BOOK ONE

I WAS born at four o’clock in the morning on the 9th of January 1908 in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and overlooking the boulevard Raspail. In the family photographs taken the following summer can be seen ladies in long dresses and ostrich-feather hats and gentlemen wearing boaters and panamas, all smiling at a baby: they are my parents, my grandfather, uncles, aunts; and the baby is me. My father was thirty, my mother twenty-one, and I was their first child. I turn the page: here is a photograph of Mama holding in her arms a baby who isn’t me; I am wearing a pleated skirt and a tam-o’-shanter; I am two and a half, and my sister has just been born. I was, it appears, very jealous, but not for long. As far back as I can remember, I was always proud of being the elder: of being first. Disguised as Little Red Riding Hood and carrying a basket full of goodies, I felt myself to be much more interesting than an infant bundled up in a cradle. I had a little sister: that doll-like creature didn’t have me.

I retain only one confused impression from my earliest years: it is all red, and black, and warm. Our apartment was red: the upholstery was of red moquette, the Renaissance dining-room was red, the figured silk hangings over the stained-glass doors were red, and the velvet curtains in Papa’s study were red too. The furniture in this awful sanctum was made of black pear wood; I used to creep into the knee-hole under the desk and envelop myself in its dusty glooms; it was dark and warm, and the red of the carpet rejoiced my eyes. That is how I seem to have passed the early days of infancy. Safely ensconced, I watched, I touched, I took stock of the world.

My feeling of unalterable security came from the presence of Louise. She used to dress me in the mornings and undress me at night; she slept in the same room as myself. Young, without beauty, without mystery – because she existed, as I thought, only in order to watch over my sister and myself – she never raised her voice, and never scolded me without good reason. Her calm gaze protected me when I made sand-pies in the Luxembourg Gardens and when I nursed my doll Blondine who had descended from heaven one Christmas Eve with a trunk containing all her clothes. As dusk began to fall she used to sit beside me and show me pictures and tell me stories. Her presence was as necessary to me, and seemed to me just as natural, as the ground beneath my feet.

My mother, more distant and more capricious, inspired the tenderest feelings in me; I would sit upon her knees, enclosed by the perfumed softness of her arms, and cover with kisses her fresh, youthful skin. Sometimes, beautiful as a picture, she would appear at night beside my bed in her dress of green tulle decorated with a single mauve flower, or in her scintillating dress of black velvet covered with jet. When she was angry with me, she gave me a ‘black look’; I used to dread that stormy look which disfigured her charming face: I needed her smile.

As for my father, I saw very little of him. He used to leave every morning for the Law Courts, carrying a briefcase stuffed with untouchable things called dossiers under his arm. He sported neither a moustache nor a beard, and his eyes were blue and gay. When he came back in the evening, he used to bring my mother a bunch of Parma violets, and they would laugh and kiss. Papa often laughed with me, too: he would get me to sing C’est une auto grise or Elle avait une jambe de bois; he would astonish me by pulling francs out of the tip of my nose. I found him amusing, and I was pleased whenever he made a fuss of me; but he didn’t play any very well-defined role in my life.

The principal function of Louise and Mama was to feed me; their task was not always an easy one. The world became more intimately part of me when it entered through my mouth than through my eyes and my sense of touch. I would not accept it entirely. The insipidity of milk puddings, porridge, and mashes of bread and butter made me burst into tears; the oiliness of fat meat and the clammy mysteries of shellfish revolted me; tears, screams, vomitings: my repugnance was so deeply rooted that in the end they gave up trying to force me to eat those disgusting things. On the other hand, I eagerly took advantage of that privilege of childhood which allows beauty, luxury, and happiness to be things that can be eaten: in the rue Vavin I would stand transfixed before the windows of confectioners’ shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruit-drops – green, red, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me. Mama used to pound sugared almonds for me in a mortar and mix the crunchy powder with a yellow cream; the pink of the sweets used to shade off into exquisite nuances of colour, and I would dip an eager spoon into their brilliant sunset. On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on the cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of black-currant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth. I was never attracted to paradises flowing with milk and honey, but I envied Hansel and Gretel their gingerbread house: if only the universe we inhabit were completely edible, I used to think, what power we would have over it! When I was grown-up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweetmeats and made me feel frustrated.

Eating was not only an exploration and an act of conquest – an acquired taste in the real sense of the phrase – but also my most solemn duty: ‘A spoonful for Mama, and another for grandmama. . . . If you don’t eat anything, you won’t grow up into a big girl.’ I would be stood up against the door-frame in the hall and a pencilled line would be drawn level with the top of my head; the new line would then be compared with an earlier one: I had grown two or three centimetres; they would congratulate me, and I would swell with pride. But sometimes I felt frightened. The sunlight would be playing on the polished floor and the white-enamelled furniture. I would look at Mama’s armchair and think: ‘I won’t be able to sit on her knee any more if I go on growing up.’ Suddenly the future existed; it would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself. I had forebodings of all the separations, the refusals, the desertions to come, and of the long succession of my various deaths. ‘A spoonful for grandpapa. . . .’ I went on eating, all the same, and I was proud that I was growing; I had no wish to remain a baby all my life. I must have been intensely aware of this conflict to be able to remember in such minute detail a certain book from which Louise used to read me the story of Charlotte. One morning Charlotte found on her bedside chair a huge egg, almost as big as herself, made of pink sugar. This egg fascinated me, too. It was both stomach and cradle, and yet you could eat it. Refusing all other food, Charlotte grew smaller day by day; she became minute: she was nearly drowned in a saucepan, the cook accidentally threw her away into the dustbin, and she was carried off by a rat. She was rescued; Charlotte, now chastened and scared, stuffed herself so greedily she began to swell and swell until she was like a gigantic bladder of lard: her mama took this monstrous balloon-child to the doctor’s. I gloated, but with a new restraint, over the pictures illustrating the diet the doctor had prescribed: a cup of chocolate, a nicely coddled new-laid egg, and a lightly grilled chop. Charlotte returned to normal size and I came out of the adventure safe and sound after having been reduced to a foetus and then blown up to matronly dimensions.

I kept on growing and I realized that my fate was sealed: I was condemned to be an outcast from childhood. I sought refuge in my own reflection. Every morning Louise would curl my hair and I would gaze with satisfaction at my face framed with ringlets: dark hair and blue eyes did not often, so they had told me, go together, and I had already learned to appreciate the value of the unusual. I was pleased with myself, and I sought to please. My parents’ friends encouraged my vanity: they politely flattered me and spoiled me, I would stroke the ladies’ furs and their satin-sheathed bosoms; I admired even more the gentlemen with their moustaches, their smell of tobacco, their deep voices, their strong arms that could lift me nearly up to the ceiling. I was particularly anxious to arouse the interests of the men: I tried to attract their attention by fidgeting and playing the ingénue, seizing any look or word that would snatch me out of my childhood limbo and give me some permanent status in their grown-up world. One evening, in the presence of one of my father’s friends, I rudely shoved away a plate of Russian salad: on a postcard sent to us during the summer holidays this friend asked, with rather laboured wit: ‘Does Simone still like Russian salad?’ The written had even more prestige than the spoken word: I was exultant. I had been taken notice of! The next time we met M. Dardelle, in front of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, I was counting on a renewal of his delicious teasing; I attempted to provoke him to another display of brilliant badinage, but found no response. I tried again, even harder. I was told to keep quiet. I had discovered, to my sharp vexation, the ephemeral nature of fame.

I was generally spared this sort of disappointment. At home, the slightest incident became the subject of vast discussions; my stories were listened to with lavish attention, and my witticisms were widely circulated. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and a host of other relatives guaranteed my continuing importance. In addition, a whole race of supernatural beings were for ever bent over me, I was given to understand, in attitudes of divine solicitude. As soon as I could walk, Mama had taken me to church: she had shown me, in wax, in plaster, and painted on the walls, portraits of the Child Jesus, of God the Father, of the Virgin, and of the angels, one of which, like Louise, was assigned exclusively to my service. My heaven was constellated with a myriad benevolent eyes.

Here below, Mama’s sister and mother tended to my physical needs. Grandmama had rosy cheeks, white hair, and trembly diamond ear-rings; she sucked wine-gum pastilles, hard and round as boot buttons, whose translucent colours enchanted me; I loved her because she was old; and I loved Aunt Lili because she was young: she lived with her parents, like a little girl, and I felt she was closer to me than the other adults. Red-faced, bald-headed, his chin daubed with a prickly, frothy grey scum, grandpa used to dance me dutifully up and down on his foot, but his voice was so gruff one never knew whether he was speaking in fun or in anger. I lunched with them every Thursday: rissoles, blanquette, ‘shape’ – known in our family as ‘floating island’ – grandmama always had a treat for me. After the meal grandpapa would doze in a tapestry armchair, and I, underneath the table, played the sort of games that make no noise. Then he would go out, and grandmama would bring out of the cupboard the metal humming-top into which we slipped, while it was spinning, circles of multi-coloured cardboard: in the backside of a lead figure she called ‘Mister Skitters’, she would light a white capsule out of which poured long coils of twisting brown matter. She played dominoes with me, and beggar-my-neighbour and spillikins. I felt stifled in that dining-room, which was as overcrowded as an antique dealer’s back shop; not an inch of wall was left bare: there were tapestries, porcelain plates, dingy oil paintings; a stuffed turkey hen displayed on a heap of very green cabbages; the side tables were covered with velvet and plush and lace; the aspidistras imprisoned in burnished copper flower-pot bowls filled me with sadness.

Sometimes Aunt Lili took me out; I don’t know how it happened, but on several occasions she took me to a horse show. One afternoon, sitting beside her in the stands at Issy-les-Moulineaux, I saw biplanes and monoplanes see-sawing through the sky. We got on well together. One of my earliest and most pleasant memories is of the time we stayed at Châteauvillain in the Haute-Marne, with one of grandmama’s sisters. Old Aunt Alice, having lost long ago her husband and daughter, was mouldering slowly away, in a deaf and lonely old age, inside a great house surrounded by a huge garden. The little town, with its narrow streets, its low houses, looked as if it had come straight out of one of my fairy-story books; the shutters, in which trefoil and heart shapes had been cut, were held back against the walls by hooks representing little figures; the door knockers were hands; a monumental gate opened on a park in which there were fallow deer; wild honeysuckle wreathed itself round a ruined stone tower. The old ladies of the town made a great fuss of me. Mademoiselle Élise gave me gingerbread hearts; Mademoiselle Marthe had a magic mouse in a glass box: you wrote a question on a card and pushed it through a slot: the mouse spun round and round, then pointed its nose at a certain compartment in the box, in which was the answer to the question, printed on a slip of paper. The thing that amazed me most of all was the eggs with designs drawn on them in charcoal which were laid by Doctor Masse’s hens; I picked them up with my own hands, which allowed me to reply, rather smartly, to a sceptical little friend: ‘But I picked them up with my own two hands!’ I liked the neatly trimmed yews in Aunt Alice’s garden, the sacramental odour of box, and, in a thatched arbour, an object as delightfully equivocal as a watch made of raw meat – a rock which was also a table, a stone table. One morning there was a thunderstorm; I was playing with Aunt Lili in the dining-room when the house was struck by lightning; it was a serious accident, which filled me with pride: every time something happened to me, I had the feeling that I was at last someone. I enjoyed an even more subtle satisfaction. On the wall of the outside water closets clematis was growing; one morning, Aunt Alice called me to her in her dry, squeaky voice; a flower was lying on the ground; she accused me of having picked it. Picking flowers in the garden was a crime whose gravity I was well aware of; but I hadn’t done it, and I denied the accusation. Aunt Alice didn’t believe me. Aunt Lili defended me with vigour. She was the representative of my parents, and my only judge. Aunt Alice, with her speckled old face, belonged to the race of wicked fairies who persecute little children; I witnessed with great complacency the struggle waged for my benefit by the forces of good against the forces of error and injustice. In Paris my parents and grandparents indignantly took up arms in my defence, and I was able to savour the triumph of virtue.

Sheltered, petted, and constantly entertained by the endless novelty of life, I was a madly gay little girl. Nevertheless, there must have been something wrong somewhere: I had fits of rage during which my face turned purple and I would fall to the ground in convulsions. I am three and a half years old, and we are lunching on the sunny terrace of a big hotel at Divonne-les-Bains; I am given a red plum and I begin to peel it. ‘No,’ says Mama; and I throw myself howling on the ground. I go howling all along the boulevard Raspail because Louise has dragged me away from the square Bourcicaut where I was making sand-pies. At such moments, neither Mama’s black looks nor Louise’s stern voice, nor even Papa’s special interventions could make any impression upon me. I used to howl so loudly, and so long, that in the Luxembourg Gardens I was sometimes looked upon as a child martyr by benevolent and misinformed nursemaids and mothers. ‘Poor little thing!’ cried one lady, offering me a sweet. All the thanks she got from me was a kick in the shins. This episode caused a sensation; an obese and bewhiskered aunt who wielded a pious pen recorded it in La Poupée Modèle. I shared with my parents an almost religious respect for print: as Louise read me the improving tale, I became aware of myself as a person of some standing; but gradually doubts began to creep in. ‘Poor Louise often wept bitterly as she thought of her lost sheep,’ my aunt had written. Louise never wept; she had no sheep; she loved me: and how could a little girl be a sheep? From that day forward I suspected that literature had only very dubious connexions with the truth.

