I read this letter ten times at least, with a lump in my throat. Now I understood the change that had come over Zaza at the age of fifteen – her air of not always being with us, her romanticism, and also her strange precognition of what love must be: she had already felt the pulse of love in her body, and this was why she had laughed when someone had claimed that the love of Tristan and Iseult was ‘platonic’, why the thought of an ‘arranged’ marriage filled her with such horror. How little I had known of her! ‘I’d like to go to sleep and never wake up again,’ she had said, and I had taken no notice; yet I knew only too well into what depths of black despair the heart can be plunged. I couldn’t bear to think of Zaza neatly dressed in her hat and coat and gloves standing on the edge of a platform in the Métro and fixing a fascinated gaze on the gleaming rails.
I received another letter a few days later. The talk with Madame Mabille had gone off very badly. She had again forbidden Zaza ever to see her cousin. Zaza was too much of a Christian to dream of disobeying her mother: but never had this prohibition seemed more frightful than then, with only half a mile separating her from the boy she loved. The thing that tormented her more than anything was the thought that he was suffering because of her, when night and day she was thinking of no one but him. I was stunned by this unhappiness which surpassed anything I had ever known. It had been agreed that I would spend three weeks with Zaza that year in the Basque country, and I was impatient to be with her.
*
When I arrived at Meyrignac, I felt ‘calmer than I’ve ever been during the last eighteen months’. All the same, a comparison with Pradelle did not favour Jacques, and I was able to think of him without trying to excuse his lapses: ‘Ah! all that frivolity, that lack of seriousness, all that talk about bars, bridge, and money! There are fine things in him, finer than in anyone else I know: but there is also something pitiful, a failure . . .’ I felt detached from him, and just sufficiently attached to Pradelle for his existence to irradiate my days without their being darkened by his absence. We wrote often to one another. I also wrote frequently to Riesmann, Blanchette Weiss, Mademoiselle Lambert, Suzanne Boigue and Zaza. I had set up a table in the attic under a skylight, and in the evenings, by the light of a small oil lamp I would cover page after page. Thanks to the letters I was receiving – particularly Pradelle’s – I no longer felt lonely. I also had long conversations with my sister; she had just passed her school-leaving certificate in philosophy, and all that year we had been very close to one another. I told her about everything, excepting my attitude to religion. She looked up to Jacques as much as I did, and she had adopted my myths. Detesting, as I had done, the majority of her schoolfellows and the Cours Désir, as well as the prejudices current in our environment, she had gleefully taken up arms against ‘the Barbarians’. Perhaps because she had not had such a happy childhood as mine, she rebelled much more boldly than I had done against the conventions that lay so heavily upon our spirits. ‘It’s silly of me, I know,’ she told me one evening with an embarrassed look, ‘but I don’t like Mama to open the letters I receive: I no longer have any pleasure in reading them.’ I told her that this bothered me, too. We took our courage in our hands: after all, we were seventeen and nineteen; we went and begged our mother not to censor our correspondence. She replied that it was her duty to watch over the safety of our souls, but in the end she gave in. It was an important victory.
The tensions between my parents and myself had on the whole slackened a little. I spent my days in peace and quiet. I was studying philosophy and thinking of writing something. I hesitated a long time before deciding what to do. Pradelle had convinced me that my first task was to search for the truth: would not the writing of books be an escape from that task? And wasn’t there a fundamental contradiction in my enterprise? I wanted to write about the vanity of things; but the writer is a traitor to his despair as soon as he writes a book: perhaps it would be better to imitate the silence of Monsieur Teste. I was afraid, also, if I started to write, that I would be driven to wish for success, fame, things I despised. These abstract scruples did not carry enough weight to make me stop writing. I consulted many of my friends by letter, and, as I had hoped, they encouraged me to begin. I started a vast novel; the heroine was to live through all my own experiences: she was to be awakened to the meaning of ‘the true life’, enter into conflict with her environment, then be disillusioned by everything: action, love, knowledge. I never knew what the ending was because I hadn’t the time and I gave up halfway through.
