I have brought to light the codes and conventions of the

circles in which I lived. I have listed the different languages that enveloped me, forging the vision I had of myself and the outside world. Nowhere could I fit in that Sunday in June.

What happened that day could not be put into words, in either of the worlds that was mine.

We stopped being decent people, the sort who don’t drink or fight and who dress properly to go into town. Despite a brand-new smock to start the term, my beautiful missal, my top grades and my daily prayers, I would never be like the other girls again. I had seen the unseeable. I knew something that the Catholic school and its sheltered environment should have guarded me against, something that implicitly bracketed me with those whose violent, alcoholic nature and mental illness gave rise to stories ending in “really, it’s disgrace to see that.”

I became unworthy of private education, its standards of excellence and perfection. I began living in shame.

The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it.

I was still in a state of shock when I took the entrance examination organized by our diocese, receiving a 70% pass, to the surprise and disappointment of Mademoiselle L. It was on the following Wednesday—June 18.

The Sunday after that, on June 22, I attended the gathering organized in Rouen by the Christian Youth Movement, like I had done the year before. The pupils were driven back by bus late at night. Mademoiselle L was in charge of seeing the girls back home in an area that included my neighborhood. It was around one o’ clock in the morning. I knocked on the shutters pinned over the grocery door. After some time, the lights went on in the store and my mother appeared in the glare of the doorway, disheveled, silent and sleepy-eyed, in a nightgown that was both creased and soiled (we would use the garment to wipe ourselves after peeing). Mademoiselle L and the girls, two or three of them, immediately stopped talking. My mother mumbled good evening, to which no one replied. I rushed into the store to stop it all. It was the first time I saw my mother through the eyes of the private school. In my memory, this scene, although barely comparable to the one in which my father tried to kill my mother, is seen as its sequel. As if the sight of my mother’s loose, unsupported flesh and suspect nightgown had exposed the way we lived and who we truly were.

(Naturally, it never occurred to me that if my mother had owned a bathrobe and had slipped it on over her nightgown, the girls and the teacher from my private school would not have been seized with dismay and I would have no recollection of that particular evening. In our world bathrobes and dressing gowns were considered luxuries; women who dressed for work as soon as they got up had no use for such incongruous, absurd garments. In my system of thinking, which ruled out the existence of bathrobes, it was impossible to escape shame.)

I feel that all the events of that summer served only to confirm our state of disgrace: “no one except us” behaves this way.

My grandmother succumbed to a pulmonary embolism at the beginning of July. I wasn’t affected by her death. About ten days later, in the Corderie neighborhood, a violent dispute broke out between one of my cousins, recently married, and his aunt, my mother’s sister, the one who lived in my grandmother’s house. In the middle of the street, in full view of the neighbors, egged on by his father my uncle Joseph, who was sitting on the embankment, my cousin proceeded to beat his aunt black and blue. Bruised all over and covered in blood, she rushed into the store. My mother accompanied her to the police station and took her to see the doctor. (The incident was tried in court a few months later.)

I contracted a cold and a bad cough which stayed with me all month. Then quite suddenly my right ear got blocked. It wasn’t customary to have the doctor come round for a cold in summer. I couldn’t hear my own voice and other people’s voices sounded muffled. I avoided speaking. I thought I would have to live like this for the rest of my life. Another incident, also in July, shortly before or after the argument in the rue de la Corderie. One evening, after the café had closed, while we were sitting having dinner, I kept complaining that the frames of my spectacles were crooked. While I was fiddling with them, my mother suddenly grabbed them and, screaming, hurled them on to the kitchen floor. The lenses shattered into tiny pieces. All I can remember is a loud clamor—my parents flinging insults at each other and my own sobs. I felt that some terrible tragedy had to follow its course, something like, “now we really are living in madness.”

This can be said about shame: those who experience it feel that anything can happen to them, that the shame will never cease and that it will only be followed by more shame.

