Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  It was a blind submission. A dispute had broken out between L’Action Française and La Démocratie Nouvelle; having first made sure that they were ten to one, the royalists had attacked the supporters of Marc Sangnier and forced them to drink whole bottles of castor oil. Papa and his friends were highly amused by this episode. When I was very small I had learnt to laugh when the evil are discomfited; without really giving it a thought, I agreed with my father that the whole thing had been a most diverting lark. I made a laughing reference to it as I was walking up the rue Saint-Benoît with Zaza. Her face hardened: ‘What a filthy thing to do!’ she said disgustedly. I didn’t know what to answer. Crestfallen, I realized that I had thoughtlessly copied my father’s attitude and that I hadn’t an idea of my own in my head. Zaza, too, was expressing her family’s opinion. Her father had belonged to the democratic Catholic group Le Sillon before it had been denounced by the Church; he still thought that Catholics have social obligations and rejected the theories of Maurras; his was a fairly coherent position, one that a fourteen-year-old girl could rally round with a clear conscience; Zaza’s indignation and her horror of violence was sincere. I, who had repeated my father’s opinion parrot-fashion, hadn’t a leg to stand on. I was hurt by Zaza’s scorn, but what worried me much more was the difference of opinion between her father and mine. I didn’t like to think that one of them might be wrong. I talked about it to Papa, but he merely shrugged his shoulders and said Zaza was only a child; this reply did not satisfy me. For the first time, I was driven to take sides: but I didn’t know anything about the matter and I couldn’t make a decision. The one conclusion I drew from this incident was that it was possible to be of another opinion than my father. One could not even be sure of what the truth was any more.

  It was Vaulabelle’s History of the Two Restorations which inclined me towards liberalism; I spent two summer holidays reading the seven volumes in grandfather’s library. I wept over the defeat of Napoleon; I developed a hatred of monarchy, conservatism, obscurantism. I wanted men to be governed by reason and I was enthusiastic about democracy which I thought would guarantee them all equal rights and liberty of conscience. That was as far as I went.

  But I was much less interested in remote political and social questions than in the problems that concerned me personally: morals, my spiritual life, my relationship with God. I began to think very deeply about these things.

  *

  All nature spoke to me of God’s presence. But it seemed to me quite definitely that He was a total stranger to the restless world of men. Just as the Pope, away inside the Vatican, hadn’t to bother his head about what was going on in the world, so God, high up in the infinity of heaven, was not supposed to take any interest in the details of earthly adventures. I had long since learnt to distinguish His law from secular authority. My insolence in class, and my furtive reading of banned books did not concern Him. As year followed after year, my growing piety was purified and I began to reject dry-as-dust morality in favour of a more lively mysticism. I prayed, I meditated, I tried to make my heart aware of the divine presence. About the age of twelve I invented mortifications: locked in the water-closet – my sole refuge – I would scrub my flesh with pumice-stone until the blood came, and fustigate myself with the thin golden chain I wore round my neck. My fervour did not bear fruit. In my books of piety there was much talk about spiritual progress and exaltation; souls were supposed to stagger up rugged paths and overcome obstacles; at one moment, they would be trudging across barren wildernesses and at another a celestial dew would fall for their refreshment: it was quite an adventure; in fact, whereas intellectually I felt I was moving ever onward and upward in my quest for knowledge, I never had the impression that I was drawing any closer to God. I longed for apparitions, ecstasies; I yearned for something to happen inside or outside me: but nothing came, and in the end my spiritual exercises were more and more like make-believe. I exhorted myself to have patience and looked forward to the day when, miraculously detached from the earth, I would find myself ensconced at the heart of eternity. Meanwhile I was able to go on living unconstrainedly on earth because my efforts set me up on spiritual peaks whose serenity could not be troubled by worldly trifles.