I have often wondered what were the causes of these outbursts, and what significance they had. I believe they can be partly explained by an impetuous vitality and by a lack of all moderation which I have never grown out of completely. I carried my disgusts to the point of vomiting, and when I coveted anything I did so with maniacal obsession; an unbridgeable chasm separated the things I loved and those I hated. I could not remain indifferent to the precipitous drop from plenty to poverty, from bliss to horror; I accepted it only if I felt it was inevitable; I have never unleashed my rage against a mere object. But I refused to submit to that intangible force: words. What I resented was that some casual phrase beginning ‘You must . . .’ or ‘You mustn’t . . .’ could ruin all my plans and poison all my happiness. The arbitrary nature of the orders and prohibitions against which I beat unavailing fists was to my mind proof of their inconsistency; yesterday I peeled a peach: then why shouldn’t I peel a plum? Why must I stop playing just at that particular moment? I seemed to be confronted everywhere by force, never by necessity. At the root of these implacable laws that lay as heavily as lead upon my spirit I glimpsed a sickening void: this was the pit I used to plunge into, my whole being racked with screams of rage. All flailing arms and legs, I would cast myself upon the ground, resisting with all the weight of my flesh and bones the tyranny of that insubstantial power; I forced it to take on material form: I would be seized and shut away in a dark cupboard among the brooms and feather dusters; there I could kick my feet and beat my hands against real walls instead of battling helplessly against the abstractions of another’s will. I knew the struggle Was in vain; from the instant that Mama had snatched the dripping plum out of my hands and Louise had packed my spade and pail away in her basket, I knew myself beaten; but I wouldn’t give in. I fought my losing battle to the bitter end. My convulsions and the tears that blinded me served to shatter the restraints of time and space, destroying at once the object of my desire and the obstacles separating me from it. I was engulfed in the rising dark of my own helplessness; nothing was left but my naked self that exploded in prolonged howls and screams.

I felt I was not only the prey of grown-up wills, but also of their consciences, which sometimes played the role of a kindly mirror in which I was unwillingly and unrecognizably reflected. They had also the power to cast spells over me; they could turn me into an animal, into a thing. ‘What beautiful legs this little girl has!’ enthused a lady who bent down to feel my calves. If I’d been able to say: ‘Silly old woman! She thinks I’m a boiling fowl,’ I’d have been all right. But at three years of age I had no means of redress against that fatuous voice, that gloating smile: all I could do was yell, and throw myself screaming to the pavement. Later I learnt to defend myself in other ways; but I became even more unreasonable: to provoke my wrath someone only had to treat me as a baby; though I was limited in my knowledge and my capabilities, that did not prevent me from considering myself to be a grown-up person. One day in the place Saint-Sulpice, walking along hand-in-hand with my Aunt Marguerite who hadn’t the remotest idea how to talk to me, I suddenly wondered: ‘How does she see me?’ and felt a sharp sense of superiority: for I knew what I was like inside; she didn’t. Deceived by outward appearances, she never suspected that inside my immature body nothing was lacking; and I made up my mind that when I was older I would never forget that a five-year-old is a complete individual, a character in his own right. But this was precisely what adults refused to admit, and whenever they treated me with condescension I at once took offence. I was as cantankerous as any bed-ridden old woman. If grandmama cheated at cards in order to let me win, or if Aunt Lili asked me riddles that were too easy, I threw a fit. I often suspected the grown-ups of acting a part; I thought too highly of their intelligence to imagine that they believed in the parts they played for my benefit; I thought that they were in league with each other to make a fool of me. At the end of a birthday dinner, grandpapa wanted me to drink his health, and I flew into paroxysms of rage. One day when I had been running Louise took out a handkerchief to mop my brow but I flung myself angrily out of her arms: I had felt her gesture of concern to be false. As soon as ever I suspected, rightly or wrongly, that people were taking advantage of my ingenuousness in order to get me to do something, my gorge rose and I began to kick out in all directions.

My violence made people nervous, I was scolded, I was even punished a little; only very rarely did I get a slap. As Mama said: ‘If you raise as much as a finger to Simone, she turns purple in the face.’ One of my uncles, exasperated beyond endurance, took the law into his own hands: I was so flabbergasted at being struck that my convulsions suddenly stopped. It would probably have been very easy for my parents to knock the nonsense out of me: but they didn’t take my tempers very seriously. Papa parodying some actor or other, took great delight in repeating: ‘This child is unsociable.’ They would also say about me, not without a touch of pride: ‘Simone is as stubborn as a mule.’ I took advantage of all this. I allowed myself every caprice; I used to disobey for the sheer pleasure of being disobedient. I would put my tongue out at family photographs, and turn my back on them: everyone laughed. These minor victories encouraged me in the belief that rules and regulations and routine conformity are not insurmountable; they are at the root of a certain optimism which persisted in me despite all corrections.

As for my defeats, they bred in me neither humiliation nor resentment; when, having exhausted my tears and screams, I finally capitulated, I was too worn-out to regret my losses; often I even forgot what all the fuss had been about. Ashamed then of excesses for which I could now find no justification, I used to feel only remorse; but this soon disappeared because my pardon was always readily granted. On the whole, my rages were adequate compensation for the arbitrary nature of the laws that bound me; they prevented me from brooding over rancorous grudges. And I never seriously called authority in question. The conduct of adults only seemed to me to be suspect in so far as it took advantage of my youthful condition: this is what I was really revolting against. But I accepted without question the values and the tenets of those around me.

The two major categories into which my universe was divided were Good and Evil. I inhabited the region of the good, where happiness and virtue reigned in indissoluble unity. I experienced certain forms of pain, it is true, that seemed to me unmerited: I sometimes bumped my head or grazed my elbow; an outbreak of eczema disfigured my face: a doctor cauterized my pimples with silver nitrate and I yelled. But these accidents were quickly forgotten, and they did not upset my belief that man experiences joy or pain according to his merits.

Living in such intimate contact with virtue, I knew that there were degrees and shades of goodness. I was a good little girl, and I had my faults; my Aunt Alice was always praying; she would surely go to heaven, and yet she had been very unjust to me. Among the people to whom I owed love and respect, there were some whom my parents censured for some reason or other. Even grandpapa and grandmama did not escape their criticism: they had fallen out with some cousins whom Mama often visited and whom I found very nice. I disliked the very word ‘quarrel’: why did people quarrel? and how? The word ‘wrangle’, too, unpleasantly reminded me of tangled hanks of wool. Wrangling and quarrelling seemed to me most regrettable activities. I always took my mother’s side. ‘Whom did you go to see yesterday?’ my Aunt Lili would ask me. ‘I shan’t tell you: Mama told me not to.’ She would then exchange a significant look with her mother. They sometimes made disagreeable remarks like: ‘Your Mama’s always going somewhere, isn’t she?’ Their spiteful tone discredited them in my eyes, and in no way lowered Mama in my own estimation. But these remarks did not alter my affection for them. I found it natural, and in a sense satisfactory that these secondary characters should be less irreproachable than those supreme divinities – Louise and my parents – who alone could be infallible.

A sword of fire separated good from evil: I had never seen them face to face. Sometimes my parents’ voices took on a rancorous note: judging by their indignation and anger, I realized that even in their own most intimate circle there were some really black sheep: I didn’t know who these were, or what their crimes might be. Evil kept a respectful distance. I could imagine its agents only as mythical figures like the Devil, the wicked fairy Carabosse and the Ugly Sisters: not having encountered them in the flesh, I reduced them to pure essences; Evil did wrong, just as fire bums, inexcusably and inevitably; hell was its natural habitat, and endless torment its proper fate; it would have seemed sacrilegious to feel pity for its pain. Indeed, the red-hot iron boots which the Seven Dwarfs made Snow-White’s stepmother wear and the flames burning Lucifer in hell never evoked in my mind the image of physical suffering. Ogres, witches, demons, stepmothers, and torturers – all these inhuman creatures symbolized an abstract power and their well-deserved defeat was illustrated by sufferings that were only abstractions.

When I left for Lyon with Louise and my sister, I cherished the fond hope that I should meet the Evil One face to face. We had been invited to stay by distant cousins who lived in a house set in a large park on the outskirts of the town. Mama had warned me that the Sirmione children had lost their mother, that they were not always very well-behaved, and that they didn’t always say their prayers: I was not to be put out if they laughed at me when I said mine. I was given to understand that their father, an elderly professor of medicine, didn’t believe in God. I saw myself draped in the white robes of Saint Blandine before she was thrown to the lions: I was sadly disappointed, for no one tried to martyr me. Whenever Uncle Sirmione left the house, he would mumble in his beard: ‘Au revoir. God bless you,’ so he couldn’t be a heathen. My cousins – aged from ten to twenty – certainly behaved in a strange way: they used to throw pebbles through the railings of the park at the boys and girls in the street outside; they were always fighting; they used to torment a poor little feeble-minded orphan girl who lived in the house; at night, to frighten her, they would drag out of their father’s study a skeleton draped in a sheet. Though I found them disconcerting, I saw no real harm in these anomalies; I couldn’t discover in them the pitchy depths of real evil. I played quietly by myself among the clumps of hydrangeas and the seamy side of life still remained beyond my ken.

But one evening I thought the end of the world had come. My parents had come to join us. One afternoon Louise took me with my sister to a fair where we enjoyed ourselves immensely. When we left for home dusk was falling. We were chattering and laughing and I was chewing one of those imitation objects I liked so much – a liquorice braid – when Mama suddenly appeared at a turning in the road. She was wearing on her head a green muslin scarf and her upper lip was swollen: what sort of time was this to be coming home? she wanted to know. She was the oldest, and she was ‘Madame’, so she had the right to scold Louise; but I didn’t like the look of her mouth or the tone of her voice; I didn’t like to see something that wasn’t friendliness in Louise’s patient eyes. That evening – or it might have been some other evening, but in my memory the two incidents are intimately connected – I was in the garden with Louise and another person I can’t remember; it was dark; in the black façade of the house, a window was open on a lighted room; we could see two moving figures and hear raised voices: ‘There’s Monsieur and Madame fighting again,’ said Louise. That was when my universe began to totter. It was impossible that papa and mama should be enemies, that Louise should be their enemy; when the impossible happened, heaven was confused with hell, darkness was conjoined with light. I began to drown in the chaos which preceded creation.

This nightmare didn’t last for ever: the next morning, my parents were talking and smiling as they always did. Louise’s snicker still lay heavy on my heart, but I put that behind me as soon as possible: there were many small things which I was able to banish thus into the limbo of forgetfulness.

This ability to pass over in silence events which I felt so keenly is one of the things which strike me most when I remember my childhood. The world around me was harmoniously based on fixed coordinates and divided into clear-cut compartments. No neutral tints were allowed: everything was in black and white; there was no intermediate position between the traitor and the hero, the renegade and the martyr: all inedible fruits were poisonous; I was told that I ‘loved’ every member of my family, including my most ill-favoured great-aunts. All my experience belied this essentialism. White was only rarely totally white, and the blackness of evil was relieved by lighter touches; I saw greys and half-tones everywhere. Only as soon as I tried to define their muted shades, I had to use words, and I found myself in a world of bony-structured concepts. Whatever I beheld with my own eyes and every real experience had to be fitted somehow or other into a rigid category: the myths and the stereotyped ideas prevailed over the truth: unable to pin it down, I allowed truth to dwindle into insignificance.

As I had failed in my efforts to think without recourse to language, I assumed that this was an exact equivalent of reality; I was encouraged in this misconception by the grown-ups, whom I took to be the sole depositaries of absolute truth: when they defined a thing, they expressed its substance, in the sense in which one expresses the juice from a fruit. So that I could conceive of no gap into which error might fall between the word and its object; that is why I submitted myself uncritically to the Word, without examining its meaning, even when circumstances inclined me to doubt its truth. Two of my Sirmione cousins were sucking sticks of candy-sugar: ‘It’s a purgative’, they told me in a bantering tone: their sniggers warned me that they were making fun of me; nevertheless the word they had used incorporated itself in my mind with the sticks of candy-sugar; I no longer liked them because they now seemed to me a dubious compromise between sweets and medicine.

Yet I can remember one case in which words did not override my reason. During our holidays in the country I was often taken to play with a little cousin; he lived in a beautiful house in vast grounds and I rather enjoyed playing with him. ‘The boy’s half-witted,’ my father remarked one evening. Cendri, who was much older than myself, seemed to me to be quite normal, because he was someone I knew well. I don’t know if I had ever been shown what a half-wit was, or had an idiot described to me: I imagined idiots as having a slobbery mouth, a vacant smile, and a blank stare. The next time I saw Cendri, I tried in vain to apply this image to his own face, but the mask wouldn’t stick; perhaps without showing it on the outside his essential nature resembled that of an idiot, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Driven by a desire to clear the matter up, and also by an obscure resentment against my father for having insulted my playmate, I asked Cendri’s grandmother: ‘Is it true that Cendri is a half-wit?’ ‘Of course not!’ she retorted with some indignation. She knew her grandson well enough. Could it be that Papa had made a mistake? It was very puzzling.