Some time after my grandmother’s death and the injuries sustained by my aunt, I went on a bus trip to Étretat with my mother—our traditional one-day summer outing to the seaside. She traveled there and back in her mourning clothes, waiting until she got to the beach to slip on her blue crepe dress, the one with red and yellow flowers, “to stop people in Y from gossiping.” A photograph she took of me, mislaid or deliberately thrown away twenty years ago, showed me standing in the sea with water up to my knees, with the Aiguille and the Aval cliff top pictured in the background. I am holding myself perfectly straight, my arms hanging down my sides, trying to pull in my stomach and push out my non-existent breasts, squeezed into a knitted woolen swimsuit.

That winter my mother signed my father and myself up for a package tour organized by the local bus operator. The idea was to go to Lourdes, visiting a few tourist spots on the way down (Rocamadour, the Padirac chasm), to stay there for three or four days and to head back toward Normandy by a different route, via Biarritz, Bordeaux and the châteaux of the Loire. My mother had already been to Lourdes on her own—now it was our turn to go. The morning we left, during the second half of August—it was still dark—we stood for ages on the sidewalk of the rue de la République, waiting for the bus that was coming from a small coastal town where it had to pick up some passengers. We drove all day, pausing at a café in Dreux in the morning and stopping for lunch at a restaurant in Olivet, along the banks of the Loiret river. In the afternoon rain set in and I could no longer make out the landscape through the window. I had grazed my finger in the café in Dreux, breaking a lump of sugar into two to give to a dog, and now it was beginning to go septic. As we were heading south, I began to feel disorientated by the change of scenery. I feared that I might never see my mother again. Apart from a crackers manufacturer and his wife, there was no one we knew. It was night-time when we reached Limoges and checked into the Hôtel Moderne. For dinner, we sat alone at a table in the middle of the dining hall. We dared not speak because of the waiters. We felt intimidated and vaguely apprehensive.

Right from the beginning, people kept the same seat and stayed there throughout the trip (making it easy for me to remember them). In the front row on the right, just ahead of us, were two young girls from Y, belonging to a family of jewelers. Behind us sat a widow, who owned some land, and her thirteen-year-old daughter, enrolled at a convent school in Rouen. In the next row there was a retired post office clerk—a widow, also from Rouen. Further on, a schoolmistress working for state education, unmarried, overweight, in a chocolate brown coat and sandals. In the front row on the left was the crackers manufacturer with his wife; behind them, a couple from the small coastal town, who sold cloth and ladies’ fashion wear, the young wives of the two bus drivers and three farming couples. It was the first time we were in the situation of having to spend ten days in the company of complete strangers, all of whom were better off than us, with the exception of the bus drivers.

The next few days, I wasn’t quite so upset by being away from home. I enjoyed discovering the mountains and the hot weather—inconceivable in Normandy—eating out twice a day and sleeping in hotels. Being able to wash in a basin, with hot and cold running water, was a luxury for me. I thought that it was “nicer at the hotel than back at home”—something I always felt while I was living with my parents, proof maybe that I belonged to the world down below. Every time we checked into a hotel, I was anxious to see my new bedroom. I could have stayed there for hours, doing nothing, just being there.

My father continued to be wary of everything we saw. During the bus trip, he kept watching the road, which was often quite steep, and paid more attention to the driver’s conduct than to the landscape. He resented having to sleep in a different bed every night. Food was particularly important to him: he was suspicious of the dishes we were served, which we had never tasted before, and was critical of ordinary produce, like bread or potatoes, which he grew in his garden. When we visited churches and châteaux, he would lag behind, visibly bored, as if he was only doing it to please me. He was not in his element, in other words, not doing things and seeing people that reflected his usual tastes and lifestyle.

He began loosening up when he made friends with the retired post office clerk, the crackers manufacturer and the cloth merchant, who were more talkative than the other passengers because of their job and who shared some of his concerns (corporate taxes) despite the obvious differences between them—they all had scrubbed hands. They were all older than my father and, like him, had no intention of traipsing around in the sun all day. Therefore they spent plenty of time over meals. Conversation touched on the arid landscapes we had driven through, the recent drought, the Mediterranean accent, anything that was different from where we lived, and the Lurs murder case.

