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He used to read aloud to her Taine’s Les Origines de la France contemporaine and Gobineau’s L’Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines.
In particular he took great pains with my handwriting and spelling: whenever I wrote him a letter, he would send it back to me, with corrections. During the holidays he used to dictate tricky passages to me, chosen usually from Victor Hugo.
In order to help form my taste in literature, he had assembled a little anthology for me in an exercise book covered with shiny black imitation leather: Un Évangile, by Coppée, Le Pantin de la petite Jeanne by Banville, Hélas! si j’avais su! by Hégésippe Moreau, and several other poems. He taught me to read them aloud, ‘putting in the expression’. He read the classics aloud to me: Ruy-Blas, Hernani, the plays of Rostand, Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française, and Labiche’s comedies.
A gospel
In order to help form my taste in literature, he had assembled a little anthology for me in an exercise book covered with shiny black imitation leather: Un Évangile, by Coppée, Le Pantin de la petite Jeanne by Banville, Hélas! si j’avais su! by Hégésippe Moreau, and several other poems. He taught me to read them aloud, ‘putting in the expression’. He read the classics aloud to me: Ruy-Blas, Hernani, the plays of Rostand, Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française, and Labiche’s comedies.
Alas if I had known
Our relationship was situated in a pure and limpid atmosphere where unpleasantness could not exist. He did not condescend to me, but raised me up to his level, and then I was proud to feel myself a grown-up person. When I fell back to my ordinary level, I was dependent upon Mama; Papa had allowed her to take complete charge of my bodily and moral welfare.
She suffered many sad disappointments in her adolescence. Her childhood and youth filled her heart with a resentment which she never completely forgot. At the age of twenty, her neck squeezed into whalebone collars, accustomed to suppressing all her natural spontaneity, resorting to silence and brooding over bitter secrets, she felt herself alone and misunderstood; despite her great beauty, she lacked assurance and gaiety.
she dreaded criticism, and, in order to avoid it, took pains to be ‘like everybody else’.
Papa’s best friend was living with a woman, and that meant he was living in sin; that didn’t prevent him from paying frequent visits to our house; but his mistress could not be received.
she was apt to confuse sexuality with vice: she always associated fleshly desires with sin.
‘Physical’ questions sickened her so much that she never attempted to discuss them with me; she did not even warn me about the surprises awaiting me on the threshold of puberty.
My father was constantly astonished by the paradoxes of the human heart, by the playful tricks of heredity, and by the strangeness of dreams; I never saw my mother astonished by anything.
My attack of measles had left me with a slight lateral curvature of the spine; a doctor drew a line down my vertebral column, as if my back had been a blackboard, and he prescribed Swedish exercises.
when I sat astride the bar, I felt a curious itching sensation between my thighs; it was agreeable and yet somehow disappointing; I tried again; the phenomenon was repeated.
I recall the surprise we felt when, after asking Mama if we might take our dolls on holiday with us, she answered simply: ‘Why not?’ We had repressed this wish for years. Certainly the main reason for my timidity was a desire to avoid her derision.
Papa didn’t go to Mass, he smiled when Aunt Marguerite enthused over the miracles at Lourdes: he was an unbeliever. This scepticism did not effect me, so deeply did I feel myself penetrated by the presence of God; yet Papa was always right: how could he be mistaken about the most obvious of all truths?
The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life – embodied by my father – and my spiritual life – expressed by my mother – were two radically heterogeneous fields of experience which had absolutely nothing in common.
So I set God apart from life and the world, and this attitude was to have a profound influence on my future development.
This imbalance, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.
Her birth had been a disappointment, because the whole family had been hoping for a boy; certainly no one ever held it against her for being a girl, but it is perhaps not altogether without significance that her cradle was the centre of regretful comment.
At the Cours Désir the ladies in charge made a habit of holding up the older children as examples to the younger ones; whatever Poupette might do, and however well she might do it, the passing of time and the sublimation of a legend all contributed to the idea that I had done everything much better. No amount of effort and success was sufficient to break through that impenetrable barrier. The victim of some obscure malediction, she was hurt and perplexed by her situation, and often in the evening she would sit crying on her little chair.
Next day we would start all over again. ‘We’ll play you know what,’ we would whisper to each other as we prepared for bed.
When she was not there I hovered between two extremes: words were either insignificant noises which I made with my mouth, or, whenever I addressed my parents, they became deeds of the utmost gravity; but when Poupette and I talked together, words had a meaning yet did not weigh too heavily upon us.
But between my sister and myself things happened naturally. We would disagree, she would cry, I would become cross, and we would hurl the supreme insult at one another: ‘You fool!’ and then we’d make it up. Her tears were real, and if she laughed at one of my jokes, I knew she wasn’t trying to humour me. She alone endowed me with authority; adults sometimes gave in to me: she obeyed me.
Their superiority was reflected on myself. In the Luxembourg Gardens, we were forbidden to play with strange little girls: this was obviously because we were made of finer stuff. Unlike the vulgar race of boys and girls, we did not have the right to drink from the metal goblets that were chained to the public fountains; grandmama had made me a present of an opalescent shell, a mother-of-pearl chalice from which I alone might drink: like my horizon blue greatcoat, it was an exclusive model.
I did not go to a state school, but attended a private establishment which manifested its originality in many ways; the classes, for example, were numbered in a curious way: zero, first, second, first-third, third-second, first-fourth, and so on. I studied my catechism in the school’s private chapel, without having to mix with a whole herd of other children from the parish. I belonged to an élite.
