‘Good luck, Beaver,’ Herbaud said in his most affectionate voice when we took our places in the library at the Sorbonne. I put a thermos flask full of coffee and a box of biscuits within reach: Monsieur Lalande’s voice announced the subject: ‘Liberty and Contingency’: faces stared at the ceiling, and pens started to scratch; I covered page after page and had the feeling that I hadn’t done too badly. At two o’clock in the afternoon Zaza and Pradelle came to fetch me; after drinking a lemonade in the Café de Flore, which was then only a small local bar, we walked for a long time in the Luxembourg Gardens which were flagged with giant mauve and yellow irises. I had a sharp but friendly discussion with Pradelle: we had always thought differently on certain points. He held that it was a very short step from happiness to sadness, from faith to unbelief, from any feeling I cared to mention and its absence. I argued the contrary with fanatical intensity. Although Herbaud reproached me for associating with any Tom, Dick, and Harry, I placed people in two categories: the few for whom I felt a lively affection, and the common herd, for whom I had a disdainful indifference. But Pradelle wanted everybody to be in the same boat. During the last two years we had become more set in our attitudes. The day before, he had written me a letter in which he brought me to book: ‘We are separated by so many things, many more, probably, than you or I are aware of . . . I cannot bear to think that your attitude towards people should be so narrowly exclusive. How can one live without gathering all mankind into the same wide net of love? But you are so intolerant when it’s a question of doing just that.’ He ended on a cordial note: ‘Despite your fanaticism, which upsets me as much as if it were a lack of consideration for others and which is so contrary to my own way of thinking, I have the greatest and most inexplicable affection for you.’ Once more that afternoon he gave me a sermon on loving my fellow-men; Zaza gave him cautious support, because she believed in the New Testament precept: ‘Judge not . . .’ In my opinion, one cannot love without hating: I loved Zaza, but I hated her mother. Pradelle and I took leave of one another without either of us having budged an inch. I stayed with Zaza until dinner time: for the first time, she told me, she had not felt like an intruder with Pradelle and me, and she was deeply grateful. ‘I don’t think there can be any man as fine as Pradelle,’ she added enthusiastically.
They were waiting for me in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, deep in an animated conversation, when I came out of my final examination a couple of days later. What a relief it was to have it all over and done with! That evening my father took me to the Lune Rousse, and we had fried eggs at Lipp’s. The next day I slept till noon. After lunch, I went to see Zaza in the rue de Berri. She was wearing a new dress in blue voile with a black and white all-over pattern and a huge straw sun-bonnet: how she had blossomed out since the beginning of the summer! As we sauntered down the Champs-Élysées, she expressed her astonishment at this selfrenewal. Two years ago, when she had broken with André, she had thought that from then on her life would be a living death; and here she was now as calm and happy as she had been in the best years of her childhood; she had begun to take an interest in books, ideas, and her own thoughts again. Moreover, she was facing the future with a self-confidence which she found hard to explain.
The same day, as we were leaving the Cinéma des Agriculteurs round about midnight, Pradelle told me how highly he thought of my friend; she never laid down the law about things on which she was an authority or about which she felt very deeply, and that was why she was so often silent: but when she did speak, every word was charged with meaning. He also admired the way in which she kept a firm hand on her feelings in the very difficult circumstances in which she found herself. He asked me to invite her to come for another walk with us, and I went home highly delighted. I recalled how attentively Pradelle had listened, that winter, whenever I had had news of Zaza, and how she had often spoken affectionately of him in her letters. They were made for one another; they loved one another. One of my dearest dreams was about to be realized: Zaza’s life would be a happy one!
The next morning, my mother told me that while I had been to the cinema Herbaud had called at the house: I was sorry to have missed him, all the more so because as we had left the examination room he had felt he hadn’t done himself justice, and had not arranged when we were to meet again. Sadly disappointed, I went out about noon to buy a cream tart and met him at the bottom of the stairs; he invited me to lunch. I got my shopping done in double-quick time. For old time’s sake, we went to the Fleur-de-Lys. He had been enchanted by the welcome my parents had given him; my father had propounded anti-militarist sentiments, and Herbaud had heartily agreed with him. He laughed long and loud when I told him how mistaken he had been. He was leaving the next day to join his wife at Bagnoles-de-I’Ome; on his return, in ten days’ time, he would be preparing for his oral with Sartre and Nizan who had issued a cordial invitation to me to join their group. Sartre wanted to make my acquaintance; he had suggested meeting me one evening in the near future. But Herbaud asked me not to go: Sartre would take advantage of his absence in order to monopolize the conversation. ‘I don’t want the bloom knocked off my most cherished opinions,’ Herbaud told me in a conspiratorial manner. We decided that my sister would go to meet Sartre at the time and place that had been arranged; she was to tell him that I had had to leave suddenly for the country and that she had come to take my place.
