Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

  It was natural that he should not reply, as we both wanted our friendship to be ‘just between us two’. All the same, I ate my heart out. When I dined with his family, I was watching all evening for a conspiratorial twinkle in his eyes. Nothing. He played the fool even more exuberantly than usual: ‘Will you stop this clowning!’ his mother laughed. He seemed so carefree and so indifferent to me that I was certain that this time I had missed the target: he had read with exasperation the dissertation which I had so ungraciously flung at his head. ‘A painful, painful evening in which his mask concealed with too hermetic a fixity his real face. . . . I wish I could vomit up my heart,’ I wrote next morning in my diary. I decided to go to ground, to forget him. But a week later, my mother, who had been told by his family, informed me that Jacques had again failed his examination: he seemed very cast down; it would be a kindness if I would go and see him. I immediately prepared my spiritual first-aid kit and ran to succour him. He really did look like a broken man; sunk in his armchair, unshaven, without a tie, hardly ‘decent’ almost, he didn’t raise the flicker of a smile. He thanked me for my letter, though without much warmth I thought. And he told me again that he was good for nothing, that he was utterly worthless. He had led a stupid life all summer, he was spoiling everything, he was a failure, he was disgusted with himself. I tried to console him, but my heart wasn’t in it. When I left, he whispered: ‘Thank you for coming,’ in a voice charged with meaning which moved me deeply: none the less I went back home feeling very low. This time, I couldn’t paint Jacques’ distress in glowing colours; I didn’t know what he’d been doing exactly all the summer, but I assumed the worst: gaming, drinking, and what I vaguely called debauchery. There must be a good explanation for such behaviour: but I found it disillusioning to have to excuse him. I recalled the great fantasy of love and admiration that I had built round him when I was fifteen and I compared it sadly with the present state of my affection for Jacques: no, I did not admire him any more. Perhaps all admiration was self-deception; perhaps in the depths of every human heart one found only the same unreliable pretence; perhaps the one link possible between two souls was compassion. This pessimistic view did nothing to console me.

  Our next meeting threw me into fresh perplexity. He had pulled himself together; he was laughing, and making quite rational plans for the future in a calm, meditative way. ‘One day I’ll get married,’ he suddenly threw out. This little phrase racked my heart. Had he uttered it casually or on purpose? In the latter case, was it a promise or a warning? It was impossible to think of any other woman but myself as his wife: yet I found that the idea of marrying him revolted me. I had been toying with the idea all summer; but now, when I contemplated the possibility of this marriage which my parents so ardently desired, I wanted to run away. I no longer regarded it as a way out but as a blind alley. For several days I lived in terror.

  The next time I went to Jacques, he had some friends with him; he introduced them to me and the young men went on talking among themselves about bars and barmen, money difficulties and obscure intrigues; I was glad that they went on talking in my presence; yet their conversation depressed me. Jacques asked me to wait while he took his friends back to their homes in his car; at the end of my tether, I flung myself on the sofa and sobbed my heart out. I had calmed down when he returned. His face had altered and once more I could feel a tender concern in his voice. ‘You know, a friendship like ours is something quite exceptional,’ he told me. He walked with me along the boulevard Raspail and we paused a long while in front of a shop window in which a ghostly white painting by Foujita was displayed. He was leaving next day for Château-villain where he was to spend three weeks. I was relieved to think that during the whole of that time my last memory of him would be tinged with the sweetness of this twilight walk.

  Still my agitation did not decrease: I didn’t know what to make of myself. At times Jacques was everything to me; at others absolutely nothing at all. I was surprised to feel almost a kind of hatred for him sometimes. I asked myself: ‘Why is it only in moments of regret, expectation, and pity that I feel my greatest surges of tenderness?’ The thought of a love sliared between us chilled my heart. If the need I had of him died, I felt myself diminished; but I noted in my diary: ‘I need him – which doesn’t mean I need to see him.’ Our conversations, instead of stimulating me as they had done the year before, sapped my strength. I preferred to think of him at a distance rather than be with him.

