Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  I often used to feel how incomparable we were, and I would mournfully tell myself: ‘He alone is happiness and life! Ah! happiness! And life, that should be everything to me!’ Yet I couldn’t bring myself to exclude Jacques from my heart. He set off on a month’s trip over the whole of France: he was going to see priests and look at churches, trying to find buyers for the Laiguillon stained-glass windows. It was winter, and very cold: I began again to long for the warmth of his presence, for a peaceful love, a place of my own, that would also be a home to us both. I no longer conducted self-interrogations. I was reading Mauriac’s Good-bye to Adolescence; I was learning long languid passages of it by heart and I would recite them to myself in the streets.

  If I persisted in this love, it was mainly because despite my hesitations I always retained a deep affection for Jacques: he was charming, and a charmer, and his engaging manners, which, though capricious, were very real, had conquered more than one fond heart; my own was quite defenceless: an intonation, a glance was enough to unleash in me a bewildered gratitude. Jacques’ intellect no longer dazzled me; I no longer needed his help in understanding books and paintings; but I was always moved by his confidences and his bouts of humility. All the others – narrow-minded young people and smug adults – thought they knew everything, and whenever they said ‘I don’t understand!’ they never thought it might be themselves who were at fault. How grateful I was to Jacques for his lack of set ideas! I wanted to help him as he had helped me. Even more than by our childhood’s past I felt myself bound to him by a sort of pact which made his ‘salvation’ even more important than my own. I believed all the more firmly in this predestined bond because I didn’t know a single man, whether young or old, with whom I could even begin to have a serious conversation. If Jacques wasn’t made for me, then no one was, and I would have to go back to a solitude which I found very bitter and hard to bear.

  At those moments when I re-dedicated myself to the service of Jacques, I would raise a statue to him again in my mind: ‘Everything that comes to me from Jacques seems like a game, a lack of courage, a cowardice – and then, after all, I realize the truth in what he says.’ His scepticism was proof of his lucidity; in truth, it was I who was lacking in courage whenever I tried to shut my eyes to the sad relativity of human ends; but he dared to admit that nothing was worth the effort. Did he waste his time in bars? That was because he was trying to escape from his despair, and sometimes he encountered a kind of poetry there. Instead of reproaching him for his excesses, I should admire him for his prodigality: he resembled that king of Thule whom he liked to take as an example and who didn’t hesitate to throw his most beautiful golden goblet into the ocean for the sake of a sigh. I wasn’t capable of such refinements, but this didn’t mean that I was unable to recognize their value. I was convinced that one day Jacques would express such things in a book. He didn’t altogether discourage my hopes: from time to time he would announce that he had found a simply wonderful title. I had to wait, give him credit. I practised these self-deceptions in the enthusiasm of his painful recoveries from dissipation and depression.

  The main reason for my desperate eagerness to save him was that apart from this love my life seemed desolately empty and futile. Jacques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down.

  *

  Zaza returned to Paris at the beginning of October. She had had her lovely black hair cut short, and her new hair-style threw into pleasant relief her rather thin face. Dressed in the style of St Thomas Aquinas, comfortably, but without elegance, she always wore a little cloche hat pulled right down to her eyebrows, and very often gloves too. On the day of our first reunion, we spent the afternoon on the quais along the Seine and in the Tuileries; she had that serious and even rather sad air which she now seemed to carry about with her permanently. She told me that her father had taken a new situation; Raoul Dautry had been given the post of head engineer on the State railways, a post Monsieur Mabille had been expecting to get; annoyed by this, he had accepted a proposition which the Citroën firm had long been making him: he would earn an enormous salary. The Mabilles were going to move to a luxurious apartment in the rue de Berri; they had bought a car; they would have to go out to dinner and give dinners in return much more frequently than before. Zaza didn’t seem to be exactly enraptured by all this; she spoke impatiently about the social life she had to put up with, and I understood that it was not of her own choosing that she kept going to weddings and funerals, baptisms, First Communions, teas, luncheons, charity bazaars, family conclaves, engagement parties, and dances; she still judged her environment with the same severely critical eye as before: perhaps even more so. Before the holidays I had lent her some books; she told me that they had given her a lot to think about; she had read Le Grand Meaulnes three times over: she had never been moved so much by any other novel. She suddenly seemed very close to me and I talked to her a little about myself: she thought as I did about many things. ‘I’ve got Zaza back!’ I joyfully told myself when I left her as dusk was falling.

