And so the picture I have of myself round about the years of discretion is of a well-behaved little girl, happy and somewhat self-opinionated. I remember one or two things which do not fit into this portrait and lead me to suppose that it wouldn’t have taken very much to upset my self-assurance. When I was eight, I was no longer as hale and hearty as I had been when younger, but had become sickly and timorous. During the classes in gymnastics which I have talked about, I was togged out in a horrid skimpy pair of tights, and I had overheard one of my aunts saying to Mama: ‘She looks like a little monkey.’ Towards the end of the course, the teacher made me join a large mixed class, a group of boys and girls accompanied by a governess. The girls wore pale blue jersey costumes, with short skirts, elegantly pleated; their shining hair, their voices, their manners, everything about them was impeccable. Yet they ran and jumped and laughed and somersaulted with the freedom and daring which I had always associated with street-urchins. I suddenly felt I was clumsy, ugly, a milksop: a little monkey; that was certainly how those children must have looked upon me; they despised me; even worse, they ignored me. I was the helpless witness of their triumph and of my own extinction.
A few months later, a friend of my parents, whose children I didn’t care for very much, took me with them to Villers-sur-Mer. It was the first time I had been away from my sister and I felt mutilated. I found the sea boring; the baths filled me with horror: the water took my breath away; I was terrified. One morning I lay weeping in my bed. Madame Rollin, in some embarrassment, took me on her knees and asked me why I was crying; it seemed to me that we were both acting in a play, and I didn’t know my lines: no, no one had been bullying me, everyone was very nice. The truth was that, separated from my family, deprived of those affections which assured me of my personal worth, cut off from the familiar routine which defined my place in the world, I no longer knew where I was, nor what my purpose was here on earth. I needed to be confined within a framework whose rigidity would justify my existence. I realized this, because I was afraid of changes. But I suffered neither bereavement nor removal from familiar surroundings, and that is one of the reasons why I persisted so long in my childish pretensions.
But my equanimity was sadly disturbed during the last year of the war.
It was bitterly cold that winter and coal was unobtainable; in our ill-heated apartment I would vainly press my chilblained fingers on the tepid radiator. The period of restrictions had begun. Bread was grey, or else suspiciously white. Instead of hot chocolate in the mornings we had insipid, watery soups. My mother used to knock up omelettes without eggs and cook up ‘afters’ with margarine and saccharine, as there was very little sugar; she dished up chilled beef, horse-meat steaks, and dreary vegetables: ‘Chinese’ and ‘Jerusalem’ artichokes, ‘Swiss’ chard and other obscure members of the beet, turnip, and parsnip families. To make the wine pan out, Aunt Lili fabricated an abominable fermented beverage from figs, which was known as ‘figgy-wiggy’. Meals lost all their old gaiety. The sirens often started wailing during the night; street lamps would go out and windows would be blacked-out; we would hear people running and the irritable voice of the air-raid warden, Monsieur Dardelle, crying: ‘Put that light out!’ My mother made us go down to the cellar once or twice; but as my father obstinately refused to leave his bed, she, too, finally decided not to bother. A number of tenants from the upper storeys used to come and take shelter in our hall; we put out armchairs for them in which they fitfully dozed. Sometimes friends of our parents, held up by the raid, would prolong a bridge party into the small hours of the morning. I enjoyed all this disorder, with the silent city lying behind the blacked-out windows suddenly coming to life again after the ‘all clear’. The annoying thing was that my grandparents, who had a fifth-floor flat near the Lion de Belfort, took the alerts seriously; they used to rush down to the cellar, and the next morning we had to go and make sure they were safe and sound. At the first boom from Big Bertha, grandpapa, convinced that the Germans were about to arrive at any moment, dispatched his wife and daughter to Charité-sur-Loire: when the fatal moment came, he himself was to fly on foot to Longjumeau. Grandmama, exhausted by her husband’s panic-stricken activity, fell ill. She had to be brought back to Paris for medical attention: but as she would no longer have been able to leave her fifth-floor flat during a bombardment, she was installed in our apartment. When she arrived, accompanied by a nurse, her flushed cheeks and empty stare