I wasn’t terribly attached to Cendri, and the incident, though it astonished me, didn’t particularly upset me. I could perceive the sinister effect of words only when their black magic clutched at my heart.

Mama had just been wearing for the first time an orange-yellow dress – tango-coloured, we called it. Louise said to the housemaid from over the road: ‘Did you see the way Madame was got up today? Proper eccentric she looked!’ Another day, Louise was gossiping in the hall with the caretaker’s daughter: two storeys up Mama was accompanying herself at the piano: ‘Oh!’ said Louise. ‘There’s Madame at it again, screaming like a macaw!’ Eccentric. Macaw. These words sounded awful to me: what had they to do with Mama, who was beautiful, elegant, and sang and played so well? And yet it was Louise who had used them: how could I counter their sinister power? I knew how to defend myself against other people: but Louise! She was justice in person; she was truth itself, and my respect for her forbade me to pass judgement on anything she said. It would not have been sufficient to question her good taste; in order to neutralize her malevolence, I should have had to put it down to bad temper, and therefore to admit that she did not get on well with Mama; in which case, one of them must be in the wrong about something! No. I wanted to have them both perfect. I endeavoured to drain Louise’s words of their meaning: certain strange sounds had issued from her mouth, for reasons which were beyond my ken. I was not altogether successful. From then on, whenever Mama wore a new dress or sang at the top of her voice, I always felt a certain uneasiness. Moreover, knowing now that it wouldn’t do to attach too much importance to what Louise had to say, I no longer listened to her with quite the same docility as before.

I was always quick to turn a blind eye on anything that seemed to threaten my security, and so I preferred to dwell on ‘safe’ questions. The problem of birth did not bother me very much. At first I was told that parents bought their children in a shop; well, the world was so vast and so full of unknown wonders that there might well be stores selling babies somewhere. Gradually this idea was forgotten, and I contented myself with a vaguer solution: ‘It is God who makes children.’ He had created the earth out of chaos, and shaped Adam out of clay: so there was nothing unusual in the idea that He could produce a baby from an empty cradle. Submission to the divine will satisfied my curiosity: in the end, it could explain everything. As for the details of this divine operation, I was sure that I should gradually get to know them. What did intrigue me very much was the great care my parents sometimes took to prevent my overhearing certain conversations: as I drew near, they would lower their voices or stop talking altogether. So there were things that I could understand but that I was not intended to hear! Whatever could they be? Why were they kept from me? Mama forbade Louise to read me one of Madame de Ségur’s fairy-tales: she said it would give me nightmares. What eventually became of that boy clothed in the skins of wild animals – for that was how the pictures showed him? My inquiries were fruitless. Ourson – the bear-cub – appeared to me to be the very incarnation of secrecy.

The great mysteries of religion were much too remote and too difficult to cause me any surprise. But the familiar miracle of Christmas often set me wondering. I thought it was quite incongruous that the all-powerful Christ-child should prefer to come down the chimney like a common sweep. I pondered this problem for a long time and finally appealed to my parents for enlightenment; they confessed their deception. I was stupefied to think that I could have believed so firmly in something that wasn’t true, to realize that what one had accepted as the truth could be untrue. I didn’t learn from experience, either. I didn’t tell myself that my parents had deceived me, and that they might deceive me in other ways. Probably I could not have forgiven them for telling me a lie which was intended to frustrate my own desires or which pained me deeply; I should have revolted, and become suspicious. But in fact I was no more put out than someone to whom a conjurer explains how his tricks are performed. Indeed I was so delighted to find my doll Blondine sitting on her little trunk beside my Christmas stocking that I was rather grateful to my parents for such an amiable deception. Perhaps too I would have held it against them if I hadn’t learnt the truth from their own lips: by admitting that they had been playing a trick on me, they convinced me of their sincerity. They were treating me now, I thought, as a grown-up; proud of my new dignity, I happily accepted the fact that they had had to indulge their baby, because I was a baby no longer: it seemed to me perfectly natural that we should continue to hoax my little sister. I was now on the side of the adults, and I presumed that henceforward I should always be told the truth.

My parents were very willing to answer my questions; my ignorance was dissipated as soon as I gave voice to it. But there was, I realized, a gap which couldn’t be bridged: to the eyes of an adult, the black marks in books were words; I would look at them: I could see them too, but I couldn’t make them out at all. I had been taught to play with letters from an early age. When I was three I knew that ‘o’ is called ‘o’, and that ‘s’ is ‘s’, just as a table is a table; I knew the alphabet fairly well, but the printed page remained a closed book to me. One day, it all seemed to click into place. Mama had opened on the dining-room table the Regimbeau reading-book for infants; I was looking at the picture of a cow, and the letters C and H which are pronounced CH in the word VACHE. I suddenly understood that they didn’t have names, as objects do, but that they represented sounds: I understood now that they were symbols. After that, I soon learnt to read. Even afterwards, however, some blocks remained in my brain. I felt that the printed letter was the sound it corresponded to; they both proceeded from the thing they expressed, and were so closely linked that no arbitrary constants were possible in their fixed equation. The understanding of the symbol did not necessarily pre-suppose an understanding of its conventional application. This is why I put up such a strong resistance when grandmama wanted to teach me the notes of the scale. Using a knitting needle, she pointed to the notes on the stave; this line, she tried to explain, corresponded to that note on the pianoforte. But why? How could it possibly do that? I could see nothing in common between the ruled manuscript paper and the keys of the instrument. Whenever people tried to impose on me such unjustified compulsions and assumptions, I rebelled; in the same way, I refused to accept truths which did not have an absolute basis. I would yield only to necessity; I felt that human decisions were dictated more or less by caprice, and they did not carry enough weight to justify my compliance. For days I persisted in my refusal to accept such arbitrary regulations. But I finally gave in: I could finally play the scale; but I felt I was learning the rules of a game, not acquiring knowledge. On the other hand I felt no compunction about embracing the rules of arithmetic, because I believed in the absolute reality of numbers.

In October 1913 – I was five and a half years old – it was decided to send me to school, a private institution with the alluring name of Le Cours Désir. The head of the elementary classes, Mademoiselle Fayet, received me in an awe-inspiring study with padded doors. All the time she was talking to my mother, she kept stroking my hair. ‘We are not governesses,’ she explained, ‘but educators.’ She wore a high-necked dress with a long skirt and I found her manner revoltingly suave; I preferred something more severe. Nevertheless on the eve of my first day under her tutelage, I jumped for joy in the hall: ‘I’m going to school tomorrow!’ ‘You won’t always feel so happy about it,’ Louise assured me. I was quite sure that for once she was mistaken. The idea of entering upon a life of my own intoxicated me. Until now I had been growing up as it were on the fringe of adult life; from now on I should have my satchel, my books, my exercise books, and my homework: my days and weeks would be arranged according to my own timetable; I had glimpses of a future which, instead of keeping me away from myself would leave its cumulative deposits in my memory: every year I would become more and more myself, and at the same time remain faithful to the schoolgirl whose birth I was celebrating at this very moment.

I was not disappointed. Every Wednesday and Saturday I participated in an hour-long ceremony whose almost religious pomp transfigured the whole week. The pupils took their places round a large oval table; the gathering was presided over by Mademoiselle Fayet, enthroned in a sort of professorial chair; from the rarefied heights of her gilded frame, Adeline Désir, our foundress, a stony-faced lady with slightly hunched shoulders who was in the process of beatification, gazed down upon us. Our mothers, installed on black imitation leather settees, did their embroidery or their knitting. According to whether we had been more or less well-behaved they bestowed good-conduct notes upon us which we had to give out at the end of the lesson. Mademoiselle entered them in her register. Mama always gave me ten out of ten: to give me only nine would have brought, we felt, disgrace upon us both. Then Mademoiselle would distribute ‘Excellent’ or ‘Satisfactory’ tokens to the righteous; at the end of each term we exchanged these for gilt-edged prize books. Then Mademoiselle took up her position at the door: she placed a kiss upon our foreheads, and whispered a word or two of good advice. I could read and write already, and count a little: I was the star turn of the ‘O’ class. Towards Christmas, I was garbed in a white robe bordered with gold braid and represented the Infant Jesus: all the other little girls had to come and bend the knee before me.

Mama helped me with my homework, and heard my lessons with the utmost care. I loved learning. The gospel story seemed to me much more amusing than Perrault’s fairy-tales because the miracles it related had really happened. The maps in my atlas enchanted me. I was moved by the solitude of islands, by the boldness of promontories, by the fragility of those tenuous strips of land that connect peninsulas to continents. I was to experience that ecstasy again when I was grown-up and saw from an aeroplane the islands of Corsica and Sardinia etched on the blue of the Mediterranean, and when, at Kolkhis, illumined by a real sun, I saw an ideal isthmus choked between two seas. The world of severe and unimaginable shapes, of stories firmly carved in the marble of the centuries, was an album of brilliantly coloured pictures that I looked at with rapturous delight.

If I took so much pleasure in study, it was perhaps because my daily life no longer satisfied me. I lived in Paris, in man-made surroundings in which everything had been completely domesticated; streets, houses, tramways, street lamps, kitchen utensils: things, as flat as pure concepts, were reduced to their material functions. The Luxembourg Gardens with its clumps of untouchable shrubs and acres of forbidden lawns was to me no more than a common playground. Sometimes a rent in the canvas gave a glimpse, beyond the surface paint, of confused, gloomy depths. The tunnels of the underground railway stretched infinitely away towards the earth’s secret core. In the boulevard Montparnasse, on the site where the Coupole now stands, was the Juglar coal depot out of which came black-faced men with coal sacks on their heads; among the piles of coke and anthracite, like wisps of charred paper in the sooty limbo of a chimney, those creatures whom God had cast out of the kingdom of light could be seen creeping about their daily tasks. But I had no hold on them. In the police state in which I was imprisoned, few things surprised me, because I did not know where the power of man began and ended. The aeroplanes and dirigibles that from time to time moved across the skies of Paris were a source of much greater wonder to adults than they were to me. Distractions were few. My parents took me to see the king and queen of England on their processional route along the Champs-Élysées; I attended some of the Lenten processions, and later the funeral of Gallieni. I followed in the wake of processions and visited the resting-places of great men. I hardly ever went to the circus, and very rarely to a Punch and Judy show. I had a few toys that amused me, but only one or two that I really loved. I enjoyed very much squinting through the lenses of a stereoscopic toy which transformed two photographic plates into a single, three-dimensional scene. I loved to rotate the strip of pictures in my kineoscope and watch the motionless horse begin to gallop. I was given tiny books which could be turned into moving pictures by flicking their pages: the little girl began to jump, the boxer to box. Shadow theatres, magic lanterns: what interested me in all these optical illusions was that they were the product of my own eyes, like the mirages which haunt the traveller in the desert. Altogether, the scanty resources of my city childhood could not compete with the riches to be found in books.

Everything was different when I left the city and was transported among animals and plants and faced with the infinite variety of nature.

We used to spend the summers in the ancient province of Limousin, with my Papa’s family. My grandfather had retired to an estate that had been bought by his father in the neighbourhood of Uzerche. He sported white side-whiskers, a black-peaked cap, and the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur. He used to hum to himself all day long. He told me the names of the trees, the flowers, and the birds. Peacocks displayed their tails in front of the house, which was covered with wistaria and begonia; in the aviary, I admired the scarlet-headed cardinal tanagers and the golden pheasants. The stream – we called it ‘the English river’ – was barred by artificial waterfalls and starred with drifting water lilies among which goldfish swam. Its waters surrounded a tiny island linked to the mainland by two sets of stepping-stones. There were cedars, wellingtonias, purple beeches, Japanese dwarf trees, weeping willows, magnolias, monkey-puzzles, deciduous and evergreen varieties, shrubberies, thickets, and coverts: the park, surrounded by a white fence, was not very big, but its diversity was such that I felt I could never explore it completely. We used to leave there in the middle of the holidays and go to stay with Papa’s sister who had married one of the local gentry; they had two children. They would come to fetch us in the brake, which was drawn by four horses. After a family lunch, we would arrange ourselves on the blue leather-covered seats that smelt of dust and sun and straw. My uncle would lead the way on horseback. After a ride of about twenty kilometres, we would arrive at La Grillière. The park, vaster and wilder than my grandfather’s at Meyrignac, but less diverting, surrounded a sinister château flanked with turrets and roofed with slate. Aunt Hélène treated me with complete indifference. Uncle Maurice, moustached, leather-booted, a hunting crop always in his hands, frightened me a little with his sudden alternations of temper and sulky silence. But I liked to play with Robert and Madeleine, who were five and three years older than myself. At my aunt’s, as at my grandfather’s, I was allowed to run freely over the lawns and touch everything. Scratching at the earth, playing with lumps of clay, stroking leaves and flowers, polishing horse-chestnuts, popping seed pods, I was learning things that are never taught by books or official syllabuses. I learnt to recognize the buttercup and the clover, the phlox, the fluorescent blue of the morning glory, the butterfly, the ladybird, the glow-worm, the dew, the spiders’ webs and the strands of gossamer; I learnt that the red of the holly is redder than the cherry laurel or the mountain ash, that autumn blooms the peach and bronzes the leaves, that the sun rises and sets in the sky although you cannot see it moving. The wealth of colours and scents excited me. Everywhere, in the green water of the ponds, in the waving grasses of the fields, under the thorny hedgerows and in the heart of the woods were hidden treasures that I longed to discover.