I had thought it the normal thing to do to seek the company of thirteen-year-old Élisabeth: after all, there was only one year between us and she too went to convent school, even if she was already in seventh grade. We were the same height but her blouse billowed out and she looked like a young girl already. On the first day, I was glad to see that we were both wearing a navy blue pleated skirt and a jacket; hers was red, mine was orange. She did not acknowledge my advances; when I spoke to her she would just smile, looking very much like her mother, whose mouth opened on to several gold teeth and who never said a word to my father. One day I put on my gym outfit—a blouse and skirt—which we had to wear out now that the Christian Youth gathering was over. It did not escape her attention: “You too went to the fair?” I was proud to say yes, mistaking her question and beaming smile for a sign of intimacy between us. Then, catching her strange intonation, I realized that it meant, “so you’ve got nothing else to wear except your gym suit.”

One day I caught these words, uttered by a woman traveling in our group, “she’ll be a real beauty later on.” Afterward I realized that it wasn’t me she was talking about but Élisabeth.

There was no question of my approaching the two girls from the jewelry store. I had no place among the women’s bodies traveling on the bus; I was just a child growing up—tall, flat and healthy-looking.

When we arrived in Lourdes, I succumbed to a strange condition. Everything I saw—the houses, the mountains, the entire landscape—kept filing by in front of me. When I was sitting in the hotel restaurant, the outside wall opposite kept whizzing past my eyes. It was only indoors that things stayed still. I didn’t say anything to my father; I thought that I had gone mad and that this condition would stay with me all my life. Every morning, when I got up, I wondered if the landscape had stopped spinning. I seem to remember that things were back to normal by the time we reached Biarritz.

My father and I duly performed the devotions recommended by my mother. Taking part in the torchlit procession, attending High Mass out in the open, under the beating sun—a woman lent me her folding chair when I almost passed out—saying our prayers in the Grotto of the Miracles. I could not say whether I enjoyed visiting these places, which caused my mother and schoolmistresses to go into raptures. I felt nothing while I was there. I recall being vaguely bored, on a gray misty morning, somewhere along the banks of the Gave river.

Along with the group, we visited the medieval castle, the caves at Bétharram and the Panorama, a sort of tent with a huge circular screen inside reproducing the landscape in the days of Bernadette Soubirous. Apart from the retired post office employee, we were the only ones not to visit the Gavarnie cirque and the Spanish bridge. These excursions weren’t included in the package tour and my father probably hadn’t taken enough money with him. (At a sidewalk café in Biarritz, he is dismayed to hear the price of the Cognacs he and the other two tradesmen have been drinking.)

Neither of us had formed any preconceived idea about the trip. There were so many customs we knew nothing about. The young girls from the jewelry store had a guidebook which they could be seen holding every time they left the bus to visit a monument. They rummaged in their beach bag and brought out cookies and chocolate. Except for a bottle of mentholated spirit and a few sugar lumps, in case we felt sick, we had brought no food with us, thinking it improper to do so.

I had only one pair of shoes, white, bought for the Communion ceremony, and they soon became grubby. My mother hadn’t given me any white polish. It never occurred to us to go out and buy some; that seemed impossible in a strange town, where we didn’t know any of the stores . . . . One evening, in Lourdes, seeing all the pairs of shoes lined up outside the bedroom doors, I decided to put mine down too. The next morning they were no cleaner and my father teased me: “I told you so. You have to pay for that.” This was not something that was conceivable for us.

All we bought were medals and a few postcards to send to my mother, the family and the people we knew. No newspapers, except Le Canard enchaîné, just once. The places we drove through gave no news of our area in the local press.

In Biarritz, I had no swimsuit or shorts. We are walking along the beach, fully dressed among the suntanned bodies in their bikinis.

