Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  *

  It was spring again. I passed my examinations in moral science and psychology. The thought of taking up philology was so distasteful to me that I gave it up. My father was bitterly disappointed: he would have liked me to take two degrees; it would have been the smart thing to do; but I wasn’t sixteen any more: I stood my ground. I had an inspiration. My final term was vacant; why not start on my diploma straight away? In those days it was not against regulations to present oneself for the diploma in the same year as the degree; if I made sufficient progress, there was nothing to stop me preparing for it on my return next October, and taking it at the same time: in this way I would gain a year! So that within eighteen months I would have finished with the Sorbonne, finished with life at home; I would be free, and a new life would begin! I did not hesitate. I went to see Monsieur Brunschvig who could see no reason why I shouldn’t carry out my plan, as I already had the certificate in science and an adequate knowledge of Greek and Latin. He advised me to do my thesis on ‘The Concept in Leibniz’ and I agreed.

  But loneliness continued to lower my spirits. It got worse at the beginning of April. Jean Pradelle went to spend a few days at Solesmes with some friends. I met him, the day after his return, at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop-library, to which we were both subscribers. In the main room Adrienne Monnier, garbed in her monkish robes, would receive celebrated authors: Fargue, Prévost, Joyce; the little rooms at the back were always empty. We sat down there on a couple of stools and talked. In a rather hesitant voice, Pradelle confided in me that at Solesmes he had taken Holy Communion: when he had seen his friends approaching the Lord’s Table, he had felt left out, excluded, abandoned; he had accompanied them to the Table next day, after having gone to confession; he had decided that he was still a believer. I listened to him with a lump in my throat: I felt abandoned, shut out, betrayed. Jacques could find refuge in the bars of Montparnasse, Pradelle at the foot of the cross: there was no one left to stand beside me. This desertion made me weep at nights.

  Two days later, my father left for La Grillière; he wanted to see his sister for some reason or other. The groaning locomotives, the red glow of smoke in the sooty night made me think of the awful finality of farewells. ‘I’m coming with you,’ I suddenly announced. My mother protested that I hadn’t even a toothbrush with me, but in the end my wish was granted. During the whole journey, leaning out of the window, I drank in the darkness and the wind. I had never seen the country in the spring; I went walking to the song of the cuckoo, among primroses and campanulas; I felt moved by memories of childhood, by my life, by my death. The fear of death had never left me; I couldn’t get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existing here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour. During those few days, the silence of nature often plunged me into joy and horror. I went even further. In those woods and meadows undisturbed by man, I thought I touched that superhuman reality I aspired to. I knelt down to pick a flower, and suddenly I felt riveted to the earth, with all the weight of the heavens on my shoulders; I couldn’t move: it was both an agony and an ecstasy which brought eternity within my grasp. I returned to Paris, convinced that I had passed through a mystical experience, and attempted to bring it on again. I had read in St John of the Cross: ‘In order to go the way thou knowest not, thou must go the way thou knowest not.’ Reversing this phrase I saw in the obscurity of my ways a sign that I was moving towards fulfilment. I would descend into the very depths of my being, and rise entire towards a zenith in which I embraced the Whole. There was no lack of sincerity in these divagations. I had lost myself in so deep a solitude that at moments I became a stranger to this world, and I was dumbfounded by its strangeness: objects had no meaning; neither did faces, nor my own body: as I couldn’t recognize anything, it was very tempting to let myself believe that I had attained the Unknown. I cultivated these states with the utmost complacency. All the same, I didn’t want to take myself in; I asked Pradelle and Mademoiselle Lambert what they thought about it all. His reply was categorical: ‘Not of the slightest interest.’ She was a little more tactful: ‘It’s a sort of metaphysical intuition.’ I came to the conclusion that one can’t base one’s life on such giddy notions and I did not try to bring them on again.

