Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

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  At the end of September my sister and I were invited to Meulan where the parents of Poupette’s best friend had a country house; Anne-Marie Gendron was one of a large family, quite a wealthy and well-integrated one; they never had any quarrels; there was never a voice raised in anger, but everywhere there were smiles and kind attentions. I found myself back in a paradise whose very memory I had forgotten. The boys took us boating on the Seine; the eldest daughter, who was twenty, took us to Vernon in a taxi. We followed the river road; I was responsive to the landscape’s charms but even more so to those of Clotilde; she invited me that evening to come to her room and we had a talk. She had passed all her exams, read a little, and was studying the piano very hard; she spoke to me of her love for music, of Madame Swetchine’s Letters, and of her family. Her desk was full of souvenirs: bundles of letters tied up with ribbon, notebooks – probably private diaries – concert programmes, photographs, and a water-colour done by her mother and given to Clotilde on her eighteenth birthday. It seemed to me a most enviable thing to have a past all to oneself: almost as enviable as having a personality. She lent me a few books; she treated me as an equal and gave me advice with all the tender solicitude of an elder sister. I developed a crush on her. I didn’t admire her as I did Zaza and she was too ethereal to inspire in me obscure longings, as Marguerite had done. But I thought she was so romantic; she presented me with the attractive image of the girl I too should be very soon. She took us back to our parents; the door had hardly closed after her departure when a scene broke out: we had left a toothbrush behind at Meulan! In contrast with the serenely happy time I had had, the acrimonious atmosphere into which I was plunged on my return suddenly seemed suffocating. Leaning my head against the cupboard in the hall, I sobbed my heart out, and my sister did likewise: ‘Here’s a nice thing! They no sooner get home than they start to cry!’ my father and mother exclaimed indignantly. For the first time I admitted to myself how painful to bear were the shouts, the recriminations, and the reprimands which I usually suffered in silence; all the pent-up tears of the past months were choking me: they had to flow some time. I don’t know if my mother guessed that inwardly I was beginning to turn away from her; but I irritated her and she often got into a temper over something I had done or said. And so I looked to Clotilde as I would have looked to a big sister for consolation. I went to see her fairly often; I was enraptured by her pretty clothes, the tasteful decoration of her room, her sweetness and kindness, and her independence; I admired her for taking a taxi whenever we went to a concert – I thought this was the height of magnificence – and for making notes on her programme about the pieces she liked best. Zaza, and even more so Clotilde’s own friends, were staggered by my friendship with her; it was customary to keep company only with girls of one’s own age, give or take a year. One day I went to tea at Clotilde’s with Lili Mabille and other ‘young ladies’. I felt out of place and I was disappointed by the insipidity of the conversation. And then Clotilde was very pious: she couldn’t possibly be my mentor, now that I was no longer a believer. I expect that she for her part found me too young; she saw to it that we met less frequently and I didn’t make any effort on my side; after a few weeks we didn’t see each other any more. Not long after that, with a great deal of sickening sentimentality, she made a suitably ‘arranged’ match.

  At the start of the school year, grandpapa fell ill. All his undertakings had failed. His son had invented a kind of tin which could be opened with a small coin: grandpapa had wanted to exploit this invention but he had lost the patent. He took his competitor to court and lost the case. Disturbing words like ‘creditors’, ‘banker’s drafts’, and ‘mortgages’ kept creeping into his conversation. Sometimes when I lunched at his house there would be a ring at the front door: he would lay a finger on his lips and we would hold our breath. His eyes would glaze over in his purpling face. One afternoon at home when he got up to go he started to mumble: ‘Where’s my umbrella?’ When I saw him again he was sitting motionless in an armchair with his eyes closed; he could only move with great difficulty and dozed all day long. From time to time he would lift his eyelids: ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he would tell grandmama. ‘I’ve got a good idea. We’ll all be rich.’ He soon became completely paralysed and never left his big bed with the twisted columns; his body became covered with bedsores which gave off a frightful smell. Grandmama nursed him and knitted children’s garments all day long. Grandpapa had always been prone to catastrophe; grandmama accepted his fate with such philosophical resignation and they were both so old anyhow that their misfortune hardly touched me.