*

Since I had started going to school, my father had become interested in my progress and my successes, and he was beginning to mean much more in my life. He seemed to me to belong to a rarer species than most men. In that era of beards and moustaches, his clean-shaven face, with its powers of mimicry, was astonishing: his friends said he resembled Rigadin the actor. No one in my circle of acquaintances was nearly as funny, as interesting and as brilliant as he; no one else had read so many books, or knew so much poetry by heart, or could argue with such passion. Standing with his back to the fireplace, he would talk volubly, with lots of gestures; and people listened to him. He was the life and soul of the party at all family reunions: he could recite monologues, or The Monkey, by Zamacoïs, and everybody applauded him. The most unusual thing about him was that during his leisure hours he was an amateur actor: whenever I saw photographs of him in the costume of Pierrot, or disguised as a waiter or a soldier or even as Sarah Bernhardt, I took him to be a kind of magician: wearing a dress and a white apron and with a cap perched on his head, he would open wide his great blue eyes and make me cry with laughter in the role of a simple-minded cook named Rosalie.

Every year my parents spent three weeks at Divonne-les-Bains with a troupe of amateur actors who put on plays at the Casino; they amused the summer visitors and the director of the Grand Hotel gave them free accommodation. In 1914 Louise, my sister and I went to await their arrival at Meyrignac. There we found my Uncle Gaston, who was Papa’s elder brother, my Aunt Marguerite, whose pallor and thinness alarmed me, and my cousin Jeanne, who was a year younger than myself. They lived in Paris, and we often saw one another there. My sister and Jeanne used to submit to my tyranny with good grace. At Meyrignac I would harness them to a little cart and make them trot with me all over the park. I gave them lessons, and drew them into escapades which I prudently never allowed to go very far. One morning we were playing in the woodshed among the fresh sawdust when the alarm bell sounded: war had been declared. I had heard the word for the first time at Lyon the year before. In wartime, I had been told, people kill each other, and I had wondered: where shall I go and hide? In the course of the year, Papa had explained to me that war means the invasion of one’s country by foreigners, and I began to look askance at the numerous Japanese who in those days used to sell fans and paper lanterns at the street corners. No. Our enemies apparently were the Germans with their pointed helmets who had already robbed us of Alsace and Lorraine and whose grotesque ugliness I discovered in the books of Hansi.

I now knew that in wartime it is only soldiers who kill one another, and I knew enough geography to know that the frontier was a long way from the Limousin. Nobody in our neighbourhood seemed to be alarmed, and so I was not unduly frightened. Papa and Mama arrived out of the blue after having spent forty-eight hours on the train. Orders for the requisitioning of horses and vehicles were nailed to the door of the coach-house, and grandpapa’s horses were taken off to Uzerche. The general agitation, the huge headlines in the Courrier du Centre all excited me; I was always glad when something was going on. I invented games appropriate to the circumstances: I was Poincaré, Jeanne was George V and my sister was the Tsar. We held our conferences under the cedars and cut the Prussians to ribbons with our sabres.

In September, at La Grillière, I learnt how to perform my duty as a loyal daughter of France. I helped Mama to make lint and knitted a balaclava helmet. My Aunt Hélène harnessed the dog-cart and we went to the nearby railway station to distribute apples to tall, beturbaned Indians who gave us handfuls of buckwheat; we took cheese and paste sandwiches to the wounded. The local women, loaded with foodstuffs, made their way along the convoys on the roads. ‘Souvenir! Souvenir!’ they cried; and the soldiers would give them buttons from their greatcoats or empty cartridge cases. One day a woman offered a German prisoner a glass of wine. There were murmurs of disapproval from the other women. ‘Well!’ she said. ‘They’re men, too, like the others.’ The sounds of disapproval grew stronger. Aunt Hélène’s eyes were filled with holy rage. The Boche was a born criminal; he aroused hatred, not indignation: you can’t feel just indignant about the Devil in person. Traitors, spies, and unpatriotic Frenchmen and women sent deliciously scandalized shivers through our virtuous breasts. I stared with studied horror at the woman who was known from then on as the ‘Frau’. In her I beheld at last Evil incarnate.

I embraced with passionate devotion the cause of the righteous. My father, who had been discharged from the Reserve because of heart trouble not long before, found himself called up for active service with the Zouaves. Mama and I went to visit him at Villetaneuse where he was in training; he had let his moustache grow, and under his tarboosh his face had a gravity which made a great impression on me. I should have to show myself worthy of such a brave father. I had already given proof of exemplary patriotism by stamping on a celluloid doll, ‘made in Germany’, which belonged, by the way, to my sister. It was only with great difficulty that I was restrained from throwing out of the window our silver knife-rests, which were branded with the same infamous device. I went round sticking the flags of the Allies in all the flower vases. In my games I was always a valiant Zouave, a heroic daughter of the regiment. I wrote everywhere in coloured chalks: Vive la France! The grown-ups admired my devotion to the cause. ‘Simone is an ardent patriot,’ they would say, with proud smiles. I stored the smiles away in my memory and developed a taste for unstinted praise. I don’t know who it was presented my mother with a length of the ‘sky blue’ cloth from which officers’ uniforms are made; a tailor made it up into coats for my sister and myself that were exact copies of military greatcoats. ‘You see: there’s even a bayonet frog!’ my mother exclaimed to her admiring or astonished friends. No other child wore a garment as original and as patriotic as mine: I felt I was a dedicated person.

It doesn’t take much for a child to become the sedulous ape; I had always been willing to show off: but I refused to play the parts expected of me in false situations concocted by adults for their own amusement. Now that I was too old to lend myself to their caresses, their fondlings, and their cajoleries, I began to feel ever more keenly in need of their approbation. They suggested a part that was easy to play and in which I felt I should be very well cast: I seized the opportunity with both hands. In my sky-blue greatcoat, I rattled a collecting box outside the door of a Franco-Belgian institution on the grand boulevard which was run by a friend of my mother. ‘Remember the poor little Belgian refugees!’ I piped. Coins rained into my flower-trimmed basket and the smiles of the passers-by assured me that I was an adorable little patriot. But one woman all in black eyed me from head to foot and said: ‘And what about the poor little French refugees?’ I was quite disconcerted. Brave little Belgians were our heroic allies; but if one was to be a real patriot one should put the French first: I felt I had been beaten on my own ground. When, at the end of the day, I went back to the Franco-Belgian institution, I was fulsomely congratulated. ‘Now I’ll be able to pay for coal!’ carolled the lady in charge. ‘But the money is for the poor little Belgian refugees!’ I howled. I had difficulty in admitting that their interests might overlap; I had imagined much more spectacular charities. To add insult to injury, Mademoiselle Fevrier, having kept for herself half of what I had collected, pretended to hand over the full amount to a nurse who dutifully cried: ‘Twelve francs! That’s simply wonderful!’ I fell into a terrible rage. I wasn’t being taken at my true value; I had thought I was the star of the proceedings, and I’d only been an accessory: I’d been cheated.

Nevertheless I retained a rather glorious memory of that afternoon, and I persevered in my good deeds. I walked in procession with other little girls in the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, singing and waving the sacred banner of St Denis. I offered up litanies and endlessly told my beads as special intentions for our dear, brave lads at the front. I repeated all the slogans and observed all the rules. I used to read in the Métro and in the trams: ‘Careless talk costs lives! Walls have ears!’ People talked about spies who stuck needles into women’s behinds and about others who distributed poisoned sweets among the children. I played for safety all the way. One day, as I was coming out of school, the mother of one of my schoolmates offered me a bag of jujubes; I refused them; she smelt heavily of scent, her lips were made-up, she wore huge rings, and worst of all she was called Madame Malin – the Evil One! I didn’t really believe that her sweets would poison me, but I thought it was a good thing to practise being suspicious.

One part of my school had been fitted out as a hospital. In the corridor, an edifying pharmaceutical odour mingled with the smell of floor polish. Under their white head-dresses, neatly spotted with blood, our teachers looked like saints and I was deeply moved when they kissed my forehead. A little refugee girl from the north was put in our class; the evacuation had seriously deranged her mind; she stammered and had nervous tics. I was always being told about the little refugees and I wanted to find some way of relieving their sufferings. I hit on the idea of putting in a box all the nice things I was given to eat: when it was full of stale cake and slightly mouldy chocolate and dry prunes, Mama helped me to wrap it up nicely and I took it to the ladies of mercy. They took care not to congratulate me too effusively, but I couldn’t help overhearing some very flattering whispers.

My feet were well set now upon the path of virtue; no more capricious rages; it had been explained to me that if I were good and pious God would save France. When the chaplain at the Cours Désir took me in hand I became an exemplary little girl. He was young, pale, infinitely suave. He taught me my catechism, and introduced me to the sweet delights of confession. I knelt down before him in a little chapel and replied to his questions and promptings with dramatic fervour. I can’t think what I could have told him, but, in the presence of my sister, who told me about it later, he congratulated Mama upon the radiant beauty of my soul. I fell in love with this soul which I imagined to be white and shining like the host itself, exposed in a silver monstrance. I piled up good deeds. Abbé Martin distributed to us at the beginning of Advent pictures representing the Infant Jesus: whenever we did a good deed, we had to prick with a pin the outline of the figure, which was drawn in violet ink. On Christmas Day, we had to go and place our pictures round the crib at the end of the church, where the light played through the pin-prick holes. I invented every kind of mortification, sacrifice, and edifying behaviour in order that my picture might be richly bedight with pinpricks. These goings-on irritated Louise. But Mama and my teachers encouraged me along the straight and narrow path. I joined a children’s confraternity known as ‘The Angels of the Passion’. This gave me the right to wear a scapular, and it was my duty to meditate upon the seven sorrows of Our Lady. In accordance with the recent instruction of Pius X, I prepared my communion in private; I went into retreat. I didn’t quite understand why the Pharisees (pharisiens), whose name was so disturbingly like that of the inhabitants of Paris, had been so much against Jesus, but I went all the way with Him in His sufferings. Dressed in white tulle with my head covered with a veil of Irish lace, I swallowed my first consecrated wafer. From then on, Mama took me three times a week to communion at Notre-Dame-des-Champs. In the grey light of early morning, I liked to hear the sound of our feet on the flagged floor of the church. Sniffing the fragrance of incense, my eyes watering with the reek of candles, I found it sweet to kneel at the foot of the cross and dream vaguely of the cup of hot chocolate awaiting me when we got back home.

This pious collusion bound me even more closely to my mother: she definitely took the first place in my life. Her brothers had been mobilized; Louise had returned to her parents to help them on the land. For Raymonde, the new maid, frizzy-haired, affected and pretentious, I had nothing but disdain. Mama hardly ever went out now, and had few visitors; she devoted nearly all her time to my sister and me; she made more of me than she did of my sister; she, too, was an elder sister, and everyone said how much I resembled her: I had the feeling that she belonged to me in a peculiarly privileged way.

Papa left for the front in October; I can see again the corridors of the Métro, and Mama walking beside me, her eyes brimming . . . she had beautiful brown eyes and two tears were slowly rolling down her cheeks. I was very touched by the sight. But I never realized that my father was in danger. I had seen wounded men; I knew there was a connexion between war and death. But I could not conceive that this great collective adventure could possibly concern me. And besides I was convinced that God would protect my father very specially for me: I was incapable of imagining any misfortune happening to him.

Events confirmed my optimism; after suffering a heart attack, my father was evacuated to the military hospital at Coulommiers, then transferred to the Ministry of War. He put on a different uniform and shaved off his moustache. About the same time, Louise returned to us. Life got back to normal.

I had made a definite metamorphosis into a good little girl. Right from the start, I had composed the personality I wished to present to the world; it had brought me so much praise and so many great satisfactions that I had finished by identifying myself with the character I had built up: it was my one reality. I was not quite so lively as before: I was growing rapidly, and an attack of measles had made my face look pale and interesting; I took sulphur baths and nourishing patent foods; I no longer upset the grown-ups with turbulent outbursts of rage; besides, my tastes fitted in well with the sort of life we were leading, so that there was not much occasion to reprimand or thwart me. If there was disagreement, I was now able to ask why, and to discuss the matter. Often all they had to say to me was: ‘It’s not done. When I say no I mean no!’ Even when that happened, I no longer thought of myself as a down-trodden child. I was sure that my parents were only trying to do their best for me. And besides, it was the will of God their lips gave utterance to: He had created me; He had died for me; He was entitled to my total submission. I felt I bore upon my shoulders the reassuring yoke of necessity.

And so I said good-bye to the independence which I had tried so hard to preserve in my earliest years. For some time, I was to be the docile reflection of my parents’ will. Now it is time to put down what I know about them.

