Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  Fortunately Zaza managed to arrange a private conversation with me. Had she suspected what I had been feeling? She told me discreetly but unmistakably that her liking for Geneviève was of the lowest order; the latter imagined that she was her intimate friend, but in fact Zaza could not reciprocate her feelings. I felt relieved. Then Geneviève left and as the holidays were drawing to a close there was much less social activity. I had Zaza to myself. One night, when everybody was asleep, we put warm shawls on over our long calico night-dresses and crept down into the garden; we sat under a pine tree and talked for a long time. Zaza was quite certain now that she no longer loved her cousin; she recounted their idyll for me in its most intimate details. It was then that I learnt what her childhood had been, and of her great feeling of having been utterly deserted, which I had had no inkling of. ‘I loved you,’ I told her; she was taken aback; she admitted that in the hierarchy of her friendships I had occupied only a minor place, though none of her childhood friends had in fact meant very much to her. In the night sky, a brown old moon was slowly foundering under the horizon. We talked of days gone by, and were saddened by the ignorance of our childhood hearts; she was grief-stricken at the thought that she had ignored me and caused me pain; for my own part, I found it bitter to have to tell her these things only now, when they had ceased to have any real meaning: I no longer preferred her above all others. Yet there was a certain relief in being able to exchange these regrets with one another. We had never been so close, and the last part of my stay at Laubardon was very happy. We would sit and talk in the library, surrounded by the collected works of Louis Veuillot and Montalembert and bound numbers of the Revue des Deux Mondes; we talked about Francis Jammes, Laforgue, Radiguet, and about ourselves. I read Zaza a few pages of my novel: she was nonplussed by the dialogues, but she urged me to go on with it. She told me that she, too, would like to write something later on, and I encouraged her to do so. When the day came for my departure, she went in the train with me as far as Mont-de-Marsan. We sat on a bench eating little cold dry omelettes and took leave of one another without sadness, for we were soon to meet again in Paris.

  *

  I was at the age when one believes in the value of epistolary outpourings. From Laubardon I wrote to my mother asking her to trust me, and assuring her that later I would really be ‘somebody’. She sent me a very nice reply. But on my return to our apartment in the rue de Rennes, my heart failed me for a moment: there were still another three years to be spent within these four walls! However, the last term had left me with some pleasant memories and I encouraged myself to take an optimistic point of view. Mademoiselle Lambert wanted me to take over part of her school-leaving certificate class at Sainte-Marie; she was to hand over the lessons in psychology to me; I had jumped at the chance to earn a little money and to get some teaching practice. I was planning to complete my degree in philosophy in April, and my degree in literature in June; these would not require much work, and I would have time to write and read and investigate more profoundly the great problems of existence. I drew up a vast plan of studies with timetables in which every minute in my day was accounted for; I took a childlike pleasure in getting the future all cut and dried and I almost recaptured the feeling of busy good intentions and simmering activity which I had known in my schooldays with the arrival of October. I hurried to see my friends at the Sorbonne. I raced across Paris, from Neuilly to the rue de Rennes, from the rue de Rennes to Belleville, casting appreciative glances at the little piles of dead leaves at the edge of the pavements.

  I went to see Jacques, and mapped out my system to him; one had to consecrate one’s life to a search for its meaning: meanwhile, one must never take anything for granted but base one’s standards on acts of love and free-will that were to be indefinitely repeated. He heard me out with good grace but shook his head: ‘No one could ever live like that.’ When I persisted, he smiled: ‘Don’t you think that’s all a bit too abstract for young people like us?’ he asked me. He was hoping that his own existence would for some time to come still be a great game of chance. During the days that followed, I would think he was right, and then that he was wrong. I would decide that I loved him, then that I decidedly did not love him. I felt put out. I let two months go by without seeing him.

