Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (7 page)

While I was still very small, he had won me over by his gaiety and gift of the gab; as I grew older, I came to admire him for more serious reasons: I was amazed at his culture, his intelligence, and his infallible good sense. At home, his pre-eminence was undisputed, and my mother, younger than he by eight years, willingly took second place. It was he who had introduced her to life and the world of books. ‘The wife is what the husband makes of her: it's up to him to make her someone,' he often said. He used to read aloud to her Taine's
Les Origines de la France contemporaine
and Gobineau's
L'Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines.
He had no overweening pretensions: on the contrary, he prided himself on knowing his limitations. He brought back from the front subjects for short stories which my mother found delightful but which he didn't develop any further for fear of writing something banal. This modesty gave proof of a lucidity of mind which authorized him to pass final judgements on any case in question.

As I grew up, he paid more and more attention to my education and my appearance. In particular he took great pains with my handwriting and spelling: whenever I wrote him a letter, he would send it back to me, with corrections. During the holidays he used to dictate tricky passages to me, chosen usually from Victor Hugo. As I was a great reader, I made few mistakes, and he told me with great satisfaction that I was a natural speller. In order to help form my taste in literature, he had assembled a little anthology for me in an exercise book covered with shiny black imitation leather:
Un Évangile,
by Coppée,
Le Pantin de la petite Jeanne
by Banville,
Hélas! si j'avais su!
by Hégésippe Moreau, and several other poems. He taught me to read them aloud, ‘putting in the expression'. He read the classics aloud to me:
Ruy-Blas, Hernani
, the plays of Rostand, Lanson's
Histoire de la littérature française,
and Labiche's comedies. I asked him many questions, which he answered willingly. He never intimidated me, in the sense that I never felt the slightest uneasiness in his presence; but I did not attempt to bridge the distance that lay between us; there were many subjects that I could not imagine myself discussing with him; to him I was neither body nor soul, but simply a mind. Our relationship was situated in a pure and limpid atmosphere where
unpleasantness could not exist. He did not condescend to me, but raised me up to his level, and then I was proud to feel myself a grown-up person. When I fell back to my ordinary level, I was dependent upon Mama; Papa had allowed her to take complete charge of my bodily and moral welfare.

My mother had been born at Verdun, in a rich and devout bourgeois family; her father, a banker, had studied with the Jesuits; her mother had been brought up in a convent. Françoise had a brother and sister younger than herself. Grandmama, entirely devoted to her husband, showed her children only a distant affection, and it was Lili, the youngest, who was her father's favourite. Mama suffered from their coldness towards her. A day-boarder at the Couvent des Oiseaux, she found some consolation in the warm regard of her teachers; under the guidance of the nuns, she eagerly threw herself into her school work and her religious duties, and, after she had passed her lower certificate of education, the Mother Superior supervised her studies. She suffered many sad disappointments in her adolescence. Her childhood and youth filled her heart with a resentment which she never completely forgot. At the age of twenty, her neck squeezed into whalebone collars, accustomed to suppressing all her natural spontaneity, resorting to silence and brooding over bitter secrets, she felt herself alone and misunderstood; despite her great beauty, she lacked assurance and gaiety. She went without enthusiasm to meet a strange young man at Houlgate. They liked one another. Won over by my father's exuberant vitality, and made confident by the proofs of tenderness he gave her, my mother began to blossom. My earliest memories of her are of a laughing, lively young woman. She also had about her something wilful and imperious which was given a free rein after her marriage. My father enjoyed the greatest prestige in her eyes, and she believed that the wife should obey the husband in everything. But with Louise, my sister, and myself she showed herself to be dictatorial and overbearing, sometimes passionately so. If one of her intimate friends or relations happened to cross her or offend her, she often reacted with anger and outbursts of violent frankness. But in society she was always timid. Brusquely transported into a social group that was very different from her provincial circle, she found difficulty in adapting herself. Her youth, her inexperience, her love for my father all made her vulnerable: she dreaded criticism, and, in order to avoid it, took pains to be ‘like everybody
else'. In her new environment, her convent morality was only half-respected. She didn't want to be taken for a prude, and so she renounced her own standards of judgement: instead she decided that she would take the rules of etiquette as her guide. Papa's best friend was living with a woman, and that meant he was living in sin; that didn't prevent him from paying frequent visits to our house; but his mistress could not be received. My mother never dreamed of protesting in any way against an illogicality sanctioned by social conventions. She consented to many other compromises; they did not do violence to her principles; it was even perhaps in order to compensate for these concessions that she preserved, in her heart of hearts, a rigorously inflexible personal morality. Although she had been without doubt happy in her marriage, she was apt to confuse sexuality with vice: she always associated fleshly desires with sin. Convention obliged her to excuse certain indiscretions in men; she concentrated her disapproval on women; she divided women into those who were ‘respectable' and those who were ‘loose'. There could be no intermediate grades. ‘Physical' questions sickened her so much that she never attempted to discuss them with me; she did not even warn me about the surprises awaiting me on the threshold of puberty. In all other matters, she accepted my father's ideas without ever appearing to find any difficulty in reconciling them with her religion. My father was constantly astonished by the paradoxes of the human heart, by the playful tricks of heredity, and by the strangeness of dreams; I never saw my mother astonished by anything.

