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The reading list he gave us was quite unappetizing: Ribot’s Attention, Gustave Lebon’s Crowd Psychology, and Fouillée’s The Power of Ideas.
I was flabbergasted to see the coordinates of the universe, too, begin to vacillate: Henri Poincaré’s speculations on the relativity of space and time and measurement plunged me into infinities of meditation. I was deeply impressed by the pages in which he evokes the passage of mankind through the universe, the blind universe: no more than a flash in the dark, but a flash that is everything! For a long time I was haunted by the image of this great fire blazing down the sightless dark.
she described the gardens in which beautiful young women, athirst for knowledge, went walking by moonlight, the sound of their voices mingling with the murmur of fountains. But my mother didn’t like the idea of the École Normale Supérieure at Sèvres.
They had given their lives to combating secular institutions and to them a state school was nothing better than a licensed brothel. In addition, they told my mother that the study of philosophy mortally corrupts the soul: after one year at the Sorbonne, I would lose both my faith and my good character. Mama felt worried.
I agreed to sacrifice philosophy for literature. But I was still determined to teach in a lycée. How scandalous! Eleven years of sermons, careful grooming, and systematic indoctrination, and now I was biting the hand that had fed me!
On the eve of the oral, my father took me to the Théâtre de Dix-Heures, where I saw Dorin, Colline, and Noël-Noël;
I was about sixteen when an aunt took my sister and me to the Salle Pleyel to see a film called La Croisière jaune. The house was full, and we had to stand at the back. I was surprised when I began to feel hands fumbling round my thin woollen coat, feeling me through the material; I thought somebody must be trying to pick my pockets or steal my handbag; I held on tightly to it; the hands continued to rub against me: it was absurd. I didn’t know what to do or say: I just let them go on. When the film was over and the lights went up, a man wearing a brown trilby sniggered and pointed me out to a
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He opened his overall, exposing something pink and erect; his face was devoid of expression and for a moment I stood there nonplussed; then I turned on my heels and fled. His preposterous gesture bothered me less than Charles VI’s display of madness on the stage of the Odéon, but it left me with the feeling that the oddest things could happen to me without any warning. After that, whenever I found myself alone with a strange man – in a shop or on a platform of the Métro – I always felt a little apprehensive.
When my partner held me in his arms and held me to his chest, I felt a funny sensation that was rather like having butterflies in the stomach, but which I didn’t find quite so easy to forget. When I got back home, I would throw myself in the leather arm chair, overpowered by a curious languor that I couldn’t put a name to and that made me want to burst into tears. On the pretext that I had too much work, I gave up going to the dancing class.
‘I thought she must connect the pleasure of dancing with something I had only the vaguest notions of – flirting. At the age of twelve, I had in my ignorance had an inkling of what physical desire and hugging and squeezing meant, but at seventeen, though in theory I was much better informed, I didn’t even know what the trouble was all about.
The word ‘marriage’ exploded in my brain and I was even more dumbfounded than the day when, in the middle of a lesson, a schoolmate had begun to bark like a dog. How could one superimpose the image of a pink, soft body lying with a naked man upon this well-behaved young lady with the studied smile standing there in a smart hat and neatly buttoned gloves? I didn’t go as far as to undress Marguerite in my mind’s eye: but I saw her in a long, transparent nightdress, her hair spread out over the pillow, offering up her body.
Yet the conversations that went on simply crackled with allusions and suggestions whose licentiousness shocked me. Madeleine told us that on our outings and at parties ‘all kinds of things’ went on in motor-cars and behind bushes. The young ladies were careful to remain young ladies. But Yvonne neglected to take this elementary precaution, and Robert’s friends, who one after the other had done what they liked with her, were obliging enough to warn my cousin, and the marriage did not take place.
I should have very much liked to find out how it was that when two mouths came in contact people got voluptuous feelings: often, looking at the lips of a young man or a young woman, I would feel amazed, just as when I used to gaze at the live rail in the Métro or at a forbidden book – what could it be? The information Madeleine proffered was always rather odd: she explained to me that physical pleasure depends on one’s personal tastes: her friend Nini couldn’t do anything unless her partner kissed or tickled the soles of her feet.
But when one of my friends, the daughter of a general, told me, not without a certain sadness, that every time she went out dancing at least one of her partners kissed her, I blamed her for letting him.
I had cherished that immaculate host, my soul; my memory was still full of images of mud-stained ermine, of trampled lilies; if physical pleasure was not transmuted by the fires of passionate love, it was a defilement. On the other hand, I was an extremist; with me, it had to be ‘all, or nothing’. If I loved a man, it would be for ever, and I would surrender myself to him entirely, body and soul, heart and head, past, present, and future.
My father, the majority of writers, and the universal consensus of opinion encouraged young men to sow their wild oats. When the time came, they would marry a young woman of their own social class; but in the meanwhile it was quite in order for them to amuse themselves with girls from the lowest ranks of society – women of easy virtue, young milliners’ assistants, work-girls, sewing-maids, shop-girls.
Therefore, despite public opinion, I persisted in my view that both sexes should observe the same rules of chastity and continence.
Papa would have liked me to take both literature and law, ‘which would always come in useful’, but I had skimmed through the Napoleonic Code at Meyrignac and this had put me off the study of law. Then my science teacher was urging me to try for the general mathematics paper, and I liked the idea: I would prepare for this certificate at the Institut Catholique. As for literature, it had been decided, at the instigation of Monsieur Mabille, that we would follow lectures in a college at Neuilly run by Madame Daniélou; in this way our connexions with the Sorbonne would be reduced to the minimum.
