About once a year we went to the Châtelet theatre. Alphonse Deville, the city councillor to whom my father had been secretary in the days when they had both been lawyers, used to place at our disposal the box reserved for members of the city council. So I saw La Course au bonheur and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, and other spectacular productions. I loved the red curtain, the lights, the scenery, and the flower ballet; but the adventures taking place on the stage were of only minor interest to me. The actors were too real, and at the same time not real enough. The most sumptuous finery had not an iota of the brilliance of a carbuncle in a fairy-tale. I used to clap my hands and gasp with wonder, but in my heart of hearts I preferred a quiet afternoon alone with my books.
As for the cinema, my parents looked upon it only as a vulgar entertainment. They thought Charlie Chaplin was very childish, even for children. However, a friend of my father’s having procured for us an invitation to see a private showing of a film, we went one morning to see L’Ami Fritz: everyone agreed that the film was charming. A few weeks later we saw, under the same privileged conditions, Le Roi de Camargue. The hero, engaged to a sweet blonde heroine, a simple peasant girl, was riding along the edge of the sea; he met a naked gipsy with smouldering eyes who slapped his horse’s neck; for a long while they stared at one another in amazement; later he went into a little house with her in the middle of the marshes. At this point I noticed my mother and grandmother exchanging looks of alarm; in the end I gathered from their distraught mien that this story was not suitable for my tender years: but I couldn’t quite understand why. While the blonde heroine was running desperately over the marshes, to be swallowed up by them in the end, I did not realize that the most frightful of all sins was being committed between the hero and the lovely dark gipsy. But her proud self-abandon had made no impression on me at all. In The Golden Legend and in the tales of Canon Schmid I had come across even more voluptuously naked scenes. But from then on, we did not go to the cinema.
I didn’t mind; I had my books, my games, and, all around me, subjects more worthy of my interest and contemplation than a lot of flat pictures: men and women, in flesh and blood. Contrary to inanimate objects, human beings, endowed with minds, did not worry me at all: they were just like myself. At that hour of the evening when the fronts of houses become transparent, I would watch the lighted windows. I never saw anything out of the ordinary; but if I caught sight of a child sitting reading at a table, I would be deeply moved to see my own life displayed as it were on a lighted stage. A woman would be setting the table, a couple would be talking: played at a distance, illuminated by chandeliers or hanging lamps, these familiar scenes, to my mind, rivalled the brilliance of the spectacles at the Châtelet. I didn’t feel shut out; I had the feeling that a single theme was being interpreted by a great diversity of actors in a great diversity of settings. Repeated to infinity from building to building, from city to city, my existence had a part in all its innumerable representations; it comprised the entire universe.
In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by. I knew too little of the habits of adults to be able to guess where they were going in such a hurry, or what the hopes and fears were that drove them along. But their faces, their appearance, and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to a fifth-floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: ‘But I won’t be able to see the people in the street any more! ‘I was being cut off from life, condemned to exile. When we were in the country, I didn’t mind being relegated to a rustic hermitage: I was overwhelmed by the wonders of Nature. But in Paris I was hungry for human company; the essence of a city is in its inhabitants: cut off from any more intimate contact, I had to be able to see them at least. Already I was beginning to want to escape from the narrow circle in which I was confined. A way of walking, a gesture, a smile would suddenly touch me deeply; I should have liked to run after the stranger turning the corner and whom I might never see again. One afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens a big girl in an apple-green coat and skirt was playing with some children; they were skipping; she had rosy cheeks and a gentle, radiant smile. That evening, I told my sister: ‘I know what love is!’ I had had a glimpse of something new. My father, my mother, my sister, and all those I loved were mine already. I sensed for the first time that one can be touched to the very heart of one’s being by a radiance from outside.
These brief impulses didn’t prevent me from feeling firmly rooted in my own environment. Curious about others, I never dreamt that my fate might be different from what it was. Above all, I felt no disappointment at being a girl. As I have already said, I did not lose myself in vain desires but happily accepted whatever was given. Besides, I could see no positive reason for considering that I’d been given a hard deal.