So I would soon be seeing Herbaud again, and I was accepted by his group: I was over the moon. I made half-hearted attempts to revise for the oral. I did some light and amusing reading, I strolled around Paris, I enjoyed myself. During the evening Poupette was spending with Sartre, I went over in my mind the year which was now coming to a close, and the whole of my youth; I was moved by thoughts of the future, and wrote in my journal: ‘Curious certainty that this reserve of riches that I feel within me will make its mark, that I shall utter words that will be listened to, that this life of mine will be a well-spring from which others will drink: the certainty of a vocation. . . .’ I felt as intensely elated as in the days when I had been borne aloft on mystical flights of fancy; but now I had my feet still on the ground. My kingdom was definitely of this world. When my sister returned, she said I had done well to stay at home. Sartre had courteously accepted our little white lie; he had taken her to the cinema and had been very kind; but conversation had dried up. ‘Everything Herbaud says about Sartre is pure invention,’ my sister told me; she knew Herbaud fairly well, and found him amusing.
I took advantage of my free time to go and see people I had more or less neglected. I visited Mademoiselle Lambert, who took fright at my serenity of mind, and Suzanne Boigue, whose conjugal felicity was making her run to seed; I spent a boring time with Riesmann, who was becoming more and more esoteric. Stépha had vanished from the scene during the last two months; she had set up house in Montrouge with Fernando, who had rented a studio there; I assumed that they were ‘living in sin’ and that she had stopped seeing me in order to cover up her misconduct. Then she showed up again with a wedding ring on her finger. She called on me at eight o’clock in the morning; we lunched at Dominique’s, a Russian restaurant which had opened in Montparnasse a few weeks earlier, and we spent the whole day walking and talking; that evening, I had dinner in her studio, its walls were hung with pale Ukrainian carpets; Fernando was painting from momihg to night, and had made great progress. A few days later, they gave a party to celebrate their marriage; there were Russians, Ukrainians, Spaniards, all of them connected vaguely with painting, sculpture, or music; there was drinking, dancing, singing, and dressing-up. But Stépha would soon be leaving for Madrid with Fernando, and they intended to stay there permanently; she was wholly taken up with preparations for this journey and with domestic worries. Our friendship – which later was to find a new lease of life – survived mainly on memories.
I still went out frequently with Pradelle and Zaza, and now it was I who began to feel I was an intruder: they got along so well together! Zaza still hardly da
red give free expression to her hopes, but they gave her courage to stand up to renewed maternal onslaughts. Madame Mabille was busy gerrymandering a marriage for her and kept on at her with merciless persistence. ‘But what have you got against this young man?’ she would cry. ‘Nothing, Mama,’ Zaza would reply. ‘I just don’t love him, that’s all.’ ‘My dear, it’s the man who loves, not the woman,’ Madame Mabille explained. She got exasperated: ‘As you’ve got nothing against the young man, why won’t you marry him? Your sister made do with a boy much less intelligent than herself!’ Zaza would tell me of these set-to’s with her mother more in sorrow than in anger, for she could not take a light-hearted view of her mother’s dissatisfaction with her. ‘I’m so tired of fighting her that two or three months ago I might have given in,’ she told me. She thought her suitor was quite nice, but she couldn’t see him becoming a friend of Pradelle or myself; he would have seemed out of place among us; she didn’t want to take as a husband a man whom she could not look up to as she did to others.
Madame Mabille must have suspected the real reasons for her daughter’s obstinacy; when I rang at her front door in the rue de Berri, she received me with an extremely frosty expression on her face; and she was soon objecting to meetings between Zaza and Pradelle. We had made plans for another boating party; the day before it was to take place, I received an express letter from Zaza:
I’ve just had a talk with Mama which makes it absolutely impossible for me to come boating with you on Thursday. Mama is leaving Paris tomorrow; as long as she is here, I can argue with her and refuse to do what she wants; but I just cannot take advantage of her absence to do something which would cause her grave displeasure. It’s very hard for me to give up Thursday evening, for I had hoped then that I might enjoy as wonderful moments as those I spent with you and Pradelle in the Bois de Boulogne. The things Mama told me have upset me so frightfully that I very nearly made up my mind to run away to some convent where I would be left in peace for a while. I’m still considering it; I’m in a state of acute mental distress. . . .