Again, Biarritz: sitting outside a big café, my father embarks on a dirty story about a priest which I have already heard back home. The others give a forced laugh.

Three images, on the way back.

During a stop on a sandy plateau with burnt vegetation, possibly in the Auvergne. I have just finished defecating far from the group, who are sitting at a roadside café. I realize that I have left part of myself in a place where I shall probably never come back. In a few hours, tomorrow, I shall be far away, back at school, yet this part of me will remain abandoned on this barren plateau for days and days, until winter.

Standing on the staircase in the château of Blois. My father, who has caught a cold, is seized with a fit of coughing. All you can hear is his cough, echoing under the vaults, drowning out the guide’s commentary. He waits behind while the other members of the group reach the top of the staircase. I turn round and wait for him, possibly with some reluctance.

One evening—it was our last day—in Tours, we had dinner in a brightly-lit restaurant where the walls were lined with mirrors, frequented by a sophisticated clientele. My father and I were seated at the end of a long table set up for the group. The waiters were paying little attention to us; we had to wait a long time between courses. At a small table nearby sat a girl aged fourteen or fifteen, suntanned, in a low-cut dress, and an elderly man who appeared to be her father.

They were talking and laughing quite freely, completely at ease, oblivious of other people. She was dipping into a thick milky substance in a glass—some years later I learnt this was yogurt, which people like us had never heard of. I caught sight of myself in the mirror, pale and sad-looking with my spectacles, silently sitting beside my father, who was staring into the far distance. I could see everything that separated me from that girl yet I wouldn’t have known what to do to resemble her.

Afterward, my father complained with unusual vehemence about this restaurant, where he claimed we had been served mashed potatoes made with “pig slop,” white and tasteless. Several weeks later, he was still venting his anger over the meal and its disgraceful “pig slop.” Although he never actually said so—it was probably then that I began decoding his speech—it was his way of expressing resentment at having been treated with contempt because we were not chic customers who ate “à la carte.”

(After evoking the images I have of that summer, I feel inclined to write “then I discovered that” or “then I realized that,” words implying a clear perception of the events one has lived through. But in my case there is no understanding, only this feeling of shame that has fossilized the images and stripped them of meaning. The fact that I experienced such inertia and nothingness is something that cannot be denied. It is the ultimate truth.

It is the bond between the little girl of 1952 and the woman who is writing this manuscript.

Except for Bordeaux, Tours and Limoges, I never went back to any of the places we visited during that trip.

The restaurant scene in Tours is by far the most vivid. When I was writing a book about my father’s life and roots, it would haunt me relentlessly, proof that there existed two separate worlds and that we would always belong to the one down below.

Chronology may be the only connection between the scene of that Sunday in June and the bus trip to Lourdes. Yet who can say that an incident following in the wake of another is not somehow overshadowed by the first one? And who can say that the natural order of events does not carry meaning?)

After we had got back home, I couldn’t stop thinking about our trip. I kept seeing myself in hotel rooms and restaurants, or walking down sun-drenched avenues. Now I knew there was another world—a huge place with a blazing sun, bedrooms and washbasins with hot water, and little girls talking to their father the way they do in novels. We were not part of it. That’s the way it was.

I’m pretty sure it was that summer that I invented the “perfect day” game, a sort of ritual inspired by Le Petit Écho de la mode—which boasted far more advertisements than the other papers we bought—after I had read through the serials and a few of the articles. The game always went the same way. I would imagine I was a young girl living alone in a big, beautiful house (alternatively, living alone in a room in Paris). I would shape my body and appearance using the products advertised in the magazine: pretty teeth (Gibbs), luscious red lips (Rouge Baiser), a slender figure (girdle X) and so on. I would usually be wearing a dress or a suit available by mail order; my furniture would come from the department store Les Galeries Barbès. The academic studies I chose were those which the École Universelle claimed provided the best job opportunities. I wouldn’t eat food unless its nutritional value was stated: pasta, Astra margarine. I would delight in forging my personality out of the products advertised only in that particular paper (a rule scrupulously observed), slowly taking time to explore each new “ad,” piecing the images together to paint the picture of a perfect day. One possible scenario would involve waking up in a Lévitan bed, having a bowl of Banania for breakfast, brushing my “glossy hair” with Vitapointe and studying my correspondence course to become a nurse or maybe a social worker. Every week a new batch of advertisements would rekindle the game which, unlike the fantasies derived from literature, was both creative and exciting—I was using real objects to build the future—as well as frustrating—I could never work out a schedule for the whole day.

