Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

We decided that we were ‘married in the sight of God’ and I called Jacques ‘my fiancé’. We spent our honeymoon on the merry-go-round’s painted horses in the Luxembourg Gardens. I took our engagement very seriously. Yet when he was away I hardly ever thought about him. I was glad to see him when he came back, but I never missed him at all.

When I was eight, I was no longer as hale and hearty as I had been when younger, but had become sickly and timorous.

The period of restrictions had begun. Bread was grey, or else suspiciously white. Instead of hot chocolate in the mornings we had insipid, watery soups. My mother used to knock up omelettes without eggs and cook up ‘afters’ with margarine and saccharine, as there was very little sugar; she dished up chilled beef, horse-meat steaks, and dreary vegetables: ‘Chinese’ and ‘Jerusalem’ artichokes, ‘Swiss’ chard and other obscure members of the beet, turnip, and parsnip families. To make the wine pan out, Aunt Lili fabricated an abominable fermented beverage from figs, which was known as ‘figgy-wiggy’. Meals lost all their old gaiety.

He had large banking interests in Verdun, and his speculations had ended in bankruptcy in which his capital and that of a good number of his clients had been swallowed up. But he still continued to have the utmost confidence in his lucky star and in his financial acumen. At the moment, he was running a boot and shoe factory which, thanks to army orders, was going fairly well; but this modest enterprise did not satisfy his passion for making business deals, considering offers, and thinking up new ways of getting rich quick.

‘Oh, yes!’ I cried, ‘let it be over soon! No matter how it ends as long as it’s over soon!’ Mama stopped and gave me a startled look: ‘Don’t you say things like that! France must be victorious!’ I felt ashamed, not just of having allowed such an enormity to escape my lips, but even of having thought of it.

a rowdy café had just opened, called La Rotonde. You could see short-cropped, heavily made-up women going in, and curiously dressed men. ‘It’s a joint for wogs and defeatists,’ declared my father.

I heard a lot about two traitors who had tried to betray France to Germany: Malvy and Caillaux.

On the 11th of November I was practising the piano under Mama’s supervision when the bells rang out for the Armistice. Papa put on his civilian clothes again. Mama’s brother died, shortly after being demobilized, of Spanish influenza. But I had hardly known him, and when Mama had dried her tears, happiness returned – for me at any rate.

At home, nothing was ever wasted: not a crust, not a wafer of soap, not a twist of string; free tickets and opportunities for free meals were always seized with avidity.

I used to think that not only in my own family but everywhere time and money were so exactly measured that they had to be distributed with the greatest economy and strictness: this idea appealed to me, because I wanted to see a world free from all irregularities.

gratuitous economy is a contradiction in terms, and it isn’t interesting or amusing.

At La Grillière there were often unoccupied moments before and after meals or at the end of Mass; I would fret and fidget: ‘Can’t that child sit still for just one minute?’ my Uncle Maurice would mutter impatiently.

I couldn’t tolerate being bored: my boredom soon turned to real distress of mind; that is why, as I have remarked, I detested idleness; but tasks which paralysed my body without occupying my mind left me with the same feeling of emptiness.

antimacassars

antimacassar /ˌan(t)ēməˈkasər/ I. noun ‹chiefly historical› a piece of cloth put over the back of a chair to protect it from grease and dirt or as an ornament. – origin mid 19th cent.: from anti- + Macassar.

This characteristic was to remain with me all my life. I bungled all practical jobs and I was never any good at work requiring finicky precision.

Why should I want to develop capabilities which would always remain fatally limited, and have only a relative importance in my life?

If I was describing in words an episode in my life, I felt that it was being rescued from oblivion, that it would interest others, and so be saved from extinction. I loved to make up stories, too: when they were inspired by my own experience, they seemed to justify it; in one sense they were of no use at all, but they were unique and irreplaceable, they existed, and I was proud of having snatched them out of nothingness.

I stood with arms akimbo in front of the section marked ‘Works suitable for Children’, in which there were hundreds of volumes. ‘All this belongs to me! ‘I said to myself, bewildered by such a profusion of riches.