  I was still very busy. Now that I had my degree, I had the entry to the Victor Cousin library, stuck away in a remote corner of the Sorbonne. It contained an enormous collection of philosophical works, and practically no one went there. I spent my days in that library. I was writing away at my novel. I was reading Leibniz and books that would be useful in the preparation of my diploma. In the evenings, exhausted by study, I would languish in my room. I should have found great consolation in not being able to quit the earth if only I had been allowed to walk about it in freedom. How I longed to plunge into the night, to listen to jazz, to rub shoulders with people! But no, I was ‘cribbed, cabined and confined!’ I felt suffocated, I was eating my heart out, I wanted to hammer my head against those prison walls.

  *

  Jacques was was about to sail for Algeria where he would do his military service. I saw him frequently, and he was friendlier than ever. He talked to me a lot about his friends. I knew that Riaucourt was having an affair with a young woman called Olga; Jacques painted their relationship in such a romantic light that for the first time I felt favourably disposed to the idea of indulging in an illicit love affair. He also referred to another, very beautiful woman called Magda whom he would have liked me to meet. ‘We both paid dearly for that affair,’ he said. Madga was one of those disturbing characters one met at night in the bars. I didn’t wonder what role she had played in Jacques’ life. I didn’t wonder about anything. I was now certain that Jacques thought a great deal of me, that he wanted me, and that I could live with him in complete happiness. I dreaded our coming separation; but I hardly gave a thought to it, so happy was I about this closer contact it had given me with Jacques.

  A week before Jacques’ departure I dined with him, together with our parents. His friend Riquet Bresson called for him after the meal; Jacques proposed to take me with them to see a film called L’Équipage. My mother, vexed that there had been no mention of marriage, no longer looked with favour upon our friendship; she refused to let me go; I pleaded with her, and my aunt spoke up in my favour: in the end, seeing how things were, my mother allowed herself to be swayed.

  We didn’t go to the cinema. Jacques took me to the Stryx, a bar in the rue Huyghens where he was one of the ‘regulars’; he hoisted me up on a tall bar-stool between himself and Riquet. He called the barman by his Christian name, Michel, and ordered a dry Martini for me. I had never even set foot in a café before, and now here I was in a bar, at night, with two young men; this was something really extraordinary for me. The pale or violently coloured bottles, the bowls of olives and salted almonds, the little tables – it all filled me with wonder; and the most astonishing thing was that this was one of Jacques’ familiar haunts. I quickly knocked back my cocktail, and as I had never touched alcohol before, not even wine, which I didn’t like, I was soon pretty high. I called Michel by his Christian name and played the fool. Jacques and Michel sat at a small table to play poker-dice and pretended not to know me. I accosted the other customers, most of whom were stolid young Swedes. One of them treated me to a second Martini which on a signal from Jacques I poured behind the counter. To keep the ball rolling I smashed a few glasses. Jacques was laughing, and I was walking on air. Then we went to The Vikings. Out on the street I linked arms with Jacques and Riquet, giving my right arm to Jacques: the left arm didn’t seem to exist at all, and I marvelled at this physical intimacy with Jacques which symbolized the fusion of our souls. He taught me to play poker-dice and had me served with a gin fizz with very little gin: I lovingly surrendered to his watchful care. Time no longer existed: it was already two o’clock when I found myself tossing off a crème de menthe at the counter in the Rotonde. All around me swarmed faces fr
om another world; miracles happened at every corner, like explosions. I felt myself bound to Jacques by an indissoluble complicity, as if we had committed a murder, or crossed the Sahara together on foot.