  I was working even harder than ever. The imminence of the examinations and the hope that I would soon be at the university spurred me on. It was a great year for me. My face got into better shape, and I was no longer incommoded by my growing body; my secrets did not weigh so heavily. My friendship with Zaza ceased to be the torment it had been. I had regained confidence in myself; and Zaza was changing too: I didn’t wonder why, but, by a stroke of irony, she became all dreamy and romantic. She began to like Musset, Lacordaire, and Chopin. She still inveighed against the pharisaism of her surroundings, but no longer extended her criticisms to the whole of humanity. From now on she spared me her sarcasms.

  There was a very select little group of us at the Cours Désir. The school only prepared for the Latin-modern languages examinations. Monsieur Mabille wanted his daughter to have a good grounding in science; I myself liked things I could get my teeth into, like mathematics. An extra teacher was appointed who taught algebra, trigonometry, and physics. Mademoiselle Chassin was young, lively, and very competent; she didn’t need to waste time on moral exhortations: we did serious work. She was very fond of us. Whenever Zaza stayed up in the clouds too long, Mademoiselle would say sweetly: ‘Where are you, Elizabeth?’ Zaza would start and smile. We had for classmates twins who were always in mourning and almost never said a word. I was enchanted by the intimate atmosphere of our classes. In Latin we had been allowed to skip a year and go on to a higher grade; the struggle to keep up with the pupils in the top class kept me on my toes. When I found myself back with my normal classmates in the year when I was to take my school-leaving certificate there was no longer the spice of novelty and Abbé Trécourt’s knowledge seemed a little thin; he frequently made mistakes in translation; but this big fellow with the blotchy complexion was more forthcoming and more jovial than our old school-marms and we had a genuine affection for him which he obviously reciprocated. Our parents thought it would be fun if we also offered Latin-modern languages in our examination, and in January we began to learn Italian; we were soon able to translate Cuore and le mie prigioni. Zaza took German; but as my English teacher showed herself to be well-disposed towards me I followed her lessons with pleasure. On the other hand, we had to put up with the patriotic tub-thumping of Mademoiselle Gontran, our history teacher; and Mademoiselle Lejeune exasperated us by the narrowness and pettiness of her literary tastes. In order to broaden our horizons we read a great deal and had long discussions among ourselves. Often we would stubbornly defend our points of view in class; I don’t know if Mademoiselle Lejeune was perspicacious enough to see through me but she now seemed to distrust me far more than Zaza.

