Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (49 page)

A few days later, I had tea with Mademoiselle Roulin, and was bored stiff. When I left her, I went straight to the Européen; I paid four francs for a seat in the balcony among the loose women and even looser men; there were couples locked in each other's arms; others were kissing; heavily scented tarts swooned with ecstasy as they listened to the crooner with the slick black hair, and their riotous laughter made the comic's dirty jokes seem even dirtier. I was too excited; I laughed and felt happy. Why? I wandered a long time on the boulevard Barbes, watching the whores and pimps – no longer with horror, but with a sort of envy. Again I was surprised at myself: ‘There is within me I know not what yearning – maybe a monstrous lust – ever-present, for noise, fighting, savage violence, and above all for the gutter. . . . What is there to prevent me today from becoming a morphinomaniac, and alcoholic, and heaven knows what else? Perhaps all that's lacking is the opportunity, a little greater hankering for everything I shall never know. . . .' At times I was shocked by this ‘perversion', by these ‘baser instincts' which I discovered in myself. What would Pradelle have thought – he who used to accuse me of putting life on a pedestal? I reproached myself with being two-faced, hypocritical. But I never once thought of denying my nature: ‘I want life, the whole of life. I feel an avid curiosity; I desperately want to
burn myself away, more brightly than any other person, and no matter with what kind of a flame.'

I was on the verge of admitting the truth to myself: I was fed up with being a disembothed spirit. Not that I was tormented by lust, as I was at the onset of puberty. But I guessed that the violence of the flesh and its crudity would have saved me from this ethereal insipidity that was atrophying my life. There was no question of my indulging in sexual experiments; my own prejudices, as well as my feelings towards Jacques, forbade me to do so. I frankly detested the Roman Catholic religion; watching Lisa and Zaza fighting for their lives against ‘this self-martyring religion', I was more and more thankful that I had escaped from its clutches; in fact, I was still contaminated by it; the sexual taboos still haunted me to such an extent that I longed to become a drug-addict or an alcoholic, but never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence. Reading Goethe, and the book about him by Emil Ludwig, I protested against his moral code. ‘That place, so calmly intended for the gratification of the senses – without heartbreak, without any discomposure – shocks me,' I wrote. ‘The worst kind of debauchery, provided it be a defence, a provocation, provided it be the means used by a Gide to find spiritual nourishment, moves me deeply; Goethe's amours irritate me.' Either physical love was identified with love itself, in which case it becomes self-explanatory, or it was a tragic fall from grace, and I hadn't the courage to attempt it.

*

Decidedly, I was a creature of the seasons. That year again, at the first whisper of spring, I blossomed forth, I sniffed up with greedy gaiety the smell of warm tarmac. I did not relax; the examination was drawing near and there were many gaps in my knowledge that had to be filled in; but sheer fatigue forced me to take rests, and I made the most of them. I walked with my sister on the banks of the Marne, I took renewed pleasure in talking to Pradelle under the chestnut trees in the Luxembourg Gardens; I bought myself a little red hat which made Stépha and Fernando smile. I took my parents to the Européen and my father treated us to ices on the terrace of the Café Wepler. My mother went fairly frequently with
me to the cinema; I saw Barbette with her at the Moulin Rouge, and found him – or her – not nearly as extraordinary as Cocteau made out. Zaza returned from Bayonne. We visited the newly opened galleries of French painting in the Louvre; I didn't like Monet, Renoir I appreciated with some reserve, I admired Manet very much, and Cézanne I worshipped because I thought I saw in his paintings ‘the descent of the spirit to the heart of the senses'. Zaza more or less shared all my tastes. I attended her sister's wedding and wasn't too bored.

During the Easter holidays I spent every day at the Nationale; there I used to meet Clairaut whom I still found rather pedantic but who continued to intrigue me; had this dry, dark little man really suffered from the ‘tyranny of the flesh'? Whatever the answer, it was quite certain that he was much preoccupied by this question. Several times he brought the conversation round to Mauriac's article. How much sexual pleasure is permissible between a Christian husband and wife? And between fiancés? He asked Zaza this question one day, and she flew into a temper: ‘It's only priests and old maids who ask that kind of thing!' she retorted. A few days later, he told me he had gone through a harrowing personal experience. At the beginning of the academic year, he had become engaged to a friend's sister; she admired him enormously, and she was of a passionate nature: if he hadn't kept a firm rein on her, heaven knows what her impetuosity might not have involved them in! He had explained to her that they should save themselves for their wedding-night, and that in the meantime only the chastest of kisses were permissible. She had persisted in offering him her open mouth, and he had kept on turning his away; at the end she had got fed-up with him and had broken off the engagement. He was obviously obsessed by this set-back. He argued about marriage, love, and women with a maniacal intensity. I thought his story was rather ridiculous, for it reminded me of Suzanne Boigue's first affair. But I felt flattered that he had confided in me.

