Mama helped me with my homework, and heard my lessons with the utmost care. I loved learning. The gospel story seemed to me much more amusing than Perrault’s fairy-tales because the miracles it related had really happened. The maps in my atlas enchanted me. I was moved by the solitude of islands, by the boldness of promontories, by the fragility of those tenuous strips of land that connect peninsulas to continents. I was to experience that ecstasy again when I was grown-up and saw from an aeroplane the islands of Corsica and Sardinia etched on the blue of the Mediterranean, and when, at Kolkhis, illumined by a real sun, I saw an ideal isthmus choked between two seas. The world of severe and unimaginable shapes, of stories firmly carved in the marble of the centuries, was an album of brilliantly coloured pictures that I looked at with rapturous delight.
If I took so much pleasure in study, it was perhaps because my daily life no longer satisfied me. I lived in Paris, in man-made surroundings in which everything had been completely domesticated; streets, houses, tramways, street lamps, kitchen utensils: things, as flat as pure concepts, were reduced to their material functions. The Luxembourg Gardens with its clumps of untouchable shrubs and acres of forbidden lawns was to me no more than a common playground. Sometimes a rent in the canvas gave a glimpse, beyond the surface paint, of confused, gloomy depths. The tunnels of the underground railway stretched infinitely away towards the earth’s secret core. In the boulevard Montparnasse, on the site where the Coupole now stands, was the Juglar coal depot out of which came black-faced men with coal sacks on their heads; among the piles of coke and anthracite, like wisps of charred paper in the sooty limbo of a chimney, those creatures whom God had cast out of the kingdom of light could be seen creeping about their daily tasks. But I had no hold on them. In the police state in which I was imprisoned, few things surprised me, because I did not know where the power of man began and ended. The aeroplanes and dirigibles that from time to time moved across the skies of Paris were a source of much greater wonder to adults than they were to me. Distractions were few. My parents took me to see the king and queen of England on their processional route along the Champs-Élysées; I attended some of the Lenten processions, and later the funeral of Gallieni. I followed in the wake of processions and visited the resting-places of great men. I hardly ever went to the circus, and very rarely to a Punch and Judy show. I had a few toys that amused me, but only one or two that I really loved. I enjoyed very much squinting through the lenses of a stereoscopic toy which transformed two photographic plates into a single, three-dimensional scene. I loved to rotate the strip of pictures in my kineoscope and watch the motionless horse begin to gallop. I was given tiny books which could be turned into moving pictures by flicking their pages: the little girl began to jump, the boxer to box. Shadow theatres, magic lanterns: what interested me in all these optical illusions was that they were the product of my own eyes, like the mirages which haunt the traveller in the desert. Altogether, the scanty resources of my city childhood could not compete with the riches to be found in books.
Everything was different when I left the city and was transported among animals and plants and faced with the infinite variety of nature.