Pradelle was deeply disappointed. ‘Remember me very kindly to Mademoiselle Mabille,’ he wrote to me. ‘Surely it would be possible for us to meet, as it were, by accident, so that she would not be breaking her promise?’ They met at the Nationale where I had started working again. I had lunch with them and they went off together for a walk afterwards. They were able to see each other alone two or three times after that, and towards the end of July Zaza, dumbfounded, announced that they were in love: they would get married when Pradelle had passed his exams and done his military service. But Zaza dreaded her mother’s opposition. I told her not to be so pessimistic. She was no longer a child and Madame Mabille, after all, only wanted her happiness: she would respect the choice she had made. What could she find to object to? Pradelle came from an excellent family, and was a practising Catholic; he would obviously have a brilliant career, and in any case his university stuthes would make him sure of getting a decent situation: Lili’s husband wasn’t exactly rolling in money either. Zaza shook her head. ‘That’s not the point. In our kind of society, marriages aren’t made like that!’ Pradelle had got to know Zaza through me: that was a black mark against him from the start. And then the prospect of a long engagement would worry Madame Mabille. But the main thing that Zaza insisted upon was that ‘it wasn’t done’. She had decided to wait until the autumn term before speaking to her mother about it; however, she was counting on hearing from Pradelle during the holidays: Madame Mabille would notice the letters arriving, and then what would happen? Despite her uneasiness, when she arrived at Laubardon Zaza felt full of hope. ‘I am convinced of one thing, which enables me to bide my time hopefully, and to go on living, even though it may involve me in many awkward contrarieties,’ she wrote to me. ‘Life is marvellous.’
*
When he returned to Paris at the beginning of July, Herbaud sent me a note inviting me to spend the evening with him. My parents disapproved of my going out with a married man, but by now I had so very nearly escaped from their sphere of influence that they had practically given up interfering in my life. So I went to see Le Pèlerin with Herbaud, and afterwards we had supper at Lipp’s. He brought me up to date with the Eugene’s latest adventures, and taught me ‘Brazilian écarte’, a game he had invented which would enable him to win all the time. He told me that his ‘comrades’ were expecting me on Monday morning at the Cité Universitaire; they were counting on me to help them work on Leibniz.
I was feeling a bit scared when I entered Sartre’s room; there were books all over the place, cigarette ends in all the corners and the air was thick with tobacco smoke. Sartre greeted me in a worldly manner; he was smoking a pipe. Nizan, who said nothing, had a cigarette stuck in the corner of his one-sided smile and was quizzing me through his pebble lenses, with an air of thinking more than he cared to say. All day long, petrified with fear, I annotated the ‘metaphysical treatise’ and in the evening Herbaud took me back home.
I went back each day, and soon I began to thaw out. Leibniz was boring, so we decided that we knew enough about him. Sartre took it upon himself to expound Rousseau’s The Social Contract upon which he had very decided opinions. To tell the truth, it was always he who knew most about all the authors and all the aspects of our syllabus: we merely listened to him talking. I sometimes attempted to argue with him; I would rack my brains to find objections to his views. ‘She’s a sly puss!’ Herbaud would laugh, while Nizan would scrutinize his finger-nails with an air of great concentration; but Sartre always succeeded in turning the tables on me. It was impossible to feel put-out by him: he used to do his utmost to help us to benefit from his knowledge. ‘He’s a marvellous trainer of intellects,’ I noted. I was staggered by his generosity, for these sessions didn’t teach him anything, and he would give of himself for hours without counting the cost.
We did most of our work in the mornings. In the afternoons, after lunching at the restaurant in the Cité, or at Chabin’s near the Parc Montsouris, we would take lots of time off. Nizan’s wife, a beautiful, exuberant brunette, would often join us. There was the fun-fair at the Porte d’Orléans. We would play at the pin-table machines, at miniature football; or we would try the shooting-gallery, and I won a huge pink vase on the Wheel of Fortune. We would all cram into Nizan’s little car and go for a spin round Paris, stopping here and there for a glass of beer at a pavement café. I explored the dormitories and the students’ dens at the École Normale, and made the traditional climb over the roofs. During these escapades, Sartre and Herbaud would sing at the tops of their voices; they usually made up the songs themselves; they composed a motet on one of Descartes’ chapter headings: ‘Concerning God: wherein is given further proof of his existence.’* Sartre had a fine voice and an extensive repertoire, including Old Man River and all the current jazz hits; at the École Normale, he was famed for his comic gifts: it was always he who took the part of Monsieur Lanson, the principal, in the annual Students’ Revue, and he scored great successes in La Belle Hélène and romantic operettas of the 1900s. When he had done the donkey’s share of the work for the day, he would put on a record, and we would listen to Sophie Tucker, Layton and Johnstone, Jack Hylton, the Revellers, and to Negro Spirituals. Every day the walls of his room were adorned by fresh drawings: metaphysical animals; the latest exploits of the Eugene. Nizan specialized in portraits of Leibniz, whom he preferred to depict as a priest, or wearing a Tyrolean hat, and bearing on his backside the imprint of Spinoza’s hoof.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Page 43