The Easter holidays came to an end; in the gardens of the École Normale, aflower with lilacs, laburnums, and pink hawthorn, I was delighted to meet my fellow-students again. I knew almost all of them. Only Sartre's little band, which included Nizan and Herbaud, remained closed to me; they had no truck with anybody else; they only attended certain lectures, and always sat apart from the rest of us. They had a bad reputation. It was said of them that they were
unsympathetic. Violently opposed to the ‘Holy Willies' among their fellow-students, they belonged to a clique composed mainly of Alain's ex-pupils and well known for its brutality: its members threw water-bombs on distinguished students at the Normale returning home at night in evening dress. Nizan was married and had travelled; he sported plus-fours and I found the eyes behind his heavy hom-rimmed glasses very intimidating. Sartre wasn't bad to look at, but it was rumoured that he was the worst of the lot, and he was even accused of drinking. Only one of them I thought seemed fairly accessible: Herbaud. He too was married. When he was with Sartre and Nizan, he ignored me. When I met him on his own, he would exchange a few words with me.

He had given a talk in January in one of Brunschvig's lectures, and during the discussion that had followed everyone had found him very amusing. I was very conscious of the charm of his mocking voice, and of the ironical twist he gave to his mouth. Weary of gazing upon the grey mass of students, I found his pink face with its baby-blue eyes very refreshing; his blond hair seemed as tough and springy as grass. One morning he had come to work in the Nationale, and despite the elegance of his blue overcoat, his light-coloured scarf, and his well-cut suit, I had found something of the country boy about him. I had a sudden inspiration: contrary to my usual habits, I went to lunch in the restaurant in the library; he cleared a place for me at his table as naturally as if we'd arranged to meet there. We talked about Hume and Kant. I passed him in the ante-room outside Laporte's study; the professor said in ceremonious tones: ‘Well, au revoir, Monsieur Herbaud'; and I thought to myself regretfully that he was a married man, inaccessible, and totally unaware of my existence. One afternoon I had noticed him in the rue Soufflot in the company of Sartre and Nizan; a woman in a grey coat was on his arm: I felt shut out. He was the only one of the three to attend Brunschvig's lectures; just before the Easter holidays, he sat down beside me in the lecture-room. He had drawn
Eugène
figures inspired by those which Cocteau created in
Le Potomak
, and composed acidulous little poems. I found him very amusing, and I was overjoyed to find someone at the Sorbonne who liked Cocteau. In a way, Herbaud reminded me of Jacques; he, like Jacques, often used a smile instead of a word and seemed to live elsewhere than in books. Every time he had come to the Nationale he had greeted me in
a friendly manner, and I had racked my brains to find something intelligent to say to him: unfortunately I had been quite unable to do so.

Nevertheless when Brunschvig started his lectures again after the holidays, Herbaud once more came and sat beside me. He dedicated a ‘Portrait of the Average Student', a few other drawings and some poems to me. He made the abrupt announcement that he was an individualist. ‘I am too,' I replied. ‘What? You!' He stared at me mistrustfully. ‘But I thought you were a Catholic, a Thomist, and devoted to good works?' I protested against this, and he was pleased that we had come to an understanding. He gave me a disjointed running commentary on our precursors, praising Sylla, Barrès, Stendhal, and other ‘individualists' including Alcibiades, for whom he had a weakness; I no longer remember all he talked about, but I found him more and more amusing; he seemed to be absolutely sure of himself and didn't take himself in the least bit seriously: it was this mixture of arrogance and irony which delighted me. When he said, as he left, that he hoped we would have many more talks, I was over the moon, and wrote in my journal that evening: ‘He has a kind of intelligence that goes straight to my heart.' I was already prepared to throw over Clairaut, Pradelle, Mallet, and all the rest of them for Herbaud. It was obviously a case of a new broom sweeping clean; I knew that I was very soon won over by people, and sometimes this made me drop them all the more quickly. All the same, I was surprised by the violence of my new enthusiasm: ‘Meeting with André Herbaud; or with myself . . .? Who else has ever made such a strong impression on me? Why am I overwhelmed by this meeting, as if something had
really
happened to me at last?'