frightened me: she could not speak and did not recognize me. She was given my room, and Louise, my sister, and I camped out in the drawing-room. Aunt Lili and grandpapa took their meals with us. Grandpapa, in his booming voice, would prophesy disaster or else would announce that he’d had a sudden stroke of good fortune. His catastrophism was in fact paralleled by an extravagant optimism. He had large banking interests in Verdun, and his speculations had ended in bankruptcy in which his capital and that of a good number of his clients had been swallowed up. But he still continued to have the utmost confidence in his lucky star and in his financial acumen. At the moment, he was running a boot and shoe factory which, thanks to army orders, was going fairly well; but this modest enterprise did not satisfy his passion for making business deals, considering offers, and thinking up new ways of getting rich quick. Unfortunately for him, he could no longer play about with adequate sums of money without the consent of his wife and children: he used to try to enlist my father’s support. One day grandpapa brought him a small gold bar which an alchemist had made from a lump of lead before his very eyes: the secret of this astounding process was to make millionaires of us all, if only we would guarantee an advance to the inventor. Papa gave a disbelieving smile, grandpapa went purple in the face, Mama and Aunt Lili took sides, and everybody started shouting. This sort of scene often happened. Overwrought, Louise and Mama quickly ‘got on their high horse’; they would ‘have words’; it even used to come to the point where Mama quarrelled with Papa; she would scold my sister and me and box our ears for the slightest thing. But I’d grown a little older: I was no longer five years old, and the days were past when a row between my parents seemed to be the end of the world; nor did I fail to distinguish between impatience and injustice. All the same, at night, when through the glass door separating the dining-room from the drawing-room I heard the cries of hatred and anger, I hid my head under the bedclothes, and my heart would grow heavy. I would think of the past as a long-lost paradise. Would we ever find it again? The world no longer seemed the safe place I had once thought it to be.
It was my gradually developing powers of imagination that made the world a darker place. Through books, communiqués, and the conversations I heard, the full horror of the war was becoming clear to me: the cold, the mud, the terror, the blood, the pain, the agonies of death. We had lost friends and cousins at the front. Despite the promises of heaven, I used to choke with dread whenever I thought of mortal death which separates for ever all those who love one another. People said sometimes in front of my sister and myself: ‘They are lucky to be children! They don’t realize. . . .’ But deep inside I would be shouting: ‘Grown-ups don’t understand anything at all about us!’ Sometimes I would feel overwhelmed by something so bitter and so very definite that no one, I was sure, could ever have known distress worse than mine. Why should there be so much suffering? I would ask myself. At La Grillière, German prisoners and a young Belgian refugee who had been excused army service on the grounds of obesity supped their broth in the kitchen side by side with French farm labourers: they all got on very well together. After all, the Germans were human beings; they, too, could be wounded and bleed to death. Why should things be like this? I began praying desperately for an end to our misfortunes. Peace was to me more important than victory. I was going upstairs with Mama one day, and talking to her: she was telling me that the war would probably be over soon. ‘Oh, yes!’ I cried, ‘let it be over soon! No matter how it ends as long as it’s over soon!’ Mama stopped and gave me a startled look: ‘Don’t you say things like that! Fr
ance must be victorious!’ I felt ashamed, not just of having allowed such an enormity to escape my lips, but even of having thought of it. All the same, I found it hard to admit that an idea or an opinion could be ‘wrong’. Underneath our flat, opposite the peaceful Dôme where Monsieur Dardelle played dominoes, a rowdy café had just opened, called La Rotonde. You could see short-cropped, heavily made-up women going in, and curiously dressed men. ‘It’s a joint for wogs and defeatists,’ declared my father. I asked him what a defeatist was. ‘A bad Frenchman who hopes for the defeat of France,’ he replied. I couldn’t understand: thoughts come and go in our heads after their own fashion; you don’t believe what you do on purpose. But my father’s outraged tones and my mother’s scandalized face left me in no doubt that it doesn’t always do to say aloud those disquieting words which you find yourself whispering below your breath.