We used to spend the summers in the ancient province of Limousin, with my Papa’s family. My grandfather had retired to an estate that had been bought by his father in the neighbourhood of Uzerche. He sported white side-whiskers, a black-peaked cap, and the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur. He used to hum to himself all day long. He told me the names of the trees, the flowers, and the birds. Peacocks displayed their tails in front of the house, which was covered with wistaria and begonia; in the aviary, I admired the scarlet-headed cardinal tanagers and the golden pheasants. The stream – we called it ‘the English river’ – was barred by artificial waterfalls and starred with drifting water lilies among which goldfish swam. Its waters surrounded a tiny island linked to the mainland by two sets of stepping-stones. There were cedars, wellingtonias, purple beeches, Japanese dwarf trees, weeping willows, magnolias, monkey-puzzles, deciduous and evergreen varieties, shrubberies, thickets, and coverts: the park, surrounded by a white fence, was not very big, but its diversity was such that I felt I could never explore it completely. We used to leave there in the middle of the holidays and go to stay with Papa’s sister who had married one of the local gentry; they had two children. They would come to fetch us in the brake, which was drawn by four horses. After a family lunch, we would arrange ourselves on the blue leather-covered seats that smelt of dust and sun and straw. My uncle would lead the way on horseback. After a ride of about twenty kilometres, we would arrive at La Grillière. The park, vaster and wilder than my grandfather’s at Meyrignac, but less diverting, surrounded a sinister château flanked with turrets and roofed with slate. Aunt Hélène treated me with complete indifference. Uncle Maurice, moustached, leather-booted, a hunting crop always in his hands, frightened me a little with his sudden alternations of temper and sulky silence. But I liked to play with Robert and Madeleine, who were five and three years older than myself. At my aunt’s, as at my grandfather’s, I was allowed to run freely over the lawns and touch everything. Scratching at the earth, playing with lumps of clay, stroking leaves and flowers, polishing horse-chestnuts, popping seed pods, I was learning things that are never taught by books or official syllabuses. I learnt to recognize the buttercup and the clover, the phlox, the fluorescent blue of the morning glory, the butterfly, the ladybird, the glow-worm, the dew, the spiders’ webs and the strands of gossamer; I learnt that the red of the holly is redder than the cherry laurel or the mountain ash, that autumn blooms the peach and bronzes the leaves, that the sun rises and sets in the sky although you cannot see it moving. The wealth of colours and scents excited me. Everywhere, in the green water of the ponds, in the waving grasses of the fields, under the thorny hedgerows and in the heart of the woods were hidden treasures that I longed to discover.
*
Since I had started going to school, my father had become interested in my progress and my successes, and he was beginning to mean much more in my life. He seemed to me to belong to a rarer species than most men. In that era of beards and moustaches, his clean-shaven face, with its powers of mimicry, was astonishing: his friends said he resembled Rigadin the actor. No one in my circle of acquaintances was nearly as funny, as interesting and as brilliant as he; no one else had read so many books, or knew so much poetry by heart, or could argue with such passion. Standing with his back to the fireplace, he would talk volubly, with lots of gestures; and people listened to him. He was the life and soul of the party at all family reunions: he could recite monologues, or The Monkey, by Zamacoïs, and everybody applauded him. The most unusual thing about him was that during his leisure hours he was an amateur actor: whenever I saw photographs of him in the costume of Pierrot, or disguised as a waiter or a soldier or even as Sarah Bernhardt, I took him to be a kind of magician: wearing a dress and a white apron and with a cap perched on his head, he would open wide his great blue eyes and make me cry with laughter in the role of a simple-minded cook named Rosalie.
Every year my parents spent three weeks at Divonne-les-Bains with a troupe of amateur actors who put on plays at the Casino; they amused the summer visitors and the director of the Grand Hotel gave them free accommodation. In 1914 Louise, my sister and I went to await their arrival at Meyrignac. There we found my Uncle Gaston, who was Papa’s elder brother, my Aunt Marguerite, whose pallor and thinness alarmed me, and my cousin Jeanne, who was a year younger than myself. They lived in Paris, and we often saw one another there. My sister and Jeanne used to submit to my tyranny with good grace. At Meyrignac I would harness them to a little cart and make them trot with me all over the park. I gave them lessons, and drew them into escapades which I prudently never allowed to go very far. One morning we were playing in the woodshed among the fresh sawdust when the alarm bell sounded: war had been declared. I had heard the word for the first time at Lyon the year before. In wartime, I had been told, people kill each
other, and I had wondered: where shall I go and hide? In the course of the year, Papa had explained to me that war means the invasion of one’s country by foreigners, and I began to look askance at the numerous Japanese who in those days used to sell fans and paper lanterns at the street corners. No. Our enemies apparently were the Germans with their pointed helmets who had already robbed us of Alsace and Lorraine and whose grotesque ugliness I discovered in the books of Hansi.
