Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

I retain only one confused impression from my earliest years: it is all red, and black, and warm.

C’est une auto grise

It’s a grey car

Elle avait une jambe de bois;

She had a wooden leg

I found him amusing, and I was pleased whenever he made a fuss of me; but he didn’t play any very ...

Mama used to pound sugared almonds for me in a mortar and mix the crunchy powder with a yellow cream; the pink of the sweets used to shade off into exquisite nuances of colour, and I would dip an eager spoon into their brilliant sunset.

if only the universe we inhabit were completely edible, I used to think, what power we would have over it!

Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweetmeats and made me feel frustrated.

I would look at Mama’s armchair and think: ‘I won’t be able to sit on her knee any more if I go on growing up.’ Suddenly the future existed; it would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself.

the diet the doctor had prescribed: a cup of chocolate, a nicely coddled new-laid egg, and a lightly grilled chop.

I felt stifled in that dining-room, which was as overcrowded as an antique dealer’s back shop; not an inch of wall was left bare: there were tapestries, porcelain plates, dingy oil paintings; a stuffed turkey hen displayed on a heap of very green cabbages; the side tables were covered with velvet and plush and lace; the aspidistras imprisoned in burnished copper flower-pot bowls filled me with sadness.

One of my earliest and most pleasant memories is of the time we stayed at Châteauvillain in the Haute-Marne, with one of grandmama’s sisters. Old Aunt Alice, having lost long ago her husband and daughter, was mouldering slowly away, in a deaf and lonely old age, inside a great house surrounded by a huge garden.

I was playing with Aunt Lili in the dining-room when the house was struck by lightning; it was a serious accident, which filled me with pride: every time something happened to me, I had the feeling that I was at last someone. I enjoyed an even more subtle satisfaction.

Sheltered, petted, and constantly entertained by the endless novelty of life, I was a madly gay little girl. Nevertheless, there must have been something wrong somewhere: I had fits of rage during which my face turned purple and I would fall to the ground in convulsions.

I carried my disgusts to the point of vomiting, and when I coveted anything I did so with maniacal obsession; an unbridgeable chasm separated the things I loved and those I hated.

But I refused to submit to that intangible force: words. What I resented was that some casual phrase beginning ‘You must . . .’ or ‘You mustn’t . . .’ could ruin all my plans and poison all my happiness.

Deceived by outward appearances, she never suspected that inside my immature body nothing was lacking; and I made up my mind that when I was older I would never forget that a five-year-old is a complete individual, a character in his own right.

As soon as ever I suspected, rightly or wrongly, that people were taking advantage of my ingenuousness in order to get me to do something, my gorge rose and I began to kick out in all directions.

These minor victories encouraged me in the belief that rules and regulations and routine conformity are not insurmountable; they are at the root of a certain optimism which persisted in me despite all corrections.

I found it natural, and in a sense satisfactory that these secondary characters should be less irreproachable than those supreme divinities – Louise and my parents – who alone could be infallible.

I was given to understand that their father, an elderly professor of medicine, didn’t believe in God.

we could see two moving figures and hear raised voices: ‘There’s Monsieur and Madame fighting again,’ said Louise. That was when my universe began to totter. It was impossible that papa and mama should be enemies, that Louise should be their enemy;

So that I could conceive of no gap into which error might fall between the word and its object; that is why I submitted myself uncritically to the Word, without examining its meaning, even when circumstances inclined me to doubt its truth.

From then on, whenever Mama wore a new dress or sang at the top of her voice, I always felt a certain uneasiness. Moreover, knowing now that it wouldn’t do to attach too much importance to what Louise had to say, I no longer listened to her with quite the same docility as before.

Mama forbade Louise to read me one of Madame de Ségur’s fairy-tales: she said it would give me nightmares. What eventually became of that boy clothed in the skins of wild animals – for that was how the pictures showed him? My inquiries were fruitless. Ourson – the bear-cub – appeared to me to be the very incarnation of secrecy.

I thought it was quite incongruous that the all-powerful Christ-child should prefer to come down the chimney like a common sweep. I pondered this problem for a long time and finally appealed to my parents for enlightenment; they confessed their deception.

Mama had opened on the dining-room table the Regimbeau reading-book for infants; I was looking at the picture of a cow, and the letters C and H which are pronounced CH in the word VACHE. I suddenly understood that they didn’t have names, as objects do, but that they represented sounds: I understood now that they were symbols.

Using a knitting needle, she pointed to the notes on the stave; this line, she tried to explain, corresponded to that note on the pianoforte. But why? How could it possibly do that? I could see nothing in common between the ruled manuscript paper and the keys of the instrument.

But I finally gave in: I could finally play the scale; but I felt I was learning the rules of a game, not acquiring knowledge. On the other hand I felt no compunction about embracing the rules of arithmetic, because I believed in the absolute reality of numbers.

