Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

  I always had fun with Stépha; Fernando was often there when I went up to see her in her room; while she made cocktails with curaçao he would show me reproductions of Soutine and Cézanne; his own painting, though still rather clumsy, pleased me, and I too admired him for dedicating his whole life to painting without bothering about material difficulties. Sometimes the three of us would go out together. We were enthusiastic about Charles Dullin’s performance as Volpone; but we were very critical of Baty in Gantillon’s Départs at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. At the end of my morning lectures, Stépha would invite me to lunch at the Knam; we would eat Polish dishes to the accompaniment of a Polish orchestra and she would ask me for advice: should she marry Fernando? I used to tell her yes; never had I seen such complete understanding between a man and a woman: they corresponded exactly to my idea of the ideal couple. She was hesitant: there were so many ‘interesting’ people in the world! This word exasperated me a little. I didn’t feel much attracted by those Romanians and Bulgarians with whom Stépha waged the battle of the sexes. At times my patriotism would come to the fore. One day we were lunching with a German student in a restaurant inside the Bibliothèque Nationale. Blond, with the ritual duelling-scars on his cheeks, he talked in a vindictive manner about the greatness of the Fatherland. I suddenly thought: ‘Perhaps one day he’ll be fighting against Jacques and Pradelle,’ and I felt a sudden urge to leave the table.

  But I struck up a friendship with the Hungarian journalist who burst into Stépha’s life towards the end of December. He was very tall and massively built, and in his broad face his thick lips seemed to have difficulty in smiling. He used to talk with great self-satisfaction about his father by adoption who was director of the biggest theatre in Budapest. He was working on a thesis about French melodrama, and was a passionate admirer of French culture, Madame de Staël and Charles Maurras; except for Hungary, he thought all the countries of Central Europe were inhabited by barbarians, particularly the Balkans. He flew into rages whenever he saw Stépha talking to a Romanian. It didn’t take much for him to lose his temper: then his hands would shake, his left foot would tap the floor convulsively, and he would have difficulty in getting his words out: I was embarrassed by this lack of self-control. He irritated me too because he was always mouthing the words: refinement, grace, delicacy. He was far from stupid, and I would listen curiously to his disquisitions on cultures and civilizations. But on the whole I didn’t care much for his conversation, and this used to annoy him: ‘If you only knew how witty I can be in Hungarian!’ he told me one day, in a voice that was at once furious and frustrated. When he tried to get round me in order to make me plead his case with Stépha, I sent him packing. ‘It’s idiotic!’ he snarled, his voice full of hatred. ‘All girls love acting as go-betweens when one of their friends has a man interested in her.’ I told him roundly that his love for Stépha was nothing to do with me, that it was an egotistical desire for possession and domination; moreover, I couldn’t trust it: was he prepared to spend the rest of his life with her? His lips trembled: ‘If you were given a Dresden china figure, you would throw it on the ground to see if it would break or not!’ I made no secret of the fact to Bandi – as Stépha called him – that I was Fernando’s ally in this affair. ‘I detest that Fernando!’ Bandi told me. ‘For one thing, he’s a Jew!’ I was shocked.

  Stépha was rather sorry for him; she thought he was fairly brilliant, and wanted to ‘get him under her thumb’, but he pursued her with too much persistency. I realized, on this occasion, that I was, as she had told me, naïve. One evening I went with Jean Mallet to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to see Podrecca’s Piccolo Teatro which was playing for the first time in Paris. I noticed Stépha there; Bandi had his arm round her, and she was not trying to disengage herself. Mallet was very fond of Stépha, whose eyes he liked to compare to those of a tiger with a dose of morphine: he suggested we should go and say hullo to her. The Hungarian quickly withdrew his arm; she smiled at me without the least embarrassment. I realized then that she treated her boyfriends with rather less severity than she had given me to understand, and I felt angry with her for what seemed to me to be disloyalty, because I didn’t know what was meant by ‘flirting’. I was very glad when she finally decided to marry Fernando. Bandi made several violent scenes at that: he would follow her home to her room, despite all her orders to let her alone. Then he calmed down. She stopped coming to the Nationale. He still used to invite me to coffee at Poccardi’s but he never talked about her to me again.