In addition, my mother sometimes took me to a little bookshop near the school, to buy English novels; they were a ‘good buy’, because it took me a long time to get through them. I took great pleasure in lifting, with the aid of a dictionary, the dark veil of foreign words; descriptions and stories retained a certain mystery; I used to find them more charming and more profound than if I had merely read them in French.

my father made me a present of L’Abbé Constantin in a beautiful edition illustrated by Madeleine Lemaire.

Two or three years later, weeping at Cyrano, sobbing over L’Aiglon, vibrating to Britannicus, I was to give myself up body and soul to the magic of the stage.

He talked a lot about the Bolsheviks, whose name dangerously resembled that of the Boche and who had, he said, ruined him; he was so pessimistic about the future that he didn’t dare set up in business as a lawyer again. He accepted the post of co-director in my grandfather’s factory. He had already suffered many disappointments; as a consequence of my grandfather’s bankruptcy, my mother’s dowry had never been paid over to him. Now, his career finished, the Russian stocks which had brought in the larger part of his income having slumped disastrously, he regretfully placed himself in the category of the ‘newly-poor’.

it was the promiscuity of marriage that repelled me. ‘At night when you go to bed, you won’t be able to have a good cry in peace!’

All day long, I felt that people’s eyes were upon me; I liked and even loved the people around me, but when I went to bed at night I felt a sharp sense of relief at the idea of being able to live at least for a little while without being watched by others; then I could talk to myself, remember things, allow my emotions a free rein and hearken to those tender inner promptings which are stifled by the presence of grown-ups.

The embarrassing thing was that God forbade so many things, but never asked for anything positive apart from a few prayers or religious practices which did not change my daily course in any way. I even found it most peculiar to see people who had just received Holy Communion plunging straight away into the ordinary routine of their lives again; I did the same, but it embarrassed me.

I had my breakfast there in the mornings: café au lait and wholemeal bread.

Before sitting down to table, Uncle Maurice would season the salad with meticulous care and toss it with wooden spatulas. At the beginning of the meal there would be a passionate discussion about the quality of the cantaloups; at its end, the flavours of different kinds of pears would be thoroughly compared.

But I could do without frivolous distractions. Reading, walking, and the games I made up with my sister were all I wanted. The chief of my pleasures was to rise early in the morning and observe the awakening of nature; with a book in my hand, I would steal out of the sleeping house and quietly unlatch the garden gate:

I felt I was one with everything: we all had our place just here, now, and for ever.

there I could always find some novel by Fennimore Cooper or some Pictorial Magazine, its pages badly foxed, which I had not seen before.

I was charmed by the smallness of the room: there was a bed, a chest of drawers, and, standing on a sort of locker, the wash bowl and water jug.

But above all, before going to bed I would stand a long time at my casement, and often I would rise in the middle of the night to look out upon the night breathing softly in its sleep. I would lean out and plunge my hands in the fresh leaves of a clump of cherry laurels; the water from the spring would be gurgling over a mossy stone; from time to time a cow would kick her hoof against the door of the byre: I could almost smell the odour of straw and hay. Monotonous and dogged as the beat of the heart would sound the stridulations of a grasshopper; against the infinite silence and the sky’s infinities I used to feel that the earth itself was echoing that voice within me which kept on whispering: ‘Here I am.’

These prohibitions were aimed particularly at the female species; a real ‘lady’ ought not to show too much bosom, or wear short skirts, or dye her hair, or have it bobbed, or make up, or sprawl on a divan, or kiss her husband in the underground passages of the Métro: if she transgressed these rules, she was ‘not a lady’.

Sometimes, before giving me a book to read, my mother would pin a few pages together; in Wells’s The War of the Worlds I found a whole chapter had been placed under the ban.

One day as I was working at my father’s desk, I noticed at my elbow a novel with a yellow paper cover: Cosmopolis.

she had read so many bad books that she had lost her faith and grown utterly weary of existence.

the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense.