  My complacency received a nasty shock. For the last seven years I had been making my confession to Abbé Martin twice a month; I would expatiate upon the state of my immortal soul; I would accuse myself of having taken Holy Communion without any true religious fervour, of not having thought often enough of God, and of having paid Him lip-service only in my prayers; he would reply to these ethereal shortcomings with a sermon couched in very elevated terms. But one day, instead of going through the usual rigmarole, he began to speak to me in a more familiar tone of voice: ‘It has come to my ears that my little Simone has changed . . . that she is disobedient, noisy, that she answers back when she is reprimanded. . . . From now on you must be on your guard against these things.’ My cheeks were aflame; I gazed with horror upon the impostor whom for years I had taken as the representative of God on earth; it was as if he had suddenly tucked up his cassock and revealed the skirts of one of the church-hens; his priest’s robe was only a disguise for an old tittle-tattle. With burning face I left the confessional, determined never to set foot in it again: from that moment on, it would have been as repugnant to me to kneel before the Abbé Martin as before ‘the old scarecrow’, Whenever I caught a glimpse of his black skirts swishing along a school corridor, my heart would begin to thump and I would run away: they made me feel physically sick, as if the Abbé’s deceit had made me his accomplice in some obscene act.

  I suppose he must have been very surprised; but probably he felt himself bound by the secret of the confessional; I never heard that he told anyone of my defection; he did not attempt to have it out with me. The break had been sudden, but complete.

  God emerged blameless from this episode; but only just. If I had been so prompt in disowning my spiritual director, it was in order to exorcise the frightful suspicion which for a moment veiled the heavens in blackness: perhaps God Himself was as fussy and narrow-minded as an old church-hen; perhaps God was stupid! While the Abbé was talking to me, an idiot hand had fallen on the back of my neck, bending my head down until it pressed my face into the ground; till the day of my death, the dead hand of stupidity would force me to crawl through life, blinded by mud and dark; I should have to say good-bye for ever to truth, liberty, and all happiness: living would be a calamity and a disgrace.

  I pulled myself away from that leaden hand; I concentrated all my revulsion on the traitor who had usurped the role of divine intermediary. When I left the chapel, God had been restored to His position of omniscient majesty; I had patched up heaven again. I went wandering under the vaulted roofs of Saint-Sulpice, seeking a confessor who would not alter the messages from on high by the use of impure human words. I tried a red-head, and then a dark-haired one whom I succeeded in interesting in my soul. He suggested a few themes for meditation and lent me a Handbook of Ascetic and Mystical Theology. But in the great bare church I could not feel at home as I did in the school chapel. My new spiritual director had not been given to me when I was a small girl; I had chosen him, rather casually: he was not a Father and I could not open myself completely to him. I had passed judgement on a priest, and despised him: no other priest would ever seem to me to be the sovereign Judge. No one on earth was the exact incarnation of God: I was alone before Him. And in the very depths of my being remained unanswered some disturbing questions: who was He? what did He really want? on whose side was He?

  My father was not a believer; the greatest writers and the finest thinkers shared his scepticism; on the whole, it was generally the women who went to church; I began to find it paradoxical and upsetting that the truth should be their privilege, when men, beyond all possible doubt, were their superiors. At the same time, I thought there was no greater disaster than to lose one’s faith and I often tried to insure myself against this risk. I had reached rather an advanc
ed stage in my religious instruction and had followed lectures in apologetics; I had subtle arguments to refute any objection that might be brought against revealed truths; but I didn’t know one that could prove them. The allegory of the clock and the clock-maker did not convince me. I was too ignorant of human suffering to find in it an argument against Providence; but there was no very obvious harmony in the world. Christ and a host of saints had manifested the supernatural here on earth: I realized that the Bible, the Gospels, the miracles, and the visions were vouched for only by the authority of the Church. ‘The greatest miracle at Lourdes is Lourdes itself,’ my father used to say. The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced. Today, I did not doubt that the Virgin had appeared to Bernadette in a blue and white robe: but tomorrow perhaps I would doubt it Believers admitted the existence of this vicious circle since they declared that faith requires divine grace. I didn’t suppose that God would play me a dirty trick and refuse me grace for ever; but I should have liked all the same to be able to get my hands on some irrefutable proof; I found only one: the voices of Joan of Arc. Joan belonged to historical fact; my father as well as my mother venerated her. She was neither a liar nor an illuminee, so how could one deny her witness? The whole of her extraordinary adventure confirmed it: the voices had spoken to her; this was an established scientific fact and I couldn’t understand how my father managed to elude it.