*

I know very little about my father’s childhood. My great-grandfather, who was Inspector of Taxes at Argenton, must have left his sons a fairly substantial fortune, because even the youngest was able to live on his private income; the eldest son, my grandfather, inherited among other properties an estate of about five hundred acres: he married a middle-class girl from a large, rich family in the north. However, either from inclination or because he had three children, he took up a post in Paris, in the Town Hall; he had a long career; when he retired he was head of a department and had been decorated. His mode of life was more brilliant than his situation. My father spent his childhood in a fine apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and was brought up, if not in opulent then at least in moderately luxurious surroundings. He had an elder sister and an elder brother, a complete duffer, noisy and often violent, who used to bully him. Papa, who was not very strong, detested violence of any kind. He found means of compensating for his physical weakness: he sought to please: he was his mother’s favourite, and his teachers’ star pupil. His tastes were completely opposite to those of his elder brother; disliking sports and gymnastics, he loved reading and studying. My grandmother encouraged him: he lived in her shadow and his only wish was to please her in every way. She came from an austere bourgeois family of unshakeable Catholic faith in God, in work, in duty, and in strict personal values; she insisted that he should be a model pupil as well as a model son. Every year Georges won the first prize at the Collège Stanislas. During the holidays, he would round up the farmers’ children and give them lessons: an old photograph shows him in the courtyard at Meyrignac, surrounded by about a dozen pupils, boys and girls. A maidservant, in a white cap and apron, is holding a tray full of glasses of orangeade. His mother died when he was thirteen years old; not only did he feel violent grief at her death, he was suddenly left to his own devices. To him my grandmother had been the incarnation of law and order; my grandfather was quite unable to take her place. He meant well, of course, and had all the right ideas: he hated the communards and spouted Déroulède. But he was more conscious of his rights than he was aware of his duties. Half-way between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, between the landed gentry and the office worker, respecting but not practising the Catholic religion, he felt himself neither completely integrated with society nor burdened with any serious responsibilities: he represented an epicurean good taste. He took up a sport only less distinguished than fencing – single-sticks – and attained the rank of assistant master in the art, a rank of which he was very proud. He didn’t like arguments or worries and let his children have a free rein. My father continued to distinguish himself in the subjects that interested him – in Latin and literature: but he no longer won first prizes. He had stopped trying.

After certain monetary compensations had been paid to my father and his sister, Meyrignac was to revert to my Uncle Gaston, and he, with his future assured, devoted himself to complete inactivity. His situation as younger brother, his attachment to his mother and his scholastic successes had led my father – whose future was not at all assured – to renounce his individuality: but he saw that he had certain gifts, and determined to make the best of them. The legal profession attracted him on account of its dramatic possibilities, because he was already a fine public speaker. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law. But he often told me that if the attitude of the family had not made it impossible, he would have entered the Conservatoire and trained as an actor. This was no idle whim: nothing was more genuine than his love for the theatre. While he was studying law, he discovered, to his great delight, the works of the best authors of his time; he spent his nights reading Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant, Bourget, Marcel Prévost, and Jules Lemaître. But he found even greater enjoyment in the pit at the Comédie Française or the music hall. He went to all the new plays; he was in love with all the actresses and idolized the great actors of his time: he shaved his face so that he might look like an actor. In those days, there was much amateur play-acting in private houses: he took elocution lessons, studied the art of make-up and joined a group of amateurs.

My father’s unusual vocation can be explained, I think, by his social standing. His name, certain family connexions, childhood friends, and those he associated with as a young man convinced him that he belonged to the aristocracy, so he adopted their manner of living. He appreciated elegant gestures, charming compliments, social graces, style, frivolity, irony, all the free-and-easy self-assurance of the rich and well-born. The more serious virtues esteemed by the bourgeoisie he found frankly boring. Thanks to a very good memory, he passed his examinations, but his student years were devoted mainly to pleasure: theatres, races, cafés, and parties. He cared so little for the common run of success that once he had passed his, qualifying examinations he didn’t bother to present a thesis but registered himself in the Court of Appeal and took a post as secretary to a well-established lawyer. He was contemptuous of successes which are obtained at the expense of hard work and effort: according to him, if you were ‘born’ to be someone, you automatically possessed all the essential qualities – wit, talent, charm, and good breeding. The trouble was that in the ranks of that high society to which he laid claim for admittance, he found he was a nobody; the ‘de’ in de Beauvoir showed he had a handle to his name, but the name was an obscure one, and did not automatically open for him the doors of the best clubs and the most aristocratic salons; and he hadn’t the means to live like a lord. He attached little importance to the positions that were open to him in the bourgeois world – the distinguished lawyer, the father of a family, the respected citizen. He set out in life with empty hands, and despised the advantages he acquired. There was only one solution left to him: to become an actor.

But an actor needs an audience: my father did not care for country life or solitude; he was only happy when he was in society. He found his profession amusing only in so far as it gave him opportunities as an actor. When he was a young man he took great care with his appearance and became quite a dandy. Having practised since childhood the art of pleasing others, he soon gained a reputation for being a brilliant talker and a great charmer. But these successes did not satisfy him; they raised him only to the lower ranks in those fashionable drawing-rooms where wealth and noble ancestry counted above all else. In order to challenge the fixed hierarchies of aristocratic society, he would have to make himself a place that was outside the accepted categories. Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction; but though my father was an avid reader he knew that writing requires those tedious virtues, patience and application, that it is a solitary occupation with a public that exists only in the writer’s imagination. On the other hand the theatre brought a ready-made solution to his problems. The actor is spared the horrors of creation: he is offered on a plate an imaginary universe in which a special place has been created for him; he occupies that place in the flesh, before an audience of flesh and blood. Reduced to the role of a mirror, the audience faithfully reflects his image; on the stage he is king and he really exists, he really feels himself to be a king. My father took a special delight in making-up; he could escape from himself by putting on a wig and a false moustache. In this way he could avoid identification; he was neither a nobleman nor a commoner: this indeterminacy lent itself to every kind of impersonation; having fundamentally ceased to be himself, he could become anyone he liked, and could outshine them all.

He never dreamed of flouting the conventions of his social group and becoming a professional actor. He devoted himself to the stage because he could not resign himself to an inferior position in society; he never contemplated the possibility of losing caste. He was doubly successful. Seeking a means of admittance to a society which was very reticent in opening its arms to him, he decided to force his way in through the front door. Thanks to his talents as an amateur, he did in fact gain access to more elegant and less austere circles than the ones he had been brought up in; witty men, pretty women, and every kind of pleasure were the things they appreciated there. As an actor and man of the world, my father had found his true vocation. He devoted all his leisure to comedy and mime. On the very eve of his marriage, he acted in a play. As soon as he had returned from the honeymoon he put Mama on the stage, where her beauty made up for her lack of experience. I have already mentioned that every year, at Divonne-les-Bains, they took part in theatrical performances given by a company of amateurs. They often went to the theatre. My father subscribed to Comédia, the theatrical magazine, and kept up to date with all the back-stage gossip. Among his intimate friends was an actor from the Odéon. During his convalescence in the hospital at Coulommiers, he wrote and played in a revue in collaboration with another patient, the young singer Gabriello, who was often invited to our house. Later on, when he no longer had the means to keep up a gay social life, he still found opportunities to tread the boards, even if it was only an affair in a church hall.

His singular individuality came out to the full in this insatiable passion for the theatre. In other respects, my father was a true representative of his period and his class. He considered the re-establishment of the monarchy a Utopian dream; but the Republic only filled him with disgust. Without actually subscribing to L’Action Française, he had many friends among the Camelots du Roi* and he admired Maurras and Léon Daudet. He would not hear any criticism of the nationalist movement in politics; if someone were sufficiently ill-advised to discuss it, he would laugh uproariously and refuse to take part: his love for his native land was above and beyond all arguments and all words: ‘It’s my only religion,’ he used to say. He detested foreigners, and was indignant that Jews should be allowed to take part in the government of the country; he was as convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt as my mother was of the existence of God. He read Le Matin and flew into a temper one day because one of our Sirmione cousins had brought a copy of L’Œuvre into the house: ‘That rag!’ he called it. He considered Renan to be a great thinker, but he respected the Church and was horrified by the bills passed by Émile Combes. His private morality was based upon the cult of the family; woman, in her role as mother, was sacred to him; he demanded the utmost fidelity from married women and all young girls had to be innocent virgins, but he was prepared to allow great liberties to men, which led him to cast an indulgent eye upon women known as ‘fast’. As is nearly always the case with idealists, he was sceptical almost to the point of cynicism. He responded to Cyrano with quivering emotion, enjoyed Clément Vautel, delighted in Capus, Donnay, Sacha Guitry, Flers, and Callavet. Both nationalist and man about town, he knew the value both of grandeur and of frivolity.

While I was still very small, he had won me over by his gaiety and gift of the gab; as I grew older, I came to admire him for more serious reasons: I was amazed at his culture, his intelligence, and his infallible good sense. At home, his pre-eminence was undisputed, and my mother, younger than he by eight years, willingly took second place. It was he who had introduced her to life and the world of books. ‘The wife is what the husband makes of her: it’s up to him to make her someone,’ he often said. He used to read aloud to her Taine’s Les Origines de la France contemporaine and Gobineau’s L’Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. He had no overweening pretensions: on the contrary, he prided himself on knowing his limitations. He brought back from the front subjects for short stories which my mother found delightful but which he didn’t develop any further for fear of writing something banal. This modesty gave proof of a lucidity of mind which authorized him to pass final judgements on any case in question.

As I grew up, he paid more and more attention to my education and my appearance. In particular he took great pains with my handwriting and spelling: whenever I wrote him a letter, he would send it back to me, with corrections. During the holidays he used to dictate tricky passages to me, chosen usually from Victor Hugo. As I was a great reader, I made few mistakes, and he told me with great satisfaction that I was a natural speller. In order to help form my taste in literature, he had assembled a little anthology for me in an exercise book covered with shiny black imitation leather: Un Évangile, by Coppée, Le Pantin de la petite Jeanne by Banville, Hélas! si j’avais su! by Hégésippe Moreau, and several other poems. He taught me to read them aloud, ‘putting in the expression’. He read the classics aloud to me: Ruy-Blas, Hernani, the plays of Rostand, Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française, and Labiche’s comedies. I asked him many questions, which he answered willingly. He never intimidated me, in the sense that I never felt the slightest uneasiness in his presence; but I did not attempt to bridge the distance that lay between us; there were many subjects that I could not imagine myself discussing with him; to him I was neither body nor soul, but simply a mind. Our relationship was situated in a pure and limpid atmosphere where unpleasantness could not exist. He did not condescend to me, but raised me up to his level, and then I was proud to feel myself a grown-up person. When I fell back to my ordinary level, I was dependent upon Mama; Papa had allowed her to take complete charge of my bodily and moral welfare.

My mother had been born at Verdun, in a rich and devout bourgeois family; her father, a banker, had studied with the Jesuits; her mother had been brought up in a convent. Françoise had a brother and sister younger than herself. Grandmama, entirely devoted to her husband, showed her children only a distant affection, and it was Lili, the youngest, who was her father’s favourite. Mama suffered from their coldness towards her. A day-boarder at the Couvent des Oiseaux, she found some consolation in the warm regard of her teachers; under the guidance of the nuns, she eagerly threw herself into her school work and her religious duties, and, after she had passed her lower certificate of education, the Mother Superior supervised her studies. She suffered many sad disappointments in her adolescence. Her childhood and youth filled her heart with a resentment which she never completely forgot. At the age of twenty, her neck squeezed into whalebone collars, accustomed to suppressing all her natural spontaneity, resorting to silence and brooding over bitter secrets, she felt herself alone and misunderstood; despite her great beauty, she lacked assurance and gaiety. She went without enthusiasm to meet a strange young man at Houlgate. They liked one another. Won over by my father’s exuberant vitality, and made confident by the proofs of tenderness he gave her, my mother began to blossom. My earliest memories of her are of a laughing, lively young woman. She also had about her something wilful and imperious which was given a free rein after her marriage. My father enjoyed the greatest prestige in her eyes, and she believed that the wife should obey the husband in everything. But with Louise, my sister, and myself she showed herself to be dictatorial and overbearing, sometimes passionately so. If one of her intimate friends or relations happened to cross her or offend her, she often reacted with anger and outbursts of violent frankness. But in society she was always timid. Brusquely transported into a social group that was very different from her provincial circle, she found difficulty in adapting herself. Her youth, her inexperience, her love for my father all made her vulnerable: she dreaded criticism, and, in order to avoid it, took pains to be ‘like everybody else’. In her new environment, her convent morality was only half-respected. She didn’t want to be taken for a prude, and so she renounced her own standards of judgement: instead she decided that she would take the rules of etiquette as her guide. Papa’s best friend was living with a woman, and that meant he was living in sin; that didn’t prevent him from paying frequent visits to our house; but his mistress could not be received. My mother never dreamed of protesting in any way against an illogicality sanctioned by social conventions. She consented to many other compromises; they did not do violence to her principles; it was even perhaps in order to compensate for these concessions that she preserved, in her heart of hearts, a rigorously inflexible personal morality. Although she had been without doubt happy in her marriage, she was apt to confuse sexuality with vice: she always associated fleshly desires with sin. Convention obliged her to excuse certain indiscretions in men; she concentrated her disapproval on women; she divided women into those who were ‘respectable’ and those who were ‘loose’. There could be no intermediate grades. ‘Physical’ questions sickened her so much that she never attempted to discuss them with me; she did not even warn me about the surprises awaiting me on the threshold of puberty. In all other matters, she accepted my father’s ideas without ever appearing to find any difficulty in reconciling them with her religion. My father was constantly astonished by the paradoxes of the human heart, by the playful tricks of heredity, and by the strangeness of dreams; I never saw my mother astonished by anything.