  Three weeks after his departure, I was crossing the place de la Sorbonne when I saw his car standing outside the Café d’Harcourt. What a shock! I knew that his life didn’t belong entirely to me; we used to speak of it in oblique terms; I was only on the fringes of his existence. But I liked to think that in our conversations he showed his real self; this little car at the kerb proclaimed that the contrary was true. At that moment, at every moment in his life, Jacques existed as a creature of flesh and blood, but for other people, not for me; against the great mass of weeks and months, our brief timid meetings counted for very little. He came to our house one evening; he was charming; and I felt bitterly disappointed. Why? I was more and more in the dark. His mother and sister were staying in Paris and I no longer had any chance of meeting him alone. I felt we were playing at hide-and-seek and that perhaps in the end we would never find each other again. Did I love him or didn’t I? Did he love me? My mother told me repeatedly with a wry smile what he had said to his mother: ‘Simone is very pretty; it’s such a pity that Aunt Françoise dresses her so badly.’ This criticism was no concern of mine: all I remembered was that he liked my face. He was only nineteen; he had to pass his exams, and then do his military service; it was quite natural that he should not talk about marriage except in a vaguely allusive way; this reserve did not belie the warmth of his greetings, his smiles, his handclasps. He had written to me: ‘Is it any of your business?’ In the affection shown to me that year by Aunt Germaine and Titite there was a kind of conspiracy: his family and my own seemed to regard us already as practically engaged. But what was he really thinking? He sometimes looked so utterly indifferent to me! At the end of November we dined at a restaurant with our parents. He joked and chattered away: his presence completely masked his absence, disguised his real self too completely: I didn’t know where I was in this masquerade. I wept half the night.

  A few days later, for the first time in my life, I saw someone die: my Uncle Gaston, suddenly carried off by an intestinal occlusion. His death-throes lasted a whole night. Aunt Marguerite sat holding his hand, and saying things he couldn’t understand. His children, my parents, my sister, and I were with him when he died. He gave the death-rattle, and vomited up some blackish stuff. When he stopped breathing his jaw sagged, and a scarf was tied round his head to keep it up. My father was sobbing openly: I had never seen him weep before. The violence of my own despair surprised everyone, including myself. I was very fond of my uncle, and I cherished the memory of our early morning hunting expeditions at Meyrignac; I was very fond of my cousin Jeanne and I couldn’t bring myself to say: she’s an orphan. But neither these regrets nor my compassion could explain the storm of grief that swept over me during the next two days: I couldn’t bear to think of that despairing glance which my uncle had cast at his wife just before he died, and in which the irreparable was already an accomplished fact. Irreparable; irremediable: these words were hammering in my brain, till I thought my head would burst; and there was another answering them: inevitable. Perhaps one day I, too, would see that look in the eyes of a man whom I had loved all my life.

  It was Jacques who brought me comfort. He seemed so moved by my ravaged eyes and was so affectionate that I dried my tears. In the course of a luncheon at his grandmother Flandin’s, she told me: ‘It wouldn’t be you if you weren’t hard at work.’ Jacques gazed at me tenderly: ‘I hope she would still be herself even if she didn’t.’ And I thought to myself: ‘I was wrong to doubt him: he really does love me.’ I dined at his house the following week, and
he told me in a confidential aside that he had got out of the mess he was in but that he was afraid he was becoming very middle-class. And then, immediately the meal was over, he went off on his own. I invented excuses for him, but not one of them really satisfied me; if he’d cared anything at all for me, he wouldn’t have shot off like that. Could he really be relied upon for anything? He certainly seemed to me to be lacking in stability and very fickle; he kept throwing himself away on small-time friendships and got involved in trivial and bothersome little affairs; he had no thought for the problems that tormented me; he was lacking in intellectual conviction. Again I felt bewildered and confused: ‘Will I ever be able to set myself free from him, despite my occasionally rebellious feelings towards him? I love him, I am madly in love with him; yet I don’t even know if he is really the one for me.’

  The fact is that there were many differences between Jacques and me. That autumn, when I drew a word-portrait of myself, the first thing I noted was what I called my ‘serious side’. ‘An implacable, austere seriousness, for which I can find no reasonable explanation, but that I submit to as if it were a burden I have to bear.’ Since my infancy I had always been headstrong, self-willed, a creature of extremes, and proud of it. Others might stop half-way in their quest for faith or in the expression of their scepticism, their desires, their plans: I despised their half-heartedness. I always carried my emotions, my ideas, my enterprises to the bitter end; I didn’t undertake anything lightly; and now, as in my earliest childhood, I wanted everything in my life to be justified by a kind of absolute necessity. This stubbornness, I realized, deprived me of certain qualities; but there was never any question of departing from my fixed intention; my ‘serious side’ was the whole of me, and I wanted very much to remain a ‘whole’ person.

