Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  Another evening, in a pin-table saloon in the avenue de Clichy, I played miniature football with a young thug whose cheek was marked with a long pink scar; we tried the rifle range too, and he insisted on paying every time. He introduced me to a friend and they treated me to a coffee. When I heard my last bus starting up, I bade them a hasty farewell and ran after it. They caught up with me just as I was going to jump on the platform; they took hold of me by the shoulders. ‘That’s a nice way to treat your friends! ‘The conductor was hesitating, with his arm raised to pull the bell; then he pulled it and the bus rumbled away. I was white with fury. The two boys assured me that I’d behaved badly: you don’t just drop your friends like that. We made it up and they insisted on accompanying me home, on foot. I made it quite clear to them that they were not to expect anything of me, but they persisted. At the rue Cassette, at the corner of the rue de Rennes, the young thug with the razor-slashed cheek put his arm round my waist. ‘When am I going to see you again?’ ‘Whenever you like,’ I said weakly. He tried to kiss me; I struggled to get free. Four policemen on bicycles came riding past; I didn’t dare call out to them but my companion released me and walked on a little way towards the house. When the police passed, he took hold of me again: ‘You won’t turn up! You’ve been having us on! I don’t like that sort of thing. I’m going to teach you a lesson.’ He looked nasty: he was going to strike me or kiss me full on the mouth, and I don’t know which I feared the more. His friend intervened: ‘Here, let’s settle this nicely. He’s grousing ’cos you cost him a bit of money, that’s all.’ I turned over the contents of my handbag. ‘I don’t want her fricking money!’ the other replied. ‘I want to teach her a lesson.’ All the same, he took my entire fortune in the end: fifteen francs. ‘Not even enough to get meself a bit of skirt!’ he sulked. I let myself into the house: I’d really had a fright.

  *

  The academic year was coming to an end. Suzanne Boigue had spent several months with one of her sisters in Morocco; there she had met Mr Right. The wedding-breakfast took place in a big suburban garden; the husband was good-looking, Suzanne was exultant, and happiness seemed to me to be very desirable. Yet I didn’t feel unhappy: Jacques’ absence and the certainty of his love kept my heart at rest; its peace was no longer threatened by the shocks of unexpected meetings or the hazards of one of his moods. I went boating in the Bois with my sister, Zaza, Lisa, and Pradelle: my friends got on well together, and when they were all with me I didn’t so much regret not getting on with them so well as individuals. Pradelle introduced me to a friend from the Normale for whom he had a great admiration: it was one of these who, at Solesmes, had persuaded him to take Holy Communion. He was called Pierre Claraut and was a supporter of L’Action Française; he was short and dark, and looked like a cricket. He was going to present himself the following year for the selective examination for teachers of philosophy, and so we would be fellow-competitors. As he had a hard, haughty, self-confident air I promised myself that on my return to the Sorbonne in October, I would try to find out what was underneath that rebarbative exterior. I went with him and Pradelle to hear the orals of the competition: there was a crowd to hear the lesson presented by Raymond Aron, for whom everybody foretold a brilliant future as a philosopher. They also pointed out to me Daniel Lagache who was going in for psychiatry. To everyone’s surprise, Jean-Paul Sartre had failed in the written examination. I thought the competition seemed difficult, but my courage didn’t fail me: I would work harder than I’d ever worked before, but within a year, I would be through with it: I already felt as if I were free at last. I think, too, that it had done me a great deal of good to have a good fling, to amuse myself and have a change of air. I had regained my self-confidence to such an extent that I no longer even kept a diary: ‘All I want is an ever greater intimacy with the world, and to put that world into a book,’ I wrote to Zaza. I was in great good humour when I arrived in the Limousin, and I received a letter from Jacques into the bargain. He talked about Biskra, the little donkeys, the dappled shade, the summer; he recalled our meetings: ‘Those were the only times I stood to attention in those days.’ And he promised that ‘next year we’ll have some good times together’. My sister, who was less experienced than I was at deciphering cryptograms, asked me what this last phrase meant. ‘It means we’re going to get married!’ I triumphantly replied.