I had no brother; there were no comparisons to make which would have revealed to me that certain liberties were not permitted me on the grounds of my sex; I attributed the restraints that were put upon me to my age. Being a child filled me with passionate resentment; my feminine gender, never. The boys I knew were in no way remarkable. The brightest one was little René, who, as a special favour, had been allowed to start school among the girls at the Cours Désir, and I always got better marks than he did. In the sight of God, my soul was no less precious than that of His little boys: why, then, should I be envious of them?
With regard to the grown-ups, my experience was rather ambiguous. In certain respects Papa, grandpapa, and my uncles appeared to me to be superior to their wives. But in my everyday life, it was Louise, Mama, grandmama, and my aunts who played the leading roles. Madame de Ségur and Zénaïde Fleuriot took children as their heroes, with grown-ups in subordinate parts; mothers had quite a prominent place in their books, while the fathers didn’t have a look-in. As for myself, I thought of grown-ups essentially in their relationship to childhood: from this point of view, my sex assured my pre-eminence. In all my games, my day-dreams, and my plans for the future I never changed myself into a man; all my imagination was devoted to the fulfilment of my destiny as a woman.
I made this destiny suit my own wishes. I don’t know why, but organic phenomena very soon ceased to interest me. When we were in the country, I helped Madeleine to feed her rabbits and her hens, but these tasks soon bored me and I cared very little for the softness of fur or feather. I have never liked animals. I found red-faced, wrinkled, milky-eyed babies a great nuisance. Whenever I dressed up as a nurse, it was to go and bring in the wounded from a battlefield; but I never nursed them. One day at Meyrignac I administered, with a rubber bulb, a simulated rectal injection to my cousin Jeanne, whose smiling passivity was an incitement to sadism: but I cannot remember any other similar event. When we played games, I accepted the role of mother only if I were allowed to disregard its nursing aspects. Despising other girls who played with their dolls in what seemed to us a silly way, my sister and I had own particular way of treating our dolls; they could speak and reason, they lived at the same rate, and in the same rhythm as ourselves, growing older by twenty-four hours every day: they were our doubles. In reality, I was more inquisitive than methodical, more impulsive than finicky; but I revelled in schizophrenic daydreams of strictness and economy: I made use of Blondine to satisfy this mania. As the perfect mother of an exemplary little girl, providing her with an ideal education from which she drew the maximum of profit, I made good the shortcomings of my daily existence under the guise of necessity. I accepted the discreet collaboration of my sister whom I high-handedly assisted in the bringing-up of her own children. But I refused to allow a man to come between me and my maternal responsibilities: our husbands were always abroad. In real life, I knew, things were quite different: the mother of a family is always flanked by her mate; she is overburdened with a thousand tiresome ta
sks. Whenever I thought of my own future, this servitude seemed to me so burdensome that I decided I wouldn’t have any children; the important thing for me was to be able to form minds and mould characters: I shall be a teacher, I thought.
Nevertheless, teaching, at least as it was practised by my own teachers, did not seem to me to give the teacher a sufficiently exclusive hold over the pupil; my pupil would belong to me completely. I should plan his day down to the minutest detail, in order to eliminate all chance disturbances; with ingenious precision combining occupation and distraction, I should exploit every moment without wasting a single one. I could see only one way of implementing this plan successfully: I should have to become a governess in a family. My parents threw up their hands in horror. But I was unable to imagine that someone charged with the education of the young could be a menial. When I considered the progress made by my sister under my tutelage, I knew the supreme happiness of having changed nothing into something; I could not conceive of any more lofty purpose in my future life than to mould a human being. It mustn’t be just anyone, of course. I realize now that it was my own image I was projecting on my future creation, just as I had done on my doll Blondine. This was the meaning behind my vocation: when I was grown-up, I would take my own childhood in hand again and make of it a faultless work of art. I saw myself as the basis of my own apotheosis.
