Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (48 page)

The consul, in a letter of recommendation he gave me for a German professor, ended with a sentence which amused me very much: ‘I beg
of you to give the warmest encouragement to Mademoiselle Mabille's most praiseworthy initiative.' You'd think I'd flown over the North Pole!

She soon decided to mix with the natives.

On Wednesday I got to know the Berlin Theatre in the most unexpected company. Just think – as Stépha would say – about six o'clock I see the manager of the Hospiz, tall old Herr Pollack, coming up to me and saying with his most amiable smile: ‘My dear little French lady, would you care to come to the theatre with me this evening?' A little bewildered by this, I inquired about the moral propriety of the performance, and considering old Herr Pollack's serious and dignified air I decided to accept. By eight o'clock we were hurrying through the streets of Berlin, talking away like old friends. Every time it was a question of paying for anything the tall Hun would say graciously: ‘You are my guest, it's free.' During the third interval, emboldened by a cup of coffee, he told me that his wife never came to the theatre with him, that she didn't share his tastes at all and had never tried to give him any pleasure during the thirty-five years of their marriage, excepting two years ago, because he was at death's door; but, as he told me in German, one can't always be at death's door. I was very amused, and found old Herr Pollack much more fun than Sudermann, whose
Die Ehre,
a problem play in the style of Alexandre Dumas fils, was being given. On leaving the Trianon Theatre, in order to put the crowning touch to this very German evening, my Hun absolutely insisted on going to eat sauerkraut and sausages!

Stépha and I laughed at the thought that, rather than let Zaza take part in a game of mixed doubles Madame Mabille had banished her to Berlin; and now Zaza was going out alone in the evening, with a man, a stranger, a foreigner, a Boche! She had, of course, made inquiries about the moral propriety of the play. But judging by later letters she had soon found her feet. She was attending lectures at the University, going to concerts, theatres, museums, she had formed friendships with students and with one of Stépha's friends, Hans Miller, whose address Stépha had given her. At first he had found Zaza so stiff and starchy that he had told her jokingly: ‘You handle life with glacé kid gloves.' She had been very mortified by this: she had decided to take her gloves off.

I am seeing so many new people, places, countries, all so different from what I've known that I can feel all my prejudices getting lamentably lost, and I no longer really know if I have ever belonged to a certain
background, nor what it could have been. I sometimes lunch in the morning at the Embassy with diplomatic celebrities, sumptuous ambassadresses from Brazil or Argentina, and in the evening find myself dining alone at Aschinger's, a very popular cheap restaurant, rubbing shoulders with a fat office worker or some French or Chinese student. I am not hemmed in by any group, no stupid reasons are suddenly given me for not being able to do something interesting; there's nothing impossible and nothing that is ‘not done', and I accept with wonder and confidence all the new and unexpected things that each day brings me. At first, I was bothered about questions of form: I used to wonder and ask people if things were ‘done' or ‘not done'. People would smile at me and say: ‘But people do just as they like', and I took the lesson to heart. Now I'm worse than any Polish girl student, I go out alone at all hours of the day and night, I go to concerts with Hans Miller, and I walk the streets with him until one o'clock in the morning. He seems to find all that so natural that I feel embarrassed at still feeling astonished by it.

Her ideas too were changing; her chauvinism was melting away.

What amazes me more than anything here is that in general all the Germans are pacifists, and – even more amazing – francophiles. The other day at the cinema I saw a film with pacifist tendencies which showed the horrors of war: everybody applauded it. It appears that last year, when
Napoleon
was shown and had a great success here, the orchestra played the
Marseillaise.
On one evening in particular, at the Ufa Palace, people applauded it so much that it had to be played three times, to general and prolonged applause. I should have been startled if, before leaving Paris, I had been told that I should be able without embarrassment to talk to a German about the war; the other day, Hans Miller told me about the time when he had been a prisoner of war, and ended by saying: ‘Perhaps you were too young to remember, but the things that were done, on both sides, were frightful; such things must never happen again!' Another time, as I was talking to him about Giraudoux'
Siegfried et le Limousin
, and telling him that he would be interested in the book he replied – but the German words expressed his feelings so much more energetically: ‘Is it a “political” or a “human” book? We've had enough talk about nations, races; now we want to hear a little about man in general.' I believe that ideas of this kind are widespread among German youth.

Hans Miller spent a week in Paris; he went out with Stépha and told her that since her arrival her friend had been transformed; given a cold reception by the Mabilles, he was astonished at the
abyss which separated Zaza from the rest of her family. She, too, was more and more aware of this. She wrote and told me that she had wept for joy when she had seen her mother's face at the window of the carriage in the train bringing her to see Zaza in Berlin; yet the thought of returning home frightened her. Lili had finally given her hand to a student from the Polytechnique, and according to Hans Miller's report, the house was upside down.