It was a secret, nameless activity which, in my mind, could not possibly be shared by others.

In September business suddenly grew slack: a Coop or Familistère store had opened in the town center. The trip to Lourdes had no doubt proved too heavy a burden financially. In the afternoon, my parents would talk in low voices in the kitchen. One day my mother accused my father and myself of not having prayed properly in the grotto at Lourdes. We burst out laughing and she blushed, as if she had revealed a secret bond she shared with heaven, which was beyond our understanding. They were thinking of selling the business and getting taken on as store assistants in a grocery, or else going back to the factory. The situation must have taken a turn for the better because none of that happened.

Toward the end of the month, a decayed tooth was giving me trouble so for the first time in my life my mother took me to see the dentist in Y. Before releasing a jet of cold water on to my gum for the injection, he asked me: “Does it hurt when you drink cider?” It was the usual drink among workers and country people, both adults and children. At home I would drink water, like the girls from my school, occasionally adding a few drops of grenadine. (Was I doomed to pick up every single sentence that reminded us of our place in society?)

At the beginning of the school term, a group of two or three of us were busy cleaning the classroom one Saturday afternoon in the company of Madame B, the teacher in charge of the sixth grade. Carried away by my dusting, I broke into the love song Boléro at the top of my voice, then immediately stopped. I refused to continue, despite strong encouragement on the part of Madame B, convinced that she would pounce on the first signs of vulgarity I showed before denouncing them violently to the other girls.

There is no point in going on. My shame was followed by more shame, only to be followed by more shame.

Now everything in our life is synonymous with shame—the urinal in the courtyard, the shared bedroom (owing to a common rural practice and the lack of space, I slept in my parents’ bed), my mother’s violent behavior and crude language, the drunken customers and the families who couldn’t pay up. Being acquainted with the various degrees of drunkenness and having to finish off the month with corned beef were enough to put me into a category for which those at private school felt only indifference and scorn.

It was normal to feel ashamed: I saw it as an inescapable fatality resulting from my parents’ occupation, their financial troubles, their working-class background and the way we generally behaved. And the events of that Sunday in June. Shame became a new way of living for me. I don’t think I was even aware of it, it had become part of my own body.

I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others. But what degree of shame could possibly be conveyed by the writing of a book which seeks to measure up to the events I experienced in my twelfth year.

Summer 1996 is drawing to an end. When I began thinking about this text, the market square in Sarajevo suffered a mortar attack that killed several dozen people and wounded hundreds of others. In the written press some journalists wrote, “we are overcome by shame.” For them, shame was something they could feel one day and not the next, something that applied to one situation (Bosnia) and not another (Rwanda). No one remembers the blood shed on the market place in Sarajevo.

While I was writing this book, my attention was immediately caught by any news item, however slight, attributed to the year 1952—the release of a movie, the publication of a book, the death of an artist and so on. I felt that these events brought home the reality of that faraway year and my identity as a child. In his novel Fires on the Plain, published in 1952, the Japanese author Shohei Ooka writes: “All this may just be an illusion but all the same I cannot question the things I have experienced. Memories too belong in that category.”

I look at the picture taken in Biarritz. My father has been dead for twenty-nine years. The only link between me and the little girl in the photograph is what happened that Sunday in June, a scene which she carries around in her head and which prompted me to write this book because it is still with me today. Only this can bring the two of us together since orgasm, the moment when my sense of identity and coherence is at its highest, was something that I was not to experience until two years later.

October 1996