I now knew that in wartime it is only soldiers who kill one another, and I knew enough geography to know that the frontier was a long way from the Limousin. Nobody in our neighbourhood seemed to be alarmed, and so I was not unduly frightened. Papa and Mama arrived out of the blue after having spent forty-eight hours on the train. Orders for the requisitioning of horses and vehicles were nailed to the door of the coach-house, and grandpapa’s horses were taken off to Uzerche. The general agitation, the huge headlines in the Courrier du Centre all excited me; I was always glad when something was going on. I invented games appropriate to the circumstances: I was Poincaré, Jeanne was George V and my sister was the Tsar. We held our conferences under the cedars and cut the Prussians to ribbons with our sabres.
In September, at La Grillière, I learnt how to perform my duty as a loyal daughter of France. I helped Mama to make lint and knitted a balaclava helmet. My Aunt Hélène harnessed the dog-cart and we went to the nearby railway station to distribute apples to tall, beturbaned Indians who gave us handfuls of buckwheat; we took cheese and paste sandwiches to the wounded. The local women, loaded with foodstuffs, made their way along the convoys on the roads. ‘Souvenir! Souvenir!’ they cried; and the soldiers would give them buttons from their greatcoats or empty cartridge cases. One day a woman offered a German prisoner a glass of wine. There were murmurs of disapproval from the other women. ‘Well!’ she said. ‘They’re men, too, like the others.’ The sounds of disapproval grew stronger. Aunt Hélène’s eyes were filled with holy rage. The Boche was a born criminal; he aroused hatred, not indignation: you can’t feel just indignant about the Devil in person. Traitors, spies, and unpatriotic Frenchmen and women sent deliciously scandalized shivers through our virtuous breasts. I stared with studied horror at the woman who was known from then on as the ‘Frau’. In her I beheld at last Evil incarnate.
I embraced with passionate devotion the cause of the righteous. My father, who had been discharged from the Reserve because of heart trouble not long before, found himself called up for active service with the Zouaves. Mama and I went to visit him at Villetaneuse where he was in training; he had let his moustache grow, and under his tarboosh his face had a gravity which made a great impression on me. I should have to show myself worthy of such a brave father. I had already given proof of exemplary patriotism by stamping on a celluloid doll, ‘made in Germany’, which belonged, by the way, to my sister. It was only with great difficulty that I was restrained from throwing out of the window our silver knife-rests, which were branded with the same infamous device. I went round sticking the flags of the Allies in all the flower vases. In my games I was always a valiant Zouave, a heroic daughter of the regiment. I wrote everywhere in coloured chalks: Vive la France! The grown-ups admired my devotion to the cause. ‘Simone is an ardent patriot,’ they would say, with proud smiles. I stored the smiles away in my memory and developed a taste for unstinted praise. I don’t know who it was presented my mother with a length of the ‘sky blue’ cloth from which officers’ uniforms are made; a tailor made it up into coats for my sister and myself that were exact copies of military greatcoats. ‘You see: there’s even a bayonet frog!’ my mother exclaimed to her admiring or astonished friends. No other child wore a garment as original and as patriotic as mine: I felt I was a dedicated person.
It doesn’t take much for a child to become the sedulous ape; I had always been willing to show off: but I refused to play the parts expected of me in false situations concocted by adults for their own amusement. Now that I was too old to lend myself to their caresses, their fondlings, and their cajoleries, I began to feel ever more keenly in need of their approbation. They suggested a part that was easy to play and in which I felt I should be very well cast: I seized the opportunity with both hands. In my sky-blue greatcoat, I rattled a collecting box outside the door of a Franco-Belgian institution on the grand boulevard which was run by a friend of my mother. ‘Remember the poor little Belgian refugees!’ I piped. Coins rained into my flower-trimmed basket and the smiles of the passers-by assured me that I was an adorable little patriot. But one woman all in black eyed me from head to foot and said: ‘And what about the poor little French refugees?’ I was quite disconcerted. Brave little Belgians were our heroic allies; but if one was to be a real patriot one should put the French first: I felt I had been beaten on my own ground. When, at the end of the day, I went back to the Franco-Belgian institution, I was fulsomely congratulated. ‘Now I’ll be able to pay for coal!’ carolled the lady in charge. ‘But the money is for the poor little Belgian refugees!’ I howled. I had difficulty in admitting that their interests might overlap; I had imagined much more spectacular charities. To add insult to injury, Mademoiselle Fevrier, having kept for herself half of what I had collected, pretended to hand over the full amount to a nurse who dutifully cried: ‘Twelve francs! That’s simply wonderful!’ I fell into a terrible rage. I wasn’t being taken at my true value; I had thought I was the star of the proceedings, and I’d only been an accessory: I’d been cheated.