  He left me outside number 71 in the rue de Rennes. I had the key to the door. But my parents were waiting up for me; my mother was in tears, and my father’s face wore its most forbidding expression. They had just come back from the boulevard Montparnasse where my mother had rung and rung at the door until my aunt stuck her head out of a window: my mother had yelled that she wanted her daughter back, and that Jacques had dishonoured me. I explained that we had been to see L’Équipage and had then called at the Rotonde for a coffee. But my parents refused to calm down, and though I was now less disturbed by their outbursts I too burst into tears and screamed with rage. Jacques had arranged to meet me next day on the terrace of the Select. Filled with consternation by my reddened eyes and by the tale his mother had told him, he gazed into my eyes more tenderly than ever; he objected to the accusation that he had treated me in a disrespectful manner: ‘I have too much real regard for you to do that,’ he told me. And I felt even closer to him than I had during our orgy of the night before. I asked him if he felt sad to be saying good-bye to Paris. ‘It’s you I don’t want to say good-bye to,’ he replied. He took me to the Sorbonne in his car. I got out. We took a long last look at one another. ‘Come on, now,’ he said, and the emotion in his voice really shook me: ‘I’m going to see you again, aren’t I? We’re not saying good-bye for ever.’ He let in the clutch, and I was standing at the edge of the pavement, not knowing where to turn. But the memory of those last moments gave me the strength to face the months of separation. ‘Here’s to next year,’ I thought to myself, and went to read Leibniz.

  *

  ‘If ever you feel like going for a spin, get in touch with Riquet,’ Jacques had told me. I sent Bresson a note and one evening I went to meet him at the Stryx: we talked about Jacques, whom he admired; but the bar was empty, and nothing happened. Nothing much happened that other evening when I went to the bar at the Rotonde for an apéritif; there were a few young people talking to one another in intimate tones; the deal tables, the rustic chairs and the red and white checked curtains made the place seem no more mysterious than the back room of a cake-shop. Yet when I tried to pay for my sherry-cobbler, the tall red-headed barman refused my money; this incident – which I never managed to fathom – had a faint touch of the miraculous and I felt greatly encouraged. By leaving home in good time and arriving late at my class, I managed to spend an hour at The Vikings on the evenings when I went to Belleville. Once I drank two whole gin fizzes: it was too much for me; I brought them up in the Métro; when I walked into the centre my knees were like water and my forehead was bathed in a cold sweat: they thought I was ill and made me lie down on a divan, praising me for my courage in turning out. My cousin Madeleine came to spend a few days in Paris: I jumped at the opportunity. She was twenty-three, and my mother gave permission for us to go alone to the theatre every evening: in fact, we had made up our minds to visit a few dens of vice. Our plans nearly fell through because, just before we left home, Madeleine put a little rouge on my cheeks as a joke: I thought it looked very pretty, and when my mother ordered me to wash it off, I protested. She probably thought it was Satan’s cloven hoof-mark she saw on my cheeks; she exorcized me by boxing my ears. I gave in, with very bad grace. However, she let me go out and my cousin and I wended our way towards Montmartre. For a long while we wandered under the light of the neon signs; we couldn’t make up our minds. We slunk into a couple of bars, both of them dead as dairies, and then we found ourselves in the rue Lepic, in a frightful little hole where young women of easy virtue awaited their customers. Two of them came and sat at our table; they were startled to see us there, for we were obviously not offering any competition. We stayed there for some time, both of us bored to death: the place made me feel sick.