The letters I was then receiving from Zaza didn’t strike the same note as those of July. She had noticed, she told me, that in the course of the last two years her intellectual development had been considerable; she had matured, she had changed. During her brief meeting with André she had got the impression that he had not made any progress; he was still very young, and a little frustrated. She was beginning to wonder if her love wasn’t just ‘an obstinate pursuit of dreams which one doesn’t wish to see vanish away, a lack of sincerity and courage’. She had surrendered, probably too completely, to the influence of Le Grand Meaulnes. ‘I found in it a love, a cult of the dream which has no basis in reality and which perhaps put me well out of my course, far away from my real self.’ She certainly did not regret her love for her cousin: ‘This emotion, experienced at the age of fifteen, was my real awakening to life; from the day I fell in love, I understood at once an infinity of things; nothing, or almost nothing, seemed to be ridiculous any more.’ But she had to admit that after the parting in January 1926 she had artificially prolonged this past existence ‘by will-power and the power of the imagination’. In any case, André had to go and spend a year in the Argentine: it would be time to make a decision when he returned. For the moment, she was sick and tired of thinking about it all; she was spending a very lively and sociable holiday at Laubardon, and at first she had found it terribly exhausting; but now, she wrote, ‘all I want to do is amuse myself’.
This sentence astonished me and in my reply I reproached her gently for taking this attitude. Zaza put up a spirited defence: she knew that a feverish search for amusement doesn’t solve anything:
Not long ago [she wrote] a great excursion to the Basque country was organized among our friends; I had such a longing for solitude that I cut my foot open with an axe in order to get out of the expedition. I had a week lying on a chaise-longue and a great deal of commiseration, but at least I had a little time to myself, and the right not to talk and not to amuse myself.
I was staggered. I knew only too well how desperately one can long for solitude and ‘the right not to talk’. But I should never have had the courage to cut my foot. No, Zaza was neither half-hearted nor resigned to her fate: there was a hidden violence in her which frightened me. Not one of her words was to be taken lightly, for she was much more sparing of them than I was. If I hadn’t made her tell me, she wouldn’t even have mentioned this incident to me.
I didn’t want to keep anything more from her: I confessed to her that I had lost my faith; she had suspected it, she replied; she, too, during the past year, had gone through a religious crisis.
When I compared faith with the usages of my childhood, and the Catholic dogma with all my new ideas, there was such a disproportion, such a disparity between them that I felt I was standing on the edge of an abyss. Claudel was a great help to me and I can never tell you how much I owe to him. And I still believe in the way I did when I was six years old, with my heart far more than with my head, and by renouncing absolutely all rational ideas. Theological discussions nearly always seem to me to be absurd and grotesque. Above all, I believe that God cannot be apprehended, for He is hidden away from us, and that the faith He gives us is a supernatural gift, a grace accorded only by Him. That is why I cannot but pity with all my heart those who are deprived of this grace, and I believe that if they are sincere and athirst for the truth that truth will one day be revealed to them. . . .Moreover [she went on] faith does not bring eternal relief from s
piritual hunger and thirst; it is as difficult to find peace of mind when one believes as when one does not believe; but one has the hope that one will know peace in another life. So she not only accepted me as I was, but she took great care not to appear in the least way superior; if she could see a ray of hope in Heaven, that didn’t prevent her, here on earth, from groping blindly in the same darkness as myself, and we still went on side by side towards the truth.
On the 10th of September I left in high spirits for Laubardon. I boarded the train at Uzerche, early in the morning, and got out at Bordeaux, for I had written to Zaza that ‘I couldn’t ride through the Mauriac country without stopping’. For the first time in my life I found myself walking along in a strange town. There was a great river, misty quaysides, and the plane trees already smelt of autumn. In the narrow streets, there was a constant play of light and shade; and then the broad avenues, stretching out towards the Esplanades. I felt sleepy and enchanted as I went floating, light as a feather, through the autumn city. In the public park, among the clumps of scarlet cannas, I dreamed dreams of an adolescent disquiet. I had been given instructions: I was to have a cup of hot chocolate in a cake shop in the allée de Tourny. I had my lunch in a restaurant called Le Petit Marguery near the station: never before had I been in a restaurant without my parents. Then a train took me along a dead-straight line bordered with endless pine forests. I loved trains. Leaning out of the window, I surrendered my face to the wind and the flying cinders and swore never to be like travellers who always huddled together in the fug of their dusty compartments.