  We struck up friendships; we would meet to play cards and chatter; in summer we would go on Saturdays to an open-air tennis court in the rue Boulard. None of our other friends meant much to Zaza or myself. If the truth were told, the older pupils at the Cours Désir were notattractive. When, after eleven years’ hard work, I won a silver-gilt medal, my father agreed without much enthusiasm to attend the prize-giving; he complained afterwards that he had never seen such a collection of ugly girls. A few of my schoolmates had quite pleasant features; but when we made public appearances we were done up like dogs’ dinners: the severe hair-styles and the violent or sickly-sweet colours of our satin or taffeta dresses drained all the life from our faces. The thing that must have struck my father most forcibly was th
e depressed, mournful look those adolescents had. I was so accustomed to it that when a new girl arrived one day and I saw her laughing – it was a real, hearty laugh – I opened my eyes wide in astonishment; she was an international golf champion and she had travelled widely; her bobbed hair, her well-cut jumper and box-pleated skirt, her sporty manner, and her uninhibited voice were obvious signs that she had not been brought up under the influence of Saint Thomas Aquinas; she spoke perfect English and knew enough Latin to be able to present the subject for her school-leaving certificate at the age of fifteen and a half; Corneille and Racine bored her to tears. ‘Literature makes me sick,’ she told me. ‘Oh, don’t say that!’ I protested. ‘Why not?’ she retorted. ‘It’s the truth.’ Her gay personality enlivened the funereal ‘lecture-study room’. Some things she found tedious, but there were other things in her life which gave her pleasure, and one felt that she had a future ahead of her. The air of sadness that emanated from my other schoolmates was due less to their appearance than to their hopeless resignation. Once they had passed their school-leaving certificate they would follow a few lecture-courses on history and literature, they would attend classes at the École du Louvre or the Red Cross where they would learn how to decorate china, make batik prints and fancy bindings, and occupy themselves with good works. From time to time they would be taken out to a performance of Carmen or for a walk round the tomb of Napoleon in order to make the acquaintance of some suitable young man; with a little luck, they would marry him. This was the elder Mabille girl’s life; she did cooking and went to dances, acted as secretary to her father, and helped her sisters to make their clothes. Her mother dragged her from one meeting with a young man to another. Zaza told me that one of her aunts had a theory about ‘the sacrament of love at first sight’: at that very moment when the fiancés said ‘yes’ before the priest, they were filled with grace, and at once fell in love with one another. These tribal rites disgusted Zaza; she declared one day that she couldn’t see any difference between a woman who married ‘for convenience’ and a prostitute; she had been taught that a Christian woman should respect her body: she would not be respecting it if she gave it to a man without love, for financial or family reasons. Her vehemence astounded me; it was as if she felt her own body was defiled by the ignominy of this bartering of human souls. The question did not arise for me. I would earn my own living, I would be free. But in Zaza’s family you either had to get married or become a nun. ‘Celibacy,’ they used to repeat, ‘is not a vocation.’ She began to dread the future; was that the cause of her insomnia? She slept badly; often she would get up in the middle of the night and rub herself from top to toe, with eau de Cologne; in the morning, to get herself going, she would swallow quantities of black coffee and white wine. When she told me about these excesses, I realized that there were many things I did not know about her. But I encouraged her in her resistance to the family code and she was grateful to me for it: I was her only ally. We both agreed that many things were disgusting, and we both had a great longing for freedom and happiness.

  Despite our differences, we often reacted to circumstances in the same manner. My father had received from his actor friend two free seats for a matinée at the Odéon; he made us a present of them; they were doing a play by Paul Fort, Charles VI. When I found myself alone with Zaza in a box, I was overjoyed. The three knocks sounded, the curtain rose, and we were watching a heavy melodrama; Charles went out of his mind; at the end of the first act, haggard-eyed, he was staggering round the stage in a long, incoherent monologue; I sank deeper and deeper into a gloomy despair that was as appallingly lonely as his own madness. I took a look at Zaza: she was white-faced. ‘If it goes on like this let’s leave,’ I suggested. She agreed. When the curtain went up on the second act, Charles, in shirt-sleeves, was struggling to get out of the clutches of masked and hooded men. We left the box. The attendant stopped us: ‘Why are you leaving?’ ‘It’s too horrible,’ I said. She burst out laughing. ‘But it isn’t real, my pets. It’s just play-acting.’ We knew that: all the same, we had seen something frightful.

  My understanding with Zaza and her good opinion helped me to free myself from the grown-ups and to see myself with my own eyes. But one incident reminded me how much I still depended on their judgement. It exploded unexpectedly just as I was beginning to enjoy a care-free existence.

  Just as I did every week, I made a careful word-for-word translation of my Latin text; I wrote it in a column opposite the original. Then I had to put it into ‘good French’. As it happened, this particular piece of prose had been translated in my text book on Latin literature, and with an elegance which I felt could not be equalled: in comparison, all the expressions which came to my mind seemed to be painfully clumsy. I had not made any mistake in the meaning; I was certain to get a good mark, and I had no ulterior motives; but the requirements of the object, the phrase itself, had to be satisfied: each sentence had to be perfect. It was repugnant to me to substitute my heavy-handed inventions for the ideal model furnished by the text book. There and then I copied it straight out of the book.