  It was not his easy-going attitude, his paradoxical and irregular behaviour with which I reproached Jacques; I believed he was more artistic, more sensitive, more spontaneous, and more gifted than myself; at times I would recall the story of Theagenus and Euphorion and I was prepared to set on a pedestal high above my own humbler qualities the special grace with which he seemed to be imbued. But contrary to my experience with Zaza, in whom I could see nothing to find fault with, certain aspects of Jacques’ character bothered me: ‘His predilection for set formulas; his enthusiasms which are often too extravagant for their objects; his rather affectedly disdainful criticisms of certain things.’ He was lacking in depth and perseverance, and sometimes – this seemed to me a much graver flaw – in sincerity. I sometimes felt exasperated by his elusiveness; and on occasion I suspected him of simply making cynical use of his scepticism in order to spare himself the least effort. He kept complaining that he didn’t believe in anything; I kept racking my brains to provide him with objects he could believe in; it seemed to me a sacred task to work hard for one’s own development and enrichment; this was the sense in which I took Gide’s precept: ‘Make yourself indispensable’; but if I reminded Jacques of this, he would simply shrug his shoulders: ‘You might as well go to bed and sleep your head off, for all the truth there is in that statement.’ I would urge him to write; I was sure he had some fine books in him. ‘What’s the use?’ he would reply. What about drawing and painting? He had the gifts. He still replied: ‘What’s the use?’ He countered all my suggestions with those three little words. ‘Jacques still persists in wanting to build on absolute foundations; he should study Kant; he won’t get anywhere like this,’ I naïvely noted in my diary one day. Yet I had a grave suspicion that Jacques’ behaviour had nothing to do with metaphysics, and most of the time I was severely critical of his attitude: I did not approve of idleness, thoughtlessness, or inconsistency. On his side, I felt that my good intentions often exasperated him. It would be possible in a friendship to overcome these divergencies; but they made the prospects of a life in common very formidable.

  I should not have worried so much about it if I had been aware of a simple opposition in our characters; but I realized that something else was at stake: the future course of our lives. On the day when he mentioned marriage, I made a long inventory of the things that separated us: ‘He is content to enjoy beautiful things; he accepts luxury and easy living; he likes being happy. But I want my life to be an all-consuming passion. I need to act, to give freely of myself, to bring plans to fruition: I need an object in life, I want to overcome difficulties and succeed in writing a book. I’m not made for a life of luxury. I could never be satisfied with the things that satisfy him.’

  There was nothing startling about the luxury of the Laiguillon home: what I was really rejecting, and what I reproached Jacques with accepting, was the bourgeois status. Our understanding was based on an ambiguity which explains the incoherence of my emotions. In my view, Jacques was freeing himself from his class because he, too, was suffering from a deep disquiet; what I did not realize was that this deep disquiet was the means which that bourgeois generation was employing in order to effect its own cure; yet I felt that at the very moment when marriage ought to have delivered him from the bonds of class, Jacques would at last coincide exactly with the persona of a young business man and head of a family. In fact, all he wanted was to play with conviction the role assigned to him by birth, and he was counting on marriage as Pascal had counted on holy water, to give him the faith he lacked. I was still not clearly conscious of all this at that time, but I understood that he looked upon marriage as a solution and not as a point of departure. There would be no question of us storming the heights together: if I became Madame Laiguillon I would be dedicated to ‘home life’. Perhaps that would not be absolutely incomparable with my personal aspirations? I distrusted all compromises, and that one in particular seemed to me to be dangerously suspect. If I were to share Jacques’ existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious. I tried to challenge his authority by having recourse to the evidence of my own passions and wishes: I often succeeded. But in moments of discouragement I was inclined to think he was right. Once under his influence and in order to gratify his desires wouldn’t I let myself be driven to sacrifice everything I thought worthwhile? I rebelled at the thought of such a personal mutilation. That is why all that winter my love for Jacques was such a painful one; either he was throwing away his talents, and I was hurt to see him drifting away from me; or he was trying to seek a certain stability in a bourgeois self-sufficiency which might have brought him closer to me if I hadn’t looked upon it as a fall from grace. I couldn’t follow him in his disordered ways, yet I didn’t want to live with him in an order I despised. We neither of us had any faith in conventional values; but I was determined to find some I could believe in, or else invent new ones; he could see as far as that; he wavered between dissipation and the depths of despair, and it was only by an acceptance of bourgeois values that he was able to pull himself together: he never thought of changing his way of life, but only of adapting himself to it. But I wanted to find a way out of it.