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I plunged straight into The Human Comedy and The Memoirs of a Man of Quality. Opposite me, her face shadowed by a huge hat covered with birds, a middle-aged lady was looking through old volumes of The Official Gazette; she was muttering and laughing to herself. In those days, anyone could use the library; all kinds of queer people and near-tramps used to take refuge there; they would talk to themselves, hum snatches of song, and gnaw at dry crusts of bread; there was one who used to walk up and down wearing a paper hat.
On the syllabus that year were Lucretius, Juvenal, the Heptameron, and Diderot;
My heart began to pound: ‘Well,’ I said, ‘for some time now I haven’t believed in God.’ Her face fell: ‘My poor darling!’ she said. She went to shut the door, so that my sister might not overhear the rest of our conversation; in a pleading voice she embarked on a demonstration of the truth of God’s existence; then, with a helpless gesture, her eyes full of tears, she stopped suddenly. I was sorry to have hurt her, but I felt greatly relieved: at last I would be able to live without a mask.
only intellectual snobbery could explain the success of modern French and foreign authors. He put Alphonse Daudet far above Dickens; whenever there was talk of the Russian novel he would despairingly shrug his shoulders.
My father appreciated the naturalism of certain young actors like Gaby Morlay, Fresnay, Blanchard, and Charles Boyer. But he thought the experiments of Copeau, Dullin, and Jouvet were quite uncalled-for, and he detested ‘those Bolshies’, the Pitoëffs. He thought that anyone who didn’t share his opinions was un-French and unpatriotic.
Garric was just over thirty; he had thinning blond hair and spoke in a lovely manner; his voice had just a trace of Auvergne accent; his lecture-commentaries on Ronsard left me spellbound.
The intellectual level at the Institut Sainte-Marie was much higher than that of the Cours Désir.
As for my fellow-students, I didn’t find them any gayer than my former school companions. They got free board and lodging in return for teaching and keeping order in the secondary classes.
I was bored by the literature lectures at the Sorbonne; the professors merely repeated in a flat voice the facts they had long ago written in their doctoral theses;
As for me, after reading learned tomes and translating Catullus all day, I would spend the evenings doing mathematical problems.
My old schoolmates hadn’t changed all that much; I hadn’t either; but before, we had been bound by a common endeavour: our studies; while now our lives were going separate ways; I was pushing forward and developing all the time, whereas they, in order to adapt themselves to their role of marriageable young girls, were beginning to grow dull and stupid. From the outset, I was being separated from them by the diverse paths our future was taking.
I always felt embarrassed by the loudness of his voice, his gesticulations, and his brutal indifference to the opinion of others; he was trying to show, by this aggressive exhibitionism, that he belonged to a superior class.
In order to prove his distinction, he began to say ‘shit’ more and more often. Now he rarely associated with people other than those he considered to be ‘common’, and indeed out-commoned the common; as he was no longer looked up to by his equals, he took a bitter pleasure in being looked down upon by his inferiors.
‘What a pity Simone wasn’t a boy: she could have gone to the Polytechnique!’ I had often heard my parents giving vent to this complaint.
yet he detested all government officials, whose taxes gobbled up his income, and he would tell me, with unconcealed resentment: ‘At any rate, you will have a pension!’
I had left the awkward age behind, and once more I found myself gazing approvingly at my reflection in the mirror; but I cut a poor figure in society.
I found smiling difficult, I couldn’t turn on the charm, make cute remarks, or any kind of concession to polite chit-chat.
That year I was preparing for examinations in literature, Latin, and general mathematics, and I was learning Greek;
I hardly had any ideas on anything; but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
only the most extraordinary successes could have countered his dissatisfaction with me.
I was being reproached with having my nose in a book all the time.
He believed firmly in the truth of what General Lyautey had said in one of his Moroccan speeches: that beyond all differences, there is a common denominator which links all men. On the basis of this concept, he decided to set up a system of exchanges between students and working-class youths which would release the former from the egotistical solitude and the latter from their ignorance.
by refusing to offer the hand of friendship to the lower classes the bourgeoisie were making a grave mistake whose consequences would fall upon their own heads.
I was thrilled by the movement’s watchwords: I had to repudiate all barriers and all artificial divisions between the classes, renounce my own class, and step outside myself.
I heard an imperious voice within me saying: ‘My life must be of service to humanity! Everything in my life must be of service!’
henceforward I made scrupulous use of every minute. I slept less; my toilet was no more than ‘a lick and a promise’; there was no longer any question of looking at myself in mirrors: I hardly ever brushed my teeth, and never cleaned my nails. I abjured all frivolous reading matter, idle gossip, and all forms of amusement; if my mother had not objected I should have given up my Saturday morning games of tennis. I always brought a book to meals; I would be learning Greek verbs or trying to find the solution to a problem.
‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings,’ she wrote on the blackboard one day.
He would come in, sit down, and cross his legs under the table, exposing mauve sock-suspenders: she was critical of such free-and-easy manners.
A dissertation on Ronsard, the analysis of one of the Sonnets à Hélène and a lecture on d’Alembert earned me heady praise. With Zaza second, I went to the top of the class and Garric planned that we would take the literature paper at the beginning of the summer term.
Both of us were cut off from life, Zaza by her despair, and I by my insane optimism; our personal solitudes did not bring us closer together: on the contrary, we became vaguely distrustful of one another and had less and less to say to each other.
One evening when I was dining with his parents, just as we were called to take our seats at table we lingered a moment in the drawing-room, talking of this and that. My mother called me sharply to heel.
He recited one of Cocteau’s poems and gave me advice about what I should read: he rattled off a score of names I had never heard before and recommended in particular a novel called, if I had heard aright, Le Grand Môle.