It was evening when I arrived. The park at Laubardon was much less beautiful than the one at Meyrignac but I thought the house was pleasant, with its tiled roof and its walls covered with Virginia creeper. Zaza took me to the bedroom which I was to share with her and Geneviève de Bréville, a blooming, well-behaved girl who according to Madame Mabille could do no wrong. I remained alone in the room for a moment to unpack and freshen up. Sounds of crockery and children’s voices came from downstairs. I wandered aimlessly round the room. I saw an exercise book bound in shiny black cloth lying on a side table and I opened it out of idle curiosity; it was Geneviève’s, and I read: ‘Simone de Beauvoir is arriving tomorrow. I must admit that the thought fills me with dismay, because frankly I do not like her.’ I was taken aback; this was a new and disagreeable experience; I had never dreamt that anyone could feel an active dislike for me; this enemy face which Geneviève saw was mine, and it rather frightened me. I didn’t have much time to think about it, for there came a knock at the door: it was Madame Mabille. ‘I’d like to have a word with you, Simone dear,’ she began; I was surprised by the friendly way she spoke to me, for of late she had hardly looked upon me with a kindly eye. With an air of embarrassment, she fingered the cameo on the velvet ribbon round her neck, and asked me if Zaza ‘had told me how things stood’. I said yes. She didn’t seem to know that her daughter’s feelings were changing, and began to explain to me why she was so much against them. André’s parents were against the marriage, and besides they belonged to a very rich, dissipated and vulgar set which would not do at all for Zaza: it was absolutely essential for her to forget her cousin, and Madame Mabille was counting on me to help her to do so. I detested being involved in a conspiracy with her; yet her appeal touched me because it must have cost her a great deal to beg for my collaboration. I assured her, with some embarrassment, that I would do my best.
Zaza had put me in the picture; at the beginning of my stay, there were never-ending picnics, tea-parties, and dances; the house was thrown open to everyone; droves of cousins and friends came to lunch and tea, to play tennis or bridge. Or else we would go to dances at the big houses in the neighbourhood, driven in the Citroën by Madame Mabille, Lili, or Zaza. There were frequent festivities in the nearby country town; I attended pelota games, I went to watch young Basque farmhands, white-faced with fear, planting rosettes in the sweating hide of skinny cows: sometimes a steel-tipped horn would rip open their lovely tight white trousers, and everyone would laugh. After dinner, someone would sit down at the piano and the whole family would join in the singing; there were parlour games, too: charades and versifying to set rhymes (bout rimés). The mornings were taken up with domestic chores. Flowers were picked and arranged in vases, and everybody took a hand with the cooking. Lili, Zaza, and Bébelle would make cakes, buns, shortbread, and brioches for afternoon tea; they helped their mother and grandmother to bottle tons of fruit and vegetables; there were always peas to be shelled, French beans to be strung, nuts to be cracked and plums to be stoned. The provision of food-stocks became a harassing and lengthy business.