I feel that at home everybody is already completely absorbed in sending out wedding invitations, receiving congratulations and gifts, choosing the ring, the trousseau, the colour of the bridesmaids' dresses (I don't think I've forgotten anything); and this great flood of formalities doesn't make me feel very much like going back home; I've so much lost touch with all that sort of thing! And really life is wonderfully interesting here. . . . When I think of my return, it's chiefly of the great joy I shall have in seeing you again; that's what I feel most. But I must confess that I am afraid to resume the existence I was leading three months ago. The very respectable formalism which governs the lives of most of the people in ‘our class' I now find quite unendurable, all the more so when I recall the not-so-distant past when, without realizing it, I was still impregnated by it; and I fear that when I step back into the picture I shall become imbued with that spirit once again.

I don't know if Madame Mabille realized that Zaza's stay in Berlin had not had the result she had expected; in any case, she was preparing to take her daughter in hand again. Meeting my mother at a party to which she had gone with Poupette, she had addressed her rather stiffly. My mother spoke Stépha's name: ‘I do not know Stépha. I know a Mademoiselle Avdicovitch who was governess to my children,' was Madame Mabille's stuffy reply, to which she had added: ‘You may bring up Simone as you wish.
I
have other principles.' She had complained of my influence upon her daughter, and had concluded: ‘Fortunately, Zaza loves me very much.'

*

The whole of Paris had flu that winter and I was in bed when Zaza returned to Paris; seated by my bedside, she described Berlin, the Opera, the concerts, the museums to me. She had put on weight and got some colour in her cheeks: Stépha and Pradelle were struck, as I was, by her metamorphosis. I told her that in October I had
been upset by her reserve; she assured me gaily that she had turned over a new leaf. Not only had many of her ideas changed, but instead of meditating on death and aspiring to the life of a nun she was bursting with a new vitality. She was hoping that her sister's departure would make existence much easier for her. Yet she lamented Lili's fate: ‘It's your last chancel' Madame Mabille had told her. Lili had run to seek advice from all her friends. ‘Accept him,' all the resigned young married women and the spinsters who couldn't get a husband had told her. Zaza's heart sank whenever she heard the two fiancés talking together. Yet without quite knowing why, she was now certain that no such future lay in store for her. For the moment, she felt she wanted to work seriously at her violin, to read a lot and extend her cultural background; she was thinking of doing a translation of a novel by Stefan Zweig. Her mother didn't dare deprive her too abruptly of her new-found freedom; she gave her permission to go out two or three times in the evening with me. We went to see the Russian Ballet in
Prince Igor.
We saw Al Jolson in
The Jaɀɀ Singer,
the first talking film, and attended a meeting organized by the ‘Effort' group where films by Germaine Dulac were shown: afterwards there was a lively debate on pure cinema and talking films. Often in the afternoons while I was working at the Nationale I would feel a gloved hand on my shoulder: Zaza would smile down at me from under her pink felt cloche and we would go for a coffee or take a walk. Unfortunately she left for Bayonne, where for a whole month she kept a sick cousin company.

I missed her very much. The newspapers were saying that such severe cold had not been known in Paris for the last fifteen years; there were ice-floes bumping down the Seine; I no longer went out walking, and I worked too hard instead. I was finishing for a professor called Laporte a dissertation for my diploma on Hume and Kant; from nine in the morning till six in the evening I was glued to my desk at the Nationale: I hardly took half an hour off for a sandwich; sometimes I would half-doze in the afternoons, and sometimes I even fell sound asleep. In the evenings, at home, I tried to read: Goethe, Cervantes, Chekhov, Strindberg. But I had headaches. I sometimes wanted to weep for weariness. And philosophy, at least as it was taught at the Sorbonne, was not at all comforting. Bréhier gave excellent lectures on the Stoics; but Brunschvig kept repeating himself; Laporte pulled every system
except Hume's to pieces. He was the youngest of our professors; he had a little moustache, wore white spats, and followed women in the street: once he had accosted one of his own students by mistake. He handed me back my dissertation with a fairly good mark and some ironic comments: I had made the mistake of preferring Kant to Hume. He invited me to his home, in a fine apartment on the avenue Bosquet, to talk to me about my work. ‘Great qualities; but very antipathetic. Style obscure; a false profundity: when one thinks of what one has to say in philosophy!' He considered all his colleagues one by one, particularly Brunschvig, then all the old masters. The philosophers of antiquity? They were stupid fools. Spinoza? A monster. Kant? An impostor. That left only Hume. I objected that Hume didn't solve any of the practical problems: he shrugged his shoulders: ‘There
are
no practical problems.' No. One must simply look upon philosophy as an amusement, and one had the right to prefer other forms of entertainment. ‘So that after all it's all a matter of convention!' I suggested. ‘Ah, no Mademoiselle, now you're exaggerating,' he countered with sudden indignation. ‘I know,' he added, ‘that scepticism isn't fashionable. All right: go and find yourself a more optimistic doctrine than mine.' He accompanied me to the door: ‘Delighted you came! You're bound to get through the examination,' he concluded, with an air of distaste. His attitude was probably healthier but less comforting than the vaticinations of Jean Baruzi.

