret of her disapproval. This paragon of all the virtues, perfectly adapted to her environment, had an answer to everything: I only had to ask a question, and she was up in arms. When I was about fifteen or sixteen, during a dinner at the Mabilles' I had expressed my astonishment that, although all people are made in the same way, the taste of tomato or herring is not the same to everybody: Lili had made fun of me. I did not make such naïve remarks now, but my reticence was enough to irritate her. One afternoon in the garden we were discussing women's suffrage; it seemed logical to everyone that Madame Mabille should be allowed the vote rather than some drunken workman. But Lili claimed to know on the best authority that among the working classes women were bigger ‘reds' than the men; if they were allowed to vote, the cause of the righteous would suffer. This argument was considered decisive. I didn't say anything, but among the chorus of approving voices, my own silence was highly subversive.

Almost every day the Mabilles had a visit from their cousin the du Moulins de Labarthète. The daughter, Didine, was very friendly with Lili. There were three sons: Henri, a financial examiner with the heavy features of an ambitious rake; Edgar was an officer in a cavalry regiment; and Xavier, a twenty-year-old seminarist: he was the only one I thought at all interesting; he had delicate features, pensive eyes, and caused his family some anxiety on account of what they called his ‘aboulia' – a lack of will-power. On Sunday mornings, stretched out in an armchair, he would take so long to make up
his mind whether or not to go to Mass that he quite often missed it altogether. He read and meditated; he looked quite out of place in this environment. I asked Zaza why she hadn't struck up a friendship with him. She appeared to be very disconcerted: ‘It would never have entered my head. That sort of thing's not possible in our house. The family wouldn't understand.' But she quite liked him. In the course of a conversation Lili and Didine were asking one another, with rather overworked stupefaction, how sensible people could possibly doubt the existence of God. Lili talked about the clock and the Great Clockmaker, all the time looking me straight in the eye; against my better judgement I decided to mention Kant. Xavier supported my views: ‘You see what happens when you haven't studied philosophy!' he said. ‘That sort of argument wouldn't satisfy you if you had, Lili!' Lili and Didine beat a hasty retreat.

The most hotly debated subject at Laubardon was the conflict which just then was setting
L'Action Française
and the Church at each other's throats. The Mabilles adamantly declared that all good Catholics should submit to the wishes of the Pope; the Labarthètes – all except Xavier, who would not commit himself – were for Maurras and Daudet. As I listened to their voices raised in passionate argument I felt left out of things. It made me feel very unhappy. In my diary I had claimed that there were many people who ‘simply did not exist'; in fact, everyone I met was of some account. I quote here from my journal: ‘Had a fit of despair while talking to Xavier du Moulin. He understood only too well the gulf that lies between them and myself, and the sophistry they employ to trap me.' I cannot remember now the reason for this outburst which obviously remained a secret between us both; but the meaning of it is clear: I couldn't light-heartedly accept the fact that I was different from the others, who treated me more or less openly as a black sheep. Zaza was fond of her family; I had been fond of them too, and the past still weighed heavily upon my conscience. Besides, my childhood had been too happy to be able to whip up hatred or even animosity in my heart: I just didn't know how to defend myself against other people's ill-will.

Zaza's friendship would have given me courage if we had been able to talk, but even at night there was a third person with us; as soon as I was in bed I tried to go to sleep. When Geneviève thought I had dropped off, she would enter into long discussions with Zaza.
She kept wondering if she were really treating her mother kindly enough; she sometimes made her feel impatient: was that awfully wrong of her? Zaza would give the briefest possible replies. But however deaf an ear she turned to these girlish effusions, they compromised her, and she became a stranger to me; I told myself, with a lump in my throat, that despite everything she believed in God, in her mother's authority and in her duties; once more I began to feel very much alone.

Fortunately Zaza managed to arrange a private conversation with me. Had she suspected what I had been feeling? She told me discreetly but unmistakably that her liking for Geneviève was of the lowest order; the latter imagined that she was her intimate friend, but in fact Zaza could not reciprocate her feelings. I felt relieved. Then Geneviève left and as the holidays were drawing to a close there was much less social activity. I had Zaza to myself. One night, when everybody was asleep, we put warm shawls on over our long calico night-dresses and crept down into the garden; we sat under a pine tree and talked for a long time. Zaza was quite certain now that she no longer loved her cousin; she recounted their idyll for me in its most intimate details. It was then that I learnt what her childhood had been, and of her great feeling of having been utterly deserted, which I had had no inkling of. ‘I loved you,' I told her; she was taken aback; she admitted that in the hierarchy of her friendships I had occupied only a minor place, though none of her childhood friends had in fact meant very much to her. In the night sky, a brown old moon was slowly foundering under the horizon. We talked of days gone by, and were saddened by the ignorance of our childhood hearts; she was grief-stricken at the thought that she had ignored me and caused me pain; for my own part, I found it bitter to have to tell her these things only now, when they had ceased to have any real meaning: I no longer preferred her above all others. Yet there was a certain relief in being able to exchange these regrets with one another. We had never been so close, and the last part of my stay at Laubardon was very happy. We would sit and talk in the library, surrounded by the collected works of Louis Veuillot and Montalembert and bound numbers of the
Revue des Deux Mondes
; we talked about Francis Jammes, Laforgue, Radiguet, and about ourselves. I read Zaza a few pages of my novel: she was nonplussed by the dialogues, but she urged me to go on with it. She told me that she, too, would like to write something
later on, and I encouraged her to do so. When the day came for my departure, she went in the train with me as far as Mont-de-Marsan. We sat on a bench eating little cold dry omelettes and took leave of one another without sadness, for we were soon to meet again in Paris.