  What a wonderful summer it was! No more tears, no more solitary effusions, no more epistolary tempests. The countryside overwhelmed me as it had done when I was five and twelve, and there was enough blue and to spare to fill the skies. I knew now what was the hidden promise in the scent of the honeysuckle, and the meaning of the morning dew. In the country lanes, over the ripening com and among the spiny gorse and the warm heather I caught innumerable glimpses of my former pains and happinesses. I went for many walks with my sister. Often we would go bathing, in our petticoats, in the beer-brown waters of the Vézère; then we would dry off in the long grass that smelt of mint. She would draw and I would read. Even outside distractions did not bother me. My parents had renewed an old friendship with some friends who were spending the summer in a neighbouring château; they had three grown-up sons, all very handsome young men who were destined for the Bar; we sometimes went over to play tennis with them. I was very happy. Their mother gave Mama a delicate hint that she would only consider girls with dowries as future daughters-in-law: this made my sister and me roar with laughter, because we were far from coveting the attentions of such well-behaved young gentlemen.

  That year again I was invited to Laubardon. My mother had been quite willing for me to meet Pradelle in Bordeaux; he was spending his holidays in the region. It was a delightful day we spent together. Pradelle certainly meant a great deal to me. And Zaza even more so. I got out of the train at Laubardon and my heart was dancing.

  In June Zaza had achieved the rare feat of passing at the first go her certificate in philology. And yet this year she had devoted only very little time to her stuthes. Her mother’s demands on her attendance and services were becoming more and more tyrannical. Madame Mabille considered that thrift was a cardinal virtue; she would have thought it immoral to buy in a shop products that could be made at home – cakes, jams, underwear, dresses, and coats. During the spring and early summer months she often got up at six in the morning to go to the fruit and vegetable markets with her daughters in order to get stuff cheap. Whenever the little Mabilles needed a new outfit, Zaza had to go and ransack a dozen shops, bringing back from each of them a swatch of samples which Madame Mabille would compare, taking into account the quality and price of the material; after a lengthy deliberation, Zaza would go back to the shop to buy the required cloth. These tasks, and the boring social duties which had increased in number since Monsieur Mabille’s promotion, exasperated Zaza. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that by trotting off to shops and tea-parties she was observing faithfully the precepts of the Gospel. Doubtless it was her Christian duty to obey her mother in everything; but in a book on Port-Royal she had been struck by a phrase of Pierre Nicole’s which suggested that obethence might also be a trap set by the Devil. By allowing herself to be diminished and her intelligence to be misused, was she not acting contrary to God’s will ? How could she know for certain what His will might be? She was afraid of the sin of pride if she surrendered to her own judgement, and of being cowardly if she gave in to pressure from outside. This doubt exacerbated the conflict which had been raging in her mind for some time: she loved her mother, but she also loved many things that her mother did not like. She would often quote to me that phrase from Ramuz: ‘The things I love do not love each other.’ The future did not offer much comfort. Madame Mabille refused point-blank to allow Zaza to take her diploma the year after; she was afraid her daughter might become an intellectual. As for love, Zaza no longer had any hope of finding it. In my family circle it sometimes – but very rarely – happened that someone married for love: that had been what my cousin Titite had done. But Mada
me Mabille said: ‘The Beauvoirs should not be judged by accepted standards.’ Zaza was much more deeply involved than I was in the rigid formalities of a class whose marriages were all arranged; now all these people who allowed themselves to be married off without a murmur were a dismally mediocre lot. Zaza was ardently in love with life; that is why the prospect of a joyless existence at times robbed her of all desire to go on living. As in her childhood, she used paradoxes to protect herself against the false idealism of her environment. Having seen Jouvet play the part of a drunkard in Le Grand Large she declared that she was in love with him and pinned his photograph over her bed; his irony, his dry wit, his scepticism at once found an echo in her. In a letter she sent me at the beginning of the holidays, she confided in me that she sometimes dreamed of renouncing this world completely. ‘After brief moments of intellectual as well as physical love of life, I am suddenly so struck by a feeling of the vanity, the futility of it all that I feel everything and everybody withdrawing from me; I feel such utter indifference for the whole of creation that I already seem to be half-dead. The renunciation of self, of existence, of everything; the renunciation made by those who try to begin the life of the hereafter here on earth – if you only knew how much it tempts me. I’ve often thought that this desire to find liberty in “bondage” was the sign of a vocation; at other times, life and the things of life become so important to me that I feel life in a convent would be a mutilation and that this is not what God wants of me. But whatever may be the path I shall tread, I could never go whole-heartedly for life as you do; even at the moments when I live with the greatest intensity I still have the taste of nothingness in my mouth.’