I tried to snap out of my depression. But Stépha was preparing her trousseau and getting her flat ready, and I hardly ever saw her now. My sister was far from cheerful, Lisa was in despair, Clairaut distant, Pradelle always the same; Mallet had been ploughed in his diploma. I tried to take an interest in Mademoiselle Roulin and other friends. I did not succeed. During one long afternoon I went on a great Journey from Assyria to Egypt, from Egypt to Greece in the galleries of the Louvre; when I came out I found a dark, wet Paris evening. I wandered about, thoughtless, loveless. I despised myself. I thought of Jacques, but from a long way off, as if he had been something I was proud of and had lost. Suzanne Boigue, who had come back from Morocco, received me in a brightly lit, discreetly exotic flat; she was beloved and happy, and I envied her. The thing that oppressed me most was to feel myself in some way diminished: ‘I feel as if I'd lost absolutely everything and the worst part of it is that I cannot bring myself to feel sorrow about it. . . .
I am inert, driven hither and thither by the occupations and the day-dreams of the moment. No part of me is engaged; I no longer cling either to an idea or to an affection by that tight, cruel, and inspiring rein which for so long attached me to so many things; I'm interested in everything
in moderation
; oh! I'm so reasonable now, I no longer even feel that dreadful anguish about my own nothingness.' I clung on to the hope that this state would only be a passing one; in four months' time, when the selective examination was over, I could once more begin to take an interest in my life; I would begin to write my book. But I should have appreciated some outside help: ‘Longing for a new affection, an adventure, anything, so long as it's something different!'

The poetry of the bars had been dissipated. But after a day spent at the Nationale or in the Sorbonne, I didn't feel at all like being cooped up in the house. Where could I go? Again I started roaming round Montparnasse, one evening with Lisa, another with Fernando and Stépha. My sister had struck up a friendship with one of her fellow-students, a bold, pretty, athletic seventeen-year-old whose mother kept a sweet-shop; she was called Gégé, and she went out as much as she liked in the evenings. I often found them together in the Dôme. One evening we decided to go to the Jungle, which had just opened up opposite the Jockey; but we were short of funds. ‘Not to worry,' said Gégé. ‘Wait for us over there: we'll fix things.' I went into the night-club on my own and took my place at the bar. Poupette and Gégé, sitting on a bench in the street, kept moaning dramatically: ‘If only we had that extra twenty francs!' A passer-by took pity on them. I have no idea what sort of yarn they spun, but soon they were perched beside me mopping up gin fizzes. Gégé knew how to lead men on. Drinks were bought for us, and we were invited to dance. A female dwarf called Chiffon whom I had already heard at the Jockey sang songs and kept up a flow of obscenities, lifting up her skirts and exhibiting thighs all marbled over with bites and bruises, inflicted on her, so she told us, by her lover. In one sense, it was very refreshing. We picked up our old habits. One evening at the bar in the Jockey I met some old acquaintances with whom I reminisced over the gay times we had had in the past; a young Swiss student, one of the regulars at the Nationale, paid me a great deal of attention; I drank and felt amused. Later that night, a young doctor who had been observing our trio with a critical eye asked me if I
came there to study human nature; when my sister left at midnight, he congratulated me on her good behaviour, but he told me reproachfully that Gégé was too young to go to night-clubs. About one o'clock, he offered to take us home in a taxi; first we dropped Gégé, and my discomfiture at finding myself alone with him in the taxi during the rest of the ride obviously amused him. I was flattered by his interest in me. A meeting with a stranger or an unexpected incident was enough to put me in a good temper again. But the pleasure I took in these brief encounters does not explain why I should have succumbed again to the fascination of these haunts of vice. I expressed my surprise in my diary: ‘Jazz, loose women, sexy dancing, bad words, drink, physical intimacies: how is it I'm not shocked, but willingly accept things that in any other situation I could never accept, and bandy lewd expressions with strange men? How does it come about that I like these things, have such an incongruous passion for them; and why does this passion have such a strong hold over me? What am I looking for in these places with their curious, dubious charm?'