There was also resentment in her scorn of mankind: she didn’t rate herself very highly, but the rest of the world didn’t seem to be worth rating highly either. She sought in heaven the love that was refused her upon earth; she was very devout. She lived in a more homogeneous environment than I did, in which religious values were given unanimous and emphatic support: the flat denial of theory in the actual practice of religion only served to give the lie a more scandalous flavour. The Mabilles gave money to charitable works. Every year, on the occasion of the national pilgrimage, they went to Lourdes: the boys served as stretcher bearers; the girls washed dishes in hospital kitchens. In their circle there was much talk of God, of charity, of ideals; but Zaza soon perceived that all these people only respected money and social position. This hypocrisy revolted her; she sought refuge from it in deliberate cynicism. I never realized how much torn and battered idealism lay behind what they called at the Cours Désir her paradoxes.
Zaza was much more informal with her other friends: she would address them as ‘tu’. At the Tuileries she would play with anyone, she was very free-and-easy in her manners, and even rather impudent. Yet my relationship with her remained somewhat stiff and formal; there were no kisses, no friendly thumps on the back; we continued to address one another as ‘vous’, and we were reserved in our speech. I knew that she thought much less of me than I did of her; she preferred me to all her other schoolmates, but scholastic life did not count as much for her as it did for me; occupied as she was with her family, her home, her piano, her holidays. I was unable to tell what place I had in her scheme of things; at first I had not bothered too much about that; but now I was beginning to wonder; I was aware that my studious zeal and my docility exasperated her; how high an opinion did she have of me? There was no question of revealing my feelings to her, nor of trying to discover hers. I had succeeded in gaining an inner freedom from the set ideas with which adults clutter up their children’s lives: I was more daring in my emotions, my dreams, my desires, and even in my use of certain words. But I never imagined that one could communicate sincerely, spontaneously, with someone else. In books, people make declarations of love and hate, they express their innermost feelings in fine phrases; but in life there are no significant speeches. What can be spoken is regulated by what can be done: if it ‘isn’t done’, it isn’t said. There could have been nothing more conventional than the letters we exchanged. Zaza used clichés and commonplace ideas a little more elegantly than I did; but neither of us expressed anything of what touched us most deeply. Our mothers read our correspondence: such a censorship certainly did not encourage us to pour out our souls. But even in our private conversations we used to observe unspoken and indefinable rules; we kept well within the bounds of modesty, for we were both of the opinion that our innermost feelings should not be exposed. So I was reduced to interpreting as best I could whatever indications I could find; the least praise from Zaza overwhelmed me with joy; the sarcastic smiles she so frequently gave me were a terrible torment. The happiness our friendship afforded me was blighted during those difficult years by the constant fear that I might incur her displeasure.
One year, in the middle of the summer holidays, her irony caused me to die a thousand deaths. I had been with my family to admire the waterfalls at Gimmel; I reacted with a dutiful enthusiasm to their rather standardized picturesqueness. Of course, as my letters were a reflection of my public life, I was careful to keep out of them the solitary joys of country life; so I decided to describe this collective excursion to Zaza, its beauties and my transports. The platitude of my style accentuated most unhappily the insincerity of my emotions. In her reply, Zaza maliciously insinuated that I had sent her by mistake one of my holiday tasks: I burst into tears. I felt that she was reproaching me with something more serious than the clumsy pomposity of my phrases: everywhere I went I dragged behind me the crippling shadow of the first-class pupil. This was partly true; but it was also true that I loved Zaza with an intensity which could not be accounted for by any established set of rules and conventions. I did not entirely correspond to the person she took me for; but I couldn’t find a way of demolishing that image and revealing my true nature to Zaza; this misunderstanding drove me to despair. In my reply I pretended to take it all very lightly but at the same time reproached Zaza for being so naughty; she sensed that she had hurt me for she wrote asking to be forgiven by return of post: I had been the victim, she told me, of a fit of bad temper. This restored my equanimity a little.
