Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

  *

  The term came to an end. I passed my examinations in mathematics and Latin. It was good to go so fast, and to succeed; but I quite decidedly had no liking for the exact sciences, nor for dead languages. Mademoiselle Lambert advised me to go ahead with my original plan: it was she who gave the philosophy lectures at Sainte-Marie; she would be glad to have me as a student; she assured me that I would obtain my degree without any difficulty. My parents made no objection. I was very satisfied with this decision.

  Although during the previous few weeks the figure of Garric had rather faded into the background of my life, I nevertheless felt I would die when I took my leave of him in a gloomy corridor in the Institut Sainte-Marie. I went to hear one more of his lectures: it was in a hall in the boulevard Saint-Germain and Henri Massis and Monsieur Mabille also spoke. It was Monsieur Mabille who spoke last: his words seemed to have difficulty in penetrating his beard and whiskers, and Zaza’s cheeks were hot with embarrassment. I couldn’t take my eyes off Garric. I felt my mother looking at me in some perplexity, but I didn’t even try to restrain the adoration in my gaze. I was learning by heart that face which was about to be extinguished for ever. The presence of a person is so complete, his absence so final; there seemed to be nothing between the two extremes. Monsieur Mabille stopped talking, the speakers left the platform; it was all over.

  But I still clung on. One morning I took the Métro to an unknown part, so far off that I felt I must have crossed a frontier without showing my papers: the place was Belleville. I walked down the long street where Garric lived; I knew the number of his house; I moved towards it, hugging the walls: if he were suddenly to see me there, I was ready to sink through the ground with shame. For a brief moment I paused in front of his house, gazed up at the mournful brick façade, and stared at the door through which he passed every morning and evening; I went on my way; I looked at the shops, the cafés, and the square; he knew them all so well that he didn’t even see them any more. What had I come here for? I went home empty-handed.

  I was sure that I would see Jacques again in October and I said good-bye to him without regret. He had just failed his law examination and was feeling a little depressed. In his last handshake and in his final smile he put so much warmth that I was overcome with emotion. I wondered anxiously if perhaps he hadn’t taken my composure for indifference. This thought distressed me. He had given me so much! I was thinking less of the book, the pictures, the films than of that light in his eyes, like the touch of a hand, whenever I talked to him about myself. I suddenly wanted to thank him, and straight away I wrote him a little note. But my pen hovered over the envelope: should I send it? Jacques set the greatest store on restraint in human relationships. With one of those mysterious smiles that might have meant anything, he had once quoted to me Goethe’s phrase, in Cocteau’s version: ‘I love you: is that any business of yours?’ Would he find my modest effusions embarrassing? Would he perhaps mutter to himself: ‘Is that any business of yours?’ Yet if my letter might bring him a little comfort, it would be cowardly not to send it. I hesitated, held back by that fear of ridicule that had paralysed my childhood; but I wasn’t going to act like a child any more. I added a hasty postscript: ‘Perhaps you will think I’m ridiculous but I would be ashamed of myself if I never dared to be.’ And I went and put the letter in the letter box.

  My Aunt Marguerite and my Uncle Gaston, who with their children were spending the season at Cauterets, had invited my sister and me to join them. A year earlier, I would have been enraptured by the mountain landscape: but now I had withdrawn into myself and the world outside no longer had any effect on me. And besides, I had had too intimate a relationship with nature to be willing to see it brought down to the level of a summer attraction, as it was here. It was served up to me on a plate, and I was not allowed the necessary leisure or solitude to get close to it: if I couldn’t give myself up to it, it would give me nothing. Pine forests and mountain torrents meant nothing to me. We went on excursions to the Gavarnie amphitheatre and the Lac de Gaube, where my cousin Jeanne took snapshots: all I saw were mournful dioramas. These uselessly elaborate surroundings could not distract me from my grief any more than could the hideous spectacle of the hotels planted along the village streets.