In complete contrast to my father’s negligence, she was profoundly conscious of her responsibilities, and took to heart the duties of mother and counsellor. She sought guidance from the Union of Christian Mothers, and often attended their meetings. She took me to school, attended my classes and kept a strict eye on my homework and my lessons; she learnt English and began to study Latin in order to be able to follow my progress. She supervised my reading, and accompanied me to Mass and compline; my mother, my sister, and I performed our devotions together, morning and evening. At every instant of the day she was present, even in the most secret recesses of my soul, and I made no distinction between her all-seeing wisdom and the eye of God Himself. None of my aunts – not even Aunt Marguerite who had been brought up in the Sacré-Cœur – practised their religion with as much zeal as she. She regularly received Holy Communion, prayed long and fervently and read numberless works of piety. Her personal conduct was an outward expression of her deep faith: with ready unselfishness, she devoted her entire being to the welfare of those near and dear to her. I did not look upon her as a saint, because I knew her too well and because she lost her temper far too easily; but her example seemed to me all the more unassailable because of that: I, too, was able to, and therefore ought to emulate her in piety and virtue. The warmth of her affection made up for her unpredictable temper. If she had been more impeccable in her conduct, she would also have been more remote, and would not have had such a profound effect upon me.

Her hold over me stemmed indeed a great deal from the very intimacy of our relationship. My father treated me like a fully developed person; my mother watched over me as a mother watches over a child; and a child I still was. She was more indulgent towards me than he: she found it quite natural that I should be a silly little girl, whereas my stupidity only exasperated my father; she was amused by my childish sayings and scribblings; he found them quite unfunny. I wanted to be taken notice of; but fundamentally I needed to be accepted for what I was, with all the deficiencies of my age; my mother’s tenderness assured me that this wish was a justifiable one. I was flattered most by praise from my father; but if he complained because I had made a mess in his study, or if he cried: ‘How stupid these children are!’ I took such censure lightly, because he obviously attached little importance to the way it was expressed. On the other hand, any reproach made by my mother, and even her slightest frown was a threat to my security: without her approval, I no longer felt I had any right to live.

If her disapproval touched me so deeply, it was because I set so much store by her good opinion. When I was seven or eight years old, I kept no secrets from her, and spoke to her with complete freedom. I have one very vivid memory which illustrates this lack of sophistication. My attack of measles had left me with a slight lateral curvature of the spine; a doctor drew a line down my vertebral column, as if my back had been a blackboard, and he prescribed Swedish exercises. I took some lessons with a tall, blond gymnastic instructor. As I was waiting for him one afternoon I did a little practice on the horizontal bar; when I sat astride the bar, I felt a curious itching sensation between my thighs; it was agreeable and yet somehow disappointing; I tried again; the phenomenon was repeated. ‘It’s funny,’ I told Mama, and then described my sensations to her. With a look of complete indifference on her face she began talking of something else, and I realized that I had asked one of those tiresome questions to which I never received any answer.

After that, my attitude seemed to change. Whenever I wondered about the ‘ties of blood’ which are often mentioned in books, or about the ‘fruit of thy womb’ in the Hail, Mary, I did not turn to my mother for confirmation of my suspicions. It may be that in the meanwhile she had countered some of my questions with evasions I have now forgotten. But my silence on these subjects arose from a more general inhibition: I was keeping a watch on my tongue and on my behaviour as a whole. My mother rarely punished me, and if ever she was free with her hands her slaps did not hurt very much. However, without loving her any less than before, I had begun to fight shy of her. There was one word which she was fond of using and which used to paralyse my sister and me: ‘It’s ridiculous!’ she would cry. We often heard her making use of this word whenever she was discussing with Papa the conduct of a third person; when it was applied to us, it used to dash us from the cosy heights of our family empyrean into the lowest depths where the scum of humanity lay grovelling. Unable to foresee what gesture or remark might unleash this terrible word upon us, we learnt to look upon any kind of initiative as dangerous; prudence counselled us to hold our tongues and stay our hands. I recall the surprise we felt when, after asking Mama if we might take our dolls on holiday with us, she answered simply: ‘Why not?’ We had repressed this wish for years. Certainly the main reason for my timidity was a desire to avoid her derision. But at the same time, whenever her eyes had that stormy look or even when she just compressed her lips, I believe that I feared the disturbance I was causing in her heart more than my own discomfiture. If she had found me out telling a lie, I should have felt the scandal it created even more keenly than any personal shame: but the idea was so unbearable, I always told the truth. I obviously did not realize that my mother’s promptness to condemn anything peculiar or new was a forestalling of the confusion that any dispute aroused in her: but I sensed that careless words and sudden changes of plan easily troubled her serenity. My responsibility towards her made my dependence even greater.

And that is how we lived, the two of us, in a kind of symbiosis. Without striving to imitate her, I was conditioned by her. She inculcated in me a sense of duty as well as teaching me unselfishness and austerity. My father was not averse to the limelight, but I learnt from Mama to keep in the background, to control my tongue, to moderate my desires, to say and do exactly what ought to be said and done. I made no demands on life, and I was afraid to do anything on my own initiative.

The harmony that bound my parents to one another strengthened the respect I felt for both of them. It allowed me to skirt one difficulty which might have embarrassed me considerably: Papa didn’t go to Mass, he smiled when Aunt Marguerite enthused over the miracles at Lourdes: he was an unbeliever. This scepticism did not effect me, so deeply did I feel myself penetrated by the presence of God; yet Papa was always right: how could he be mistaken about the most obvious of all truths? Nevertheless, since my mother, who was so pious, seemed to find Papa’s attitude quite natural, I accepted it calmly. The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life – embodied by my father – and my spiritual life – expressed by my mother – were two radically heterogeneous fields of experience which had absolutely nothing in common. Sanctity and intelligence belonged to two quite different spheres; and human things – culture, politics, business, manners, and customs – had nothing to do with religion. So I set God apart from life and the world, and this attitude was to have a profound influence on my future development.

My situation in the family resembled that of my father in his childhood and youth: he had found himself suspended between the airy scepticism of my grandfather and the bourgeois earnestness of my grandmother. In my own case, too, my father’s individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother’s teaching. This imbalance, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.

For the time being, I felt I was being protected and guided both in matters of this life and of the life beyond. I was glad, too, that I was not entirely at the mercy of grown-ups; I was not alone in my children’s world; I had an equal: my sister, who began to play a considerable role in my life about my sixth birthday.

We called her Poupette; she was two and a half years younger than me. People said she took after Papa. She was fair-haired, and in the photographs taken during our childhood her blue eyes always appear to be filled with tears. Her birth had been a disappointment, because the whole family had been hoping for a boy; certainly no one ever held it against her for being a girl, but it is perhaps not altogether without significance that her cradle was the centre of regretful comment. Great pains were taken to treat us both with scrupulous fairness; we wore identical clothes, we nearly always went out together; we shared a single existence, though as the elder sister I did in fact enjoy certain advantages. I had my own room, which I shared with Louise, and I slept in a big bed, an imitation antique in carved wood over which hung a reproduction of Murillo’s Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. A cot was set up for my sister in a narrow corridor. While Papa was undergoing his army training, it was I who accompanied Mama when she went to see him. Relegated to a secondary position, the ‘little one’ felt almost superfluous. I had been a new experience for my parents: my sister found it much more difficult to surprise and astonish them; I had never been compared with anyone: she was always being compared with me. At the Cours Désir the ladies in charge made a habit of holding up the older children as examples to the younger ones; whatever Poupette might do, and however well she might do it, the passing of time and the sublimation of a legend all contributed to the idea that I had done everything much better. No amount of effort and success was sufficient to break through that impenetrable barrier. The victim of some obscure malediction, she was hurt and perplexed by her situation, and often in the evening she would sit crying on her little chair. She was accused of having a sulky disposition; one more inferiority she had to put up with. She might have taken a thorough dislike to me, but paradoxically she only felt sure of herself when she was with me. Comfortably settled in my part of elder sister, I plumed myself only on the superiority accorded to my greater age; I thought Poupette was remarkably bright for her years; I accepted her for what she was – someone like myself, only a little younger; she was grateful for my approval, and responded to it with an absolute devotion. She was my liegeman, my alter ego, my double; we could not do without one another.

I was sorry for children who had no brother or sister; solitary amusements seemed insipid to me; no better than a means of killing time. But when there were two, hopscotch or a ball game were adventurous undertakings, and bowling hoops an exciting competition. Even when I was just doing transfers or daubing a catalogue with water-colours I felt the need of an associate. Collaborating and vying with one another, we each found a purpose in our work that saved it from all gratuitousness. The games I was fondest of were those in which I assumed another character; and in these I had to have an accomplice. We hadn’t many toys; our parents used to lock away the nicest ones – the leaping tiger and the elephant that could stand on his hind legs; they would occasionally bring them out to show to admiring guests. I didn’t mind. I was flattered to possess objects which could amuse grown-ups; and I loved them because they were precious: familiarity would have bred contempt. In any case the rest of our playthings – grocer’s shop, kitchen utensils, nurse’s outfit – gave very little encouragement to the imagination. A partner was absolutely essential to me if I was to bring my imaginary stories to life.

A great number of the anecdotes and situations which we dramatized were, we realized, rather banal; the presence of the grown-ups did not disturb us when we were selling hats or defying the Boche’s artillery fire. But other scenarios, the ones we liked best, required to be performed in secret. They were, on the surface, perfectly innocent, but, in sublimating the adventure of our childhood, or anticipating the future, they drew upon something secret and intimate within us which would not bear the searching light of adult gazes. I shall speak later of those games which, from my point of view, were the most significant. In fact, I was always the one who expressed myself through them; I imposed them upon my sister, assigning her the minor roles which she accepted with complete docility. At that evening hour when the stillness, the dark weight, and the tedium of our middle-class domesticity began to invade the hall, I would unleash my fantasms; we would make them materialize with great gestures and copious speeches, and sometimes, spellbound by our play, we succeeded in taking off from the earth and leaving it far behind until an imperious voice suddenly brought us back to reality. Next day we would start all over again. ‘We’ll play you know what,’ we would whisper to each other as we prepared for bed. The day would come when a certain theme, worked over too long, would no longer have the power to inspire us; then we would choose another, to which we would remain faithful for a few hours or even for weeks.

I owe a great debt to my sister for helping me to externalize many of my dreams in play: she also helped me to save my daily life from silence; through her I got into the habit of wanting to communicate with people. When she was not there I hovered between two extremes: words were either insignificant noises which I made with my mouth, or, whenever I addressed my parents, they became deeds of the utmost gravity; but when Poupette and I talked together, words had a meaning yet did not weigh too heavily upon us. I never knew with her the pleasure of sharing or exchanging things, because we always held everything in common; but as we recounted to one another the day’s incidents and emotions, they took on added interest and importance. There was nothing wrong in what we told one another; nevertheless, because of the importance we both attached to our conversations, they created a bond between us which isolated us from the grown-ups; when we were together, we had our own secret garden.

We found this arrangement very useful. The traditions of our family compelled us to take part in a large number of duty visits, especially around the New Year; we had to attend interminable family dinners with aunts and first cousins removed to the hundredth degree, and pay visits to decrepit old ladies. We often found release from boredom by running into the hall and playing at ‘you know what’. In summer, Papa was very keen on organizing expeditions to the woods at Chaville or Meudon; the only means we had of enlivening the boredom of these long walks was our private chatter; we would make plans and recall all the things that had happened to us in the past; Poupette would ask me questions; I would relate episodes from French or Roman history, or stories which I made up myself.

What I appreciated most in our relationship was that I had a real hold over her. The grown-ups had me at their mercy. If I demanded praise from them, it was still up to them to decide whether to praise me or not. Certain aspects of my behaviour seemed to have an immediate effect upon my mother, an effect which had not the slightest connexion with what I had intended. But between my sister and myself things happened naturally. We would disagree, she would cry, I would become cross, and we would hurl the supreme insult at one another: ‘You fool!’ and then we’d make it up. Her tears were real, and if she laughed at one of my jokes, I knew she wasn’t trying to humour me. She alone endowed me with authority; adults sometimes gave in to me: she obeyed me.

One of the most durable bonds that bound us together was that which exists between master and pupil. I loved studying so much that I found teaching enthralling. Playing at school with my dolls did not satisfy me at all: I didn’t just want to go through the motions of teaching: I really wanted to pass on the knowledge I had acquired.

Teaching my sister to read, write, and count gave me, from the age of six onwards, a sense of pride in my own efficiency. I liked scrawling phrases or pictures over sheets of paper: but in doing so I was only creating imitation objects. When I started to change ignorance into knowledge, when I started to impress truths upon a virgin mind, I felt I was at last creating something real. I was not just imitating grown-ups: I was on their level, and my success had nothing to do with their good pleasure. It satisfied in me an aspiration that was more than mere vanity. Until then, I had contented myself with responding dutifully to the care that was lavished upon me: but now, for the first time, I, too, was being of service to someone. I was breaking away from the passivity of childhood and entering the great human circle in which everyone is useful to everyone else. Since I had started working seriously time no longer fled away, but left its mark on me: by sharing my knowledge with another, I was fixing time on another’s memory, and so making it doubly secure.

