Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

Because I was a prey to agonizing desires, with parched mouth, I would toss and turn in my bed, calling for a man’s body to be pressed against my own, for a man’s hand to stroke my flesh.

Embarrassed by my body, I developed phobias: for example, I couldn’t bear to drink from a glass I had already drunk from. I had nervous tics: I couldn’t stop shrugging my shoulders and twitching my nose.

they were the days and weeks and years. Since the day I was born I had gone to bed richer in the evening than I had been the day before; I was steadily improving myself, step by step; but if, when I got up there, I found only a barren plateau, with no landmark to make for, what was the point in it all?

This refusal to make the final break with the past became very clear when I read Louisa M. Alcott’s Good Wives, which is a sequel to Little Women. A year or more had passed since I had left Jo and Laurie together, smiling at the future. As soon as I picked up the little paper-backed Tauchnitz edition in which their story was continued I opened it at random. I happened on a page which without warning broke the news of Laurie’s marriage to Jo’s young sister, Amy, who was blonde, vain, and stupid. I threw the book away from me as if it had burned my fingers. For several days I was absolutely crushed by a misfortune which had seemed to strike at the very roots of my being: the man I loved and by whom I had thought I was loved had betrayed me for a little goose of a girl. I hated Louisa M. Alcott for it. Later, I discovered that Jo herself had turned Laurie down.

My mother’s whole education and upbringing had convinced her that for a woman the greatest thing was to become the mother of a family; she couldn’t play this part unless I played the dutiful daughter, but I refused to take part in grown-up pretence just as much as I did when I was five years old.

When he stayed at home he read us Victor Hugo and Rostand;

After that, and perhaps partly because of that incident, I no longer believed in my father’s absolute infallibility.

As I was not now admitting everything I thought, why not venture unmentionable acts? I was learning how to be secretive.

On holiday I was always short of reading matter;

Ever since my conversations with Madeleine, I had begun to doubt whether Sacha Guitry, Flers and Callavet, Capus and Tristan Bernard would really do me any harm.

At home in Paris, pretending to limit my reading of Musset to his Nuits, I would install myself behind the huge volume of his collected works and read all his plays, Rolla and Les Confessions d’un enfant du siècle.

I spent wonderful hours curled up in the leather armchair, devouring the collection of paper-backed novels which had enchanted my father’s youth: Bourget, Alphonse Daudet, Marcel Prévost, Maupassant, and the Goncourts.

It was impossible for Mama to catch me out; but at moments the mere thought that Les Demi-vierges or La Femme et le pantin was lying under my pillow made me shudder with fright.

Half virgins

It was impossible for Mama to catch me out; but at moments the mere thought that Les Demi-vierges or La Femme et le pantin was lying under my pillow made me shudder with fright.

Woman and the puppet

I had given an account of the story of Silas Marner at school. Before going on holiday, my mother had bought me a copy of Adam Bede.

But Zaza was more selective; Greece enchanted her, the Romans bored her; insensible to the misfortunes of the royal family, she was enthusiastic about Napoleon. She admired Racine, but Corneille exasperated her; she detested Horace and Polyeucte but blazed with sympathy for Le Misanthrope.

The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld were her bedside book and she never tired of repeating at every opportunity that men are guided by self-interest.

she caused a scandal at the Cours Désir by defending, in a French composition, Alceste against Philinte, and another time when she placed Napoleon above Pasteur.

‘I’ve no personality,’ I would sadly tell myself. My curiosity embraced everything; I believed in an absolute truth, in the need for moral law; my thoughts adapted themselves to their objects; if occasionally one of them took me by surprise, it was because it reflected something that was surprising. I preferred good to evil and despised that which should be despised. I could find no trace of my own subjectivity.

I had wanted myself to be boundless, and I had become as shapeless as the infinite.

I loved Zaza so much that she seemed to be more real than myself: I was her negative; instead of laying claim on my own characteristics, I had to have them thrust upon me which I supported with ill grace.

It was André Laurie’s Schoolboy in Athens.

the talented ones offered the gifted ones admiration and devotion. But in the end it was Theagenus who survived his friend and wrote about him: he was both mind and memory, the essential Subject.

a perfect specimen of a right-minded bourgeois upbringing, she sailed through life with all the assurance of those great ladies who, with their thorough grasp of etiquette, allow themselves on occasion to break all the rules;

in the long gallery at the Louvre, he expatiated on the beauties of Correggio, and again, coming out of a cinema after seeing The Three Musketeers, when he predicted that the moving pictures would be the death of art.

