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The Potomak (Cocteau), Les Nourritures Terrestres (Gide), L’Annonce faite à Marie (Claudel), Le Paradis à l’ombre des épées, Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort (Montherlant).
But now, suddenly, men of flesh and blood were speaking to me with their lips close to my ear; it was something between them and me; they were giving expression to the aspirations and the inner rebellions which I had never been able to put in words, but which I recognized.
I read Gide, Claudel, Jammes. I exhausted the resources of Jacques’ private library; I took out a subscription to the ‘Maison des Amis des Livres’, in which Adrienne Monnier, in a long dress of grey home-spun, held court; I was so greedy for reading matter that I couldn’t be satisfied with the two-books-at-a-time rule: I would secretly slip half a dozen or so into my satchel; the difficulty was getting them back on the shelves, and I’m afraid I didn’t get them all put back.
the novel that Jacques loved above all others and which was called not Le Grand Môle but Le Grand Meaulnes.
The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I learnt by heart new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies and I sanctified every circumstance in my existence by the recital of these sacred texts.
instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. For months I kept myself going with books: they were the only reality within my reach.
blamed me for wasting on Mauriac, Radiguet, Giraudoux, Larbaud, and Proust time which would have been better employed studying the geography of Baluchistan, the life of the Princesse de Lamballe, the habits of eels, the soul of Woman, or the Secret of the Pyramids.
I now took more interest in my state of mind than in the world about me. I began to keep a private diary; I wrote this inscription on the fly-leaf; ‘If anyone reads these pages, no matter who it may be, I shall never forgive that person. It would be a cheap and ugly thing to do. You are requested to take heed of this warning, despite its ridiculous pomposity.’
‘I am alone. One is always alone. I shall always be alone.’ I find this leitmotif running right through my diary. But I had never really believed it. I sometimes used to tell myself proudly: ‘I am not as others are.’
I made the brutal discovery that I had been wrong from the start; far from admiring me, people did not accept me at all; instead of weaving laurel crowns for me, people were banishing me from society.
My father regarded Anatole France as the greatest writer of the century; at the end of the summer holidays he had made me read The Red Lily and The Gods Athirst. I had not evinced much enthusiasm for these. But he persisted and gave me for my eighteenth birthday the four volumes of The Literary Life. France’s hedonism filled me with indignation.
I despised also the platitude of Maupassant’s novels which my father considered to be works of art.
I couldn’t separate love from friendship: he couldn’t see what these two sentiments had in common.
I was not a feminist to the extent of caring about politics: I didn’t give twopence for women’s right to the vote.
Taken as a whole, the frivolity of bourgeois love-affairs and adulteries made me sick.
Current notions of sexual morality scandalized me both by their indulgence and their severity. I was stupefied to learn from a small news item that abortion was a crime: what went on in one’s body should be one’s own concern; no amount of argument could make me see it any differently.
I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills. I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself. I was grateful for an exile which had driven me to find such lonely and such lofty joys; I despised those who knew nothing about them, and was astonished that I had been able to exist for so long without them.
My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich, and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.
My mother had often told me how she had suffered from grandmama’s coldness towards her, and that she hoped she could be a friend to her daughters; but how could she have talked to me as one woman to another? In her eyes I was a soul in mortal peril; I had to be saved from damnation: I was an object, not a woman.
‘Simone would rather bite out her tongue than say what she’s thinking,’ she would remark in a tone of sharp vexation. That was quite true: I was prodigiously silent. I had given up arguing, even with my father; I hadn’t the slightest chance of influencing his way of thinking – it was like beating my head against a brick wall.
‘Why have words, when their brutal precision bruises our complicated souls?’
I decided I must ‘tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’: in that way I would avoid disguising and at the same time betraying my thoughts. This was not very clever of me, for I merely succeeded in scandalizing my parents without satisfying their curiosity.
‘You’re taking the wrong view of life altogether; life isn’t as complicated as all that,’ my mother would say.
But then I would feel so utterly cut off from my fellow-beings; I would gaze in the looking-glass at the person they could see: it wasn’t me; I wasn’t there, I wasn’t anywhere; how could I find myself again? I was on the wrong track. ‘Life is a lie,’ I would tell myself in a fit of depression.
‘Family, I hate you! You dead homes and shut doors!’ Ménalque’s*
From Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres (Translators note).
When I read the first books by Barrès I learnt that ‘the free man’ always arouses the ire of the ‘barbarians’, and that my first duty was to hold my own against them.
As they had no intention of overthrowing society they contented themselves with studying the states of their precious souls in the minutest detail: they preached ‘sincerity towards oneself’.
Out of disgust with an outworn morality, the most daring went as far as to question the existence of Good and Evil: they were admirers of Dostoyevsky’s ‘possessed’ creatures; Dostoyevsky became one of their idols. Certain of them practised a disdainful aestheticism; others rallied round the flag of the immoralists.
Of course, I did not approve of people stealing out of self-interest or going to bed with someone for the pure pleasure of it; but if these became quite gratuitous acts, acts of desperation and revolt – and, of course, quite imaginary – I was prepared to stomach all the vices, the rapes, and the assassinations you might care to mention. Doing wrong was the most uncompromising way of repudiating all connexions with respectable people.
