I know, because for three years I tried every possible ruse to avoid this grievous trial, and for three years I was defeated daily. Our building being without an elevator, the trick was to get down the staircase unobserved. I tried tiptoeing. Childishly ineffective. I crept down in my stocking feet. A fruitless effort. I shod myself in Indian moccasins and tennis shoes. To no avail. Then I tried a new tack: I tried disguise. The concierge saw right through it. Finally I hit upon the marvelous idea of tying the sheets together and letting myself down through the window. Pierre pulled me back over the sill, pointing out that the line of my descent would take me, fatefully, right past her window.
Trapped, I studied not only the collected works of Napoleon, but his military maneuvers too. Nowhere, however, was there the slightest clue as to how the Little Corporal would have handled the situation. At last it was that old saw about Alexander the Great that released me from my dilemma, or rather, his old blade. I remembered that when Alexander was confronted with the hideous convolutions of the Gordian knot it never occurred to him to try to unravel it, but with the single stroke that made him master of the world, he cut smack through it with his sword. In this principle lay my liberation.
Craftily, stealthily, I began house hunting. Secretly, furtively, I whispered to Pierre one afternoon that I’d found just the dwelling we were looking for. Closeted in the hushed dimness of a notaire’s office, I signed the documents which gave us possession of a house all for ourselves and all to ourselves. A house, of course, without a concierge.
Silently we went about packing our possessions in the apartment, and finally, on a glowing, golden day in June, we gathered up the children and our belongings and descended the stairs to run the gauntlet for the very last time.
The concierge, of course, awaited us. And with an absolutely dazzling smile, she said, “Isn’t it a lovely day, Madame—a lovely, lovely day!”
On a trip home to the United States not so long ago I went through a very extraordinary experience on television. Influenced, I suppose, by the backwash of the McCarthy investigations, the style of the television interview had become, I found to my discomfiture, the style of the third degree. And all sorts of rather banal facts about one’s life, when subjected to the accusatory question, seemed to take on, under the interviewer’s cold, condemning glare, the most sinister and criminal implications. But I want you to know that once, under the thumbscrew’s unspeakable duress, I snapped back with a réponse that merits your highest approbation. In fact, since I may never prove myself in France, and run a great risk of never being coronated, I feel that the least that you, my fellow Americans, can do, is make me President. I really have earned it.
Here’s what happened. On a nation-wide program, a green and baleful eye bore down on me and a voice freighted with censure charged me with the following terrible indictment: “Miss de Havilland, we understand that you have two offspring, a boy and a girl, and that you are bringing up the first a Protestant, and the second a Catholic. Do you not think, Miss de Havilland, that this confused background is unfair to your children?”
Before 20,000,000 people I was appalled. I’d never thought of my conduct as confused before, in this regard, and I couldn’t imagine the children being upset in any way by having different but intimately related faiths. Furthermore, it had never occurred to me that I could possibly be considered a bad mother for what had come about so naturally. As I struggled to reply, I was more than rattled, I was affrighted, for I was certain that if I didn’t come up with the right answer I would either be boiled in oil or grilled alive under the supervision of the Inquisitor General and in full view of the television audience. Suddenly, some mysterious force invaded my paralyzed psyche, set my tongue a-going, and I heard myself replying with a certain spirit, “This country was founded on the principle of religious tolerance, and we practice it right in the heart of the family.” The Inquisitor folded, and just as I was about to throw her into a pot of boiling oil, the program came to a close.
All right, now when do you inaugurate me?
—
However, the question which had hung for such a long, foreboding moment upon the air has, since then, stimulated me to considerable thought about the fact that it was so easy for me, a Protestant, to take Gisèle down to the Church of Saint Honoré d’Eylau in the Avenue Victor Hugo and turn her over to the spiritual ministrations of Monseigneur Sedillière. It is true, of course, that although every Frenchman is born protestant and protesting, almost none would ever dream of being baptized anything but Catholic, and it is also true that it is to this massive majority that my husband belongs. But it was not, I realized after the television program, just to please my husband that I had so blithely and so joyfully delivered my daughter unto Rome. It was also, I decided finally, because I myself had had a quite unique and special training for that particular and portentous moment.