And so, in the present as well as in the future, I proudly imagined myself reigning alone over my own life. However, religion, history, and mythology suggested other personages I might play. I often imagined that I was Mary Magdalene, and that I was drying Christ’s feet with my long hair. The majority of real or legendary heroines – Saint Blandine, Joan of Arc, Griselda, Geneviève de Brabant – only attained to bliss and glory in this world or in the next after enduring painful sufferings inflicted on them by males. I willingly cast myself in the role of victim. Sometimes I laid stress upon her spiritual triumphs: the torturer was only an insignificant intermediary between the martyr and her crown. My sister and I set ourselves endurance tests: we would pinch each other with the sugar-tongs, or flay each other with the sticks of our little flags; you had to die rather than recant, but I always cheated shamelessly, for I always expired at the first taste of the rod but I considered that my sister was still alive until she had recanted. At times I was a nun confined in a cell, confounding my jailer by singing hymns and psalms. I converted the passivity to which my sex had condemned me into active defiance. But often I found myself revelling in the delights of misfortune and humiliation. My piety disposed me towards masochism; prostrate before a blond young god, or, in the dark of the confessional with suave young Abbé Martin, I would enjoy the most exquisite transports: the tears would pour down my cheeks and I would swoon away in the arms of angels. I would whip up these emotions to the point of paroxysm when, garbing myself in the blood-stained shift of Saint Blandine, I offered myself up to the lions’ claws and to the eyes of the crowd. Or else, taking my cue from Griselda and Geneviève de Brabant, I was inspired to put myself inside the skin of a persecuted wife; my sister, always forced to be Bluebeard or some other tyrant, would cruelly banish me from his palace, and I would be lost in primeval forests until the day dawned when my innocence was established, shining forth like a good deed in a naughty world. Sometimes, changing my script, I would imagine that I was guilty of some mysterious crime, and I would cast myself down, thrillingly repentant, at the feet of a pure, terrible, and handsome man. Vanquished by my remorse, my abjection, and my love, my judge would lay a gentle hand upon my bended head, and I would feel myself swoon with emotion. Certain of my fantasies would not bear the light of day; I had to indulge them in secret. I was always extraordinarily moved by the fate of that captive king whom an oriental tyrant used as a mounting-block; from time to time, trembling, half-naked, I would substitute myself for the royal slave and feel the tyrant’s sharp spurs riding down my spine.
The idea of nakedness came into these incantations more or less clearly. The tom tunic of Saint Blandine revealed the whiteness of her thighs; Saint Geneviève had nothing but her long hair to protect her modesty. I had never seen grown-ups other than hermetically clad from top to toe; during my bath-time, Louise scrubbed me with such vehemence that self-appraisal was impossible; besides, I had been taught never to look at my naked body, and I had to contrive to change my underwear without uncovering myself completely. In our universe, the flesh had no right to exist. And yet I had known the softness of my mother’s arms; in the neck of certain ladies’ dresses I could see the beginning of a darkening cleft which both embarrassed and attracted me. I was not ingenious enough to be able to re-create those pleasurable sensations I had accidentally discovered during my gymnastic lessons; but from time to time the soft touch of downy flesh against my own, or a hand gently stroking my neck, made me shiver with tender anticipation. Too innocent to invent a caress, I had to resort to a subterfuge. Taking the image of the man–mounting-block as my pattern, I would effect the metamorphosis of the human body into an inanimate object. I used to carry it out on myself whenever I cast myself down at the feet of a sovereign lord and master. In order to absolve me, he would lay upon my bended head his judge’s hand: and when I begged for pardon, I experienced sensual delight. But whenever I abandoned myself to these delicious downfalls, I never for one moment forgot that it was just a game. In reality I refused to submit to anybody: I was, and I would always remain, my own master.