Zaza did not suspect how much I idolized her, nor that I had adjured my pride in her favour. At a charity bazaar held in the Cours Désir, a graphologist examined our handwritings; Zaza’s appeared to indicate a precocious maturity, sensitivity, culture, and remarkable artistic gifts; mine showed nothing better than infantilism. I accepted this verdict: yes, I was an industrious pupil, a good little girl, and nothing more. Zaza protested against it with a vehemence I found very comforting. She protested again in a short letter against another analysis, just as unfavourable, which I had sent to her, and sketched my portrait in these words: ‘Rather reserved, a tendency to conform to convention and custom; but the warmest of hearts and an unequalled, kindly indulgence in overlooking the faults of her friends.’
It wasn’t often we were so frank with one another. Was that my fault? The fact is that it was Zaza who spoke, very sweetly, of my reserve: would she have liked a freer relationship with me? My affection for her was fanatical, but she was very reticent towards me; perhaps it was I, after all, who was responsible for our excessive discretion.
Yet I found it very irksome. Though she was brusque and caustic in her manner, Zaza was sensitive; one day she came to school, her face ravaged with weeping because she had learnt the evening before of the death of a distant cousin. She would have been deeply touched by the devotion I felt for her: in the end I couldn’t bear to think that she knew nothing about it. As it was impossible for me to say anything, I decided I must do something. It would be running a great risk: Mama would consider my plan ridiculous; or Zaza herself would think it odd. But the need to express my feelings was so great that for once I felt I must go forward with it. I revealed my plan to my mother, who approved it. I was to give Zaza for her birthday a bag which I would make with my own hands. I bought some blue and red silk brocaded in gold; it seemed to me the height of luxury. Following a pattern in Practical Fashions, I mounted it on a base of woven straw, and lined it with cerise satin; I enveloped my handiwork in tissue paper. When the day arrived, I waited for Zaza in the cloakroom; I handed her my gift; she threw me a stupefied look, then she blushed hotly and her whole face changed; for a moment we stood looking at one another, embarrassed by our emotion, and quite unable to find in our repertory of set responses a single appropriate word or gesture. The next day we met with our mothers. ‘Now thank Madame de Beauvoir,’ said Madame Mabille in her most affable tones, ‘for all the trouble she must have taken.’ She was trying to bring my unprecedented action within the range of polite grown-up reactions. I realized at that moment that I didn’t like her any more. In any case, she failed in the attempt. Something had happened that could not be wiped out by polite social usage.
But I still wasn’t able to relax. Even when Zaza was very friendly towards me, even when she seemed to enjoy being with me I was afraid of appearing importunate. She only let me have brief glimpses of that secret ‘personality’ which inhabited her; my notions of what her conversations with herself would be like became an almost religious obsession. One day I went to the rue de Varennes to get a book which she had promised to lend me; she wasn’t at home; I was asked to wait for her in her room, for she was not expected to be long. I looked at the walls covered with blue paper, da Vinci’s Saint Anne, the crucifix: Zaza had left open on her desk one of her favourite books: the Essays of Montaigne. I read the page she had left it open at and that she would continue reading when I wasn’t there: but the printed symbols seemed to me as remote from my understanding as in the days wh
en I didn’t know the alphabet. I tried to see the room with Zaza’s eyes, to insinuate myself into the internal monologue that was always going on inside her; but in vain. I could touch all the objects that were expressions of her presence; but they did not give her up to me; they revealed, but at the same time concealed her; it was almost as if they defied me ever to come close to her. Zaza’s existence seemed so hermetically sealed that I couldn’t get the smallest foothold in it. I took my book and fled. When I met her the next day, she seemed dumbfounded by my action: why had I rushed away like that? I couldn’t explain it to her. I would not even admit to myself with what fevered torment I paid for the happiness she gave me.