  For I was unhappy. Garric had disappeared for ever. And how did I stand with Jacques? In my letter I had given him my address at Cauterets; as he would obviously not want his reply to fall into my parents’ hands he would write to me here, or not at all. Dozens of times every day I went to look in pigeon-hole number 46 behind the hotel desk: nothing. Why? I had felt a carefree confidence in our friendship; now I wondered: did I mean anything to him? Had he found my letter childish? Or uncalled-for? Was it simply that he had forgotten me? What torture! And how I wished I could brood over it in peace and quiet! But I never had a minute to myself. I was sleeping in the same room with Poupette and Jeanne; we always went out together; all day long I had to keep a ceaseless watch on myself, and other peoples’ voices were constantly assailing my ears. At La Rallière, over a cup of hot chocolate, and in the evenings at the hotel the lady guests and the gentlemen guests chattered away; it was the holidays, they were all reading something and they all kept talking about what they were reading. One of them would say: ‘It’s very well written, but parts of it are rather dull.’ Another would announce: ‘Parts of it are rather dull, but it’s very well written.’ Occasionally, someone, with a far-off look in his eyes and a carefully modulated voice, would say: ‘It’s a curious work.’ Or, in rather severer tones: ‘It’s not everybody’s taste.’ I used to wait for night-time in order to indulge in the luxury of tears; the next day, the letter would still not have arrived; once again I would start waiting for night, my nerves on edge, and my emotions in a very prickly state. One morning in my room I burst into tears; I don’t know how I managed to reassure my flustered aunt.

  Before going on to Meyrignac, we spent two days at Lourdes. It gave me a shock. Confronted with that ghastly parade of the sick, the moribund, the lame, and the goitrous, I made the brutal discovery that the world was not just an expression of the human soul. Human beings had bodies and their bodies were full of suffering. As I followed a procession, indifferent to the squalling of hymns and the sour body-smells of church-hens on the loose, I began to feel ashamed of my self complacency. This human misery was the only truth. I felt vaguely envious of Zaza who, when she went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, washed the dirty dishes in hospitals. How could one forget oneself, give oneself utterly? And for what? Tragedy, disguised by grotesquely smiling masks of hope, was here too completely devoid of meaning to make the scales fall from my eyes. For a day or two I supped on horrors; then I took up the threads of my own worried existence again.

  I spent a miserable holiday at Meyrignac. I wandered around the chestnut plantations weeping my heart out. I felt I was absolutely alone in the world. That year, my own sister was like a stranger to me. My aggressively self-critical attitude had offended my parents, who now regarded me with suspicion. They read the novels I had brought with me and discussed them with Aunt Marguerite: ‘It’s morbid, it’s perverted, it’s not natural,’ I used to hear them saying; their pronouncements used to wound me as much as their comments on my black moods or their wild guesses as to what was in my mind. With more leisure than they enjoyed in Paris, they bore even less patiently with my silences, and I didn’t make things any better by giving way once or twice to reckless outbursts of temper. Despite all my efforts, I still remained very vulnerable. Whenever my mother nodded her head saying: ‘You’re in a bad way, my girl,’ I flew into a rage; but if I succeeded in mastering my temper and gave her a soft answer, she would give a sigh of fatuous satisfaction and say: ‘There, now, that’s better!’ which only served to exasperate me all the more. I was fond of my parents, and in this environment where we had been so happy together I felt our lack of contact even more painfully than in Paris. In addition I had nothing to do; I had only been able to get hold of a s
mall number of books. Reading a book on Kant, I developed a passion for critical idealism which confirmed me in my rejection of God. In Bergson’s theories about ‘the social ego and the personal ego’ I enthusiastically recognized my own experience. But the impersonal voices of the philosophers didn’t bring me the same consolation as those of my favourite authors. I could no longer feel their elder-brotherly presences about me. My sole refuge was my diary; when I had chewed over my boredom and sadness in it, I could begin again to feel bored and sad.

  One night, at La Grillière, just as I had laid myself to sleep in a vast country bed, I was overwhelmed by a terrible anguish; I had on occasion been terrified by the thought of death, to the point of tears and screams; but this time it was worse. Life was already tilting over the brink into absolute nothingness; at that instant I felt a terror so violent that I very nearly went to knock on my mother’s door and pretend to be ill, just in order to hear a human voice. In the end I fell asleep, but I retained a horrified memory of that awful attack of nerves.

  When we got back to Meyrignac, I toyed with the idea of writing; I preferred literature to philosophy, and I wouldn’t have been at all pleased if someone had prophesied that I would become a kind of female Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed to move me. What I dreamed of writing was a ‘novel of the inner life’; I wanted to communicate my experience. I hesitated. I could feel within me ‘masses of things to say’; but I realized that writing is an art and that I was not an expert. All the same I jotted down a few subjects for novels and finally I made a decision. I composed my first work. It was the story of an attempt to escape that came to nothing. The heroine was the same age as myself, eighteen; she was spending her holidays with her family in a country house where she was awaiting the arrival of her fiancé whom she loved in a conventional manner. Until then she had been satisfied with the banality of her existence. Suddenly she discovered that there was ‘something else’. A musician, a genius, awoke in her a realization of the real things in life: art, sincerity, disquiet. She felt that she had been living a lie; a strange, feverish longing took possession of her. The musician went away. The fiancé arrived. From her room on the first floor she could hear the joyous cries of welcome; she hesitated: was she going to keep, or lose for ever, what the musician had given her a glimpse of? Her courage failed her. She went downstairs and smilingly entered the drawing-room where the others were awaiting her. I had no illusions about the value of this tale; but it was the first time I had made myself put my own experience into words, and I took pleasure in writing it.

