Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  Paradoxically, it was through reading a ‘permitted’ book that I was launched upon the dread paths of deception. I had given an account of the story of Silas Marner at school. Before going on holiday, my mother had bought me a copy of Adam Bede. Sitting under the poplars in the ‘landscape garden’ I had been patiently plodding my way through a slow, rather dull story. Suddenly, after a walk through a wood, the heroine – who was not married – found herself with child. My heart began to pound: heaven forbid that Mama should read this book! Because then she would know that I knew: I couldn’t bear the thought. I was not afraid of being reprimanded. I was not to blame. But I had a panic-stricken fear of what would go on in her mind. Perhaps she would consider it her duty to have a talk with me: this prospect filled me with horror because, judging by the silence she had always maintained on these subjects, I deduced that she would find it repugnant to mention them. To me, the existence of unmarried mothers was an objective fact which was no more disturbing to me than the fact of the Antipodes; but my knowledge of the fact would become, in my mother’s mind, a scandal that would defile us both.

  Despite my anxiety I did not invent the simple pretext of having lost my book in the woods. Losing something, if it were only a toothbrush, unleashed such storms at home that this remedy was almost as frightening as the fact it would attempt to conceal. In addition, though I was quite unscrupulous in my use of mental blinkers, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to tell my mother a positive falsehood; my stammerings and my blushes would have given me away. I simply took great care that Adam Bede did not fall into her hands. Fortunately she didn’t think of reading it herself and I was spared her distress.

  So my relationships with my family had become much less simple than formerly. My sister no longer idolized me unreservedly, my father thought I was ugly and harboured a grievance against me because of it, and my mother was suspicious of the obscure change she sensed in me. If they had been able to read my thoughts, my parents would have condemned me; instead of protecting me as once it did, their gaze held all kinds of dangers for me. They themselves had come down from their empyrean; but I did not take advantage of this by challenging their judgement. On the contrary, I felt doubly insecure; I no longer occupied a privileged place, and my perfection had been impaired; I was uncertain of myself, and vulnerable. All this was to modify my relationships with others.

  *

  Zaza’s talents were outstanding; she could play the piano fairly remarkably for her age and she was beginning to learn the violin. While my own handwriting was grossly childish, hers astonished me by its elegance. My father appreciated, as I did, the stylishness of her letters and the vivacity of her conversation; he found it amusing to treat her with ceremonious politeness, and she lent herself to this game with charm and grace. The ‘difficult’ age was not making her lose her good looks; she dressed and arranged her hair without any affectation, and behaved with all the ease of a well-bred young lady. Yet she had not lost her boyish daring; during the holidays, she would gallop bare-back through the pine forests of the Landes with a fine disregard for the branches that whipped her face. She went on a visit to Italy; on her return, she talked to me about the buildings, the statues, and the pictures she had liked; I envied her the pleasures she had known in a legendary land, and I gazed with even greater respect at that little dark head which contained so many beautiful images. I was dazzled by her originality. I was less concerned with criticizing than with gaining knowledge, and so I was interested in everything. But Zaza was more selective; Greece enchanted her, the Romans bored her; insensible to the misfortunes of the royal family, she was enthusiastic about Napoleon. She admired Racine, but Corneille exasperated her; she detested Horace and Polyeucte but blazed with sympathy for Le Misanthrope. She had always made fun of everything ever since I had first known her; between the ages of twelve and fifteen her irony became systematic; she turned to ridicule not only the majority of the people we knew, but also established customs and conventional ideas. The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld were her bedside book and she never tired of repeating at every opportunity that men are guided by self-interest. I had no opinions about mankind in general and her studied pessimism made a vast impression on me. Many of her notions were subversive; she caused a scandal at the Cours Désir by defending, in a French composition, Alceste against Philinte, and another time when she placed Napoleon above Pasteur. Her audacity enraged certain of our teachers; others attributed it to her youth and were amused by it; to some she was a holy terror, while she was the favourite of others. I usually rated myself above her, even in French, in which I was superior to her in the ‘groundwork’ of my compositions; but I think she set no store by the first place; although her marks were not as good as mine, her free-and-easy attitude to her work gave it an indefinable quality which mine lacked, despite or perhaps because of my assiduity. She was said to have ‘personality’: that was her supreme advantage. The confused self-complacency I had indulged in had not given my character any very definite outlines; inside me, everything was shapeless and without significance. But in Zaza I could glimpse a presence, flashing as a spring of water, solid as a block of marble, and as firmly drawn as a portrait by Dürer. I compared this with my own interior void, and despised myself. Zaza forced me to make this comparison because she would often draw parallels between her nonchalance and my earnestness, her defects and my perfections, which she liked to poke fun at. I was not spared her sarcasm.