*
The majority of the boys I knew seemed to me uncouth and of very limited intelligence; yet I knew that they belonged to a privileged category. If they had charm and a ready wit I was prepared to put up with them. My cousin Jacques had never lost his prestige in my eyes. He lived alone with his sister and an old nurse in the house in the boulevard Montparnasse and he often came to spend the evening with us. At thirteen he already had the assurance of a young man; his independent way of life, and his authority in discussion had turned him into a precocious adult and I thought it was quite natural that he should treat me as a little girl. My sister and I were delighted whenever we heard his ring at the door. One evening he arrived so late that we were already in bed; we rushed into the study in our nighties. ‘What a way to behave!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘You’re big girls now!’ I was taken aback. I looked upon Jacques as a sort of elder brother. He helped me to do my Latin prose, criticized my choice of books, and recited poems to me. One evening, on the balcony, he declaimed Hugo’s Tristesse d’Olympio, and I suddenly remembered, with a stab of the heart, that we had been ‘engaged’. But now the only real conversations he ever had were with my father.
He was a day-boy at the Collège Stanislas, where he was a brilliant pupil; between the ages of fourteen and fifteen he became infatuated with his French literature teacher who taught him to prefer Mallarmé to Rostand. My father shrugged his shoulders in exasperation at this. As Jacques would run down Cyrano without being able to explain its weak points to me, and would recite obscure poems with great relish but without showing me why they were beautiful, I agreed with my parents that he was ‘putting it on’. All the same, while deploring his tastes I admired the high-handed way he defended them. He knew a host of poets and writers of whom I knew nothing at all; the distant clamour of a world that was closed to me used to come into the house with him: how I longed to explore that world! Papa used to say with pride: ‘Simone has a man’s brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man.’ And yet everyone treated me like a girl. Jacques and his friends read real books and were abreast of all current problems; they lived out in the open; I was confined to the nursery. But I did not give up all hope. I had confidence in my future. Women, by the exercise of talent or knowledge, had carved out a place for themselves in the universe of men. But I felt impatient of the delays I had to endure. Whenever I happened to pass by the Collège Stanislas my heart would sink; I tried to imagine the mystery that was being celebrated behind those walls, in a classroom full of boys, and I would feel like an outcast. They had as teachers brilliantly clever men who imparted knowledge to them with all its pristine glory intact. My old school-marms only gave me an expurgated, insipid, faded version. I was being crammed with an ersatz concoction; and I felt I was imprisoned in a cage.
In fact I no longer looked upon the ladies of the establishment as the august high-priestesses of Knowledge but as rather comical old church-hens. More or less affiliated to the Jesuit order, they parted their hair on the side while they were still ‘novices’ and in the middle when they had taken their final vows. They thought it their duty to show their devoutness in the eccentricity of their garb: they wore dresses of shot silk with leg-o’-mutton sleeves and whaleboned collars; their skirts swept the floor; their qualifications were Christian virtues rather than degrees and diplomas. It was considered a great triumph when Mademoiselle Dubois, a dark, bewhiskered lady, managed to scrape through a degree in English; Mademoiselle Billon, who was at least thirty, had been seen, all buttoned-up and blushing, at the Sorbonne, trying to get through the oral of her school-leaving certificate. My father made no secret of the fact that he found these pious old frauds a little backward. It exasperated him that I should be obliged, at the end of any composition in which I described an outing or a party, to ‘thank God for a pleasant day’. He thought highly of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, and knew Victor Hugo by heart: he wouldn’t allow that French literature came to a stop in the seventeenth century. He went as far as to suggest to my mother that my sister and I should attend the lycée; there we would enjoy a better and more liberal grounding and at much less cost. I rejected this proposal with all the vehemence I could muster. I should have lost all desire to go on living if I had been separated from Zaza. My mother supported my objections. But I was divided over this question too. I wanted to stay on at the Cours Désir and yet I didn’t like it there any more. I went on working zealously, but my behaviour was changing. The lady in charge of higher studies, Mademoiselle Lejeune, a tall, gaunt woman with a ready tongue, was rather intimidating; but with Zaza and a few other fellow-pupils I used to make fun of the rest of our teachers’ foibles. The assistant mistresses just couldn’t keep us in order. We used to spend free time between classes in a large room known as ‘the lecture-study room’. There we would talk and giggle and plague the life out of the poor creature left in charge whom we had nicknamed ‘the old scarecrow’. My sister, who had thrown all discretion to the winds by now, had decided that she would behave in the most outrageous way. With a friend she had chosen herself, Anne-Marie Gendron, she founded the Cours Désir Gazette; Zaza lent her some hectograph jelly and from time to time I contributed to it; we turned out some bloodthirsty numbers. We were no longer given marks for good conduct; our mistresses lectured us and complained to our mother. She got rather worried, but as my father always laughed at our escapades she disregarded the complaints. I never dreamed of attaching any moral significance to our naughty pranks; as soon as I found out how stupid our schoolmistresses were, they could no longer speak with any authority on what was right and wrong.