  After that he settled in France as correspondent to a Hungarian newspaper. Ten years later, on the eve of the declaration of war, I met him at the Dôme. He was going to join up next day in a regiment composed of foreign volunteers. He handed over to me for safe keeping an object which he prized very highly: it was a travelling clock in the form of a glass sphere. He confessed to me that he was a Jew, an illegitimate child, and a sexual maniac: he could only love women weighing more than fifteen stone; Stépha had been the one exception in his life: he had hoped that, despite her small stature, she would be able to give him, thanks to her intelligence, an illusion of immense size. The war swept him away; he never came back for his clock.

  *

  From Berlin Zaza wrote me long letters from which I read extracts to Stépha and Pradelle. When she left Paris she had called the Germans ‘Huns’, and it was with great trepidation that she set foot in enemy territory:

  My arrival at the Fiobel Hospiz was rather awful; I was expecting a women’s hostel, but found it was a great caravanserai full of enormous Huns, all quite respectable; when I entered my room the Mädchen, as Stépha had told me, handed me a bunch of keys for the wardrobe, the room door, entrance door and finally the street door, in case I should want to come in after four o’clock in the morning. I was so exhausted by the journey, so bewildered by the extent of my freedom and by the immensity of Berlin that I hadn’t the courage to go down to dinner and sought refuge, soaking my pillow with tears, in a curious bed without any sheets which consisted only of one huge eiderdown. I slept for thirteen hours, went to Mass in a Roman Catholic church, walked wide-eyed round the streets, and by midday my morale had improved. I’ve got more used to things by now; there are moments when I’m suddenly seized by an unreasonable longing for my family, for you, for Paris, a sharp and painful stab of homesickness; but I like life in Berlin, I’ve not had any difficulty with anyone, and I feel that the three months I’m to spend here are going to be most interesting.

  She got no help from the French colony, which was composed entirely of the Diplomatic Corps: there were only three French students in Berlin and people found it very surprising that Zaza should have come to spend a term in Germany attending lectures at the University.

  The consul, in a letter of recommendation he gave me for a German professor, ended with a sentence which amused me very much: ‘I beg of you to give the warmest encouragement to Mademoiselle Mabille’s most praiseworthy initiative.’ You’d think I’d flown over the North Pole!

  She soon decided to mix with the natives.

  On Wednesday I got to know the Berlin Theatre in the most unexpected company. Just think – as Stépha would say – about six o’clock I see the manager of the Hospiz, tall old Herr Pollack, coming up to me and saying with his most amiable smile: ‘My dear little French lady, would you care to come to the theatre with me this evening?’ A little bewildered by this, I inquired about the moral propriety of the performance, and considering old Herr Pollack’s serious and dignified air I decided to accept. By eight o’clock we were hurrying through the streets of Berlin, talking away like old friends. Every time it was a question of paying for anything the tall Hun would say graciously: ‘You are my guest, it’s free.’ During the third interval, emboldened by a cup of coffee, he told me that his wife never came to the theatre with him, that she didn’t share his tastes at all and had never tried to give him any pleasure during the thirty-five years of their marriage, excepting two years ago, b
ecause he was at death’s door; but, as he told me in German, one can’t always be at death’s door. I was very amused, and found old Herr Pollack much more fun than Sudermann, whose Die Ehre, a problem play in the style of Alexandre Dumas fils, was being given. On leaving the Trianon Theatre, in order to put the crowning touch to this very German evening, my Hun absolutely insisted on going to eat sauerkraut and sausages!

  Stépha and I laughed at the thought that, rather than let Zaza take part in a game of mixed doubles Madame Mabille had banished her to Berlin; and now Zaza was going out alone in the evening, with a man, a stranger, a foreigner, a Boche! She had, of course, made inquiries about the moral propriety of the play. But judging by later letters she had soon found her feet. She was attending lectures at the University, going to concerts, theatres, museums, she had formed friendships with students and with one of Stépha’s friends, Hans Miller, whose address Stépha had given her. At first he had found Zaza so stiff and starchy that he had told her jokingly: ‘You handle life with glacé kid gloves.’ She had been very mortified by this: she had decided to take her gloves off.