  In the Bois de Boulogne, I walked round the lake with Jean Pradelle; we watched the autumn, the swans, the people in rowing-boats; we took up our discussions where we had left off: with a diminished ardour. I thought a lot of Pradelle, but oh, how untormented he was! His tranquillity offended me. Riesmann made me read his novel, which I thought puerile, but when I read him a few pages of mine he found it insufferably boring. Jean Mallet still talked to me about Alain, Suzanne Boigue about the state of her affections, Mademoiselle Lambert about God. My sister had recently entered a school of applied arts where she was very unhappy. Zaza was cultivating the virtue of obedience and spent hours in the large shops picking over samples of material with her mother. Boredom once more descended upon me, and solitude. When I had told myself that day in the Luxembourg Gardens that it was to be my lot, there was so much gaiety in the air that I didn’t feel too bad about it; but now, seen through the fogs of autumn, the future frightened me. I should never love anyone, no one is ever big enough for one’s love; I should not know the joys of a family hearth; I should spend my days in a small provincial room which I would leave only in order to give my lessons: what a barren existence! I no longer even hoped to have a true understanding with another human being. Not one of my friends would take me as I was, without reserves; Zaza prayed for me, Jacques thought I was too abstract, Pradelle deplored my rank obstinacy and the way I kept working myself up. What alarmed them was the most firmly rooted of my convictions: my refusal to accept that mediocre existence which they, in one way or another, said yes to, and my frantic efforts to escape from it. I tried to content myself. ‘I’m not like other people; I’ll have to try to accept that,’ I would keep telling myself; but I couldn’t content myself. Cut off from everybody, I no longer had any link with the world: it was becoming a spectacle that did not concern me personally. One after the other I had renounced fame, happiness, and the wish to serve others; now I was not even interested in living. At moments I completely lost all sense of reality: the streets, the cars, the passers-by were only so many shadows among which my own anonymous presence floated aimlessly. I would sometimes tell myself, fearfully but proudly, that I was mad: it’s a very short step between utter loneliness and madness. There were plenty of reasons why I should have lost my wits. For two years I had been struggling to get out of a trap but without finding a way; I kept bumping into invisible obstacles: in the end it must affect my brain. My hands remained empty; I tried to offset my disillusionment by repeating to myself both that one day I would possess everything and that it would not be worth anything anyway: I got all muddled by these contradictions. Above all, I was bursting with health and youthful vigour, and I was confined to home and library: all that vitality which I was unable to make use of unleashed its futile whirlwinds in my head and heart.

  The earth was nothing to me any more; I was ‘outside life’. I didn’t even want to write any more; the horrible vanity of all things had me by the throat again; but I had had enough of suffering and weeping in the past year; I built a new hope for myself. In moments of perfect detachment when the universe seems to be reduced to a set of illusions and in which my own ego was abolished, something took their place: something indestructible, eternal; it seemed to me that my indifference was a negative manifestation of a presence which it was perhaps not impossible to get in touch with. I was not thinking of the Christian God: I was more and more disgusted by Roman Catholicism. But all the same I was influenced by Mademoiselle Lambert, by Pradelle who affirmed that it was possible to attain to true ‘being’: I read Plotinus and books about mystical psychology; I began to wonder if, beyond the limitations of reason, certain experiences were not susceptible to revealing the absolute to me; I was seeking fulfilmen
t in this desert of abstraction in which I was reducing the inhospitable world to sand. Why shouldn’t a mystical theology be possible? ‘I want to touch God or become God,’ I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums.

  Yet I was fed-up with myself. I almost gave up keeping my diary. I was busy. At Neuilly, as at Belleville, I got on well with my pupils, and was amused by the rest of the teaching staff. At the Sorbonne, no one attended the lectures in sociology and psychology, so insipid did they seem to us. I only went to the demonstrations which, with the help of a few madmen, Georges Dumas gave every Sunday and Tuesday morning at Sainte-Anne. Maniacs, paranoiacs, schizophrenics, and people suffering from dementia praecox paraded on a platform; he never told us anything about their case-histories or their mental conflicts; he hardly even seemed to be aware that things were going on in their minds. He contented himself with demonstrating that their anomalies were based on the patterns which he had outlined in his Treatise. He was clever at choosing the questions which would provoke the effects he required, and the malice in his waxen old face was so infectious that we had difficulty in repressing our laughter: it was almost as if madness were an enormous lark. Even seen from this angle, it fascinated me. Lunatics, imbeciles; hallucinated, demented, moonstruck, hilarious, tormented, possessed creatures – these people were different.