  I had sent a little note to Garric, the sort a pupil sends to a teacher, and he had replied with a postcard, the sort a teacher sends to a pupil; I no longer thought about him very much. By his personal example he had encouraged me to uproot myself from my past, from my environment: condemned to solitude, I had followed him headlong into the heroic life. But it was a hard road, and I would certainly have preferred my life sentence to be put off for a while; my friendship with Jacques seemed to authorize me to go on hoping. Lying in the heather or wandering the country lanes it was always his face I saw before me. He hadn’t replied to my letter but in time my disappointment died away, softened by memories of his welcoming smiles, our complicity, and of the velvet hours I had spent in his company. I was so weary of crying that I allowed myself a few day-dreams. I would light the lamp, I would sit on the red velvet sofa: I would feel at home. I would look at Jacques: he would be mine. Without any doubt, I was in love with him; why should he not be in love with me too? I began to make plans for our future happiness. If I had renounced all thoughts of personal happiness, it could only be because I thought I couldn’t have him; but as soon as it began to seem possible, I started to long for happiness again.

  Jacques was good-looking; his was a boyish, fleshly beauty; yet he never once caused me the least physical disturbance or aroused in me the faintest sexual desire; perhaps I was mistaken when I noted in my diary, not without some astonishment, that he had made some tentative gesture of affection and something inside me had recoiled: it signified that at any rate in my imagination I kept my distance. I had always looked upon Jacques as an elder brother, rather remote and grand; my family, whether hostile or well-disposed towards our relationship, never ceased to bait us; doubtless that is why my love for him was the kind I would have had for an angel.

  My love owed the irremediable nature which I at once attributed to it to the fact that we were cousins and childhood friends. I had bitterly reproached Jo March and Maggie Tulliver with having betrayed their childhood loves: by loving Jacques I felt I was living out my destiny. I would recall our former ‘engagement’, and the stained-glass plaque he had made me a present of; I rejoiced in the fact that we had been separated in adolescence, because it had given me the rapturous joy of discovering him all over again. This idyllic match was obviously to be made in heaven.

  In truth, if I believed it to be inevitable, it was because, without consciously realizing it, I felt it would provide the ideal solution to all my difficulties. Though thoroughly detesting the sameness of bourgeois life, I still felt a little nostalgia for those evenings in the black and red study in the days when I couldn’t imagine myself ever leaving my parents. The Laiguillon’s house, that beautiful apartment with its thick-pile carpets, the airy drawing-room, and the shadowy gallery were already my own hearth and home; I would read side by side with Jacques, and I would think of ‘the two of us’ just as in former days I had thought of ‘the four of us’. His mother and sister would lavish their affection upon me and my parents would be kinder to me: I should become once more a person universally loved and I would take my place again in that society from which I had felt myself exiled for ever. Yet I would not give up my new ideas; with Jacques beside me, happiness would never mean just closing our eyes to reality; day would lovingly follow day, but all the time we would be pursuing our search; we would lose our way together, without ever going astray from one another, joined for ever by a common disquiet. So I would find my salvation in peace of heart and not in mental anguish. Exhausted by tears and boredom, I suddenly staked my whole future on this one chance. I waited in a fever of impatience for our return to Paris, and my heart seemed to thump to the rhythm of the train that took us back there.

  *

  When I found myself back in our old apartment with the threadbare carpets it was a brutal awakening for me: I hadn’t come to earth beside Jacques, but at home; I was going to spend a whole year between these walls, I had a sudden vision of a long succession of days and months; what a wilderness! I had made a clean sweep of all my old friends, comrades, and pleasures; Garric was lost to me for ever: I would see Jacques at the most two or three times a month, and nothing encouraged me to expect from him any more than what he had already given me. So once more I should know the misery of joyless awakenings; in the evenings, there would be the refuse bin to empty; there would be more weariness and boredom. In the stillness of the chestnut groves, the delirious fanaticism which had helped me to get through the past year had finally exhausted itself; it would all be the same as before, only without that kind of madness which had helped me to bear it.