  We were never left alone with the Abbé Trécourt; one of our old school-marms would sit at a little table near the window and supervise us; before he handed us back our translations, she entered our marks in a register. On that day the task had fallen to Mademoiselle Dubois, the one with the degree, whose Latin classes I would have normally attended the year before had not Zaza and I turned our noses up at them in favour of the Abbé’s: she did not like me. I could hear her making a fuss behind my back; she was whispering furious protests. In the end she drafted a note which she placed on top of the pile of exercise books before giving them back to the Abbé. He wiped his eyeglasses, read the message, and smiled: ‘Yes,’ he said mildly, ‘this passage from Cicero was already translated in your text books and many of you apparently noticed it. I have given the highest marks to those of you whose work showed the most originality.’ Despite his indulgent tones, Mademoiselle Dubois’ furious face, and the uneasy silence of my classmates filled me with terror. Whether through force of habit, absent-mindedness, or simple affection, the Abbé had given me the best mark. I had got 17. In any case, no one had got less than 12. Doubtless in order to justify his partiality he asked me to construe the text word by word: I kept my voice steady and did so without a mistake. He congratulated me and the tension eased a little. Mademoiselle Dubois didn’t dare ask me to read out my final version; Zaza, sitting next to me, didn’t so much as glance at it: she was scrupulously honest and I think refused to entertain any suspicions about me. But when the lesson was over certain of my other classmates started whispering together and Mademoiselle Dubois took me to one side: she felt she would have to inform Mademoiselle Lejeune of my perfidy. And so the thing I had often dreaded was finally going to happen: an action performed innocently and in secret would, by being brought to light, disgrace me. I still felt some respect for Mademoiselle Lejeune: the idea that she would despise me was torture. It was impossible to turn back the clock, to undo what I had done: I was marked for life! I had had a presentiment of danger: the truth can be unjust, unfair; all that evening and part of the night I tried to fight a way out of the trap into which I had so thoughtlessly fallen and which would not let me go. Usually I got round difficulties by running away from them, or keeping silent, or forgetting them; I rarely took any initiative; but this time I decided to fight it out. Lies would be needed to cover up the circumstances which conspired against me; so lie I must. I went to see Mademoiselle Lejeune in her study and I swore to her, with tears in my eyes, that I hadn’t copied my Latin translation: only some involuntary recollections of the text book version had slipped into mine. Convinced that I had done nothing wrong, I defended myself with all the fervour of an injured innocent. But my tactics were absurd: I was guiltless, I should have taken my work with me as the chief evidence in my defence; but I merely gave my word. The principal did not believe me, told me so, and added impatiently that the subject was now close
d. She did not tell me off, and she did not reproach me for what I had done: this indifference, and the crisp tone of her voice made me realize that she hadn’t an ounce of affection for me. I had been afraid that my mistake would ruin the good opinion she had of me: but for a long time now I had had nothing more to lose. I recovered my equanimity. She had so categorically withheld her respect that I no longer wished for it.

  During the weeks preceding the examination, my happiness was unalloyed. The weather was fine and my mother allowed me to go and study in the Luxembourg Gardens. I would sit in the ‘English gardens’, at the edge of a lawn, or near the Medici fountain. I was still wearing my hair down my back, caught together with a slide, but my cousin Annie, who often made me a present of her cast-off clothes, had given me that summer a white pleated skirt with a blue cretonne bodice; in my sailor-hat I fancied myself to be a real young lady. I was reading Faguet, Brunetière, and Jules Lemaître; I would sniff the fragrance of the lawns and feel I was as emancipated as the university students who strolled through the gardens. I would pass through the gates and go and rummage round the arcades of the Odéon; I felt the same thrill of delight there as I had felt at the age of ten in my mother’s circulating library, the Bibliothèque Cardinale. Here there were displayed rows of leather-bound books, gilt-edged; their pages had been cut, and I would stand there reading for two or three hours without ever being asked to buy anything. I read Anatole France, the Goncourts, Colette, and whatever I could lay my hands on. I told myself that as long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.

  I had also been given permission to sit up late: when Papa had left for the Café Versailles where he played bridge nearly every evening, and when Mama and my sister had gone to bed I would be left alone in the study. I would lean out of the window; the wind would bring me gusts of fragrance from the leafy trees; across the way, windows would be lighted. I would get Papa’s opera glasses, take them out of their case and spy on the lives of strangers, just as I had used to do; I didn’t care how trivial were the things I saw; I was – I still am – very conscious of the fascination of these little peep-shows, these lighted rooms hanging in the night. My gaze would wander from house to house, and I would tell myself, deeply affected by the balmy airs of the summer evening: ‘Soon I’ll be living my own life . . . really living.’