  I also went to hear Jean Baruzi, the author of a thesis that was very well thought of on St John of the Cross; he treated all the major problems by fits and starts. Black-haired, dark-skinned, his eyes flashed sombre fires in the dark night of the soul. Every week his trembling voice would be drawn out of abysmal silences, promising us harrowing illuminations in the weeks to come. The students at the Normale did not go to his lectures, which were attended by certain outsiders, among whom were René Daumal and Roger Vailland. They were writers in avant-garde magazines; the former was said to be a deep thinker, the other to have a lively intelligence. Vailland liked shocking people and his very appearance was striking. His smooth skin was stretched tightly on a face that was all profiles: from the front, all that could be seen was his adam’s apple. The blasé expression on his face belied his youth: he looked an old man who had been regenerated by some devil’s magic philtre. He was often seen in the company of a young woman, with his arm laid negligently round her neck. He would introduce her as ‘my woman’. In a magazine called Le Grand Jeu I read a violent diatribe by him against an army sergeant who had punished a private for having bestial relations with a sow. Vailland claimed that all men, both civil and military, had the right to perform bestial acts. I wondered about it. As I have already mentioned, I had a bold imagination, but I was easily shocked by reality. I did not attempt to get into conversation with Daumal or Vailland, who ignored me.

  I struck up only one new friendship: with Lisa Quermadec, a boarder at Sainte-Marie who was reading for a degree in philosophy. She was a frail little Breton girl with a lively, rather boyish face and short-cropped hair. She detested Neuilly and the mysticism of Mademoiselle Lambert. She believed in God, but thought that those who claimed to love Him were boasters or snobs: ‘How can you love someone you don’t know?’ she asked. I liked her very much, but her rather bitter scepticism did not add to the gaiety of life. I went on with my novel. I undertook for Baruzi an enormous dissertation on ‘the personality’ in which I displayed the sum total of my knowledge and my ignorance. Once a week I went to a concert, alone or with Zaza: I heard the Sacre du Printemps twice, and was enraptured by it. But on the whole I was no longer very interested in anything. I was disappointed with the second volume of letters between Rivière and Fournier: the fevers of their youth were extinguished by trivial worries, spite, bitterness. I wondered if the same degradation lay in wait for me.

  I went back to see Jacques. He paced up and down the gallery with the same smiles and gestures as before, and the past came to life again. I returned frequently to see him. He would talk and talk and talk; the twilight would fill with cigarette smoke and shimmering words would tremble in the blue coils of air; somewhere, in unknown places, one could meet people who were unlike any others, and things happened – funny things, or rather tragic, sometimes very beautiful things. What things? When the door closed behind me, the words died away. But the next week again I would surprise in his gold-flecked eyes the glow of Adventure. Adventure, escape, getting away from it all: perhaps that was the answer! It was the answer given by Marc Chadourne in Vasco which had a considerable success that winter and which I read with almost as much enthusiasm as Le Grand Meaulnes. Jacques had never crossed the seven seas; but many young novelists – among them Philipe Soupault – declared that one could go on marvellous voyages without ever leaving Paris; they would describe the bewildering poetry of those bars in which Jacques spent his nights. I began to feel in love with him again. I had gone to such lengths of indifference and even disdain that this return of passion astounds me. Yet I think I know the explanation for it. At first the past had a great deal to do with it: I loved Jacques because I had loved him in the past. And then I was weary of feeling loveless and full of despair: I was overtaken by a longing for tenderness and security. Jacques showed me a kindness that was now invariable; he put himself out to please me, he entertained me. Even so, all that would not have sufficed to draw me back to him. What really decided me was his great discomposure; he felt uncertain and out of place; when I was with him, I felt less ill at ease than when I was with people who accepted life blindly; nothing, I thought, was more important than to say no to life; I therefore concluded that he and I were of the same species, and once again I linked my destiny with his. However this did not give me much comfort; I knew how different we were and I was no longer counting on love to deliver me from loneliness. I had the feeling that I was suffering a calamity, rather than moving forward of my own free will towards the happiness I longed for. I celebrated my twentieth birthday with a melancholy tirade: ‘I shall not go to the South Seas. I shall never read St John of the Cross again. There is no sadness; nothing surprises me any more. Dementia praecox would be a way out. What if I tried to live? But I was brought up at the Cours Désir.’