It all began, I think, back in the Convent of Notre Dame in Belmont, California, where the nuns were unwittingly preparing me for more than one of the exigencies of life in France. Just as surely as she was investing me with the staying powers of a camel by saying, “No!” every time I raised a desperate “May I…?” hand in class, Sister Mary Constancia was insuring in still other ways my happy adaptation to a country which is fully 95 per cent Roman Catholic.
She did it by the sagest of rules. She said that all the little Protestants in the convent (five in the primary grades) must, absolutely must get up at 5:30 in the morning with all the little Catholics, to go to Mass. The rule was marvelously clever, because if all the little Protestants had been allowed to stay in bed, can you imagine the falling away there would have been among the faithful? There was only one exception to the rule: Protestant or Catholic, you could remain in bed if you had taken castor oil the night before. Naturally, on first learning of this dispensation I took immediate advantage of it and swallowed a tablespoon of castor oil for five nights in a row. In the long run and in the short, however, I found the practice rather fatiguing, and finally gave it up. I developed, at last, the true school spirit.
It seemed to me, moreover, that the Mass was a perfectly awesome and beautiful ceremony—the flowers, the candles, the incense, and the splendid robes of Father Greene were to me the ultimate in what was poetic, mystical, and romantic. We will not go into my conduct, however, the time the cat got loose behind the altar.
When I entered the convent, I did so under a decided handicap. My sister Joan, fifteen months younger than I, had been there for six months just before me, and with the really beastly shrewdness that younger sisters are wont to have, she had had a vision. Right there, during Mass, she had seen the Virgin Mary, and had immediately fainted. Of course, the nuns were in a dither of excitement about it, and Joan, who had already earned among them the gentle appellation “duckie,” departed from the convent at Christmastime with their tender blessings, leaving behind her an aura of unsurmountable prestige. Now, you just try following to a convent a younger sister who has had a Vision. Just try it.
Once established in the convent’s strict and reverent routine, I waited and waited to have a manifestation of my own. Nothing happened at all, except that Sister Mary Constancia had a vision of what she considered a really degrading nature during Physical Ed., and as a result I was detained after class to write one hundred times on the blackboard, “Henceforth I will always be a lady and will never again show my bloomers while playing basketball.” She called me, as I remember it, a “brass monkey.” Not even her brass monkey. A brass monkey.
Anyway, when it became clear to me that the Virgin Mary was feeling rather reticent and would not immediately help me to attain the same prestige which she had so indulgently bestowed upon my sister, it occurred to me one day that what she wanted me to do was render her a service before making her appearance.
At that very moment I happened to be in her Grotto in the convent grounds, and as the thought struck me, I noticed simultaneously that the Grotto was crawling and encrusted with disgu
sting little garden snails. “What an offense they must be to her,” I exclaimed. They were, immediately, an offense to me too. In our garden at home I had seen similar snails, and the family custom was to pour salt upon them, to which they would react by boiling up into a froth and subsequently evaporating. Instantly, I understood what I must do to bring about the Visitation of the Virgin. I must dedicate myself to ridding the Virgin’s Grotto utterly and completely of those blemishing, abhorrent and sacrilegious snails.
I became wily and resourceful in the pursuit of this holy enterprise, and promptly organized a chosen band of mixed Catholics and Protestants to assist me every noon hour, immediately after lunch and just before our first afternoon class, to wage this battle of the innocents.
The problem, of course, was to obtain the salt. I solved it. I instructed my small army to remove from the luncheon table, every day and without being observed, every one of the saltcellars thereon. I told them not to put the cellars in their pockets where the nuns would easily detect them, but to secrete them in their bloomers. My crew was then to meet me in the Grotto and join me in the attack, and at the first sound of the class bell, restore the cellars to their bloomers. At the evening meal, they were surreptitiously to return each shaker to the table.