  One evening at Meyrignac I was leaning, as on so many other evenings, out of my window; a warm fragrance was rising from the stables up to the star-sprinkled sky; my prayer rose half-heartedly and then fell back to earth. I had spent my day eating forbidden apples and reading, in a book by Balzac – also forbidden – the strange idyll of a young man and a panther; before falling asleep I was going to tell myself some queer old tales which would put me in a queer state of mind. ‘These are sins,’ I told myself. It was impossible to deceive myself any longer: deliberate disobedience, systematic lies, impure imaginings – such conduct could hardly be described as innocent. I dipped my hands into the freshness of the cherry laurel leaves. I listened to the gurgling of the water, and I knew then that nothing would make me give up earthly joys. ‘I no longer believe in God,’ I told myself, with no great surprise. That was proof: if I had believed in Him, I should not have allowed myself to offend Him so light-heartedly. I had always thought that the world was a small price to pay for eternity; but it was worth more than that, because I loved the world, and it was suddenly God whose price was small: from now on His name would have to be a cover for nothing more than a mirage. For a long time now the concept I had had of Him had been purified and refined, sublimated to the point where He no longer had any countenance divine, any concrete link with the earth or therefore any being. His perfection cancelled out His reality. That is why I felt so little surprise when I became aware of His absence in heaven and in my heart. I was not denying Him in order to rid myself of a troublesome person: on the contrary, I realized that He was playing no further part in my life and so I concluded that He had ceased to exist for me.

  This liquidation had been bound to happen. I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life. On the other hand it would have been repugnant to me to skip in bad faith from the profane to the sacred and to affirm my belief in Him when I was living without His presence. I could not admit any kind of compromise arrangement with heaven. However little you withheld from Him, it would be too much if God existed; and however little you gave Him, it would be too much again if He did not exist. Quibbling with one’s conscience, haggling over one’s pleasures – such petty bargaining disgusted me. That is why I did not attempt to prevaricate. As soon as I saw the light, I made a clean break.

  My father’s scepticism had prepared the way for me; I would not be embarking alone upon a hazardous adventure. I even felt great relief at finding myself released from the bonds of sex and childhood, and in agreement with those liberal spirits I admired. The voices of Joan of Arc did not trouble me too much; I was intrigued by other enigmas: but religion had got me used to mysteries. And it was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world. My incredulity never once wavered.

  Yet the face of the universe changed. More than once during the days that followed, sitting under the purple beech or the silvery poplars I felt with anguish the emptiness of heaven. Until then, I had stood at the centre of a living tableau whose colours and lighting God Himself had chosen; all things murmured softly of His glory. Suddenly everything fell silent. And what a silence! The earth was rolling through space that was unseen by any eye, and lost on its immense surface, there I stood alone, in the midst of sightless regions of the air. Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone: without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, and all this hurly-burly in my head existed for no one. I got up and ran back to the gardens and sat down under the catalpa between Mama and Aunt Marguerite, so great was my need to hear a human voice.

  I made another discovery. One afternoon, in Paris, I realized that I was condemned to death. I was alone in the house and I did not attempt to control my despair: I screamed and tore at the red carpet. And when, dazed, I got to my feet again, I asked myself: ‘How do other people manage? How shall I manage too? . . .’ It seemed to me impossible that I could live all through life with such horror gnawing at my heart. When the reckoning comes, I thought, when you’re thirty or forty and you think: ‘It’ll be tomorrow,’ how on earth can you bear the thought? Even more than death itself I feared that terror that would soon be with me always.

  Fortunately, in the course of the scholastic year these metaphysical fulgurations were rare: I hadn’t enough free time and solitude. My changed attitude did not affect my daily life. I had stopped believing in God when I discovered that God had no influence on my behaviour: so this did not change in any way when I gave Him up. I had always imagined that the logical necessity of moral laws depended on Him: but they were so deeply engraved on my spirit that they remained unaltered for me after I had abolished Him. It was my respect for her which gave my mother’s rulings a sacred character, and not the fact that she might owe her authority to some supernatural power. I went on submitting myself to her decisions. Everything was as before: the concept of duty; righteousness; sexual taboos.