The maps in my atlas enchanted me. I was moved by the solitude of islands, by the boldness of promontories, by the fragility of those tenuous strips of land that connect peninsulas to continents. I was to experience that ecstasy again when I was grown-up and saw from an aeroplane the islands of Corsica and Sardinia etched on the blue of the Mediterranean, and when, at Kolkhis, illumined by a real sun, I saw an ideal isthmus choked between two seas.

In the boulevard Montparnasse, on the site where the Coupole now stands, was the Juglar coal depot out of which came black-faced men with coal sacks on their heads; among the piles of coke and anthracite, like wisps of charred paper in the sooty limbo of a chimney, those creatures whom God had cast out of the kingdom of light could be seen creeping about their daily tasks.

I enjoyed very much squinting through the lenses of a stereoscopic toy which transformed two photographic plates into a single, three-dimensional scene. I loved to rotate the strip of pictures in my kineoscope and watch the motionless horse begin to gallop.

The most unusual thing about him was that during his leisure hours he was an amateur actor: whenever I saw photographs of him in the costume of Pierrot, or disguised as a waiter or a soldier or even as Sarah Bernhardt, I took him to be a kind of magician:

Papa had explained to me that war means the invasion of one’s country by foreigners, and I began to look askance at the numerous Japanese who in those days used to sell fans and paper lanterns at the street corners. No. Our enemies apparently were the Germans with their pointed helmets who had already robbed us of Alsace and Lorraine and whose grotesque ugliness I discovered in the books of Hansi.

Orders for the requisitioning of horses and vehicles were nailed to the door of the coach-house, and grandpapa’s horses were taken off to Uzerche. The general agitation, the huge headlines in the Courrier du Centre all excited me;

My Aunt Hélène harnessed the dog-cart and we went to the nearby railway station to distribute apples to tall, beturbaned Indians who gave us handfuls of buckwheat; we took cheese and paste sandwiches to the wounded.

One day a woman offered a German prisoner a glass of wine. There were murmurs of disapproval from the other women. ‘Well!’ she said. ‘They’re men, too, like the others.’ The sounds of disapproval grew stronger.

I stared with studied horror at the woman who was known from then on as the ‘Frau’. In her I beheld at last Evil incarnate.

To add insult to injury, Mademoiselle Fevrier, having kept for herself half of what I had collected, pretended to hand over the full amount to a nurse who dutifully cried: ‘Twelve francs! That’s simply wonderful!’ I fell into a terrible rage. I wasn’t being taken at my true value; I had thought I was the star of the proceedings, and I’d only been an accessory: I’d been cheated.

I used to read in the Métro and in the trams: ‘Careless talk costs lives! Walls have ears!’ People talked about spies who stuck needles into women’s behinds and about others who distributed poisoned sweets among the children. I played for safety all the way.

From then on, Mama took me three times a week to communion at Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In the grey light of early morning, I liked to hear the sound of our feet on the flagged floor of the church. Sniffing the fragrance of incense, my eyes watering with the reek of candles, I found it sweet to kneel at the foot of the cross and dream vaguely of the cup of hot chocolate awaiting me when we got back home.

I knew there was a connexion between war and death. But I could not conceive that this great collective adventure could possibly concern me.

Half-way between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, between the landed gentry and the office worker, respecting but not practising the Catholic religion, he felt himself neither completely integrated with society nor burdened with any serious responsibilities: he represented an epicurean good taste.

he spent his nights reading Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant, Bourget, Marcel Prévost, and Jules Lemaître.

He was contemptuous of successes which are obtained at the expense of hard work and effort: according to him, if you were ‘born’ to be someone, you automatically possessed all the essential qualities – wit, talent, charm, and good breeding.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction; but though my father was an avid reader he knew that writing requires those tedious virtues, patience and application, that it is a solitary occupation with a public that exists only in the writer’s imagination. On the other hand the theatre brought a ready-made solution to his problems. The actor is spared the horrors of creation: he is offered on a plate an imaginary universe in which a special place has been created for him; he occupies that place in the flesh, before an audience of flesh and blood.

In this way he could avoid identification; he was neither a nobleman nor a commoner: this indeterminacy lent itself to every kind of impersonation; having fundamentally ceased to be himself, he could become anyone he liked, and could outshine them all.

He considered the re-establishment of the monarchy a Utopian dream; but the Republic only filled him with disgust. Without actually subscribing to L’Action Française, he had many friends among the Camelots du Roi* and he admired Maurras and Léon Daudet.

He detested foreigners, and was indignant that Jews should be allowed to take part in the government of the country; he was as convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt as my mother was of the existence of God. He read Le Matin and flew into a temper one day because one of our Sirmione cousins had brought a copy of L’Œuvre into the house: ‘That rag!’ he called it.

As is nearly always the case with idealists, he was sceptical almost to the point of cynicism. He responded to Cyrano with quivering emotion, enjoyed Clément Vautel, delighted in Capus, Donnay, Sacha Guitry, Flers, and Callavet. Both nationalist and man about town, he knew the value both of grandeur and of frivolity.

was he who had introduced her to life and the world of books. ‘The wife is what the husband makes of her: it’s up to him to make her someone,’ he often said.