I hardly ever saw Zaza, and I felt rather bored. And although I was quite insensitive to other people’s feelings about me, I realized that the Mabilles and their friends didn’t think much of me. Badly dressed, and caring little about my personal appearance, I couldn’t bring myself to curtsy to the old ladies, I couldn’t control the violence of my gestures or the pitch of my laughter. I hadn’t a penny and was making plans for a career: that was shocking enough; but to make matters worse I was to be a teacher, in a lycée, too! For generations these people had been fighting a losing battle against undenominational education: in their eyes I was heading for an ignominious future. I held back my tongue as much as possible, and kept a check on myself, but in vain: every word I said, and even my silences, caused consternation. Madame Mabille forced herself to be friendly. Monsieur Mabille and old Madame Larivière politely ignored me. The eldest son had just entered a training college for the priesthood; Bébelle aspired to a religious vocation: they took no notice of me. But the youngest children found me vaguely odd, they had a vague grudge against me. Lili made no secret of her disapproval. This paragon of all the virtues, perfectly adapted to her environment, had an answer to everything: I only had to ask a question, and she was up in arms. When I was about fifteen or sixteen, during a dinner at the Mabilles’ I had expressed my astonishment that, although all people are made in the same way, the taste of tomato or herring is not the same to everybody: Lili had made fun of me. I did not make such naïve remarks now, but my reticence was enough to irritate her. One afternoon in the garden we were discussing women’s suffrage; it seemed logical to everyone that Madame Mabille should be allowed the vote rather than some drunken workman. But Lili claimed to know on the best authority that among the working classes women were bigger ‘reds’ than the men; if they were allowed to vote, the cause of the righteous would suffer. This argument was considered decisive. I didn’t say anything, but among the chorus of approving voices, my own silence was highly subversive.
Almost every day the Mabilles had a visit from their cousin the du Moulins de Labarthète. The daughter, Didine, was very friendly with Lili. There were three sons: Henri, a financial examiner with the heavy features of an ambitious rake; Edgar was an officer in a cavalry regiment; and Xavier, a twenty-year-old seminarist: he was the only one I thought at all interesting; he had delicate features, pensive eyes, and caused his family some anxiety on account of what they called his ‘aboulia’ – a lack of will-power. On Sunday mornings, stretched out in an armchair, he would take so long to make up his mind whether or not to go to Mass that he quite often missed it altogether. He read and meditated; he looked quite out of place in this environment. I asked Zaza why she hadn’t struck up a friendship with him. She appeared to be very disconcerted: ‘It would never have entered my head. That sort of thing’s not possible in our house. The family wouldn’t understand.’ But she quite liked him. In the course of a conversation Lili and Didine were asking one another, with rather overworked stupefaction, how sensible people could possibly doubt the existence of God. Lili talked about the clock and the Great Clockmaker, all the time looking me straight in the eye; against my better judgement I decided to mention Kant. Xavier supported my views: ‘You see what happens when you haven’t studied philosophy!’ he said. ‘That sort of argument wouldn’t satisfy you if you had, Lili!’ Lili a
nd Didine beat a hasty retreat.
The most hotly debated subject at Laubardon was the conflict which just then was setting L’Action Française and the Church at each other’s throats. The Mabilles adamantly declared that all good Catholics should submit to the wishes of the Pope; the Labarthètes – all except Xavier, who would not commit himself – were for Maurras and Daudet. As I listened to their voices raised in passionate argument I felt left out of things. It made me feel very unhappy. In my diary I had claimed that there were many people who ‘simply did not exist’; in fact, everyone I met was of some account. I quote here from my journal: ‘Had a fit of despair while talking to Xavier du Moulin. He understood only too well the gulf that lies between them and myself, and the sophistry they employ to trap me.’ I cannot remember now the reason for this outburst which obviously remained a secret between us both; but the meaning of it is clear: I couldn’t light-heartedly accept the fact that I was different from the others, who treated me more or less openly as a black sheep. Zaza was fond of her family; I had been fond of them too, and the past still weighed heavily upon my conscience. Besides, my childhood had been too happy to be able to whip up hatred or even animosity in my heart: I just didn’t know how to defend myself against other people’s ill-will.
Zaza’s friendship would have given me courage if we had been able to talk, but even at night there was a third person with us; as soon as I was in bed I tried to go to sleep. When Geneviève thought I had dropped off, she would enter into long discussions with Zaza. She kept wondering if she were really treating her mother kindly enough; she sometimes made her feel impatient: was that awfully wrong of her? Zaza would give the briefest possible replies. But however deaf an ear she turned to these girlish effusions, they compromised her, and she became a stranger to me; I told myself, with a lump in my throat, that despite everything she believed in God, in her mother’s authority and in her duties; once more I began to feel very much alone.