  I am seeing so many new people, places, countries, all so different from what I’ve known that I can feel all my prejudices getting lamentably lost, and I no longer really know if I have ever belonged to a certain background, nor what it could have been. I sometimes lunch in the morning at the Embassy with diplomatic celebrities, sumptuous ambassadresses from Brazil or Argentina, and in the evening find myself dining alone at Aschinger’s, a very popular cheap restaurant, rubbing shoulders with a fat office worker or some French or Chinese student. I am not hemmed in by any group, no stupid reasons are suddenly given me for not being able to do something interesting; there’s nothing impossible and nothing that is ‘not done’, and I accept with wonder and confidence all the new and unexpected things that each day brings me. At first, I was bothered about questions of form: I used to wonder and ask people if things were ‘done’ or ‘not done’. People would smile at me and say: ‘But people do just as they like’, and I took the lesson to heart. Now I’m worse than any Polish girl student, I go out alone at all hours of the day and night, I go to concerts with Hans Miller, and I walk the streets with him until one o’clock in the morning. He seems to find all that so natural that I feel embarrassed at still feeling astonished by it.

  Her ideas too were changing; her chauvinism was melting away.

  What amazes me more than anything here is that in general all the Germans are pacifists, and – even more amazing – francophiles. The other day at the cinema I saw a film with pacifist tendencies which showed the horrors of war: everybody applauded it. It appears that last year, when Napoleon was shown and had a great success here, the orchestra played the Marseillaise. On one evening in particular, at the Ufa Palace, people applauded it so much that it had to be played three times, to general and prolonged applause. I should have been startled if, before leaving Paris, I had been told that I should be able without embarrassment to talk to a German about the war; the other day, Hans Miller told me about the time when he had been a prisoner of war, and ended by saying: ‘Perhaps you were too young to remember, but the things that were done, on both sides, were frightful; such things must never happen again!’ Another time, as I was talking to him about Giraudoux’ Siegfried et le Limousin, and telling him that he would be interested in the book he replied – but the German words expressed his feelings so much more energetically: ‘Is it a “political” or a “human” book? We’ve had enough talk about nations, races; now we want to hear a little about man in general.’ I believe that ideas of this kind are widespread among German youth.

  Hans Miller spent a week in Paris; he went out with Stépha and told her that since her arrival her friend had been transformed; given a cold reception by the Mabilles, he was astonished at the abyss which separated Zaza from the rest of her family. She, too, was more and more aware of this. She wrote and told me that she had wept for joy when she had seen her mother’s face at the window of the carriage in the train bringing her to see Zaza in Berlin; yet the thought of returning home frightened her. Lili had finally given her hand to a student from the Polytechnique, and according to Hans Miller’s report, the house was upside down.

  I feel that at home everybody is already completely absorbed in sending out wedding invitations, receiving congratulations and gifts, choosing the ring, the trousseau, the colour of the bridesmaids’ dresses (I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything); and this great flood of formalities doesn’t make me feel very much like going back home; I’ve so much lost touch with all that sort of thing! And really life is wonderfully interesting here. . . . When I think of my return, it’s chiefly of the great joy I shall have in seeing you again; that’s what I feel most. But I must confess that I am afraid to resume the existence I was leading three months ago. The very respectable formalism which governs the lives of most of the people in ‘our class’ I now find quite unendurable, all the more so when I recall the not-so-distant past when, without realizing it, I was still impregnated by it; and I fear that when I step back into the picture I shall become imbued with that spirit once again.

  I don’t know if Madame Mabille realized that Zaza’s stay in Berlin had not had the result she had expected; in any case, she was preparing to take her daughter in hand again. Meeting my mother at a party to which she had gone with Poupette, she had addressed her rather stiffly. My mother spoke Stépha’s name: ‘I do not know Stépha. I know a Mademoiselle Avdicovitch who was governess to my children,’ was Madame Mabille’s stuffy reply, to which she had added: ‘You may bring up Simone as you wish. I have other principles.’ She had complained of my influence upon her daughter, and had concluded: ‘Fortunately, Zaza loves me very much.’