  ‘I’ve no personality,’ I would sadly tell myself. My curiosity embraced everything; I believed in an absolute truth, in the need for moral law; my thoughts adapted themselves to their objects; if occasionally one of them took me by surprise, it was because it reflected something that was surprising. I preferred good to evil and despised that which should be despised. I could find no trace of my own subjectivity. I had wanted myself to be boundless, and I had become as shapeless as the infinite. The paradox was that I became aware of this deficiency at the very moment when I discovered my individuality; my universal aspiration had seemed to me until then to exist in its own right; but now it had become a character trait: ‘Simone is interested in everything.’ I found myself limited by my refusal to be limited. Ideas and modes of conduct which had imposed themselves quite naturally upon me were in fact the reflections of my passivity and my lack of discrimination. Instead of being a pure mind set like a flawless jewel at the centre of everything, I took on flesh; it was a painful fall from grace. The face that was suddenly ascribed to me could only bring me disappointment for until then I had lived like God Himself, without a face. That is why I so readily accepted humiliation. If I was only one individual among many, any difference, instead of confirming my sovereignty, was liable to establish my inferiority. My parents had ceased to be dependable authorities; and I loved Zaza so much that she seemed to be more real than myself: I was her negative; instead of laying claim on my own characteristics, I had to have them thrust upon me which I supported with ill grace.

  A book which I read about my thirteenth birthday provided me with a myth in which I believed for a long time. It was André Laurie’s Schoolboy in Athens. Theagenus, an earnest, painstaking, and sensible schoolboy, was captivated by good-looking Euphorion; this young aristocrat, elegant, sensitive, refined, artistic, witty, and impertinent, dazzled his schoolfellows and teachers, though he was often reproached for his easy-going ways. He died in the flower of his youth, and it was Theagenus who fifty years later told their story. I identified Zaza with the handsome blond ephebe, and myself with Theagenus: there were obviously people who were gifted and people who were merely talented, and I classed myself irremediably in the latter category.

  Yet my modesty was equivocal: the talented ones offered the gifted ones admiration and devotion. But in the end it was Theagenus who survived his friend and wrote about him: he was both mind and memory, the essential Subject. If it had been suggested that I should be Zaza, I should have refused; I preferred owning the universe to having a single face. I persiste
d in the conviction that I alone would succeed in laying bare reality without either deforming or minimizing it. It was only when I compared myself with Zaza that I bitterly deplored my banality.

  Up to a certain point I was the victim of a mirage; I felt myself from within, and I saw her from without: it wasn’t a fair contest. I found it extraordinary that she could not touch or even look at a peach without shivers running down her spine, whereas my own horror of oysters was self-explanatory. But she was the only school-friend who could surprise me. Zaza was really a rather exceptional person.

  She was the third of the nine Mabille children, and the second eldest daughter; her mother hadn’t had time to fuss over her; she had always been involved in the life of her brothers, their friends, and cousins and had adopted their boyish ways; from an early age she had been considered as a grown-up person and charged with adult responsibilities. Madame Mabille, married at the age of twenty-five to a practising Catholic who was in addition her cousin, was at the time of Zaza’s birth securely established in her position as mother of a family; a perfect specimen of a right-minded bourgeois upbringing, she sailed through life with all the assurance of those great ladies who, with their thorough grasp of etiquette, allow themselves on occasion to break all the rules; this was why she tolerated her children’s harmless pranks: Zaza’s spontaneity and naturalness reflected her mother’s proud unselfconsciousness. I had been stupefied that Zaza should have dared, in the middle of a piano recital, to put her tongue out at her mother: it was because she counted on her support; over the heads of the assembled parents and teachers they were both laughing at conventions. If I had been guilty of such an incongruous act, my mother would have been deeply ashamed: my conformity was a reflection of her timidity.