  We got into the habit of going for a walk together every Sunday morning. It would hardly have been possible for us to have an intimate talk either at her house or mine; and we were completely ignorant as to the purpose of cafés: ‘But what are all those people there for? Haven’t they got homes?’ Zaza asked me once as we were passing the Café de la Régence. So we used to tramp up and down the Champs-Elysées or the paths of the Luxembourg Gardens; if it was fine, we would sit on the iron seats at the edge of a lawn. We borrowed the same books from Adrienne Monnier’s library; we read with passionate interest the correspondence between Alain Fournier and Jacques Rivière; she far and away preferred Fournier; I was fascinated by Rivière’s methodical rapacity. We would discuss and comment on our daily lives. Zaza was having serious trouble with Madame Mabille who reproached her with spending too much time on studying, reading, and music and neglecting her ‘social duties’; she thought the books Zaza liked were very dubious works; she was worrying. Zaza still felt the same devotion for her mother as before, and she couldn’t bear to think she was causing her pain. ‘Yet there are some things I don’t want to give up!’ she told me in an anguished voice. She was afraid there might be even graver conflicts in the future. After being dragged from one interview to another with ‘suitable parties’ her sister Lili, who was now twenty-three, would one day get herself married off; and then it would be Zaza’s turn. ‘I won’t let them do it to me!’ she declared. ‘But then I shall have to have a row with Mama!’ Though I didn’t talk to her about Jacques or my new views on religion, I too confided many things in her. But on the day after that night I had spent weeping my heart out, following the dinner with Jacques and our parents, I felt unable to wander round alone until the evening; I went and rang at Zaza’s door and as soon as I found myself alone with her I burst into tears. She was so dumbfounded that I told her everything.

  As usual, I used to pass the better part of my days working. That year Mademoiselle Lambert was lecturing on logic and on the history of philosophy and I started studying for the examinations in both these subjects. I was glad to be reading philosophy again. I was still as keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings; it seemed to me that I had been taken in by ‘a conjuring trick whose secret, though childishly simple, cannot be guessed’. I was hoping, if not to elucidate the mystery, at least to get to closer grips with it. As my philosophical equipment consisted only in what the Abbé Trécourt had taught me, I began by groping my way blindly through the systems of Descartes and Spinoza. These sometimes bore me up to lofty heights, out into the infinite: I would see the earth like an ant-h
ill at my feet, and even literature became a futile jabbering of voices; sometimes they seemed no more than clumsy scaffoldings constructed on air without any relationship to reality. I studied Kant, and he convinced me that no one could ever put me wise to things. His Critique seemed to me to be so very much to the point and I took so much pleasure in getting the hang of it that for the moment I couldn’t find it in my heart to be saddened by it. Yet if it failed to explain the mystery of the universe and of my own existence, I really didn’t know what could be the point of philosophy; I was only moderately interested in doctrines which I already took exception to. I did a dissertation on ‘Descartes and the Ontological Fallacy’ which Mademoiselle Lambert thought very mediocre. All the same, she had decided to take an interest in me, and this flattered me very much. During her logic lectures, I whiled away the time by watching her face, her mannerisms, her clothes. She always wore simple blue dresses that were at the same time rather studied in their effect; I found the cool ardour of her expression rather boring, but I was always startled by her smile which would transform the severe mask into a human face. It was rumoured that she had lost her fiancé in the war and that after this affliction she had withdrawn from worldly life. She inspired passion in certain breasts: she was even accused of abusing her hold over certain students who, out of love for her, formed part of the ‘inner circle’ which she presided over with Madame Daniélou. Then after having lured these devoted young things she was said to reject their advances. It didn’t matter to me what she did. In my view, it was not enough just to think or just to live; I gave my complete allegiance only to those who ‘thought their lives out’: Mademoiselle Lambert did not ‘live’ her life. She gave lectures and was working on a thesis: I thought such an existence was very arid. Nevertheless I liked going to see her in her study, which was of the same blue as her dresses and her eyes: there was always a tea-rose in a crystal vase on her table. She would recommend books; she lent me La Tentation d’Occident by a young unknown called André Malraux. She would ask me very searching questions about myself, without making me feel scared. She thought it was quite natural that I should have lost my faith. I talked to her about many things, and about the state of my heart: did she think that one should resign oneself to a life of conjugal love and happiness? She gave me a rather anxious look: ‘Do you really believe, Simone, that a woman can find fulfilment without love and marriage?’ There was no doubt that she, too, had her problems; but it was the only time she referred to them; her task was to help me resolve my own. I listened to her advice without having much faith in it; I couldn’t forget that she had a stake in Heaven; but I was grateful to her for having such a deep concern about me and her faith in me was very comforting.

  In July I had put my name down for the Social Service Groups. The woman in charge of the women’s sections, a huge purple-faced individual, made me the head of the Belleville group. At the beginning of October she called a meeting of officers to give us our instructions. The young women I met at this gathering were depressingly like my ex-schoolmates at the Cours Désir. I had two assistants, one of whom was to teach English, the other gymnastics; they were close on thirty and never went out in the evenings without their parents. Our group had its headquarters in a sort of community centre administered by a tall, dark, rather handsome girl of about twenty-five; she was called Suzanne Boigue and I got on well with her. But my new activities gave me very little satisfaction. On one evening a week for two hours I would talk about Balzac or Victor Hugo to young working girls; I would lend them books and we would have discussions; they were fairly numerous, and regular attenders; but they mainly came in order to meet one another and to keep in with the centre, which provided them with more material benefits. There was also a men’s section, and the young men and women were brought together fairly frequently at social gatherings and dances; dancing and flirtation attracted them much more than study circles. I thought this was quite natural. My students were working all day long in fashion workshops or tailoring establishments; the knowledge, of a rather spasmodic nature, which was doled out to them had no bearing on their own experience and was of no use to them at all in their work. I saw nothing wrong in making them read Les Misérables or Le Père Goriot; but Garric was much mistaken if he imagined that I was providing them with Culture; and it was distasteful to me to follow instructions which called upon me to talk to them about human dignity or the value of suffering: I would have felt I was having them on. As for friendship, here too Garric had misled me. The atmosphere at the centre was a fairly happy one; but between the young people of Belleville and those who, like myself, had come to teach them there was neither intimacy nor anything in common. We came together to pass the time, that was all. My disillusionment extended itself to Garric. He came to give a lecture and I spent a good part of the evening with him and Suzanne Boigue. I had passionately wanted to have a chance to speak to him one day, as one grown-up to another: our conversation seemed utterly pointless now. He chewed over the same old ideas: friendship was to take the place of hatred; instead of thinking from the point of view of parties, trade unions, and revolutions we had to orientate our thinking from the point of view of trade, family, and region; the great problem was to preserve the dignity of man. I listened to him with only half my attention. My admiration for him had died at the same time as my faith in his work. A little later, Suzanne Boigue asked me to take over a correspondence course for sick children in the sanatorium at Berck: I accepted. I found this work, because of its modest aim, to be more effective. Nevertheless I concluded that action is a deceptive solution: by pretending to devote oneself to the welfare of others one was providing oneself with too easy a way out. I had no idea that action could take forms far different from the kind I was condemning. Because if I felt that the Groups were something of a humbug, I was all the same a victim of that humbug. I thought I was in real contact with ‘the people’; they seemed to be friendly, deferential, and willing to collaborate with their privileged superiors. This fake experience only served to aggravate my ignorance.

  From a personal point of view, what I appreciated most in my work for the Groups was that it allowed me to spend an evening away from home. I had once more become very intimate with my sister; I would talk to her about love, friendship, happiness, and its snares; about joy and the beauties of the inner life; she read Francis Jammes and Alain Fournier. On the other hand, my relationship with my parents did not get any better. They would have been sincerely grieved if they had guessed how much their attitude affected me: but they didn’t. They considered my tastes and my opinions to be a challenge to common sense and to themselves, and they counter-attacked on all sides. Sometimes they called in the help of their friends; they would then all join in denouncing the charlatanism of modern artists, the intellectual snobbery of the public, the decadence of France, and the civilized world: during these broadsides, all eyes would be directed towards me. Monsieur Franchot, a brilliant talker, well up in literature and the author of two novels which he had had published at his own expense, asked me one evening in a sarcastic tone of voice what beauties I could possibly find in Max Jacob’s Cornet à dés. ‘Ah! ‘I snapped, ‘it cannot be penetrated at a casual reading.’ They all burst out laughing and I must admit that I had given them reason to: but in such cases I had no other alternative but to take refuge in either pedantry or coarseness. I tried hard not to let myself be drawn, but my parents wouldn’t allow me to sham dead. Convinced that I was being worked upon by baleful influences, they would question me suspiciously: ‘And what’s so extraordinary about your Mademoiselle Lambert?’ my father would demand. He held it against me that I had no family feeling and preferred the company of strangers to his own. My mother admitted in principle that one might like friends one had chosen oneself better than distant relatives, but she thought my feelings towards Zaza were excessive. On the day when I went without warning to weep my heart out at Zaza’s, I told my parents of the visit: ‘I called in to see Zaza.’ ‘But you saw her l
ast Sunday!’ my mother cried. ‘You’ve no need to go running to her all the time! ‘There was a lengthy scene. Another bone of contention was the books I read. My mother could not resign herself to the inevitable; she turned pale as she glanced through Jean-Richard Block’s La Nuit Kurde. She let everybody know what a trial I was to her – my father, Madame Mabille, my aunts, my cousin and her friends. I couldn’t bring myself to ignore the air of mistrust I felt all around me. How long the evenings seemed, and the Sundays! My mother said that a fire could not be made in my bedroom fireplace; so I put up a card table in the drawing-room, where there was an oil heater, but the door was always open. My mother would come in and out, coming and going and leaning over my shoulder all the time: ‘What’s that you’re doing? What’s that book you’re reading?.’ Endowed with considerable energy for which she could find no outlet, she believed in being merry and bright. Singing, laughing, joking, she would try to bring back the happy bursts of merriment which used to fill the house in the days when my father didn’t go out every evening and everyone was in a good humour. She wanted me to join in, and if I did not show any inclination to do so she would start to worry: ‘What are you thinking about? What’s the matter with you? What are you looking like that for? Of course, I’m only your mother, you won’t tell me anything . . .’ When at last she went to bed, I was too exhausted to take advantage of the peace and quiet. How I should have liked just to go to the cinema! I would stretch out on the carpet with a book, but my head would feel so heavy that often I would fall asleep on the floor. I would drag myself off to bed, sick at heart. I would wake next morning feeling listless and bored, and my days would seem to crawl with a mournful slowness. I had had my fill of books: I had read too many that were everlastingly repeating the same old thing; they didn’t bring me any fresh hope. I preferred killing time in the picture galleries in the rue de la Seine or the rue de la Boétie: painting took me out of myself. I used to try hard to get away from myself. Sometimes I would lose myself in the glowing embers of the setting sun; I would look at pale yellow chrysanthemums blazing against a pale green lawn; at the moment when the street lamps came on and changed the leafy trees of the Carrousel into a stage set at the Opéra, I would listen to the fountains playing. There was no lack of good will; it only needed a ray of sunlight to set my heart dancing. But it was autumn, it was drizzling; my joys were rare and soon past. Then boredom would return, and despair. The last year, too, had begun badly; I had been counting on mixing happily with the rest of the world, and I had been kept in my cage, then sent into exile. I had made shift by working hard, but in a negative way: the break with my past, with my environment; I had also made some great discoveries: Garric, Jacques’ friendship, books. I had felt a renewed confidence in the future, and soared high into the heavens, seeking a heroic destiny. What a let-down! Once more the future was now and all promises should have been carried out already, without any need to wait. I had to be of service: to what? To whom? I had read, thought, and learnt much; I told myself that I was ready; I was rich; but nobody wanted anything from me. Life had appeared to me so full; I had sought with fanatical ardour to use my whole self in replying to its endless calls: it was empty; not One voice had asked for me. I felt strong enough to lift the whole world on my shoulders: and I couldn’t find a single pebble that needed moving. My disillusionment was bitter: ‘I am so much more than what I can do!’ It was not enough to have renounced fame and happiness; I no longer even wished for my existence to be a fruitful one; I no longer wished for anything: I was learning the painful lesson of ‘the sterility of being’. I was working in order that I might have a profession; but a profession is a means: towards what end? Marriage? What would that mean? Whether it was bringing up children or correcting exercises, it was all the same old song; it was absolutely useless. Jacques was right to say: what’s the use? People resigned themselves to pointless existences: not me. Mademoiselle Lambert, just like my mother, spent her days in aimless activity; as long as they were doing something, it didn’t matter what they did. ‘But I want to be driven by a force so exacting that it doesn’t leave me time to bother about anything! ‘I didn’t find any such force, and in my impatience I universalized my particular case: ‘Nothing has any need of me, nothing has need of anybody, because nothing has any need to exist.’