  This letter had frightened me a little. Zaza reassured me in it that my lack of faith did not come between her and me. But if ever she entered a convent she would be lost to me; and to herself, I thought.

  On the evening of my arrival I had a disappointment; I wasn’t sleeping in Zaza’s room, but in Mademoiselle Avdicovitch’s; she was a Polish student who had been engaged as a governess for the period of the holidays; she was looking after the three youngest Mabilles. My only consolation was that I found her charming: Zaza had talked to me about her in her letters; she liked her very much. She had pretty blonde hair, blue eyes that were both languorous and gay, a broad, full mouth and a quite exceptional attractiveness which I then hadn’t the face to call by its right name: sex-appeal. Her gauzy dress revealed a pair of deliciously rounded shoulders; in the evenings she would sit down at the piano and sing Ukrainian love-songs with a coquetry that enchanted Zaza and me, but which scandalized everybody else. At bedtime, I was startled to see her putting on a pair of pyjamas instead of a nightdress. She opened up her heart to me at once. Her father had a large sweet factory at Lwow; while studying at the university, she had taken part in the struggle for Ukrainian independence and had spent a few days in prison. She had left home to complete her stuthes, first in Berlin, where she had spent two or three years, then in Paris; she was attending lectures at the Sorbonne and receiving an allowance from her parents. She had wanted to use the holidays to advantage by going to live with a French family: the experience had flabbergasted her. I realized next morning the extent to which she shocked the conventional Mabilles; she was so graceful and feminine that beside her Zaza and I and Zaza’s friends seemed like young novices. In the afternoon, she would amuse herself by telling everybody’s fortune with cards, including Xavier du Moulin’s; without regard to the dignity of his cloth, she flirted discreetly with him: he appeared to be not indifferent to her advances, and smiled at her a great deal. She gave him the whole works, and foretold that he would very soon meet the queen of hearts. The mothers and elder sisters were outraged; behind her back, Madame Mabille accused Stépha of not keeping her place. ‘Besides, I’m sure she’s no lady,’ she said. She blamed Zaza for being too friendly with this foreigner.

  As for myself, I wonder why she invited me: probably in order not to cross her daughter too much; but she did her best to make a private conversation between Zaza and myself impossible. Zaza used to spend her mornings in the kitchen: it broke my heart to see her spending hours covering jam pots with greaseproof paper, assisted by Bébelle or Mathé. During the day, she wasn’t alone for a minute. Madame Mabille was increasing the numbers of parties and outings in the hope of getting Lili settled: she was already beginning to get a bit long in the tooth. ‘This is the last year I’m going to bother with you: what I’ve gone through for you! All those interviews with eligible young men! Well, it’s your sister’s turn next,’ she had publicly declared during a dinner at which Stépha was present. Already there were well-set-up young men from the Polytechnique who had intimated to Madame Mabille that they would be glad to marry her younger daughter. I couldn’t help wondering if after all Zaza would let herself be persuaded that her Christian duty was to set up house; but I could no more see her accepting the dullness of a dutiful marriage than the stultifying deadness of a convent.