  Monsieur Mabille I did not altogether like. He was too different from my own father, who did not care for him either. He had a long beard and eyeglasses; he went to communion every Sunday and gave up a great deal of his leisure time to social work. His silken hair and his Christian virtues seemed to me to feminize him and lowered him in my estimation. At the beginning of our friendship, Zaza had told me that he could make children cry with laughing when he gave readings of Le Malade imaginaire. A little later, she listened to him with a deferential interest when, in the long gallery at the Louvre, he expatiated on the beauties of Correggio, and again, coming out of a cinema after seeing The Three Musketeers, when he predicted that the moving pictures would be the death of art. She would movingly evoke for me the night of her parents’ marriage, when, by the side of the lake, they had stood hand in hand listening to Offenbach’s Barcarolle— ‘Lovely night, O night of love. . . .’ But gradually she began to talk in a different tone about her father. ‘Papa is so very serious!’ she told me one day, with some asperity. The elder daughter, Lili, took after Monsieur Mabille; she was as methodical, finicky, and categorical as he was, and was brilliant at mathematics: they got along famously together. Zaza didn’t like this elder sister who was so positive and so preachy. Madame Mabille pretended to have the greatest esteem for this paragon but there was a secret rivalry between them and often their hostility came to the surface. Madame Mabille made no bones about her preference for Zaza: ‘She’s a living image,’ she would say happily. For her part, Zaza showed a passionate preference for her mother. She told me that Monsieur Mabille had several times asked in vain for his cousin’s hand in marriage; but Guite Larivière, impulsive, vivacious, beautiful, stood in awe of this former student of the Military Academy of Artillery and Engineering who was so serious and severe. But she led a very sheltered existence in the Basque country, where there were not many eligible young men; at the age of twenty-five, at the imperious insistence of her mother, she finally gave way and accepted him. Zaza confided in me also that Madame Mabille – to whom she attributed great reserves of charm, sensitivity, and imagination – had suffered from the lack of understanding of a husband who was as boring as an algebra text book; Zaza didn’t tell me everything; I realize today that she was physically repelled by her father. Her mother had enlightened her at a very early age, and with a wicked crudity, about the realities of sex: Zaza had a precocious understanding of why Madame Mabille had hated the first night of her marriage and had loathed her husband’s embraces ever since. She extended the repugnance she felt for him to the rest of his family. On the other hand, she adored her maternal grandmother who shared her bed whenever she came to Paris. At one time Monsieur Larivière had been a militant supporter in provincial newspapers and revues of the ultramontane ideas of Louis Veuillot; he had left on his death a few articles and an immense library. Zaza, who disliked mathematics as much as she did her father, took up literature. But when her grandfather died, as neither Madame Larivière nor Madame Mabille had any pretensions to culture, there was no one to guide Zaza’s tastes: she was forced to think for herself. To tell the truth, her originality was very limited; fundamentally, Zaza, like myself, reflected her environment. But at the Cours Désir and in our homes we were so narrowly bound by prejudice and convention that the least flash of sincerity and the slightest trace of imagination was always something of a surprise.

  What impressed me most about Zaza was her cynicism. I was thunderstruck when, a few years later, she told me the reasons for it. She was far from sharing the lofty opinion I had of her. Madame Mabille had too many offspring, she performed too many ‘social obligations’ and sat on too many committees to be able to give very much of herself to her children; I believe her smiling patience concealed cold indifference; even when she was very small, Zaza had felt herself to be more or less neglected; later her mother singled her out for special but very limited affection; the passionate love Zaza felt for her was a jealous rather than a happy devotion. I don’t know if a certain amount of spite had its part to play in her resentment against her father: she cannot have been indifferent to the preference her father showed for Lili. In any case, the third offspring in a family of nine children can scarcely fail to regard herself as only one among many; she benefits from a collective solicitude which does not encourage her to think she is someone very special. None of the Mabille children were shy or diffident; they thought too highly of their family to feel any timidity in front of strangers; but whenever Zaza, instead of behaving as a member of a clan, was left to her own devices, she discovered in herself a host of faults: she was ugly, ungraceful, not very nice, and nobody loved her. She compensated for this sense of inferiority by making fun of everything. I did not notice it then, but she never made fun of my faults, only of my virtues; she never drew attention to her gifts and her successes; she only exposed her weaknesses. When I was fourteen, during the Easter holidays she wrote to me that she hadn’t the heart to revise her physics notes, and yet that the idea of failing in the next test grieved her deeply: ‘You cannot understand how I feel, because if you had to prepare for a test, instead of torturing yourself about not knowing anything, you would set to work to prepare yourself for it.’ I was saddened by these words which poked fun at my hard-working, conscientious ways; but their veiled aggression seemed to indicate that Zaza was reproaching herself for her own indolence. If I irritated her, it was because she felt I was at the same time right and wrong; she defended in a joyless way the unfortunate child she considered herself to be against my maddening perfection.