Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

he said his objection to universal suffrage was based upon the fact that the majority of the electorate were stupid and ignorant: only ‘enlightened’ people ought to have a say in the matter. I bowed to his logic which was supported by an empirical truth: ‘enlightenment’ is the prerogative of the bourgeoisie.

Whenever I went with Mama to call on grandfather’s tenant-farmers, the stink of manure, the dirty rooms where the hens were always scratching and the rusticity of their furniture seemed to me to reflect the coarseness of their souls; I would watch them labouring in the fields, covered in mud, smelling of sweat and earth, and they never once paused to contemplate the beauty of the landscape; they were ignorant of the splendours of the sunset.

When he read me Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, I promptly adopted his idea that the brains of the lower classes were made differently from ours.

Some books – Dickens’s novels and Hector Malot’s Sansfamille-described the hard life of the poor; I thought the miner’s lot, cooped up all day in dark pits, and at the mercy of any sudden fall of rock, was terrible. But I was assured that times had changed. The workers worked much less, and earned much more; since the advent of trade unions, the real victims had been the employers. The workers, who were much luckier than we were, didn’t have to ‘keep up appearances’ and so they could treat themselves to roast chicken every Sunday; their wives bought the best cuts in the markets and could even afford silk stockings. They were used to hard work and squalid homes: these things did not distress them as they would us. Their recriminations were not justified by the facts. ‘Besides,’ my father would say, raising his shoulders, ‘they’re not dying of starvation!’ No, if the workers hated the bourgeoisie, it was because they were conscious of our superiority. Communism and socialism were the results of envy. ‘And envy,’ my father would add, ‘is not a pretty thing.’

But here I got a glimpse of a universe in which the air you breathed smelt of soot, in which no ray of light ever penetrated the filth and squalor: existence here was a slow death.

But in the end I dried my tears without having called society in question.

Neither my mother nor my teachers doubted for a moment that the Pope was elected by the Holy Spirit; yet my father thought His Holiness should not interfere in world affairs and my mother agreed with him; Pope Leo XIII, by devoting encyclicals to ‘social questions’ had betrayed his saintly mission; Pius X, who had not breathed a word about such things, was a saint.

In all eventualities, patriotism and concern for maintaining the established order of things were considered more important than Christian charity. Telling lies was an offence against God; yet Papa could claim that in committing a forgery Colonel Henry had acted like an upright man. Killing was a crime, but the death-penalty must not be done away with.

it was most disconcerting to find that Caesar always got the better of God.

A dispute had broken out between L’Action Française and La Démocratie Nouvelle; having first made sure that they were ten to one, the royalists had attacked the supporters of Marc Sangnier and forced them to drink whole bottles of castor oil.

Zaza, too, was expressing her family’s opinion. Her father had belonged to the democratic Catholic group Le Sillon before it had been denounced by the Church; he still thought that Catholics have social obligations and rejected the theories of Maurras; his was a fairly coherent position, one that a fourteen-year-old girl could rally round with a clear conscience; Zaza’s indignation and her horror of violence was sincere. I, who had repeated my father’s opinion parrot-fashion, hadn’t a leg to stand on.

It was Vaulabelle’s History of the Two Restorations which inclined me towards liberalism; I spent two summer holidays reading the seven volumes in grandfather’s library. I wept over the defeat of Napoleon; I developed a hatred of monarchy, conservatism, obscurantism. I wanted men to be governed by reason and I was enthusiastic about democracy which I thought would guarantee them all equal rights and liberty of conscience.

But I was much less interested in remote political and social questions than in the problems that concerned me personally: morals, my spiritual life, my relationship with God. I began to think very deeply about these things.

About the age of twelve I invented mortifications: locked in the water-closet – my sole refuge – I would scrub my flesh with pumice-stone until the blood came, and fustigate myself with the thin golden chain I wore round my neck.

till the day of my death, the dead hand of stupidity would force me to crawl through life, blinded by mud and dark; I should have to say good-bye for ever to truth, liberty, and all happiness: living would be a calamity and a disgrace.

He suggested a few themes for meditation and lent me a Handbook of Ascetic and Mystical Theology.

I didn’t suppose that God would play me a dirty trick and refuse me grace for ever; but I should have liked all the same to be able to get my hands on some irrefutable proof; I found only one: the voices of Joan of Arc. Joan belonged to historical fact; my father as well as my mother venerated her. She was neither a liar nor an illuminee, so how could one deny her witness? The whole of her extraordinary adventure confirmed it: the voices had spoken to her; this was an established scientific fact and I couldn’t understand how my father managed to elude

I could not admit any kind of compromise arrangement with heaven. However little you withheld from Him, it would be too much if God existed; and however little you gave Him, it would be too much again if He did not exist. Quibbling with one’s conscience, haggling over one’s pleasures – such petty bargaining disgusted me. That is why I did not attempt to prevaricate. As soon as I saw the light, I made a clean break.

Suddenly everything fell silent. And what a silence! The earth was rolling through space that was unseen by any eye, and lost on its immense surface, there I stood alone, in the midst of sightless regions of the air. Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone: without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, and all this hurly-burly in my head existed for no one.

I got up and ran back to the gardens and sat down under the catalpa between Mama and Aunt Marguerite, so great was my need to hear a human voice.

Everything was as before: the concept of duty; righteousness; sexual taboos.

I could be said to be living a double life; there was no relationship between my true self and the self that others saw.