Nevertheless I retained a rather glorious memory of that afternoon, and I persevered in my good deeds. I walked in procession with other little girls in the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, singing and waving the sacred banner of St Denis. I offered up litanies and endlessly told my beads as special intentions for our dear, brave lads at the front. I repeated all the slogans and observed all the rules. I used to read in the Métro and in the trams: ‘Careless talk costs lives! Walls have ears!’ People talked about spies who stuck needles into women’s behinds and about others who distributed poisoned sweets among the children. I played for safety all the way. One day, as I was coming out of school, the mother of one of my schoolmates offered me a bag of jujubes; I refused them; she smelt heavily of scent, her lips were made-up, she wore huge rings, and worst of all she was called Madame Malin – the Evil One! I didn’t really believe that her sweets would poison me, but I thought it was a good thing to practise being suspicious.
One part of my school had been fitted out as a hospital. In the corridor, an edifying pharmaceutical odour mingled with the smell of floor polish. Under their white head-dresses, neatly spotted with blood, our teachers looked like saints and I was deeply moved when they kissed my forehead. A little refugee girl from the north was put in our class; the evacuation had seriously deranged her mind; she stammered and had nervous tics. I was always being told about the little refugees and I wanted to find some way of relieving their sufferings. I hit on the idea of putting in a box all the nice things I was given to eat: when it was full of stale cake and slightly mouldy chocolate and dry prunes, Mama helped me to wrap it up nicely and I took it to the ladies of mercy. They took care not to congratulate me too effusively, but I couldn’t help overhearing some very flattering whispers.
My feet were well set now upon the path of virtue; no more capricious rages; it had been explained to me that if I were good and pious God would save France. When the chaplain at the Cours Désir took me in hand I became an exemplary little girl. He was young, pale, infinitely suave. He taught me my catechism, and introduced me to the sweet delights of confession. I knelt down before him in a little chapel and replied to his questions and promptings with dramatic fervour. I can’t think what I could have told him, but, in the presence of my sister, who told me about it later, he congratulated Mama upon the radiant beauty of my soul. I fell in love with this soul which I imagined to be white and shining like the host itself, exposed in a silver monstrance. I piled up good deeds. Abbé Martin distributed to us at the beginning of Advent pictures re
presenting the Infant Jesus: whenever we did a good deed, we had to prick with a pin the outline of the figure, which was drawn in violet ink. On Christmas Day, we had to go and place our pictures round the crib at the end of the church, where the light played through the pin-prick holes. I invented every kind of mortification, sacrifice, and edifying behaviour in order that my picture might be richly bedight with pinpricks. These goings-on irritated Louise. But Mama and my teachers encouraged me along the straight and narrow path. I joined a children’s confraternity known as ‘The Angels of the Passion’. This gave me the right to wear a scapular, and it was my duty to meditate upon the seven sorrows of Our Lady. In accordance with the recent instruction of Pius X, I prepared my communion in private; I went into retreat. I didn’t quite understand why the Pharisees (pharisiens), whose name was so disturbingly like that of the inhabitants of Paris, had been so much against Jesus, but I went all the way with Him in His sufferings. Dressed in white tulle with my head covered with a veil of Irish lace, I swallowed my first consecrated wafer. From then on, Mama took me three times a week to communion at Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In the grey light of early morning, I liked to hear the sound of our feet on the flagged floor of the church. Sniffing the fragrance of incense, my eyes watering with the reek of candles, I found it sweet to kneel at the foot of the cross and dream vaguely of the cup of hot chocolate awaiting me when we got back home.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Page 4