However, in this very select circle, certain of my parents’ friends enjoyed one great advantage over us: they were rich; as a mere corporal, my father earned about five cents a day, and we were obliged to practise a genteel economy.
Children were born, I told myself, by divine decree; but, contrary to all orthodox thought, I set certain limits to the power of the Almighty. This presence within me which told me I was myself and no one else was dependent on nobody; nothing could touch it; it was impossible that anyone, were it God Himself, could have created it; God had merely provided, as it were, the outer wrapping.
I realized, with dreadful anguish, that this absence of memory was the same as extinction, nothingness; everything conspired to suggest that, before making my first appearance in my cradle, I had not existed at all. I should have to correct this deficiency:
otiose
otiose /ˈōdēˌōs ˈōSHēˌōs/ I. adjective 1. serving no practical purpose or result • he did fuss, uttering otiose explanations. 2. ‹archaic› indolent; idle. II. derivatives otiosely adverb – origin late 18th cent.: from Latin otiosus, from otium ‘leisure.’
In the darkness of the past, in the stillness of inanimate beings I had dire forebodings of my own extinction; I conjured up delusive fallacies, and turned them into omens of the truth, and of my own death.
Lying flat on the Turkey carpet, I used to read Madame de Ségur, Zénaïde Fleuriot, Perrault’s fairy-tales, Grimm, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Bavarian author of children’s tales, Canon Schmid, the books of Töpffer and Bécassine, the adventures of the Fenouillard family and those of Sapper Camember, Sans famille, Jules Verne, Paul d’Ivoi, André Laurie, and the series of little pink books, the ‘Livres Roses’ published by Larousse, which contained legends and folk tales from every country in the world, and which during the war included stories of the great heroes.
the novels of Madame de Ségur never caused me the slightest astonishment.
Andersen taught me what melancholy is; in his tales, objects suffer from neglect, are broken and pine away without deserving their unhappy fate; the little mermaid, before she passed into oblivion, was in agony at every step she took, as if she were walking on red-hot cinders, yet she had not done anything wrong: her tortures and her death made me sick at heart.
As I did not look to literature for a reflection of reality, I never had the idea that I might write down my own experiences or even my dreams; the thing that amused me was to manipulate an object through the use of words, as I once used to make constructions with building-blocks; only books, and not life in all its crudity, could provide me with models: I wrote pastiche.
I admired the old ladies in their whalebone collars who were able to spend the rest of their days handling the volumes in their black bindings with titles displayed on a red or orange rectangle on the spine.
La Course au bonheur
Race to happiness
The actors were too real, and at the same time not real enough. The most sumptuous finery had not an iota of the brilliance of a carbuncle in a fairy-tale.
we went one morning to see L’Ami Fritz: everyone agreed that the film was charming. A few weeks later we saw, under the same privileged conditions, Le Roi de Camargue.
he met a naked gipsy with smouldering eyes who slapped his horse’s neck; for a long while they stared at one another in amazement; later he went into a little house with her in the middle of the marshes. At this point I noticed my mother and grandmother exchanging looks of alarm;
when my parents decided to move to a fifth-floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: ‘But I won’t be able to see the people in the street any more!
But in Paris I was hungry for human company; the essence of a city is in its inhabitants: cut off from any more intimate contact, I had to be able to see them at least. Already I was beginning to want to escape from the narrow circle in which I was confined.
I sensed for the first time that one can be touched to the very heart of one’s being by a radiance from outside.
But I refused to allow a man to come between me and my maternal responsibilities: our husbands were always abroad. In real life, I knew, things were quite different: the mother of a family is always flanked by her mate; she is overburdened with a thousand tiresome tasks. Whenever I thought of my own future, this servitude seemed to me so burdensome that I decided I wouldn’t have any children; the important thing for me was to be able to form minds and mould characters: I shall be a teacher, I thought.
I should have to become a governess in a family.
This was the meaning behind my vocation: when I was grown-up, I would take my own childhood in hand again and make of it a faultless work of art. I saw myself as the basis of my own apotheosis.
apotheosis /əˌpäTHēˈōsəs/ I. noun — [usu. in sing.] 1. the highest point in the development of something; culmination or climax • his appearance as Hamlet was the apotheosis of his career. 2. the elevation of someone to divine status; deification. – origin late 16th cent.: via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek apotheōsis, from apotheoun ‘make a god of,’ from apo ‘from’ + theos ‘god.’
The majority of real or legendary heroines – Saint Blandine, Joan of Arc, Griselda, Geneviève de Brabant – only attained to bliss and glory in this world or in the next after enduring painful sufferings inflicted on them by males. I willingly cast myself in the role of victim. Sometimes I laid stress upon her spiritual triumphs: the torturer was only an insignificant intermediary between the martyr and her crown.
But often I found myself revelling in the delights of misfortune and humiliation. My piety disposed me towards masochism; prostrate before a blond young god, or, in the dark of the confessional with suave young Abbé Martin, I would enjoy the most exquisite transports: the tears would pour down my cheeks and I would swoon away in the arms of angels. I would whip up these emotions to the point of paroxysm
I had been taught never to look at my naked body, and I had to contrive to change my underwear without uncovering myself completely. In our universe, the flesh had no right to exist.
The condescension of grown-ups turns children into a general species whose individual members are all alike: nothing exasperated me more than this.
On the first floor landing there was a bookcase from which he would select books for me; sitting on the stairs, we would read side by side, I Gulliver’s Travels and he Popular Astronomy.