  I had no intention of revealing my spiritual turmoil to my father: it would have put him in a terribly embarrassing situation. So I bore my secret all alone and found it a heavy burden: for the first time in my life I had the feeling that good was not necessarily the same thing as truth. I couldn’t help seeing myself through the eyes of others – my mother, Zaza, my school-friends, my teachers even – and through the eyes of the girl I once had been. The year before, among the philosophy specialists, there had been an older pupil of whom it was rumoured that she was an ‘unbeliever’; she worked well, she never expressed subversive notions, and she had not been expelled; but I would feel a sort of terror whenever I caught sight, in the school corridors, of her face which was all the more disturbing because of the fixed intensity of a glass eye. Now it was my turn to feel I was a black sheep. The awkwardness of my situation was aggravated by dissimulation: I still went to Mass and took Holy Communion. I would swallow the host with complete indifference, and yet I knew that, according to the faith, I was committing a sacrilege. I was making mine all the worse by concealing it; but how could I have dared confess it? I would have been pointed at with the finger of scorn, expelled from the school; I would have lost Zaza’s friendship; and how terribly upset my mother would have been! I was condemned to live out a lie. It was no harmless fib: it was a lie that cast a shadow over my whole life, and sometimes – especially with Zaza whose forthrightness I admired – it weighed upon my spirits like a secret disease. Once again I was the victim of a spell which I couldn’t manag
e to exorcize: I had done nothing wrong, and I felt guilty. If the grown-ups had called me a hypocrite, a blasphemer, an unnatural and artful child, their verdict would have seemed to me at once horribly unjust and perfectly well-deserved. I could be said to be living a double life; there was no relationship between my true self and the self that others saw.

  Sometimes I suffered such distress at feeling myself a marked person, an accused outcast, that I longed to fall into error again. I had to return the Handbook of Ascetic and Mystical Theology to Abbé Roulin. I went back to Saint-Sulpice, kneeled down in his confessional, and told him that I had not partaken of the sacraments for several months because I had lost my faith. Seeing the Handbook and measuring the heights from which I had fallen, the Abbé was astounded, and with a disconcerting brutality asked me: ‘What mortal sin have you committed?’ I protested that I had not committed any sin. He did not believe me and advised me to pray hard. I resigned myself to the life of an outcast.

  About this time I read a novel which seemed to me to translate my spiritual exile into words: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss made an even deeper impression upon me than Little Women. I read it in English, at Meyrignac, lying on the mossy floor of a chestnut plantation. Maggie Tulliver, like myself, was tom between others and herself: I recognized myself in her. She too was dark, loved nature, and books and life, was too headstrong to be able to observe the conventions of her respectable surroundings, and yet was very sensitive to the criticism of a brother she adored. Her friendship with the young hunchback who lent her books moved me just as much as that between Jo and Laurie; I longed for her to marry him. But once again love broke with childhood. Maggie fell in love with a cousin’s fiancé, Stephen, whose heart she captured quite unintentionally. Compromised by him, she refused to marry him out of loyalty to Lucy; village society would have excused a treachery sanctioned by marriage, but would not forgive Maggie for having sacrificed appearances to the voice of conscience. Even her brother disowned her. The only relationship I could imagine was a love-friendship one; in my view, the exchange and discussion of books between a boy and a girl linked them for ever; I couldn’t understand the attraction Maggie felt for Stephen. But as she loved him, she should not have given him up. It was when she went back to the old mill, when she was misunderstood, calumniated, and abandoned by everyone that I felt my heart blaze with sympathy for her. I wept over her sorry fate for hours. The others condemned her because she was superior to them; I resembled her, and henceforward I saw my isolation not as a proof of infamy but as a sign of my uniqueness. I couldn’t see myself dying of solitude. Through the heroine, I identified myself with the author: one day other adolescents would bathe with their tears a novel in which I would tell my own sad story.