Zaza confided in me also that Madame Mabille – to whom she attributed great reserves of charm, sensitivity, and imagination – had suffered from the lack of understanding of a husband who was as boring as an algebra text book; Zaza didn’t tell me everything; I realize today that she was physically repelled by her father.

the passionate love Zaza felt for her was a jealous rather than a happy devotion.

She compensated for this sense of inferiority by making fun of everything.

But I never imagined that one could communicate sincerely, spontaneously, with someone else. In books, people make declarations of love and hate, they express their innermost feelings in fine phrases; but in life there are no significant speeches. What can be spoken is regulated by what can be done: if it ‘isn’t done’, it isn’t said.

The happiness our friendship afforded me was blighted during those difficult years by the constant fear that I might incur her displeasure.

sketched my portrait in these words: ‘Rather reserved, a tendency to conform to convention and custom; but the warmest of hearts and an unequalled, kindly indulgence in overlooking the faults of her friends.’

I would not even admit to myself with what fevered torment I paid for the happiness she gave me.

One evening, on the balcony, he declaimed Hugo’s Tristesse d’Olympio, and I suddenly remembered, with a stab of the heart, that we had been ‘engaged’. But now the only real conversations he ever had were with my father.

Papa used to say with pride: ‘Simone has a man’s brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man.’

I was being crammed with an ersatz concoction; and I felt I was imprisoned in a cage.

ersatz /ˈerˌzäts ˈerˌsäts/ I. adjective 1. (of a product) made or used as a substitute, typically an inferior one, for something else • ersatz coffee. 2. not real or genuine • ersatz emotion. – origin late 19th cent.: from German, literally ‘replacement.’

He thought highly of Voltaire and Beaumarchais, and knew Victor Hugo by heart: he wouldn’t allow that French literature came to a stop in the seventeenth century.

If this dunce-like dullness had won the day we would no longer have had the right to think, to make fun of people, to experience real emotions and enjoy real pleasures. We had to fight against it, or else give up living.

In that sad corridor I realized vaguely that my childhood was coming to an end. The grown-ups still had me under their thumb, but peace had gone for ever from my heart. I was now separated from them by this freedom that was no source of pride to me, but that I suffered in solitary silence.

As soon as I arrived at Meyrignac all barriers seemed to be swept away and my horizon broadened.

In the face of the changing sky, constancy was seen to be something more than routine habit, and growing-up did not necessarily mean denying one’s true self.

I became unique and I felt I was needed: my own eyes were needed in order that the copper-red of the beech could be set against the blue of the cedar and the silver of the poplars. When I went away, the landscape fell to pieces, and no longer existed for anyone; it no longer existed at all.

Usually my curiosity was insatiable; I believed I could possess something as soon as I knew about it, and that I could get this knowledge in a superficial glance. But in order to make a small part of the countryside my own I wandered day after day along the country lanes, and would stand motionless for hours at the foot of a tree: then the least vibration of the air and every fleeting autumnal tint would move me deeply.

sans-culottes

Papa enjoyed the works of Madelin, Lenôtre, and Funck-Brentano.

About the age of nine, I had wept over the misfortunes of Louis XVII and admired the heroism of the insurgent Breton royalists. But I very soon dismissed the monarchy;

Certain of Papa’s friends maintained that England and not Germany was our hereditary enemy; but that was as far as their dissensions went.

There was the red peril; there was the yellow peril: soon a new wave of barbarism was spreading from the four corners of the earth and from the lowest depths of society; revolution would precipitate the world into chaos. My father used to prophesy these calamities with a passionate vehemence that filled me with consternation; this future that he painted in such lurid colours was my future;

I was told that in order to construct the railway to Uzerche the State had expropriated a certain number of small farmers and landed gentry:

Up went my head: ‘But it’s shameful that poor people should not be allowed to have the vote!’ I cried. Papa smiled. He explained to me that a nation is a collection of private properties; and it is those who own them who naturally have the task of administering them.

He ended by quoting Guizot’s maxim: ‘Get rich!’