Stupidity: at one time my sister and I used to accuse other children of stupidity when we found them dull and boring; now there were many grown-ups, and in particular our school-teachers, who came in for the charge. Unctuous sermons, all kinds of solemn twaddle, grand words, inflated turns of phrase, and any pompous affectation was ‘stupidity’. It was stupid to attach importance to trifles, to persist in observing conventions and customs, to prefer commonplaces and prejudices to facts. The very height of stupidity was when people fatuously believed that we swallowed all the righteous fibs that were dished out to us. Stupidity made us laugh; it was one of our never-failing sources of amusement; but there was also something rather frightening about it. If this dunce-like dullness had won the day we would no longer have had the right to think, to make fun of people, to experience real emotions and enjoy real pleasures. We had to fight against it, or else give up living.
In the end my teachers got fed up with my insubordination and they let me know their displeasure. The Institut Adeline Désir took great care to distinguish itself from secular establishments where the mind is cultivated at the expense of the soul. At the end of the year, instead of awarding prizes for scholastic success – which would have run the risk of encouraging worldly rivalry among the pupils – we were presented at the end of March, in the presence of a bishop, with certificates and medals which were mainly rewards for industriousness and good behaviour and also for long attendance at the school. The ceremonies took place, with tremendous pomp, at the Salle Wagram. The highest distinction was called ‘the certificate of honour’ awarded to only a few pupils from each class who had excelled in everything. The rest only had a right to ‘special mentions’. That year, after my name had reverberated in the solemn
silence of the hall, I was startled to hear Madame Lejeune announce: ‘Special mentions in mathematics, history, and geography.’ From my assembled schoolmates came a murmur of consternation, and also of satisfaction, because not all of them were my friends. I took this affront without turning a hair. At the end of the ceremony, my history teacher came up to my mother: Zaza had a bad influence upon me; we would no longer be allowed to sit next to one another at school. I tried hard to keep a stiff upper lip, but in vain: my eyes filled with tears, to the great delight of Mademoiselle Gontran who thought I was weeping because I had only got a special mention; I was popping with rage because they were going to take me away from Zaza. But my distress had a more profound significance. In that sad corridor I realized vaguely that my childhood was coming to an end. The grown-ups still had me under their thumb, but peace had gone for ever from my heart. I was now separated from them by this freedom that was no source of pride to me, but that I suffered in solitary silence.
*
I no longer held sway over the world: the façades of buildings and the indifferent glances of the passers-by exiled me from life. That is why about this time my love of the countryside took on an almost mystical fervour. As soon as I arrived at Meyrignac all barriers seemed to be swept away and my horizon broadened. I lost myself in the infinite and at the same time remained myself. I felt on my eyelids the heat of the sun that shines for everyone but that here and now was lavishing its caresses on me alone. The wind went whirling round the poplars; it came from elsewhere, from everywhere; it went hustling through space, and I, too, was whirled away with it, without stirring from where I stood, right to the ends of the earth. When the moon arose in the heavens, I would be in touch with far-off cities, deserts, oceans, and villages which at that moment were bathed, as I was, in its radiance. I was no longer a vacant mind, an abstracted gaze, but the turbulent fragrance of the waving grain, the intimate smell of the heather moors, the dense heat of noon or the shiver of twilight; I was heavy; yet I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds.