Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  I wanted to talk about these things; I wanted to talk about all sorts of things with people who, unlike Jacques, wouldn’t let their sentences trail away at the ends. I was eager to find new acquaintances. At the Institut Sainte-Marie, I sought the confidences of my fellow-students: but quite definitely there was not one of them who interested me. At Belleville, I began to take much greater pleasure in talking to Suzanne Boigue. She had chestnut-coloured hair, very severely cut, a broad forehead, very light blue eyes, and she had a certain dashing air. She earned her living as director of the centre I have been talking about; her greater age, her independence, her responsibilities, and her authority all contributed to her importance. She was a believer, but she gave me to understand that the relations she had with her Maker were not altogether satisfactory. We had almost the same taste in books. And I was gratified to observe that she, too, was not taken in by the Groups, nor by the idea of ‘action’ in general. She confessed to me that she, too, wanted to live her life to the full; she, too, despaired of ever finding more than a drug in the activities of daily life. As we were both hale and hearty young women, our disillusioned conversations, far from depressing, re-invigorated me. On leaving her, I would stride purposefully through the Buttes Chaumont park. Just as I did, she wanted to find her rightful place in the world. She went to Berck to meet a sort of female saint who had devoted her life to ‘the bedridden ‘. On her return, she declared forcefully: ‘I’m not cut out to be a saint.’ At the beginning of the spring, she was smitten with a young and pious fellow-worker in the Groups; they decided to get married. Circumstances would compel them to wait two years; but, as Suzanne Boigue informed me, when you’re in love, time doesn’t count. She was radiant. I was stupefied when, a few weeks later, she announced that she had ‘broken it off ‘with her fiancé. The physical attraction between them was too strong, and the young man was scared by the intensity of their kisses. He had asked Suzanne not to see him any more, in order to preserve their chastity; they would keep themselves for one another, but at a distance. She had preferred to call the whole thing off. I thought it was all very queer, and I was never able to discover the ins and outs of the affair. But I was touched by Suzanne’s disappointment, and by her efforts to overcome it.

  The students I tried to get friendly with at the Sorbonne were all, I thought, both male and female, without any interest: they kept rushing about in noisy groups, laughing their heads off; they weren’t interested in anything and were quite complacent about their indifference. But in the history and philosophy lectures I noticed a young man, much older than myself, who had very serious blue eyes; dressed entirely in black, and wearing a black felt hat, he never spoke to anyone excepting a little thin-faced dark girl; he was always smiling at her. One day in the library he was translating some of Engel’s letters when some students at his table began to kick up a disturbance; his eyes flashed, and in a curt voice he asked for silence in such an authoritative manner that he was instantly obeyed. ‘He must be somebody!’ I told myself, highly impressed. I managed to get into conversation with him, and after that, whenever the little dark girl wasn’t there, we would talk together. One day I walked a little way with him along the boulevard Saint-Michel: that evening, I asked my sister if I had acted improperly; she reassured me that I hadn’t and I did it again. Pierre Nodier was a member of the ‘Philosophies’ group to which belonged Mohrange, Friedmann, Henri Lefebvre, and Politzer; thanks to a generous subsidy from the father of one of the group, a rich banker, they had started a magazine; but their patron, infuriated by an article in it against the war in Morocco, had withdrawn his support. A little later the magazine was revived under a new name, L’Esprit. Pierre Nodier brought me two numbers: it was my first contact with left-wing intellectuals. But I didn’t feel at all out of my depth: I could recognize the idiom to which the literature of the period had accustomed me; these young men, too, were talking about soul, salvation, joy, eternity; they declared that all thought should be ‘concrete’ and ‘carnal’, but they said so in abstract terms. According to them, philosophy could not be distinguished from revolution, in which lay humanity’s final hope; but in those days Politzer believed that ‘in the interests of truth, historical materialism is not inseparable from revolution’: he believed in the value of the idealist Idea, on condition that it was apprehended in its concrete totality, with no intermediary stage of abstraction. They were interested above all in the manifestations of the Spirit; economy and politics to their mind could only play subordinate roles. They condemned capitalism because it had destroyed ‘the sense of being’ in man; they considered that through the uprisings of the peoples of Asia and Africa ‘History is coming to be the servant of Wisdom’. Friedman pulled to pieces the ideology of the young bourgeois intellectuals; their disquiet and lack of responsibility were puerile: but he wanted a new mystique to take its place. It was a question of giving back to men ‘the eternal part of themselves’. They didn’t look upon life from the point of view of necessity or labour; they were turning it into a romantic dream. ‘There is life, and all our love goes out to it,’ wrote Friedmann. Politzer defined it in a phrase which caused a sensation: ‘The triumphant, brutal life of the sailor who stubs out his cigarette on the Gobelins tapestries in the Kremlin terrifies you, and you don’t want to hear about it: and yet that is life!’ They weren’t far removed from the surrealists, many of whom were in fact being converted to the Revolution. It attracted me, too, but only from a negative point of view; I began to hope that society would be turned topsy-turvy, but I didn’t understand the workings of society any better than before. And I remained indifferent to the great events which were taking place in the world. All the newspapers – even Candide – were devoting columns and columns to the revolution that had broken out in China: it didn’t make me bat an eyelid.

  Yet my conversations with Nodier were beginning to broaden my mind. I used to ask him lots of questions. He was very willing to answer them and I found these conversations so profitable that I asked myself sadly: why wasn’t I fated to love a man like this, who would share my liking for study and the exchange of ideas, and whom I could love with my head as well as my heart? I was very sorry when, towards the end of May, he said good-bye to me outside the Sorbonne. He was leaving for Australia where he had found a post; the little dark girl was to follow him out there. Shaking my hand for the last time, he said, in a voice charged with meaning: ‘I wish you every good thing in life.’

  At the beginning of March, I passed my examinations in the history of philosophy with flying colours, and on that occasion made the acquaintance of a group of left-wing students. They asked me to sign a petition: Paul Boncour had tabled an army bill decreeing the mobilization of women, and the magazine Europe was organizing a protest campaign. I was in a quandary. I was all for the equality of the sexes; and in case of danger, wasn’t it one’s duty to do all one could to defend one’s country? When I had read the text of the bill, I said: ‘But this is very patriotic!’ The large young man who was sending round the petition sniggered: ‘Who wants patriotism?’ This was a question I had never asked myself: I didn’t know how to reply. They explained to me that the new law, if it came into force, would result in a general mobilization of freedom of conscience, and that decided me: after all, freedom of thought was sacred; and then all the others were signing: so I signed too. I didn’t have to be asked twice when it was a question of petitioning for the reprieve of Sacco and Vanzetti; their names didn’t mean anything to me, but I was assured that they were innocent: besides, I disapproved of the death penalty.

  My political activities didn’t go any further and my ideas remained hazy. One thing I knew: I detested the extreme right. One afternoon, a handful of brawling young men had entered the Sorbonne library shouting: ‘Down with wops and Jews!’ They were carrying stout canes, and had turned out a few of the darker-skinned students. This triumph of violence and stupidity had shocked and angered me. I detested conformity, all forms of obscurantism, and wanted me
n to be governed by reason; therefore I was interested in the left. But I disliked all labels: I hated people to be catalogued. Several of my fellow-students were socialists; I thought the word had an evil ring; a socialist couldn’t possibly be a tormented soul; he was pursuing ends that were both secular and limited: such moderation irritated me from the outset. The Communists’ extremism attracted me much more; but I suspected them of being just as dogmatic and stereotyped as the Jesuits. Nevertheless, about May I struck up a friendship with an ex-student of Alain who was a communist: in those days, such an unlikely conjunction caused no surprise. He praised Alain’s lectures, outlined his ideas to me, lent me his books. He also introduced me to Romain Rolland and I became a firm believer in pacifism. Mallet was interested in many other things: in painting, the cinema, the theatre, even the music hall. There was a fire in his eyes and in his voice, and I enjoyed talking to him. I noted in my diary, with some astonishment: ‘I’ve found out that it’s possible to be intelligent and take an interest in politics.’ In fact, he didn’t know much about the theory of politics and didn’t teach me anything. I continued to rate social questions lower than problems of metaphysics and morals: what was the use of bothering about suffering humanity if there was no point in its existence?

  This obstinate refusal prevented me from deriving any benefit from my meeting with Simone Weil. While preparing to enter the Normale – the training-college in Paris for professoriates – she was taking the same examinations as myself at the Sorbonne. She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up; she would stroll round the courtyard of the Sorbonne attended by a group of Alain’s old pupils; she always carried in the one pocket of her dark-grey overall a copy of Libres Propos and in the other a copy of Humanité. A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world today: the Revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry,’ she snapped. Our relationship did not go any further. I realized that she had classified me as ‘a high-minded little bourgeois’, and this annoyed me, just as I used to be annoyed whenever Mademoiselle Litt attributed certain tastes I had to the fact that I was only a child; I believed that I had freed myself from the bonds of my class: I didn’t want to be anyone else but myself.

  I don’t really know why I had anything to do with Blanchette Weiss. She was short and stout, and in a face bursting with self-sufficiency her two malevolent little eyes were always darting here and there; but I was fascinated by her gift of the gab and her command of philosophical jargon; she rattled off student gossip and metaphysical speculations with a volubility which I mistook for intelligence. As finite modes are unable to communicate without the intervention of the infinite, therefore all human love, she explained, is sin; she considered herself entitled to assume the absolute authority of the infinite in her disparagement of all the people she knew. I was amused to learn from her something about the ambitions, the little foibles, the weaknesses and vices of our professors, and our fellow-students. ‘I have the soul of a Proustian caretaker,’ she declared complacently. Rather inconsistently, she charged me with clinging to my nostalgia for the absolute: ‘Now me, I create my own system of values,’ she stated. What could they be? On this point she was somewhat vague. She attached the greatest importance to her inner life: I agreed with her there; she disdained wealth; so did I; but she explained to me that in order to be able to keep one’s mind off money it was necessary to have enough for one’s needs, and that she would probably consent to a marriage of convenience: I was disgusted. I also found that she suffered from a curious kind of narcissism; all curled and bedizened she thought she looked the living image of Clara d’Ellébeuse. Despite all this, I had such a longing to have someone I could ‘exchange ideas’ with that I used to see her fairly frequently.