The plan worked brilliantly for a full week. Snails were foaming up all over the Grotto and turning into vapor, and in my imagination I saw this sacred place clean of its blemishes, and I myself favored at last, in full Mass, before the entire school and all the nuns, and even Father Greene, with a glorious Appearance of the Holy Mother.
In the meantime, of course, consternation reigned among the nuns. After every noontime meal, no saltcellars remained upon the table. After every dinnertime repast, the saltcellars were back in their accustomed places. Alas, the finger pointed inexorably to the Brass Monkey. The Brass Monkey was questioned, the plot exposed, and all the saltcellars were ordered restored without further delay to the refectory table, never to be removed again no matter how noble the cause, under pain of having to write two hundred times upon the blackboard another humiliating legend.
Of course, I never did have the Vision. My great work had not been completed, you see, and I do think the Virgin Mary does like things to be perfectly tidy before she gives such a special benediction.
My contact with the Mother Church was less intimate after I left the convent, but the ground, if it had not been sanctified, had at least been salted.
One day after I had taken up residence in France, and I discovered from Benjamin’s otherwise praiseworthy report card that his soin and écriture were mal (his neatness and writing were bad), I took him by the hand in the lovely Normandy village near which he goes to boarding school and where I lunch with him on Sundays, and I said, “Ben, because I don’t see a Protestant one anywhere around, you are going with me into that ravishing twelfth-century Roman Catholic church in the square, and you are going to pray for a little heavenly assistance with your soin and écriture.”
Benjamin was horrified. He protested that he wouldn’t even go into a Catholic church. “Why,” he gasped, “they don’t even have so much as the same Bible that we do.”
“Never mind,” said I with firmness. “In such a time as this, it is not the differences between the faiths which interest me, it’s the similarities.”
We entered the church, which, at two in the afternoon, was quite deserted, and as I strode round looking for the proper place to address a few words of intercession, I noticed that one saint had an extraordinary number of plaques de remerciement (tablets saying “thank you”) embedded in the wall behind her—thirty-nine in all, whereas the others had, at most, only nine. I had no idea who this remarkable personage might be, but I said to Ben, “Clearly this is the saint to address your plea to. She’s a whizz—you can see that for yourself. Here’s a saint who gets things done.” Very dutifully, Ben knelt down, folded his hands, closed his eyes, and you could see that he was doing a lot of very earnest silent praying.
Two weeks later, when we were again together in the village, Benjamin pulled from his pocket his most recent report card and handed it to me. I examined it with tense eagerness, my eyes rapidly running down the subjects until they reached soin and écriture. Alongside those two words was the miraculous observation “Bien.”
“Well, Ben,” I said, exhilarated, “you have certainly found yourself a friend.” And I immediately inquired at the local bistro who the saint was with the thirty-nine plaques de remerciement.
“You mean,” came the query, “the one with the red and white roses in her hands?”
“Yes, I think so,” I replied.
“Oh,” was the answer, “that’s Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux.”
From that moment on, Sainte Thérèse and I, as is well known among my friends, became much more than mere acquaintances. We have what you might call a working relationship.
Two years ago when I was in California, for example, a Protestant friend of mine who had been having difficulties in his marriage invited me to dine with him. He said, “You know, my wife is in Europe and she simply won’t come back. I’m very much afraid that our marriage is at an end and I deeply regret the fact, as I’d very much like it to go on.”
I leaned across the table and fixed him with a glowing eye. “You have nothing whatsoever to worry about,” I said. “I am leaving for France in a very few days. The minute I get there I will go straight out to Benjamin’s school to see him. I will immediately thereafter pay a visit to Sainte Thérèse in the church in the village square. I will, I assure you, light a candle for you and your wife, and your marriage will be restored—you can be certain of it.”