  *

  The whole of Paris had flu that winter and I was in bed when Zaza returned to Paris; seated by my bedside, she described Berlin, the Opera, the concerts, the museums to me. She had put on weight and got some colour in her cheeks: Stépha and Pradelle were struck, as I was, by her metamorphosis. I told her that in October I had been upset by her reserve; she assured me gaily that she had turned over a new leaf. Not only had many of her ideas changed, but instead of meditating on death and aspiring to the life of a nun she was bursting with a new vitality. She was hoping that her sister’s departure would make existence much easier for her. Yet she lamented Lili’s fate: ‘It’s your last chancel’ Madame Mabille had told her. Lili had run to seek advice from all her friends. ‘Accept him,’ all the resigned young married women and the spinsters who couldn’t get a husband had told her. Zaza’s heart sank whenever she heard the two fiancés talking together. Yet without quite knowing why, she was now certain that no such future lay in store for her. For the moment, she felt she wanted to work seriously at her violin, to read a lot and extend her cultural background; she was thinking of doing a translation of a novel by Stefan Zweig. Her mother didn’t dare deprive her too abruptly of her new-found freedom; she gave her permission to go out two or three times in the evening with me. We went to see the Russian Ballet in Prince Igor. We saw Al Jolson in The Jaɀɀ Singer, the first talking film, and attended a meeting organized by the ‘Effort’ group where films by Germaine Dulac were shown: afterwards there was a lively debate on pure cinema and talking films. Often in the afternoons while I was working at the Nationale I would feel a gloved hand on my shoulder: Zaza would smile down at me from under her pink felt cloche and we would go for a coffee or take a walk. Unfortunately she left for Bayonne, where for a whole month she kept a sick cousin company.

  I missed her very much. The newspapers were saying that such severe cold had not been known in Paris for the last fifteen years; there were ice-floes bumping down the Seine; I no longer went out walking, and I worked too hard instead. I was finishing for a professor called Laporte a dissertation for my diploma on Hume and Kant; from nine in the morning till six in the evening I was glued to my desk at the Nationale: I hardly took half an hour off for a sandwich; sometimes I
would half-doze in the afternoons, and sometimes I even fell sound asleep. In the evenings, at home, I tried to read: Goethe, Cervantes, Chekhov, Strindberg. But I had headaches. I sometimes wanted to weep for weariness. And philosophy, at least as it was taught at the Sorbonne, was not at all comforting. Bréhier gave excellent lectures on the Stoics; but Brunschvig kept repeating himself; Laporte pulled every system except Hume’s to pieces. He was the youngest of our professors; he had a little moustache, wore white spats, and followed women in the street: once he had accosted one of his own students by mistake. He handed me back my dissertation with a fairly good mark and some ironic comments: I had made the mistake of preferring Kant to Hume. He invited me to his home, in a fine apartment on the avenue Bosquet, to talk to me about my work. ‘Great qualities; but very antipathetic. Style obscure; a false profundity: when one thinks of what one has to say in philosophy!’ He considered all his colleagues one by one, particularly Brunschvig, then all the old masters. The philosophers of antiquity? They were stupid fools. Spinoza? A monster. Kant? An impostor. That left only Hume. I objected that Hume didn’t solve any of the practical problems: he shrugged his shoulders: ‘There are no practical problems.’ No. One must simply look upon philosophy as an amusement, and one had the right to prefer other forms of entertainment. ‘So that after all it’s all a matter of convention!’ I suggested. ‘Ah, no Mademoiselle, now you’re exaggerating,’ he countered with sudden indignation. ‘I know,’ he added, ‘that scepticism isn’t fashionable. All right: go and find yourself a more optimistic doctrine than mine.’ He accompanied me to the door: ‘Delighted you came! You’re bound to get through the examination,’ he concluded, with an air of distaste. His attitude was probably healthier but less comforting than the vaticinations of Jean Baruzi.