Marriage was the antidote which allowed you to partake freely and without danger of the sometimes highly suspect fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: but I simply couldn’t understand why. I never dreamed of discussing these problems with my friends. One girl had been expelled from the school because she had had ‘evil conversations’ with some of the other girls;

Madeleine did not give us any other details. She went on to announce, however, that within a year or two certain things would happen inside my body; I should have my ‘whites’ and then I would bleed every month and I should have to wear some kind of bandage between my thighs. I asked if these emissions would be called my ‘reds’, and my sister was worried about how she would manage with all those bandages: how would she make water? These questions exasperated Madeleine; she said we were a couple of ninnies, lifted her shoulders in an expressive despair, and went off to feed her chickens.

we always chose the most questionable ones and took great delight in carolling: ‘The white breasts are lovelier by far – to my hungry mouth – than the wild strawberries of the woods – and their milk I suck . . .’

But I had lost all my illusions as to the nature of their secret: they had no access to occult spheres where the white radiance of eternity shone brighter for them than it did for us, or where the horizon was vaster than that of my smaller world. My disillusionment served to reduce the universe and mankind to a trivial day-to-day level. I did not realize it immediately, but the prestige of grown-ups had suffered a considerable diminution in my esteem.

but there was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott. The March girls were Protestants, their father was a pastor and their mother had given them as a bedside book not The Imitation of Christ but The Pilgrim’s Progress: these slight differences only made the things we had in common with the March girls stand out all the more. I was moved when Meg and Jo had to put on their poor brown poplin frocks to go to a matinée at which all the other children were dressed in silk; they were taught, as I was, that a cultivated mind and moral righteousness were better than money; their modest home, like my own, had about it – I don’t know why – something quite exceptional. I identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual. Brusque and bony, Jo clambered up into trees when she wanted to read; she was much more tomboyish and daring than I was, but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books. She wrote: in order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories. I don’t know if I dreamed of reviving my old friendship with Jacques, or if, rather more vaguely, I was longing for the barrier between my own world and the world of boys to be broken down, but the relationship between Jo and Laurie touched me to the heart. Later, I had no doubt, they would marry one another; so it was possible for maturity to bring to fruition, instead of denying them, the promises made in childh...

She was called Elizabeth Mabille, and she was the same age as myself. Her schooling, begun with a governess, had been interrupted by a serious accident: in the country, while roasting some potatoes out in the open, her dress had caught fire; third-degree bums on her thighs had made her scream with agony for night after night; she had had to remain lying down for a whole year; under her pleated skirt, her flesh was still puffed up.

But with Zaza I had real conversations, like the ones Papa had in the evenings with Mama. We would talk about our school work, our reading, our common friends, our teachers, and about what we knew of the world: we never talked about ourselves. We never exchanged girlish confidences. We did not allow ourselves any kind of familiarity. We addressed each other formally as ‘vous’ (never ‘tu’) and, excepting at the ends of letters, we did not give each other kisses.

I had everything, yet my hands were empty. I was walking along the boulevard Raspail with Mama and I suddenly asked myself the agonizing question: ‘What is happening to me? Is this what my life is to be? Nothing more? And will it always be like this, always?’ The idea of living through an infinity of days, weeks, months, and years that were void of hope completely took my breath away: it was as if, without any warning, the whole world had died. But I was unable to give a name to this distress either.

I needed her presence to realize how much I needed her. This was a blinding revelation.

I didn’t require Zaza to have any such definite feelings about me: it was enough to be her best friend. The admiration I felt for her did not diminish me in my own eyes. Love is not envy. I could think of nothing better in the world than being myself, and loving Zaza.

To make up for that he now went out in the evenings much more than formerly, to play bridge with friends or in a café; in summer he spent his Sundays at the races. Mama was often left alone. She did not complain, but she hated housework and poverty was hard for her to bear; her nerves were always on edge now. My father gradually lost his even good-temper. They never really quarrelled, but they used to shout very loudly at one another over the merest trifles, and often vented their irritation upon my sister and myself.

‘Well,’ my sister began, ‘I don’t think I love you as much as I used to! There!’

when I thought of the bladders swollen with water in their bellies, I felt the same terror as Gulliver did when the young giantesses displayed their breasts to him.