  But Zaza was still my only real friend. Unfortunately her mother was beginning to look upon me with a rather jaundiced eye. It was under my influence that Zaza preferred studying to domestic life, and I was lending her scandalous books. Madame Mabille detested Mauriac: she took his portrayals of bourgeois homes as a personal insult. She didn’t trust Claudel, whom Zaza liked because he helped her to reconcile heaven and earth. ‘You would be better occupied reading the Fathers of the Church,’ Madame Mabille bad-temperedly remarked. She came several times to our house to complain to my mother about me and made it quite clear to Zaza that she wished we would see less of each other. But Zaza stood firm; our friendship was one of those things she would not give up. We used to see each other very often. We used to study Greek together; we would go to concerts and art exhibitions. Sometimes she would play the piano for me – Chopin and Debussy. We often went for long walks. One afternoon, having screwed an unwilling permission out of my mother, Zaza took me to a hairdresser and I had my hair cut off. I didn’t gain much by this, because my mother was furious that I had forced her hand, and refused to allow me the luxury of having my hair set. From Laubardon where she was spending the Easter holidays, Zaza sent me a letter which moved me to the depths of my being: ‘Since the age of fifteen I had lived in great moral solitude; it hurt me to feel so lost and isolated: you have broken that solitude.’ This didn’t prevent her from being plunged just then ‘in the depths of despair’. She wrote: ‘Never have I felt so overwhelmed by myself.’ She added: ‘I’ve lived too long with my eyes turned towards the past and unable to tear myself away from the wonder of my childhood memories.’ Again I took this for granted. I thought it was natural that one should be unwilling to grow up.

  It was a great relief to me not to see Jacques any more; I was no longer torturing myself over him. The first rays of spring sunshine were taking the nip of winter out of my blood. While I continued to work hard, I decided that I would have a little amusement. I went fairly often to the cinema in the afternoons; I usually went to the Studio des Ursulines, the Vieux-Colombier, and the Ciné-Latin; this was a little hall with wooden seats situated behind the Panthéon; a piano accompanied the films; the seats weren’t dear and they showed revivals of the best films of the last few years; it was there that I saw The Gold Rush and many other Chaplin films. On certain evenings my mother would accompany my sister and me to the theatre. I saw Jouvet in Le Grand Large, in which Michel Simon was making his first appearance, Dullin in La Comédie du bonheur and Madame Pitoëff as St Joan. I used to look forward to these outings for days; they irradiated my week. I can tell how much importance I attached to them when I think of how hardly the austerity of the first two terms weighed upon me. Now, during the daytime, I would visit all the exhibitions, and go for long prowls round the galleries of the Louvre. I would wander all over Paris, my eyes no longer brimming with tears, but looking at everything. I loved those evenings when, after dinner, I would set out alone on the Métro and travel right to the other side of Paris, near Les Buttes Chaumont, which smelt of damp and greenery. Often I would walk back home. In the boulevard de la Chapelle, under the steel girders of the overhead railway, women would be waiting for customers; men would come staggering out of brightly lit bistros; the fronts of cinemas would be ablaze with posters. I could feel life all round me, an enormous, ever-present confusion. I would stride along, feeling its thick breath blow in my face. And I would say to myself that after all life is worth living.

  I began to have ambitions again. Despite my friendships and my uncertain love-affair, I still felt very much alone; there was no one who knew me or loved me completely, for myself alone; no one was, nor, I thought could anyone ever be ‘someone definite and complete’
to me. Rather than go on suffering because of this, I again took refuge in pride. My isolation was a sign of my superiority; I no longer had any doubts about that: I was somebody, and I would do great things. I thought up themes for novels. One morning in the library at the Sorbonne, instead of doing Greek translation, I began ‘my book’. I had to study for the exams in June; I hadn’t enough time; but I calculated that next year I would have more free time and I made a promise to myself that I would then without more ado write my very own book ‘It is to be a work,’ I told myself in my diary, ‘which will tell all.’ I often insisted in my journal on this necessity to ‘tell all’, which makes a curious contrast with the paucity of my experience. Philosophy had increased my tendency to seize the essence, the root, the totality of things; and as I was living in a world of abstractions I believed that I had discovered, once and for all, the truth of life. From time to time I would suspect that there was more to it than I had so far discovered: but only very occasionally. My superiority over other people came precisely from the fact that I didn’t let anything get past me: the peculiar value of my work would be the result of this exceptional privilege.

  Sometimes I would have scruples; I would recall that all is vanity: but I would disregard them. In imaginary dialogues with Jacques I would challenge his ‘What’s the use?’ I had only one life to live, I wanted it to be a success, nobody would stop me, not even he. I did not abandon my view of the absolute; but as there didn’t seem to be much to be gained in that quarter I decided not to bother about it. I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: ‘I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.’ As I was going to continue to exist, once this despair had been established I had to live as best I could here below, that is, do what I liked.