*

Thanks to my sister I was asserting my right to personal freedom; she was my accomplice, my subject, my creature. It is plain that I only thought of her as being ‘the same, but different’, which is one way of claiming one’s pre-eminence. Without ever formulating it in so many words, I assumed that my parents accepted this hierarchy, and that I was their favourite. My room gave on to the corridor where my sister slept and at the end of which was my father’s study; from my bed I could hear my father talking to my mother in the evenings, and this peaceful murmur often lulled me to sleep. But one evening my heart almost stopped beating; in a calm voice which held barely a trace of curiosity, Mama asked: ‘Which of the two do you like best?’ I waited for Papa to say my name, but he hesitated for a moment which seemed to me like an eternity: ‘Simone is more serious-minded, but Poupette is so affectionate. . . .’ They went on weighing the pros and the cons of our case, speaking their inmost thoughts quite freely; finally they agreed that they loved us both equally well: it was just like what you read in books about wise parents whose love is the same for all their children. Nevertheless I felt a certain resentment. I could not have borne it if one of them had preferred my sister to myself; if I was resigned to enjoying an equal share of their affection, it was because I felt that it was to my advantage to do so. But I was older, wiser, and more experienced than my sister: if my parents felt an equal affection for us both, then at least I was entitled to more consideration from them; they ought to feel how much closer I was to their maturity than my sister.

I thought it was a remarkable coincidence that heaven should have given me just these parents, this sister, this life. Without any doubt, I had every reason to be pleased with what fate had brought me. Besides, I was endowed with what is known as a happy disposition; I have always found reality more rewarding than the mirages of the imagination; now the things whose existence was most real to me were the things I owned myself: the value I attached to them protected me from all disappointments, nostalgias, and regrets; my affection for them overcame all baser longings. Blondine, my doll, was old-fashioned, dilapidated, and badly dressed; but I wouldn’t have exchanged her for the most gorgeous doll queening it in a smart shop window: the love I had for her made her unique and irreplaceable. I wouldn’t have changed the park at Meyrignac for any earthly paradise, or our apartment for any palace. The idea that Louise, my sister, and my parents might be any different from what they were never entered my head. And as for myself, I couldn’t imagine myself with any other face, or with any other body: I felt quite satisfied with the way I was.

It is not a very big step from contentment to complacency. Highly satisfied with the position I occupied in the world, I regarded it as a specially privileged one. My parents were exceptional human beings, and I considered our home to be exemplary in every way. Papa liked making fun of people, and Mama had a shrewd critical bent; few were the persons who found favour in their eyes, but I never heard anyone run them down: hence their way of life could be taken to represent the absolute norm of behaviour. Their superiority was reflected on myself. In the Luxembourg Gardens, we were forbidden to play with strange little girls: this was obviously because we were made of finer stuff. Unlike the vulgar race of boys and girls, we did not have the right to drink from the metal goblets that were chained to the public fountains; grandmama had made me a present of an opalescent shell, a mother-of-pearl chalice from which I alone might drink: like my horizon blue greatcoat, it was an exclusive model. I remember a Mardi-Gras at which our bags were filled, not with common confetti, but with rose petals. My mother bought her cakes only from specially designated pastrycooks: the éclairs made by the family baker might as well have been constructed of plaster, so inedible did we consider them: the delicacy of our stomachs, too, distinguished us from baser mortals. While the majority of the children in my circle took a popular children’s magazine called La Semaine de Suzette, I was presented with a subscription to L’Étoile Noëliste, which Mama considered to be of a higher moral tone. I did not go to a state school, but attended a private establishment which manifested its originality in many ways; the classes, for example, were numbered in a curious way: zero, first, second, first-third, third-second, first-fourth, and so on. I studied my catechism in the school’s private chapel, without having to mix with a whole herd of other children from the parish. I belonged to an élite.

However, in this very select circle, certain of my parents’ friends enjoyed one great advantage over us: they were rich; as a mere corporal, my father earned about five cents a day, and we were obliged to practise a genteel economy. We were often invited, my sister and I, to children’s parties on a staggeringly lavish scale: in vast suites of rooms draped with satins and velvets and dripping with chandeliers a host of children would gorge themselves on ices, cakes, and marrons glacés; there would be Punch and Judy shows and performances by ventriloquists and conjurers, and we would all dance round a huge, gift-laden Christmas tree. The other little girls would be arrayed in gorgeous silks and laces; but we wore woollen frocks the colour of mould or mud. I used to feel a little uncomfortable in such surroundings; at the end of the day, exhausted, sticky, and feeling decidedly ill, I would be nauseated by the rich carpets, the crystal chandeliers, the silks and taffetas; I was always glad when I got back home. My entire upbringing continually re-affirmed that virtue and culture were more desirable than material wealth, and my own tastes encouraged me to believe it; I therefore accepted with equanimity our more modest state. True to my calculated optimism, I even convinced myself that our condition was an enviable one; I saw in our mediocrity the golden mean. I considered the poor and the people of the streets as rank outsiders; but princes and millionaires, too, were outside the real world: their peculiar situation excluded them from normal society. As for myself, I believed I had access to the very highest, as well as to the very lowest ranks of the social scale; actually the former were closed to me, and I was radically cut off from the latter.

Few things could disturb my equanimity. I looked upon life as a happy adventure; my faith protected me from the terrors of death: I would close my eyes when my time came, and in a flash the snowy hands of angels would transport me to the celestial regions. In a gilt-edged prize volume, I read a moral fable which set the final seal on my convictions; a little larva which lived at the bottom of a pond began to feel worried; one after the other her companions disappeared into the night of the aquatic firmament: would she, too, one day disappear? Suddenly she found herself on the other side of the dark: she had wings, and she could fly, under the sun’s caressing rays, among hosts of marvellous flowers. The analogy, it seemed to me, was irrefutable; a thin azure curtain separated me from paradises resplendent with the true light; time and again I would dispose my limbs upon the carpet, close my eyes and join my hands in prayer, and then command my soul to make her escape. It was only a game; if I had really believed my final hour had come, I should have shrieked with terror. But the idea of death at least did not frighten me. One evening, however, I was chilled to the marrow by the idea of personal extinction. I was reading about a mermaid who was dying by the sad sea waves; for the love of a handsome prince, she had renounced her immortal soul, and was being changed into sea-foam. That inner voice which had always told her ‘Here I am’ had been silenced for ever, and it seemed to me that the entire universe had foundered in the ensuing stillness. But – no, it couldn’t be. God had given me the promise of eternity: I could not ever cease to see, to hear, to talk to myself. Always I should be able to say: ‘Here I am.’ There could be no end.

But there had been a beginning; that disturbed me sometimes. Children were born, I told myself, by divine decree; but, contrary to all orthodox thought, I set certain limits to the power of the Almighty. This presence within me which told me I was myself and no one else was dependent on nobody; nothing could touch it; it was impossible that anyone, were it God Himself, could have created it; God had merely provided, as it were, the outer wrapping. In the supernatural intervals of space there floated, I was convinced, myriads of invisible, impalpable souls awaiting incarnation. I had been one of them but had unfortunately forgotten everything about that state of bliss; they wandered between heaven and earth, but were never able to recall their wanderings. I realized, with dreadful anguish, that this absence of memory was the same as extinction, nothingness; everything conspired to suggest that, before making my first appearance in my cradle, I had not existed at all. I should have to correct this deficiency: I would capture in flight those will-o’-the-wisps whose delusive radiance illuminated nothing; I would lend them my eyes, I would dissipate their darkness, and the children who would be born the next day would remember. . . . I used to lose myself completely in these dizzy and otiose speculations, and vainly refuse to admit the scandalous divorce of consciousness and time.

I had at least emerged from the shades; but the things all round me remained lost in darkness. I enjoyed those tales in which needles were given ideas proper to needles, and the sideboard was provided with thoughts that were essentially those of a wooden sideboard: but they were, after all, just stories; objects had black, impenetrable hearts, and reposed upon the earth without being remotely aware that they were doing so, and without being able to murmur reassuringly: ‘Here I am.’ I have related elsewhere how, at Meyrignac, I stupidly gazed at an old jacket thrown over the back of a chair. I tried to put myself as it were inside the jacket, and say: ‘I am a tired old jacket. It was quite impossible, and I was stricken with panic. In the darkness of the past, in the stillness of inanimate beings I had dire forebodings of my own extinction; I conjured up delusive fallacies, and turned them into omens of the truth, and of my own death.

It was through my own eyes that light was created; during the holidays particularly I revelled in visual discoveries; but from time to time I was beset by gnawing doubts: far from bringing me a revelation of the world around me, I felt my presence was a blot upon the face of the earth. I did not, of course, imagine that while I was asleep the flowers in the drawing-room went off to a ball, nor that behind shop windows the ornaments and trinkets played out insipid idylls. But I sometimes suspected the familiar countryside of imitating those enchanted forests that disguise themselves as something else when their secrets are about to be violated by an unwelcome intruder: mirages float before his eyes, he loses his way, and the clearings and coppices are able to preserve their mysteries. Hidden behind a tree, I would try in vain to surprise the solitary secret I imagined lay at the heart of every wood. An improving tale entitled Valentine, or The Demon of Curiosity made a great impression upon me. A wicked fairy godmother was taking Valentine for a ride in her carriage; she told him that they were passing through an enchanted kingdom, but the blinds had been lowered at the carriage windows, and he was not to lift them; driven on by his evil genius, Valentine disobeyed; but all he could see outside was utter darkness: his inquisitiveness had destroyed the very thing he wanted to see. I was not interested in the rest of the tale; while Valentine was at grips with his particular demon, I was busy waging an anxious war against blind ignorance.

Though they were sometimes agonizing, my fits of disquiet quickly passed away. The world was vouched for by the presence in it of grown-ups, and I only rarely attempted to penetrate its mysteries without their assistance. I preferred to follow them through the imaginary universes which they liked to create around me.

I used to squat in the hall, in front of the imitation-rustic corner cupboard on which stood a carved wood clock that concealed in its dusty interior two copper weights shaped like pine-cones and all the dark and backward abysms of time; beside it, in the wall, there was a hot air vent; through its gilded grating I could smell nauseating gusts of tepid air rising from the lower depths. This yawning chasm and the stillness measured by the solemn ticking of the clock used to fill me with awful apprehension. I found reassurance in books: they said what they had to say, and didn’t pretend to say anything else; when I was not there, they were silent; if I opened one, it said exactly what it meant: if there was a word I didn’t understand, Mama would explain it to me. Lying flat on the Turkey carpet, I used to read Madame de Ségur, Zénaïde Fleuriot, Perrault’s fairy-tales, Grimm, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Bavarian author of children’s tales, Canon Schmid, the books of Töpffer and Bécassine, the adventures of the Fenouillard family and those of Sapper Camember, Sans famille, Jules Verne, Paul d’Ivoi, André Laurie, and the series of little pink books, the ‘Livres Roses’ published by Larousse, which contained legends and folk tales from every country in the world, and which during the war included stories of the great heroes.

I was given only children’s books, and they were chosen for me with the greatest care; they were based on the same moral standards as those observed by my parents and teachers; the good were rewarded, and the wicked punished; misadventures befell only those who were vain, ridiculous, and stupid. I accepted the fact that these essential principles were safeguarded for my benefit; usually I did not try to find any relationship between reality and the fantasies I read in books; they amused me, but as it were at a distance, as I would be amused by a Punch and Judy show; that is why, despite the strange ulterior significance that adults ingeniously discover in them, the novels of Madame de Ségur never caused me the slightest astonishment. Madame Bonbec, General Dourakine, together with Monsieur Cryptogame, the Baron de Crac and Bécassine were only animated puppets. A story was something nice in itself, like a marionette show or a pretty picture; I was aware of the necessity informing these constructions which have a beginning, a development, and an end, and in which words and phrases shine with their own peculiar radiance, like colours in a picture. But occasionally a book would speak to me more or less vaguely about the world around me or about myself: then it would make me wonder, or dream, and sometimes it would shake my convictions. Andersen taught me what melancholy is; in his tales, objects suffer from neglect, are broken and pine away without deserving their unhappy fate; the little mermaid, before she passed into oblivion, was in agony at every step she took, as if she were walking on red-hot cinders, yet she had not done anything wrong: her tortures and her death made me sick at heart. A novel I read at Meyrignac, which was called The Jungle Explorers, gave me a nasty shock. The author related his extravagant adventures sufficiently well to make me feel I was actually taking part in them. The hero had a friend called Bob, who was rather stout, a good trencherman and absolutely devoted to his companion in danger; he won my sympathies at once. They were imprisoned in an Indian jail: they discovered a subterranean passage just wide enough to let a man crawl along. Bob went first; suddenly he uttered a terrible scream: he had encountered a python. With loudly beating heart and clammy palms I witnessed the grim tragedy: the serpent devoured good old Bob! This story obsessed me for a long time. The mere idea of being swallowed alive was enough to make my blood run cold; but I should have been less shaken if I had disliked the victim. Bob’s frightful death made nonsense of all the rules of life: it was obvious, now, that anything could happen.