I did exactly as I had promised, but four weeks later received a rather querulous letter from the husband to the effect that my efforts had been of no avail. I wrote him immediately not to lose faith. The desired reunion would take a little while to bring about, perhaps, but he could be assured that, in the end, the happy result would obtain. Sainte Thérèse, I explained, was, after all, a European, and therefore could not be expected to have the same sense of time as we Americans. I must say I did have an anxious moment, though, when a letter arrived from the wife saying that in a few days she would be taking the final, decisive step and would be filing suit for divorce. However, on the very eve of the scheduled day, a cable from the husband came winging over the Atlantic, bearing the message, “Sainte Thérèse rides again.” The marriage had been restored.
Nevertheless, about six months later, when I found myself again in California, I once more received an invitation from the besieged and beleaguered husband. At the end of the meal, with a grave and disheartened face he confided that he had already given the sad news to Louella and wanted me to know before I picked up the morning Examiner that this time the marriage was really at an end and a divorce between him and his wife would soon take place. Furthermore, he was now perfectly resigned to the inevitable, he said, and had already adjusted himself fully, and even with a certain relief, to the idea of a completely new and celibate life. As we parted company, I said to him with utmost sympathy, that I was, as he knew, returning on the morrow to France. That immediately on arriving there I would of course go straight to Normandy to visit Ben, and that I would at once pay a visit to Sainte Thérèse in the church of the village square where, he could be assured, I would light a candle for him and his wife. He paled, clutched my arm and whispered with a hoarse and desperate urgency, “Separate candles! Separate candles!”
I don’t know why it is that it should have fallen to me to train Gisèle in the customs of her faith, but the other day when we went to see Ben in Normandy and then around to my favorite village haunt, just outside that lovely edifice, I rehearsed my daughter in the proper conduct of a little Roman Catholic on entering her church. I told her that on coming through the door and seeing the altar she must make a little genuflection, like a curtsy, and that, at the same time, she should make the sign of the Cross with her right hand, touching first her forehead, t
hen her breast, then her left shoulder, and finally her right. She loved the whole idea and practiced energetically. However, when we got into the church, she did as she’d been told, but with much greater fullness than I’d counted on. She bent both knees, in what can only be described as a deeply reverent but unmistakable squat, and then proceeded to make the sign of the Cross with both hands at the same time, starting at different points of the compass and ending up in what appeared to be a sort of sacramental cat’s cradle.
I am sure, though, that her radiant spirit can only have charmed the angelic personages who may have been observing her, and I am certain, too, that Sainte Thérèse, herself, was very pleased a little later, when Gisèle rose after having addressed to her her very first prayers, and exclaimed in a ringing and jubilant tone, “Ça y est!” or, freely translated, “All set!”
Just as I once did, you have probably been cherishing for years the tender illusion that 75 per cent of the population of the land of the fleur de lys is made up of pert but immaculate French maids just longing to run your home for you in a manner of brisk perfection, with a gleaming smile and an adorable accent, garbed in a smart black uniform set off by spotless white cuffs, collar and apron. That French maid, dear friends, whom you first encountered in a Philip Barry play or a Noël Coward musical comedy, existed at that moment of discovery only in the mind of the playwright. As, dear friends, the present theatrical trend being what it is, she now exists only in yours.
You think you’ve got your problems in the land of the free but flustered housewife, with nary a hand to help, either with that dinner you’ve invited those people to on Tuesday evening, or with those wild Indians who have the effrontery to pass themselves off as Boy Scouts but require a reliable adult or adolescent presence on Friday night, when you will be dining down the road with the friend who cannot imagine what she was thinking of when she recklessly asked you. Well, over here, under the broad, bright bands of the tricolor, you can have troubles too. You may be able to get the hand, but the amount of help it will give you, and the style in which it will give it—wait until you hear.
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