  Yet I wasn’t to be put off. I told my parents that the centre at Belleville was getting up an entertainment for the 14th of July, that I was rehearsing my pupils in a play and that I would have to be out several nights a week; I told them that I was giving the money I spent on gin fizzes towards the upkeep of the centre. I often went to the Jockey in the boulevard Montparnasse: Jacques had told me about it, and I liked the highly coloured posters on the walls, where Chevalier’s straw hat and Chaplin’s boots kept company with Greta Garbo’s smile; I loved the shining bottles, the little striped flags, the smell of tobacco and alcohol, the voices, the laughter, the saxophone. The women amazed me: I had no words to describe the material of their dresses, the colour of their hair; I couldn’t imagine any shop in which one might buy such gossamer-fine silk stockings, such very high-heeled shoes, such vivid red lipstick. I would listen to them arguing with men about their rates for the night or for a short time or for the various refinements of pleasure they had to offer. My imagination didn’t react: I had set up a blockage in it. At first especially, I didn’t think of the people around me as creatures of flesh and blood, but as allegories: Disquiet, Futility, Stupidity, Despair, Genius perhaps, and certainly Vice in all its masks. I remained convinced that sin is the absence of God and I would perch on my bar-stool with all the fervour which made me kneel, as a child, before the Holy Sacrament: it was the same presence I was in touch with; jazz had taken the place of the deep-toned organ, and I used to be on the look-out for adventure as I had once waited upon the coming of ecstatic illumination. Jacques had told me: ‘Anything you do in a bar-no matter what it is-will make things happen.’ And so I did whatever came into my head. If a customer came in with his hat on, I would shout ‘Hat!’ and throw his headgear up at the ceiling. From time to time I would smash a glass or two. I would hold forth, accosting ‘regulars’ whom I naïvely tried to mystify: I would give myself out to be a model, or a tart. With my dingy old frock, my woollen stockings, my sensible shoes and my face ignorant of make-up, I never deceived anyone. ‘You’ve not got the right touch, dearie,’ an old cripple with thick horn-rimmed spectacles told me. ‘You’re a little middle-class girl who wants to play at being a bohemian,’ said a man with a hook nose who wrote love-serials for the papers. I protested violently. The cripple drew something on a piece of paper: ‘There you are; if you want to be a professional, that’s what you have to do, and have it done to you as well.’ I didn’t lose my nerve. ‘It’s very badly drawn,’ I remarked icily. ‘It’s good enough,’ he retorted. He opened his flies, but this time I had to turn my eyes away. ‘That doesn’t interest me.’ They all laughed. ‘You see!’ cried the serial-writer. ‘A real tart would have said: that’s nothing much to brag about!’ With the help of alcohol, I coolly swallowed their obscenities. Besides, they left me alone. Occasionally someone would offer me a drink or invite me to dance, nothing more: apparently I didn’t incite them to lubricity.

  My sister joined me several times on these evenings out; in order to give herself a ‘low-class’ appearance she would wear her hat on one side and pull her skirts up over her crossed knees. We would talk loudly and laugh at the tops of our voices. Or we would enter a bar separately, pretending not to know one another and then we would start to fight: we would tear each other’s hair, scream insults at one another, and feel very gratified if such an exhibition diverted the public for a few minutes.

  On the evenings when I stayed at home, I could hardly bear the silence of my room; again I sought release in mysticism. One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn’t, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts, I was very glad He didn’t exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity.

  Anyhow, there was now one place on earth where I felt at home: I became one of the regulars at the Jockey, I saw familiar faces there, and I liked being there more and more. All I needed was one gin fizz, and my loneliness evaporated: then all men were brothers and we all understood one another, everybody loved everybody e
lse. No more problems, no more regrets and tensions: I was filled with the ever-present here and now. I would dance in arms that held me tight, and my body would have presentiments of escapes and abandonments that were easier and more satisfying than my mystical spasms; far from taking offence as I had at the age of sixteen, I would find comfort in the warmth of a strange hand on the back of my neck, stroking me with a gentleness which resembled love. I didn’t know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn’t matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feeling that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom. I had progressed since the days when I had hesitated to walk in the street beside a young man: I merrily defied convention and authority. The attraction that bars and dance-halls had for me was based in great part on their illicit character. Never would my mother have set her feet in such places; my father would have been deeply shocked to find me there, and Pradelle grieved; it gave me a feeling of great satisfaction to know that I was so totally at odds with authority.

  I gradually grew bolder. I allowed men to accost me in the streets, and went to drink in bars with strangers. One evening I got in a car that had followed me all along the street. ‘Like to go for a spin to Robinson?’ the driver suggested. He was not at all attractive, and what would become of me if he left me stranded ten miles out of Paris, at midnight? But I had certain principles: ‘Live dangerously. Refuse nothing,’ said Gide, Rivière, the surrealists, and Jacques. ‘All right,’ I said. At the place de la Bastille, sitting outside a café, we drank cocktails in glum silence. When we got back into the car, the man put his hand on my knee: I pushed him violently away. ‘What’s up? You get yourself picked up off the street, and now you don’t want nobody to touch you?’ His voice had a nasty sound. He stopped the car and tried to kiss me. I ran off, followed by a flood of oaths. I caught the last Métro. I realized that I had got off lightly; but I was pleased that I had performed a truly gratuitous act.