My hesitant pacifism did not prevent me from being proud of my parents’ patriotism. Alarmed by the bombs and by Big Bertha, the majority of the pupils in my school left Paris before the end of the academic year. I was left alone in my class with a great silly twelve-year-old girl; we would sit at the big table facing Mademoiselle Gontran; she paid special attention to me. I took particular pleasure in those classes, which were as solemn as public lectures and as intimate as private lessons. One day, when I arrived with my sister and Mama at the school, we found the building empty: everyone had dashed dowṅ into the cellars. We were highly amused. Our own courage and spirit in the face of danger showed plainly that we were beings apart.
Grandmama recovered her wits and went back to her own house. During the holidays and when we returned to school I heard a lot about two traitors who had tried to betray France to Germany: Malvy and Caillaux. They should have been shot but weren’t; anyhow, their plans were foiled. On the 11th of November I was practising the piano under Mama’s supervision when the bells rang out for the Armistice. Papa put on his civilian clothes again. Mama’s brother died, shortly after being demobilized, of Spanish influenza. But I had hardly known him, and when Mama had dried her tears, happiness returned – for me at any rate.
*
At home, nothing was ever wasted: not a crust, not a wafer of soap, not a twist of string; free tickets and opportunities for free meals were always seized with avidity. My sister and I wore our clothes until they were threadbare, and even after that. My mother never wasted a second; she would knit while she was reading; when she talked to my father or to friends she would be sewing, patching, or embroidering; when she travelled by tram or by the Métro she would crochet miles of ‘tatting’ with which she ornamented our petticoats. In the evenings, she did her accounts; for years, every penny that passed through her hands had been noted down in a big black ledger. I used to think that not only in my own family but everywhere time and money were so exactly measured that they had to be distributed with the greatest economy and strictness: this idea appealed to me, because I wanted to see a world free from all irregularities. Poupette and I often used to play at being explorers lost in a desert or castaways on a desert island; or, in a besieged town, we would be gallant defenders dying of starvation: we used to perform miracles of ingenuity in order to draw the maximum of profit from our most infinitesimal resources; it was one of our favourite themes in our play. Everything must be put to use: I felt I must carry out this command to the letter. In the little notebooks in which I used to write down each week a résumé of my lessons, I began to cover every page with minute script, taking care not to leave the smallest blank space anywhere. My teachers were puzzled: they asked my mother if I had a mean streak. I got over that mania fairly quickly: gratuitous economy is a contradiction in terms, and it isn’t interesting or amusing. But I remained convinced that one must make use of everything, and of one’s self, to the utmost. At La Grillière there were often unoccupied moments before and after meals or at the end of Mass; I would fret and fidget: ‘Can’t that child sit still for just one minute?’ my Uncle Maurice would mutter impatiently. My parents and I used to laugh at him when he talked that way: my father and mother condemned idleness. I found it all the more reprehensible because it bored me so. Duty therefore was mixed with pleasure. That is why, at this period, my existence was such a happy one: I simply had to do just as I liked, and everyone was delighted with me.
The Cours Désir – or, to give it its full name, the Adeline Désir Institute – had boarders, day-boarders, special day-pupils, and others who, like myself, simply followed the lessons; twice a week there were the General Culture classes, which lasted for two hours; I took as extras English, the piano, and the catechism. My neophyte awe had not abated: the moment Mademoiselle entered the classroom, every second became holy. Our teachers didn’t tell us anything wildly exciting; we would recite our lessons, and they would correct our exercises; but I asked for nothing more than that my existence should be publicly sanctioned by them. My merits were inscribed in a register which perpetuated their memory. I had to surpass myself all the time, or at least to equal my previous achievement. There was always a fresh start to be made; to have failed would have filled me with consternation, and victory exalted me. These glittering moments shone like beacons down the year: each day was leading me further on. I felt sorry for grown-ups whose uneventful weeks are feebly irradiated by the dullness of Sundays. To live without expecting anything seemed to me frightful.