Something
had
happened to me, something which indirectly was to shape the whole of my life to come: but I wasn't to know that till later.

From then on, Herbaud became one of the regulars at the Nationale; I used to keep the chair next to mine for him. We used to lunch in a sort of tea-room on the first floor of a cake-shop; I could only just afford the ‘special', but he used to insist on stuffing me with strawberry tarts. Once, at the Fleur-de-Lys in the square Louvois, he treated me to what I thought was a sumptuous spread. We would stroll together in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and sit beside the fountain; the wind would ruffle the jet of
water and sprinkle cold drops on our faces. I would suggest that we go back to work. ‘Let's go and have a coffee first,' Herbaud would say. ‘If you don't have one, you'll work badly, then you'll fidget and prevent me from reading.' He would take me to Poccardi's, and when I used to stand up after draining my cup, he would say: ‘What a pity!' He was the son of a schoolteacher from somewhere near Toulouse and he had come to Paris to study for the Normale. That is how he had met Sartre and Nizan; he often talked to me about them; he admired Nizan's smooth, gay distinction, but he had more to do with Sartre, who he said was prodigiously interesting. He despised our other fellow-students, individually and
en masse.
He thought Clairaut was a stuffy pedant and never spoke to him. One afternoon Clairaut came over to me with a book in his hand: ‘Mademoiselle de Beauvoir,' he began, in a quizzing, inquisitorial tone, ‘what do you make of Brochard who is of the opinion that Aristotle's God would be able to experience sexual pleasure?' Herbaud cast him a disdainful look: ‘I should hope so, for His sake,' he haughtily replied. In our early days together, we used to talk chiefly about the little world we both belonged to: our friends, our professors, the competition. He told me about the subject that students would suggest – it was a traditional joke – for their theses: ‘The difference between the notion of concept and the concept of notion.' He had invented others: ‘Of all the authors in your syllabus, which one do you prefer, and why?' And: ‘Body and soul: resemblances, differences; advantages and disadvantages of.' In fact, he only had the most tenuous association with the Sorbonne and the Normale; his life was elsewhere. He talked to me a little about it. He spoke to me about his wife who in his view was every feminine paradox incarnate; about Rome, which they had visited on their honeymoon, and the Forum, which had moved him to tears; about his system of morality and the book he wanted to write. He used to bring me magazines like
Detective
and the
Autocar
; he would take a passionate interest in a cycle-race or in a crime novel; he made my head swim with his anecdotes, with unexpected juxtapositions. He could handle everything – bombast and dry wit, lyricism and cynicism, naïveté and insolence – with such happy ease that nothing he said ever seemed banal. But the most irresistible thing about him was his laugh: when he gave vent to his laughter, it was as if he had just unexpectedly dropped in on a strange planet and was making a rapturous discovery of its prodigious comicality;
whenever he exploded in laughter, everything seemed to me to be novel, surprising, deliciously funny.

Herbaud didn't resemble any of my other friends, whose faces were all so commonsensical that they almost ceased to exist as faces. Actually, there was nothing seraphic about Jacques' face, but a certain bourgeois icing masked some of its abundant sensuality. It would have been impossible to reduce Herbaud's face to a symbol; the jutting jaw, the broad, liquid smile, the blue irises set in their lustrous corneas; his flesh, his bone-structure, and his very skin made an ineffaceable impression and were self-sufficient. Herbaud had more than a face: he had an unmistakable body, too. Walking under the leafy trees, he told me how much he detested death, and that he would never submit to being ill or old. How proud he was of the young red blood pulsing in his veins! I would watch him come striding through the gardens with his rather awkward grace; I would look at his ears, transparent in the sun as pink sugar-candy, and I knew that I had beside me not an angel, but a real man. I was tired of saintliness and I was overjoyed that he should treat me – as only Stépha had done – as a creature of the earth. Because he was not interested in my soul; his liking for me was not based just on an evaluation of my good points, but being spontaneous and undemanding, accepted the whole of me, just as I was. The others talked to me in a deferential, or at any rate in a grave and reserved way. Herbaud laughed as he spoke to me, put his hand on my arm and used to shake his finger at me in mock warning when he called me, ‘My poor young friend!' He would make all kinds of remarks about my appearance – friendly, joking remarks, always unexpected.