‘Sin is God’s empty place,’ Stanislas Fumet wrote in Our Baudelaire. So immoralism was not just a snook cocked at society; it was a way of reaching God. Believers and unbelievers alike used this name. According to some, it signified an inaccessible presence, and to others, a vertiginous absence; there was no difference,
there is not much distance between a superhuman sacrifice and a gratuitous crime, and I saw in Sygne the sister of Lafcadio. The important thing was to use whatever means one could to find release from the world, and then one would come within reach of eternity.
From then on, I only attached a relative value to my intellectual life, as it had failed to reconcile me with everyone whose respect I wanted. I invoked a superior authority which would allow me to challenge outside judgements: I took refuge in ‘my inmost self’ and decided that my whole existence would be subordinate to it.
As for happiness, I had known what it is, and I had always wanted it. I did not find it easy to give it up. If I decided to abjure happiness, it was because I felt it would always be withheld from me. I could not separate it from love, friendship, tenderness, and I was setting out on an ‘irremediably solitary’ enterprise. In order to find happiness, I should have had to go back, to go down in my own estimation: I asserted that all happiness is in itself a fall from grace. How could happiness be reconciled with disquiet?
he laughed one day as he showed me in one of his exercise-books a teacher’s comment which reproached him for making ‘divers odd noises in Spanish’;
I found their official recognition of our friendship very convenient because it authorized me to be alone with Jacques.
He would take me into the long, pseudo-medieval gallery where his work table stood; there was never very much light there, as the windows were of stained glass; I liked that semi-darkness, and the trunks and chests of massive wood. I would sit on a sofa covered with crimson velvet; he would pace up and down with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth, and screwing up his eyes a little as if trying to catch a glimpse of his thoughts in the whorls of smoke. I would give back the books I had borrowed, and he would lend me others; he would read to me Mallarmé, Laforgue, Francis Jammes,
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‘C’est chic d’aimer Aimée!’
It’s chic to love Aimée
he would smile and quote Cocteau: ‘It’s like a railway accident; something you feel but can’t explain in words.’
Sometimes, he would give me a minute description of a single detail: a yellow light at the corner of a backcloth, or a hand slowly opening on the screen; his voice, amused and rapt, would suggest the infinite. But he also gave me very precious hints on how to look at a picture by Picasso; he flabbergasted me because he could identify a Braque or a Matisse without seeing the signature: that seemed to me like magic. I was dazed by all the new things he revealed to me, so much so that I almost had the feeling that he was the author of them all. I more or less attributed to him Cocteau’s Orpheus,
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Striding up and down the gallery, rumpling his beautiful golden-brown hair, he would confess to me with a smile: ‘It’s frightful to be so complicated! I simply get lost in my own complications!’ Once he told me very seriously: ‘D’you see, what I need is to have something to believe in!’ ‘Isn’t it enough just to live?’ I answered.
Another time he wanted to take me to see the Russian Ballet. My mother put her foot down: ‘Simone may not go out with you in the evenings.’ Not that she had any doubts about my losing my virtue; before dinner, I could spend hours alone in the flat with Jacques: but after dinner, any place, unless it was exorcized by the presence of my parents, was automatically a den of vice. So our friendship was restricted to exchanges of unfinished sentences broken by lengthy silences and readings from our favourite authors.
I walked down the long street where Garric lived; I knew the number of his house; I moved towards it, hugging the walls: if he were suddenly to see me there, I was ready to sink through the ground with shame. For a brief moment I paused in front of his house, gazed up at the mournful brick façade, and stared at the door through which he passed every morning and evening; I went on my way; I looked at the shops, the cafés, and the square; he knew them all so well that he didn’t even see them any more. What had I come here for? I went home empty-handed.
‘I love you: is that any business of yours?’
I had had too intimate a relationship with nature to be willing to see it brought down to the level of a summer attraction, as it was here. It was served up to me on a plate, and I was not allowed the necessary leisure or solitude to get close to it: if I couldn’t give myself up to it, it would give me nothing.
they were all reading something and they all kept talking about what they were reading. One of them would say: ‘It’s very well written, but parts of it are rather dull.’ Another would announce: ‘Parts of it are rather dull, but it’s very well written.’ Occasionally, someone, with a far-off look in his eyes and a carefully modulated voice, would say: ‘It’s a curious work.’ Or, in rather severer tones: ‘It’s not everybody’s taste.’
They read the novels I had brought with me and discussed them with Aunt Marguerite: ‘It’s morbid, it’s perverted, it’s not natural,’ I used to hear them saying; their pronouncements used to wound me as much as their comments on my black moods or their wild guesses as to what was in my mind.
Reading a book on Kant, I developed a passion for critical idealism which confirmed me in my rejection of God. In Bergson’s theories about ‘the social ego and the personal ego’ I enthusiastically recognized my own experience. But the impersonal voices of the philosophers didn’t bring me the same consolation as those of my favourite authors.
Life was already tilting over the brink into absolute nothingness; at that instant I felt a terror so violent that I very nearly went to knock on my mother’s door and pretend to be ill, just in order to hear a human voice.
Jacques was good-looking; his was a boyish, fleshly beauty; yet he never once caused me the least physical disturbance or aroused in me the faintest sexual desire;
he had made some tentative gesture of affection and something inside me had recoiled: it signified that at any rate in my imagination I kept my distance. I had always looked upon Jacques as an elder brother, rather remote and grand;