  I, too, would have liked to try that ‘hazardous and useless’ existence whose attractions Jacques and the younger novelists were praising all the time. But how could I introduce the unexpected into my daily life? Very occasionally my sister and I managed to spend an evening away from our mother’s vigilant eye; Poupette often took drawing lessons in the evening at La Grande Chaumière, and this provided a convenient pretext when I, too, had a good excuse for going out in the evenings. With the money I was earning at Neuilly we would go to see an avant-garde play at the Studio des Champs-Élysées, or we would go and stand in the promenade at the Casino for Maurice Chevalier. We would walk the streets, talking about our lives and about Life; adventure, unseen but ever-present, rubbed shoulders with us everywhere. These pranks used to raise our spirits; but we couldn’t repeat them often. The monotony of daily life continued to weigh heavily upon me: ‘Oh! deadly awakenings, life without longing, without love; all over, finished already, and so quickly; frightful boredom. Things can’t go on like this! What do I want? What can I do? Nothing, nothing, nothing. My book? Vanity of vanities. Philosophy? I’m fed up to the teeth with it. Love? Too tired. Yet I’m only twenty. I want to live!’

  It couldn’t last: It didn’t last. I would go back to my book, to philosophy, to love. And then it would start all over again: ‘Always this never-ending conflict! A ready acknowledgement of my own powers, of my superiority to all of them; keenly aware of all I could do; but this feeling of complete futility in everything! No, it can’t go on like this.’

  But it did go on. And after all, perhaps it would go on like this for ever. Like a lunatic pendulum I swung frantically from apathy to wild happiness. At night I would climb the steps to the Sacré-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so be
autiful, and because it was useless. I would run down the narrow little streets of the Butte laughing at all the lights. I would fall into an arid despondency of heart, and then be bounced up into happiness again. It was wearing me out.

  I became more and more dissatisfied with my friends. Blanchette Weiss quarrelled with me, I never knew why: she suddenly, without any explanation, turned her back on me and did not reply to the letter in which I asked her what was the matter. I learnt later that she thought I was a mischief maker and accused me of being jealous of her to the extent of spoiling the books she had lent me by chewing their leather bindings. My friendship with Riesmann had cooled off. He had invited me to his house. There, in an immense drawing-room full of works of art I had met Jean Baruzi and his brother Joseph, author of an esoteric novel; there was also a celebrated official sculptor whose works disfigured the whole of Paris, and other academic personalities: the conversation filled me with consternation. Riesmann himself annoyed me with his aestheticism and his sentimentality. The others, the ones I liked, the ones I loved – the one I loved – did not understand me; they weren’t good enough for me; their existence, their presence did not solve anything.

  Solitude had long ago plunged me into pride. My head was completely turned. Baruzi handed me back my dissertation with copious praise; he gave me an interview after the lecture and, in his voice with the dying fall, sighed out the hope that it might be the basis for an important work. I got swelled-headed: ‘I am sure that I shall reach loftier heights than any of them. Is this pride? If I didn’t have genius, it would be; but if I have got genius – as I sometimes believe; as I am sometimes quite sure – then it simply means that I recognize clearly my superior gifts,’ I wrote complacently in my diary. The next day I went to see Charlie Chaplin in The Circus; when I came out of the cinema I went for a walk in the Tuileries; an orange sun was foundering in a pale blue sky and making the windows of the Louvre flash with fire. I remembered other dusks and suddenly I felt stunned by that necessity which I had been calling out for so desperately all this time: I was to write my book. This was no new project. Yet because I wanted things to happen to me, and they never did, I turned my emotion into an event. Once again, I uttered vows to heaven and earth. Nothing was ever, under any circumstances, to stand in the way of my writing a book. The fact is that I was no longer calling my decision into question. I also promised myself that from now on I would wish for happiness, and obtain it.