*

I was at the age when one believes in the value of epistolary outpourings. From Laubardon I wrote to my mother asking her to trust me, and assuring her that later I would really be ‘somebody'. She sent me a very nice reply. But on my return to our apartment in the rue de Rennes, my heart failed me for a moment: there were still another three years to be spent within these four walls! However, the last term had left me with some pleasant memories and I encouraged myself to take an optimistic point of view. Mademoiselle Lambert wanted me to take over part of her school-leaving certificate class at Sainte-Marie; she was to hand over the lessons in psychology to me; I had jumped at the chance to earn a little money and to get some teaching practice. I was planning to complete my degree in philosophy in April, and my degree in literature in June; these would not require much work, and I would have time to write and read and investigate more profoundly the great problems of existence. I drew up a vast plan of studies with timetables in which every minute in my day was accounted for; I took a childlike pleasure in getting the future all cut and dried and I almost recaptured the feeling of busy good intentions and simmering activity which I had known in my schooldays with the arrival of October. I hurried to see my friends at the Sorbonne. I raced across Paris, from Neuilly to the rue de Rennes, from the rue de Rennes to Belleville, casting appreciative glances at the little piles of dead leaves at the edge of the pavements.

I went to see Jacques, and mapped out my system to him; one had to consecrate one's life to a search for its meaning: meanwhile, one must never take anything for granted but base one's standards on acts of love and free-will that were to be indefinitely repeated. He heard me out with good grace but shook his head: ‘No one could ever live like that.' When I persisted, he smiled: ‘Don't you think that's all a bit too abstract for young people like us?' he asked me. He was hoping that his own existence would for some time to come still be a great game of chance. During the days that
followed, I would think he was right, and then that he was wrong. I would decide that I loved him, then that I decidedly did not love him. I felt put out. I let two months go by without seeing him.

In the Bois de Boulogne, I walked round the lake with Jean Pradelle; we watched the autumn, the swans, the people in rowing-boats; we took up our discussions where we had left off: with a diminished ardour. I thought a lot of Pradelle, but oh, how untormented he was! His tranquillity offended me. Riesmann made me read his novel, which I thought puerile, but when I read him a few pages of mine he found it insufferably boring. Jean Mallet still talked to me about Alain, Suzanne Boigue about the state of her affections, Mademoiselle Lambert about God. My sister had recently entered a school of applied arts where she was very unhappy. Zaza was cultivating the virtue of obedience and spent hours in the large shops picking over samples of material with her mother. Boredom once more descended upon me, and solitude. When I had told myself that day in the Luxembourg Gardens that it was to be my lot, there was so much gaiety in the air that I didn't feel too bad about it; but now, seen through the fogs of autumn, the future frightened me. I should never love anyone, no one is ever big enough for one's love; I should not know the joys of a family hearth; I should spend my days in a small provincial room which I would leave only in order to give my lessons: what a barren existence! I no longer even hoped to have a true understanding with another human being. Not one of my friends would take me as I was, without reserves; Zaza prayed for me, Jacques thought I was too abstract, Pradelle deplored my rank obstinacy and the way I kept working myself up. What alarmed them was the most firmly rooted of my convictions: my refusal to accept that mediocre existence which they, in one way or another, said yes to, and my frantic efforts to escape from it. I tried to content myself. ‘I'm not like other people; I'll have to try to accept that,' I would keep telling myself; but I couldn't content myself. Cut off from everybody, I no longer had any link with the world: it was becoming a spectacle that did not concern me personally. One after the other I had renounced fame, happiness, and the wish to serve others; now I was not even interested in living. At moments I completely lost all sense of reality: the streets, the cars, the passers-by were only so many shadows among which my own anonymous presence floated aimlessly. I would sometimes tell myself, fearfully but proudly, that I was mad: it's a very short step
between utter loneliness and madness. There were plenty of reasons why I should have lost my wits. For two years I had been struggling to get out of a trap but without finding a way; I kept bumping into invisible obstacles: in the end it must affect my brain. My hands remained empty; I tried to offset my disillusionment by repeating to myself both that one day I would possess everything and that it would not be worth anything anyway: I got all muddled by these contradictions. Above all, I was bursting with health and youthful vigour, and I was confined to home and library: all that vitality which I was unable to make use of unleashed its futile whirlwinds in my head and heart.