In complete contrast to my father's negligence, she was profoundly conscious of her responsibilities, and took to heart the duties of mother and counsellor. She sought guidance from the Union of Christian Mothers, and often attended their meetings. She took me to school, attended my classes and kept a strict eye on my homework and my lessons; she learnt English and began to study Latin in order to be able to follow my progress. She supervised my reading, and accompanied me to Mass and compline; my mother, my sister, and I performed our devotions together, morning and evening. At every instant of the day she was present, even in the most secret recesses of my soul, and I made no distinction between her all-seeing wisdom and the eye of God Himself. None of my aunts – not even Aunt Marguerite who had been brought up in the Sacré-Cœur – practised their religion with as much zeal as
she. She regularly received Holy Communion, prayed long and fervently and read numberless works of piety. Her personal conduct was an outward expression of her deep faith: with ready unselfishness, she devoted her entire being to the welfare of those near and dear to her. I did not look upon her as a saint, because I knew her too well and because she lost her temper far too easily; but her example seemed to me all the more unassailable because of that: I, too, was able to, and therefore ought to emulate her in piety and virtue. The warmth of her affection made up for her unpredictable temper. If she had been more impeccable in her conduct, she would also have been more remote, and would not have had such a profound effect upon me.

Her hold over me stemmed indeed a great deal from the very intimacy of our relationship. My father treated me like a fully developed person; my mother watched over me as a mother watches over a child; and a child I still was. She was more indulgent towards me than he: she found it quite natural that I should be a silly little girl, whereas my stupidity only exasperated my father; she was amused by my childish sayings and scribblings; he found them quite unfunny. I wanted to be taken notice of; but fundamentally I needed to be accepted for what I was, with all the deficiencies of my age; my mother's tenderness assured me that this wish was a justifiable one. I was flattered most by praise from my father; but if he complained because I had made a mess in his study, or if he cried: ‘How stupid these children are!' I took such censure lightly, because he obviously attached little importance to the way it was expressed. On the other hand, any reproach made by my mother, and even her slightest frown was a threat to my security: without her approval, I no longer felt I had any right to live.

If her disapproval touched me so deeply, it was because I set so much store by her good opinion. When I was seven or eight years old, I kept no secrets from her, and spoke to her with complete freedom. I have one very vivid memory which illustrates this lack of sophistication. My attack of measles had left me with a slight lateral curvature of the spine; a doctor drew a line down my vertebral column, as if my back had been a blackboard, and he prescribed Swedish exercises. I took some lessons with a tall, blond gymnastic instructor. As I was waiting for him one afternoon I did a little practice on the horizontal bar; when I sat astride the bar, I felt a curious itching sensation between my thighs; it was agreeable
and yet somehow disappointing; I tried again; the phenomenon was repeated. ‘It's funny,' I told Mama, and then described my sensations to her. With a look of complete indifference on her face she began talking of something else, and I realized that I had asked one of those tiresome questions to which I never received any answer.

After that, my attitude seemed to change. Whenever I wondered about the ‘ties of blood' which are often mentioned in books, or about the ‘fruit of thy womb' in the Hail, Mary, I did not turn to my mother for confirmation of my suspicions. It may be that in the meanwhile she had countered some of my questions with evasions I have now forgotten. But my silence on these subjects arose from a more general inhibition: I was keeping a watch on my tongue and on my behaviour as a whole. My mother rarely punished me, and if ever she was free with her hands her slaps did not hurt very much. However, without loving her any less than before, I had begun to fight shy of her. There was one word which she was fond of using and which used to paralyse my sister and me: ‘It's
ridiculous
!' she would cry. We often heard her making use of this word whenever she was discussing with Papa the conduct of a third person; when it was applied to us, it used to dash us from the cosy heights of our family empyrean into the lowest depths where the scum of humanity lay grovelling. Unable to foresee what gesture or remark might unleash this terrible word upon us, we learnt to look upon any kind of initiative as dangerous; prudence counselled us to hold our tongues and stay our hands. I recall the surprise we felt when, after asking Mama if we might take our dolls on holiday with us, she answered simply: ‘Why not?' We had repressed this wish for years. Certainly the main reason for my timidity was a desire to avoid her derision. But at the same time, whenever her eyes had that stormy look or even when she just compressed her lips, I believe that I feared the disturbance I was causing in her heart more than my own discomfiture. If she had found me out telling a lie, I should have felt the scandal it created even more keenly than any personal shame: but the idea was so unbearable, I always told the truth. I obviously did not realize that my mother's promptness to condemn anything peculiar or new was a forestalling of the confusion that any dispute aroused in her: but I sensed that careless words and sudden changes of plan easily troubled her serenity. My responsibility towards her made my dependence even greater.

And that is how we lived, the two of us, in a kind of symbiosis. Without striving to imitate her, I was conditioned by her. She inculcated in me a sense of duty as well as teaching me unselfishness and austerity. My father was not averse to the limelight, but I learnt from Mama to keep in the background, to control my tongue, to moderate my desires, to say and do exactly what ought to be said and done. I made no demands on life, and I was afraid to do anything on my own initiative.

The harmony that bound my parents to one another strengthened the respect I felt for both of them. It allowed me to skirt one difficulty which might have embarrassed me considerably: Papa didn't go to Mass, he smiled when Aunt Marguerite enthused over the miracles at Lourdes: he was an unbeliever. This scepticism did not effect me, so deeply did I feel myself penetrated by the presence of God; yet Papa was always right: how could he be mistaken about the most obvious of all truths? Nevertheless, since my mother, who was so pious, seemed to find Papa's attitude quite natural, I accepted it calmly. The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life – embodied by my father – and my spiritual life – expressed by my mother – were two radically heterogeneous fields of experience which had absolutely nothing in common. Sanctity and intelligence belonged to two quite different spheres; and human things – culture, politics, business, manners, and customs – had nothing to do with religion. So I set God apart from life and the world, and this attitude was to have a profound influence on my future development.

My situation in the family resembled that of my father in his childhood and youth: he had found himself suspended between the airy scepticism of my grandfather and the bourgeois earnestness of my grandmother. In my own case, too, my father's individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's teaching. This imbalance, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.