  I was so frightened that I wanted to run straight away to see Jacques: only he could help me now. As I have said, my parents looked upon him with mixed feelings. That morning my mother forbade me to go and see him, and made a violent attack on him and on the influence he had over me. I still didn’t dare disobey or tell any outright lies. I still used to tell my mother what my plans were for the day; in the evening I had to give her a full account of how I had passed my time. I gave in. But I was choking with fury and vexation. For weeks I had been looking forward eagerly to this meeting, and here I was being debarred from it by a whim of my mother’s! I was horrified to realize the extent of my dependence. Not only had I been condemned to exile, but I was not even allowed the freedom to fight against my barren lot; my actions, my gestures, my words were all
rigidly controlled; they tried to fathom every thought, and could with one word bring to nought the plans on which I had set my heart: there was no way out for me. During the past year I had been more or less able to adapt myself to my fate because I was so taken aback by the great changes that were going on inside me; but now this spiritual adventure was over and I again fell into a depression. I had become a different person, and I should have had a different world about me; but what kind? What was I really looking for? I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like. This passivity filled me with despair. There was nothing for it but to wait. How long? three years? four years? That’s a long time when you’re eighteen. And if I spent them in prison, in chains, when I came out I would still find myself just as alone, without love or hope or anything. I would teach philosophy in some provincial school: what good would that do me? What about writing? My attempts at Meyrignac were quite worthless. If I remained where I was, a victim of the same monotonous routines, the same boredom, I would never make any progress: I would never write a book. No, there was no single ray of hope anywhere. For the first time in my existence I believed sincerely that it would be better to be dead.

  After a week, I was given permission to go and see Jacques. When I arrived at his front door, I was overcome by panic: he was my only hope, and all I knew about him was that he had not replied to my letter. Had he been touched or irritated by it? How would he receive me? I walked two or three times round the block: I felt more dead than alive. The bell-push embedded in the wall frightened me: it had the same deceptively harmless appearance as the dark hole in which as a child I had so imprudently poked my finger. I pressed it. As usual, the door opened automatically and I went upstairs. Jacques smiled at me, and I sat down on the crimson sofa. He handed me an envelope with my name on it: ‘Here, take this,’ he said. ‘I didn’t send it to you because I wanted this to be just between us two.’ He had blushed right up into his hair. I opened the envelope. At the top of the letter he had written: ‘Is it any business of yours?’ In it he congratulated me for not being afraid of appearing ridiculous; he assured me that he had often thought of me ‘in the long, warm, lonely afternoons’. He gave me advice. ‘If you were more human you would shock your family much less; and in the end it’s better to be like that: I was going to say more self-respecting. . . . The secret of happiness and the very height of artistic achievement is to be like everybody else, yet to be like no one on earth.’ He closed with this: ‘Will you look upon me as your friend?’ A great sun rose in my heart. And then Jacques began to speak, using little disjointed phrases, as the dusk was falling. Things weren’t going at all well, he told me, not well at all. He was in a mess, really fed up; he had always thought he was a fairly decent person: he didn’t believe that any longer; he despised himself; he no longer knew what he could do about himself. I listened, touched by his humility, enraptured by his confidences, and overwhelmed by his depression. When I left him, my heart was in a whirl. I sat down on a bench in the street to fondle and gaze at the present he had given me: a sheet of fine, thick, deckle-edged paper covered with signs in violet ink. Certain bits of his advice surprised me: I didn’t feel I was inhuman; I wasn’t trying deliberately to shock people; I didn’t in the least want to be like everybody else; but I was touched that he should have taken the trouble to compose these beautifully cadenced sentences for me. Again and again and again I read the inscription: ‘Is it any business of yours?’ It clearly meant that Jacques cared for me much more than he had ever admitted before; but there was something else which proved definitely that he didn’t love me: he wouldn’t have sunk to such depths of despair if he had been in love with me. My mistake was obvious, and I resigned myself to the inevitable: it was not possible to reconcile love and disquiet. Jacques had brought me back to reality; cosy chats by the fire, lamplight on lilac and roses were not for us. We were too clear-headed and too demanding ever to let ourselves be lulled into the false security of love. Jacques would never abandon his tormented pursuit of the truth. He had reached the end of his despair, to the point of turning back on himself in disgust: I would have to follow him along that thorny path. I called upon Alissa and Violaine to support me, and plunged headlong into self-renunciation. ‘I shall never love anyone else, but love is impossible between us two,’ I decided. I did not disown the conviction that had impressed itself upon me during the holidays: Jacques was my destiny. But the reasons why I linked my fate with his would not allow him to bring me happiness. I had a part to play in his life: but it was not to invite him to sleep away his disquiet; I had to fight against his discouragement and help him to carry on his search. I undertook the task immediately. I wrote him a fresh letter in which I quoted scores of reasons for going on living drawn from the best authors.