I even tended to look upon myself, at least from the childhood level, as the One and Only. Of a sociable disposition, I took pleasure in associating with certain little girls of my acquaintance. We used to have games of Pope Joan or Lotto, and we would exchange books. But in general I hadn’t the slightest respect for any of my little friends, whether boys or girls. I demanded that our play should be in dead earnest, with precise observance of all the rules, and that victory should be bitterly fought for and hardly won; my sister was equal to these exigencies; but the usually ineffectual playfulness and fundamental lack of seriousness of my other partners always exasperated me. I suppose that on the other hand I must often have taxed them beyond all endurance. At one period I used to arrive at the Cours Désir half an hour before class started; I would join in the games of the boarders; one day, seeing me coming across the playground, a little girl flapped her right hand under her chin in an expressive gesture: ‘Oh, it’s her again! She gets my goat!’ This little girl was ugly, stupid, and wore spectacles: I was rather surprised at her outburst but was unable to feel any great annoyance. Another day we went out to the suburbs to visit some friends of my parents whose children had a croquet set. At La Grillière, croquet was our favourite pastime; all through lunch and during the afternoon walk with my parents’ friends and children I kept talking about croquet. I was itching to play. The other children complained to my sister: ‘She gets on our nerves with all that talk about how good she is at croquet!’ When my sister repeated this to me later that evening, I greeted the information with complete indifference. I could not possibly be hurt by stupid children who demonstrated their inferiority by not liking croquet as passionately as I did. Entrenched in our own preferences, our manias, our principles, and our own particular set of values, my sister and I conspired to condemn the silliness of other children. The condescension of grown-ups turns children into a general species whose individual members are all alike: nothing exasperated me more than this. Once at La Grillière, as I was eating some cobnuts, the elderly lady who was Madeleine’s governess announced fatuously: ‘All children adore nuts.’ I made fun of her to Poupette. My personal tastes were not dictated by my age; I was not ‘a child’: I was me, myself.
My sister benefited, as a humble vassal, from the supreme sovereignty which I conferred upon myself: she never disputed my divine right. I used to think that if I had to share that regal authority, my life would lose all meaning. In my class there were twins who understood one another in a way that was almost miraculous. I used to wonder how one could resign onesel
f to living with a double; I should have been, it seemed to me, only half a person; and I even had the feeling that my experiences, repeated identically in another would have ceased to be my own. A twin would have deprived my existence of the very thing that gave it value: its glorious singularity.
During my first eight years, I knew only one child for whom I had any respect: luckily for me, he did not turn up his nose at me. My bewhiskered great-aunt often used her grandchildren as models for her heroes in La Poupée Modèle. Their names were Titite and Jacques; Titite was three years older than me, Jacques only six months. They had lost their father in a motoring accident; their mother, who had married again, lived at Châteauvillain. During my eighth summer, we paid a rather long visit to my Aunt Alice. The two houses were almost next to one another. I attended the lessons given to my cousins by a sweet, blonde-haired young lady; not as advanced as they were, I was dazzled by Jacques’ brilliant compositions, by his knowledge, his assurance. With his rosy cheeks, his amber eyes, his curly hair bright as freshly fallen horse-chestnuts, he was a very good-looking little boy. On the first floor landing there was a bookcase from which he would select books for me; sitting on the stairs, we would read side by side, I Gulliver’s Travels and he Popular Astronomy. When we went down into the garden, it was always he who invented our games. He had begun the construction of an aeroplane which he had already baptized Old Charlie, in honour of Guynemer; in order to keep him supplied with materials, I collected all the empty tins I could find in the streets.
The aeroplane had not even begun to take shape, but Jacques’ prestige did not suffer. When in Paris, he did not live in an ordinary building, but in an old house on the boulevard Montparnasse where stained-glass windows were made; on the street level were the offices, and above them the flat; the workshops occupied the next floor and the display rooms were at the very top; it was his house, and he did the honours when I visited him with all the authority of a master of men. He would explain to me the processes in the making of stained glass, and point out the differences between stained glass and ordinary vulgar painted stuff; he used to talk to the workmen in a kindly, concerned tone of voice, and I would listen open-mouthed to this little boy who already seemed to have a whole team of grown-ups under his authority: he inspired me with awe. He treated grown-ups as if he were on an equal footing with them, and he even shocked me a little when he treated his grandmother rather roughly. He usually despised girls, and so I valued his friendship all the more. ‘Simone is a precocious child,’ he had declared. The word pleased me vastly. One day with his own hands he made a real stained-glass window whose blue, red, and white lozenges were framed in lead; on it, in black letters, he had inscribed a dedication: ‘For Simone.’ Never had I received such a flattering gift. We decided that we were ‘married in the sight of God’ and I called Jacques ‘my fiancé’. We spent our honeymoon on the merry-go-round’s painted horses in the Luxembourg Gardens. I took our engagement very seriously. Yet when he was away I hardly ever thought about him. I was glad to see him when he came back, but I never missed him at all.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Page 8