I expected, and I was expected. I was responding ceaselessly to a necessity which spared me from asking: why am I here? Seated at Papa’s desk, doing an English translation or copying out an essay, I was occupying my rightful place on earth and doing what I should be doing. The formidable array of ash-trays, ink-stands, paper-knives, pens, and pencils scattered round the pink blotting-pad played their own parts in that unalterable necessity, which informed my entire world, and the world itself. From my study armchair I listened to the harmony of the spheres.
But I did not carry out all my tasks with the same eagerness. My wish to conform had not entirely killed in me certain desires and repulsions. At La Grillière, whenever Aunt Hélène served pumpkin pie, I would rush from the table in tears rather than touch it; neither threats nor thumpings could persuade me to eat cheese. I was obstinate in other, more important matters. I couldn’t tolerate being bored: my boredom soon turned to real distress of mind; that is why, as I have remarked, I detested idleness; but tasks which paralysed my body without occupying my mind left me with the same feeling of emptiness. Grandmama succeeded in interesting me in tapestry work and embroidery; it was a question of accommodating the wool or cotton to a printed pattern on canvas, and this task used to keep me fairly well occupied; I cobbled up a dozen antimacassars and covered one of the chairs in my room with hideous tapestry. But I always made a mess of hems, ‘whipped’ seams, darning and mending, scallops, buttonhole and cross-stitch, raised satin-stitch and knotted-bar work. In order to stimulate my interest, Mademoiselle Fayet told me a little story: an eligible young man was being regaled with the list of a certain young lady’s talents; she was a musician, and well-read, and gifted with hundreds of attractive qualities. ‘Can she sew?’ he inquired. Saving the respect I owed to my teacher, I found it quite ridiculous that I should be expected to conform to the requirements of an unknown young man. My skill with the needle did not improve. In every aspect of learning and culture, the more eager I was to learn, the more tiresome did I find the mechanics of study. When I opened my English text books, I seemed to be setting out on a journey, and I studied them with passionate absorption; but I could never take the trouble to acquire a correct accent. I enjoyed sight-reading a sonatina: but I could never bring myself to learn one by heart; my scales and Czerny exercises were always a scramble, so that in the pianoforte examinations I was always near the bottom. In solfeggio and musical theory I was hopeless: I sang either sharp or flat, and was a wretched failure in musical dictation. My handwriting was so shapeless that I had to have private lessons, which did not make any great improvement. If I had to trace the course o
f a river or the outline of a country, I was so clumsy that I was absolved from all blame for the messes I made. This characteristic was to remain with me all my life. I bungled all practical jobs and I was never any good at work requiring finicky precision.
It was not without some vexation that I became aware of my deficiencies; I should have liked to excel in everything. But they were too deeply rooted in my nature to be amenable to ephemeral spurts of will-power. As soon as I was able to think for myself, I found myself possessed of infinite power, and yet circumscribed by absurd limitations. When I was asleep, the earth disappeared; it had need of me in order to be seen, discovered, and understood; I was, I felt, charged with a mission which I carried out with pride; but I did not assume that my imperfect body could have any part in it: on the contrary, as soon as my physical activities intervened, things tended to go wrong. Doubtless in order to express the full truth of any piece of music it was necessary to play it ‘with expression’, and not to massacre it: but in any case, it would never, under my stumbling fingers, attain the fullest pitch of perfection, so why should I wear myself out trying to master it ? Why should I want to develop capabilities which would always remain fatally limited, and have only a relative importance in my life? The modest results of so much effort repelled me, for I had only to look, to read, and to think in order to reach the absolute. When I translated an English text, I discovered in it the one, complete, universal meaning, whereas the th sound was only one modulation among millions of others in my mouth: I really couldn’t bother my head about that. The urgency of my self-appointed task debarred me from wasting time on such futilities: there were so many things to be learned! I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars. When I was compelled to do tiresome exercises, my mind cried out at the barren waste of my gifts, and I used to think that I was losing precious time. I was frustrated and filled with guilt: I got through such impositions as quickly as possible, bashing them out on the rocks of my impatience.