George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss made an even deeper impression upon me than Little Women. I read it in English, at Meyrignac, lying on the mossy floor of a chestnut plantation. Maggie Tulliver, like myself, was tom between others and herself: I recognized myself in her. She too was dark, loved nature, and books and life, was too headstrong to be able to observe the conventions of her respectable surroundings, and yet was very sensitive to the criticism of a brother she adored. Her friendship with the young hunchback who lent her books moved me just as much as that between Jo and Laurie; I longed for her to marry him. But once again love broke with childhood. Maggie fell in love with a cousin’s fiancé, Stephen, whose heart she captured quite unintentionally. Compromised by him, she refused to marry him out of loyalty to Lucy; village society would have excused a treachery sanctioned by marriage, but would not forgive Maggie for having sacrificed appearances to the voice of conscience. Even her brother disowned her.

in my view, the exchange and discussion of books between a boy and a girl linked them for ever;

That unending repetition of ignorance and indifference was a living death.

I raised my eyes and looked at the oak tree: it dominated the landscape and there was not another like it. That, I decided, is what I would be like.

everyone read novels: they touched the imagination and the heart; they brought their authors universal and intimate fame. As a woman, these dizzy summits seemed to me much more accessible than the lowlier slopes; the most celebrated women had distinguished themselves in literature.

In my friend’s album I cited as my favourite hobbies reading and conversation.

When I was fifteen I loved volumes of letters, intimate journals – for example the diary of Eugénie de Guérin – that attempted to make time come to a stop. I had also realized that novels, short stories, and tales are not divorced from life but that they are, in their own way, expressions of it.

I was interested at the same time in myself and in others; I accepted my ‘incarnation’ but I did not wish to renounce my universal prerogative. My plan to be a writer reconciled everything; it gratified all the aspirations which had been unfolding in me during the past fifteen years.

To give up love seemed to me to be as senseless as to neglect one’s health because one believes in eternal life.

I was feeling rather stifled in the family circle.

After that, reading in the study, I would often look up from my book and wonder silently: ‘Will I ever meet the one who is made for me?’

Zaza did not agree with me on this point; for her, too, love implied mutual esteem and understanding; but if a man was sensitive and imaginative, whether he was an artist or a poet, she said it didn’t matter to her if he had had very little education or was even not very intelligent. ‘But then you would not be able to discuss everything,’ I objected.

My education, my culture, and the present state of society all conspired to convince me that women belong to an inferior caste;

in order to be able to acknowledge him as my equal, he would have to prove himself my superior in every way.

At the end of my penultimate year at school I was fifteen and a half, and I went with my parents to spend part of the holidays at Châteauvillain. Aunt Alice was dead; we stayed with Aunt Germaine, the mother of Titite and Jacques.

The clouds in the lake were tinged with pink; I got up but could not bring myself to go; I leaned against the hazel hedge; the evening breeze was caressing the spindle-trees; it was touching me, too, brushing and buffeting me, and I gave myself up to its gentle violence. The hazel leaves were rustling and I understood their mysterious whispers; I was expected: by myself. Bathed in the sunset glow, with the world crouching at my feet like a big friendly animal, I smiled to myself at the adolescent who would die on the morrow only to rise again in all her glory: no other life, no moment in any other life could hold all the promises which were thrilling my credulous heart.

It seemed to me a most enviable thing to have a past all to oneself: almost as enviable as having a personality.

I admired her for taking a taxi whenever we went to a concert – I thought this was the height of magnificence – and for making notes on her programme about the pieces she liked best.

One day I went to tea at Clotilde’s with Lili Mabille and other ‘young ladies’. I felt out of place and I was disappointed by the insipidity of the conversation.

Zaza was changing too: I didn’t wonder why, but, by a stroke of irony, she became all dreamy and romantic. She began to like Musset, Lacordaire, and Chopin.

Once they had passed their school-leaving certificate they would follow a few lecture-courses on history and literature, they would attend classes at the École du Louvre or the Red Cross where they would learn how to decorate china, make batik prints and fancy bindings, and occupy themselves with good works. From time to time they would be taken out to a performance of Carmen or for a walk round the tomb of Napoleon in order to make the acquaintance of some suitable young man; with a little luck, they would marry him.

Zaza told me that one of her aunts had a theory about ‘the sacrament of love at first sight’: at that very moment when the fiancés said ‘yes’ before the priest, they were filled with grace, and at once fell in love with one another.

But in Zaza’s family you either had to get married or become a nun. ‘Celibacy,’ they used to repeat, ‘is not a vocation.’

Usually I got round difficulties by running away from them, or keeping silent, or forgetting them; I rarely took any initiative; but this time I decided to fight it out. Lies would be needed to cover up the circumstances which conspired against me; so lie I must.

I was reading Faguet, Brunetière, and Jules Lemaître; I would sniff the fragrance of the lawns and feel I was as emancipated as the university students who strolled through the gardens. I would pass through the gates and go and rummage round the arcades of the Odéon; I felt the same thrill of delight there as I had felt at the age of ten in my mother’s circulating library, the Bibliothèque Cardinale. Here there were displayed rows of leather-bound books, gilt-edged; their pages had been cut, and I would stand there reading for two or three hours without ever being asked to buy anything. I read Anatole France, the Goncourts, Colette, and whatever I could lay my hands on. I told myself that as long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.

I didn’t like their place: it was too well-groomed; there were no sunken lanes, no woods; the meadows were surrounded by barbed wire.

We went by car to Rouen; the afternoon was spent visiting churches, of which there were very many, each one unleashing delirious admiration; the stone tracery in Saint Maclou caused their enthusiasm to rise to a paroxysm of ecstasy:

I got my first real taste of philosophy by reading Intellectual Life, by Père Sertilanges, and Ollé-Laprune’s Moral Certainty which bored me considerably.