  A few days after my arrival, all the well-to-do families in the neighbourhood were invited to an immense picnic on the banks of the Adour. Zaza lent me her dress of pink tussor. She was wearing a white silk dress with a green sash and a jade necklace; she had lost weight. She had frequent migraines, and slept badly; to cheer herself up a little she dabbed some rouge on her cheeks; despite this artifice, she looked ill and sad. But I loved her face and it hurt me to see her offering it to anybody with perfect amiability: she played with deceptive ease her role of a young society lady. We arrived in good time; gradually the guests began driving up, and every one of Zaza’s smiles, every nod stabbed at my heart. I busied myself, with the others, laying out the tablecloth on the grass and unpacking hampers of crockery and food; I turned the handle of a machine which made ice-cream. Stépha took me to one side and asked me to explain to her Leibniz’s philosophical system: for an hour or so I forgot my boredom. But after that the day dragged heavily along. There were pickled eggs, pastry horns filled with savouries, aspics, and puff biscuits, plates of cold meat-balls, galantines, pâtés, cold jellied chicken, hot stews, potted meats, candied fruits, tarts, raised pies, and marzipan fruits: all the lathes of the household had performed their social duties with the utmost zeal. We stuffed ourselves with food, we laughed without much real gaiety; we talked for the sake of talking: nobody seemed to be having any fun. Towards the end of the afternoon, Madame Mabille asked me if I knew where Zaza was; she set off to look for her, and I followed. We found her taking a dip in the Adour at the foot of a waterfall; she had used as a bathing costume a voluminous cloak of rough tweed. Madame Mabille scolded her, but in a playful way: she didn’t waste her authority on peccadilloes. I realized that Zaza had felt in need of solitude and violent sensations, and perhaps of purification too, after that long and sticky afternoon, and I felt reassured: she was not yet ready to let herself sink into a contented, matronly slumber.

  Yet I realized that her mother had a great hold over her. Madame Mabille pursued a clever policy with her children: when they were very small, she would treat them with playful indulgence; later, she would allow them to have their own way in little things, so that when it was a question of getting them to do something her credit was unimpaired. She could on occasion bring into play vivacity and a certain charm; she had always shown a particular affection for her younger daughter, who had been taken in by her smiles: love as much as respect paralysed her attempts at rebellion. But one evening she let herself go. Madame Mabille declared in the course of dinner, in a very cutting voice: ‘I don’t understand how a believer could have anything to do with unbelievers.’ I was horrified to feel the blood mounting to my cheeks. Zaza indignantly retorted: ‘No one has the right to judge anyone else. God leads people by the paths He chooses for them.’ ‘I am not judging anyone,’ Madame Mabille replied icily. ‘We must pray for lost souls; but we must not let ourselves be contaminated by them.’ Zaza was choking with anger, and that, too, reassured me. But I felt that the atmosphere at Laubardon was
more hostile than in the preceding year. Later, in Paris, Stépha told me that the children used to snigger at me because I was so badly dressed: they sniggered, too, on the day Zaza lent me one of her dresses without saying why. I was not vain about my appearance and I never noticed people’s reactions to it: I was indifferent to all kinds of affronts. Nevertheless, I sometimes felt my heart sink with misery. Stépha was curious to see Lourdes, and I felt even more alone while she was away. One evening after dinner, Zaza sat down at the piano; she played some Chopin; she played well; I sat looking at her helmet of black hair with its touchingly white, straight parting and told myself that it was this passionate music which really expressed her true self; but there was that mother and all that family between us, and perhaps one day she would disown her real self, and I would lose her. I felt such piercing sadness that I got up, left the room and went to bed in tears. The door opened; Zaza entered and came over to my bed, leaned over me and kissed me. Our friendship had always been such an undemonstrative one that her action overwhelmed me with joy.