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‘Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody,’ she insisted in her autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
Heaven heard my prayers, and my father was appointed to a desk job at the Ministry of War because of his heart trouble.
We walked with sadness past Café La Rotonde, which had just opened noisily beneath our window, and which was, Papa said, a hang-out for defeatists.
In the cloakroom I was reunited with my schoolmates from last year; I didn’t have any particular attachments among them, but I liked the noise we all made together.
‘Andrée Gallard. I’m nine. If I look younger it’s because I got burned alive and didn’t grow much after that. I had to stop studying for a year but Maman wants me to catch up on what I missed. Can you lend me your notebooks from last year?’
Maman found out more from the teachers at school. Andrée’s parents were only loosely connected with Uncle Jacques’s Gallards, but they were perfectly good people. Monsieur Gallard had attended the École Polytechniquefn1, had a good job at Citroën and was the president of the League of Fathers of Large Families; his wife, who was born a Rivière de Bonneuil, came from a great dynasty of militant Catholics, and was greatly respected by the parishioners of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin.
Madame Gallard obligingly recounted to Maman the story of Andrée’s martyrdom: the fissured flesh, the enormous blisters, the sterilised bandages, Andrée’s delirium and courage; while playing nearby, one of her little friends had accidentally kicked her, which reopened her wounds; she had made such an effort not to cry out that she fainted.
His impiety didn’t bother me, and my mother, who was very pious, seemed to find it normal. A man as superior as Papa necessarily had more complicated dealings with God than women and little girls did. Monsieur Gallard, on the other hand, took Communion every Sunday with his family, wore a long beard and pince-nez, and during his free time performed charitable works. His silky hair and Christian virtue feminised him, and lowered him in my estimation.
I just barely beat her at composition and she was given the honour of copying two of her essays into the livre d’or.
It was in those moments that I was most troublingly aware of the gift she had received from heaven, which I found so enthralling: her personality. Secretly I thought to myself that Andrée was one of those prodigies about whom, later on, books would be written.
Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races.
The Origins of Contemporary France by Hippolyte Taine.
Papa changed back into civilian clothes, but nothing much else happened. He talked endlessly about a certain capital city that had been plundered by Bolsheviks; these faraway men whose name sounded dangerously close to the Bochesfn5 seemed to possess terrifying powers.
Would Andrée have been sad if we had been prevented from seeing each other? Less than I would have been, to be sure. They called us the inseparables, and she preferred my company to that of the other girls. But it seemed to me that her love for her mother made her other attachments pale by comparison.
‘She told me that as far as she was concerned, she forgave me, but beyond that it is between me and my confessor.’
Now that I thought about it, it pained me to watch them. And what about Andrée? Her cynicism had often made me ask myself questions that scandalised me the minute I formulated them.
‘We never did anything bad, Bernard and I,’ she said in a serious voice, ‘but we did kiss and not platonically. Pascal is so pure. I was afraid he would be terribly shocked.’ She added, with conviction, ‘But he’s only severe as far as he himself is concerned.’ ‘How could he have been shocked? You were children, you and Bernard, and you loved each other.’ ‘One can sin at any age,’ Andrée said; ‘and love isn’t an excuse for everything.’
Before meeting her, he only made an exception for his sister, whom he considered to be a pure spirit, and for me, because I had so little awareness of being female. He understood now that women were, as women, God’s creatures. ‘However, there is only one Andrée in the world,’ he added, with so much warmth that Andrée no longer had any doubt that he loved her.
went back up to my room. She’s their slave, I thought. Not a single move she makes isn’t regulated by the mother or the grandmother, and immediately made to serve as a lesson for the little ones. Not a single thought in her head isn’t answerable to God!
It felt so right, being dazzled by all that magnificence, feeling your soul float above your head, white and shining like the Host at the heart of the monstrance! And then, one day, soul and heaven darken, and you find that remorse, sin and fear have taken up residence.
How was she to know whether in loving Pascal she were not carrying out Satan’s designs? Every moment, all of eternity was at stake, and there was no clear indication whether she was about to win or lose! Pascal had helped Andrée to overcome these fears. But our night-time conversation showed me that she had quickly fallen prey to them again. It was certainly not in church that her heart found peace.
The tables had to be set up, the buffet spread, the tablecloths laid out in the right places. Other cars arrived, some shiny and new, others antique, even a break pulled by two horses. The young people immediately started laying out dishes. The older people sat against tarpaulin-wrapped tree trunks, or on folding chairs. Andrée smiled and curtsied at them; the older men particularly liked her, and she had long talks with them. In between conversations, she relieved Malou and Guite, who were turning the crank on a complicated machine that turned cream into ice cream. I helped them as well.
Bresson
Was it permissible to flirt? Up to what point? In the end everyone was against it, but it provided for many giddy private conversations between the girls and boys. Overall, these young people were strait-laced, but some were pretty vulgar; there was quite a lot of naughty giggling, and these titillated young people began telling stories that sounded officially above board, but in a way that suggested they could well tell others. We opened a magnum of champagne, and someone said we should all drink from the same glass so each could learn the thoughts of the person next to them.