Despite their conventionality, my books helped to broaden my horizons; besides, I was charmed to be an apprentice to the sorcery that transmutes printed symbols into stories; and it was natural that I should want to reverse the magical process. Seated at a little table, I would transfer to paper sentences that were winding about in my head: the white sheet would be covered with violet blotches which purported to tell a story. The silence all round me in the room took on an aura of solemnity: I felt I was officiating at a solemn rite. As I did not look to literature for a reflection of reality, I never had the idea that I might write down my own experiences or even my dreams; the thing that amused me was to manipulate an object through the use of words, as I once used to make constructions with building-blocks; only books, and not life in all its crudity, could provide me with models: I wrote pastiche. My first work was entitled The Misfortunes of Marguerite. The heroine, from Alsace, and an orphan to boot, was crossing the Rhine with a brood of sisters and brothers in order to escape to France. But then I was piqued to learn that the river doesn’t run where it ought to have, and my novel was abandoned. So then I dished up in a slightly different form La Famille Fenouillard which we all admired very much in our house: Monsieur and Madame Fenouillard with their two little daughters were a sort of blue-print for our own family. One evening Mama read to Papa my new story, which I had entitled La Famille Cornichon. It made her laugh, and he had smiled his approval. Grandpapa presented me with a volume bound in a yellow cover whose pages were entirely blank; Aunt Lili copied my story into this little book in her neat convent script: I gazed with pride upon this almost real object which owed its existence to me. I composed two or three other works which did not have quite the same success. Sometimes I contented myself with inventing titles for my future works. When we went to the country, I would play at being a bookseller; I entitled the silvery leaf of the birch The Azure Queen, and the varnished leaf of the magnolia Flower of the Snows; I arranged some scholarly displays of my stock. I wasn’t sure whether when I was grown-up I wanted to write books or sell them, but in my view they were the most precious things in the world. My mother subscribed to a circulating library in the rue Saint-Placide. Impassable barriers prohibited my entry into those book-lined corridors which seemed to extend to infinity like the tunnels in the Métro. I admired the old ladies in their whalebone collars who were able to spend the rest of their days handling the volumes in their black bindings with titles displayed on a red or orange rectangle on the spine. Buried away in the silence, and masked by the sombre monotony of their bindings, all the words in the world were there, waiting to be deciphered. I dreamed of shutting myself away in those dusty avenues, and never coming out again.

About once a year we went to the Châtelet theatre. Alphonse Deville, the city councillor to whom my father had been secretary in the days when they had both been lawyers, used to place at our disposal the box reserved for members of the city council. So I saw La Course au bonheur and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, and other spectacular productions. I loved the red curtain, the lights, the scenery, and the flower ballet; but the adventures taking place on the stage were of only minor interest to me. The actors were too real, and at the same time not real enough. The most sumptuous finery had not an iota of the brilliance of a carbuncle in a fairy-tale. I used to clap my hands and gasp with wonder, but in my heart of hearts I preferred a quiet afternoon alone with my books.

As for the cinema, my parents looked upon it only as a vulgar entertainment. They thought Charlie Chaplin was very childish, even for children. However, a friend of my father’s having procured for us an invitation to see a private showing of a film, we went one morning to see L’Ami Fritz: everyone agreed that the film was charming. A few weeks later we saw, under the same privileged conditions, Le Roi de Camargue. The hero, engaged to a sweet blonde heroine, a simple peasant girl, was riding along the edge of the sea; he met a naked gipsy with smouldering eyes who slapped his horse’s neck; for a long while they stared at one another in amazement; later he went into a little house with her in the middle of the marshes. At this point I noticed my mother and grandmother exchanging looks of alarm; in the end I gathered from their distraught mien that this story was not suitable for my tender years: but I couldn’t quite understand why. While the blonde heroine was running desperately over the marshes, to be swallowed up by them in the end, I did not realize that the most frightful of all sins was being committed between the hero and the lovely dark gipsy. But her proud self-abandon had made no impression on me at all. In The Golden Legend and in the tales of Canon Schmid I had come across even more voluptuously naked scenes. But from then on, we did not go to the cinema.

I didn’t mind; I had my books, my games, and, all around me, subjects more worthy of my interest and contemplation than a lot of flat pictures: men and women, in flesh and blood. Contrary to inanimate objects, human beings, endowed with minds, did not worry me at all: they were just like myself. At that hour of the evening when the fronts of houses become transparent, I would watch the lighted windows. I never saw anything out of the ordinary; but if I caught sight of a child sitting reading at a table, I would be deeply moved to see my own life displayed as it were on a lighted stage. A woman would be setting the table, a couple would be talking: played at a distance, illuminated by chandeliers or hanging lamps, these familiar scenes, to my mind, rivalled the brilliance of the spectacles at the Châtelet. I didn’t feel shut out; I had the feeling that a single theme was being interpreted by a great diversity of actors in a great diversity of settings. Repeated to infinity from building to building, from city to city, my existence had a part in all its innumerable representations; it comprised the entire universe.

In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by. I knew too little of the habits of adults to be able to guess where they were going in such a hurry, or what the hopes and fears were that drove them along. But their faces, their appearance, and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to a fifth-floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: ‘But I won’t be able to see the people in the street any more! ‘I was being cut off from life, condemned to exile. When we were in the country, I didn’t mind being relegated to a rustic hermitage: I was overwhelmed by the wonders of Nature. But in Paris I was hungry for human company; the essence of a city is in its inhabitants: cut off from any more intimate contact, I had to be able to see them at least. Already I was beginning to want to escape from the narrow circle in which I was confined. A way of walking, a gesture, a smile would suddenly touch me deeply; I should have liked to run after the stranger turning the corner and whom I might never see again. One afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens a big girl in an apple-green coat and skirt was playing with some children; they were skipping; she had rosy cheeks and a gentle, radiant smile. That evening, I told my sister: ‘I know what love is!’ I had had a glimpse of something new. My father, my mother, my sister, and all those I loved were mine already. I sensed for the first time that one can be touched to the very heart of one’s being by a radiance from outside.

These brief impulses didn’t prevent me from feeling firmly rooted in my own environment. Curious about others, I never dreamt that my fate might be different from what it was. Above all, I felt no disappointment at being a girl. As I have already said, I did not lose myself in vain desires but happily accepted whatever was given. Besides, I could see no positive reason for considering that I’d been given a hard deal.

I had no brother; there were no comparisons to make which would have revealed to me that certain liberties were not permitted me on the grounds of my sex; I attributed the restraints that were put upon me to my age. Being a child filled me with passionate resentment; my feminine gender, never. The boys I knew were in no way remarkable. The brightest one was little René, who, as a special favour, had been allowed to start school among the girls at the Cours Désir, and I always got better marks than he did. In the sight of God, my soul was no less precious than that of His little boys: why, then, should I be envious of them?

With regard to the grown-ups, my experience was rather ambiguous. In certain respects Papa, grandpapa, and my uncles appeared to me to be superior to their wives. But in my everyday life, it was Louise, Mama, grandmama, and my aunts who played the leading roles. Madame de Ségur and Zénaïde Fleuriot took children as their heroes, with grown-ups in subordinate parts; mothers had quite a prominent place in their books, while the fathers didn’t have a look-in. As for myself, I thought of grown-ups essentially in their relationship to childhood: from this point of view, my sex assured my pre-eminence. In all my games, my day-dreams, and my plans for the future I never changed myself into a man; all my imagination was devoted to the fulfilment of my destiny as a woman.

I made this destiny suit my own wishes. I don’t know why, but organic phenomena very soon ceased to interest me. When we were in the country, I helped Madeleine to feed her rabbits and her hens, but these tasks soon bored me and I cared very little for the softness of fur or feather. I have never liked animals. I found red-faced, wrinkled, milky-eyed babies a great nuisance. Whenever I dressed up as a nurse, it was to go and bring in the wounded from a battlefield; but I never nursed them. One day at Meyrignac I administered, with a rubber bulb, a simulated rectal injection to my cousin Jeanne, whose smiling passivity was an incitement to sadism: but I cannot remember any other similar event. When we played games, I accepted the role of mother only if I were allowed to disregard its nursing aspects. Despising other girls who played with their dolls in what seemed to us a silly way, my sister and I had own particular way of treating our dolls; they could speak and reason, they lived at the same rate, and in the same rhythm as ourselves, growing older by twenty-four hours every day: they were our doubles. In reality, I was more inquisitive than methodical, more impulsive than finicky; but I revelled in schizophrenic daydreams of strictness and economy: I made use of Blondine to satisfy this mania. As the perfect mother of an exemplary little girl, providing her with an ideal education from which she drew the maximum of profit, I made good the shortcomings of my daily existence under the guise of necessity. I accepted the discreet collaboration of my sister whom I high-handedly assisted in the bringing-up of her own children. But I refused to allow a man to come between me and my maternal responsibilities: our husbands were always abroad. In real life, I knew, things were quite different: the mother of a family is always flanked by her mate; she is overburdened with a thousand tiresome tasks. Whenever I thought of my own future, this servitude seemed to me so burdensome that I decided I wouldn’t have any children; the important thing for me was to be able to form minds and mould characters: I shall be a teacher, I thought.

Nevertheless, teaching, at least as it was practised by my own teachers, did not seem to me to give the teacher a sufficiently exclusive hold over the pupil; my pupil would belong to me completely. I should plan his day down to the minutest detail, in order to eliminate all chance disturbances; with ingenious precision combining occupation and distraction, I should exploit every moment without wasting a single one. I could see only one way of implementing this plan successfully: I should have to become a governess in a family. My parents threw up their hands in horror. But I was unable to imagine that someone charged with the education of the young could be a menial. When I considered the progress made by my sister under my tutelage, I knew the supreme happiness of having changed nothing into something; I could not conceive of any more lofty purpose in my future life than to mould a human being. It mustn’t be just anyone, of course. I realize now that it was my own image I was projecting on my future creation, just as I had done on my doll Blondine. This was the meaning behind my vocation: when I was grown-up, I would take my own childhood in hand again and make of it a faultless work of art. I saw myself as the basis of my own apotheosis.

And so, in the present as well as in the future, I proudly imagined myself reigning alone over my own life. However, religion, history, and mythology suggested other personages I might play. I often imagined that I was Mary Magdalene, and that I was drying Christ’s feet with my long hair. The majority of real or legendary heroines – Saint Blandine, Joan of Arc, Griselda, Geneviève de Brabant – only attained to bliss and glory in this world or in the next after enduring painful sufferings inflicted on them by males. I willingly cast myself in the role of victim. Sometimes I laid stress upon her spiritual triumphs: the torturer was only an insignificant intermediary between the martyr and her crown. My sister and I set ourselves endurance tests: we would pinch each other with the sugar-tongs, or flay each other with the sticks of our little flags; you had to die rather than recant, but I always cheated shamelessly, for I always expired at the first taste of the rod but I considered that my sister was still alive until she had recanted. At times I was a nun confined in a cell, confounding my jailer by singing hymns and psalms. I converted the passivity to which my sex had condemned me into active defiance. But often I found myself revelling in the delights of misfortune and humiliation. My piety disposed me towards masochism; prostrate before a blond young god, or, in the dark of the confessional with suave young Abbé Martin, I would enjoy the most exquisite transports: the tears would pour down my cheeks and I would swoon away in the arms of angels. I would whip up these emotions to the point of paroxysm when, garbing myself in the blood-stained shift of Saint Blandine, I offered myself up to the lions’ claws and to the eyes of the crowd. Or else, taking my cue from Griselda and Geneviève de Brabant, I was inspired to put myself inside the skin of a persecuted wife; my sister, always forced to be Bluebeard or some other tyrant, would cruelly banish me from his palace, and I would be lost in primeval forests until the day dawned when my innocence was established, shining forth like a good deed in a naughty world. Sometimes, changing my script, I would imagine that I was guilty of some mysterious crime, and I would cast myself down, thrillingly repentant, at the feet of a pure, terrible, and handsome man. Vanquished by my remorse, my abjection, and my love, my judge would lay a gentle hand upon my bended head, and I would feel myself swoon with emotion. Certain of my fantasies would not bear the light of day; I had to indulge them in secret. I was always extraordinarily moved by the fate of that captive king whom an oriental tyrant used as a mounting-block; from time to time, trembling, half-naked, I would substitute myself for the royal slave and feel the tyrant’s sharp spurs riding down my spine.

The idea of nakedness came into these incantations more or less clearly. The tom tunic of Saint Blandine revealed the whiteness of her thighs; Saint Geneviève had nothing but her long hair to protect her modesty. I had never seen grown-ups other than hermetically clad from top to toe; during my bath-time, Louise scrubbed me with such vehemence that self-appraisal was impossible; besides, I had been taught never to look at my naked body, and I had to contrive to change my underwear without uncovering myself completely. In our universe, the flesh had no right to exist. And yet I had known the softness of my mother’s arms; in the neck of certain ladies’ dresses I could see the beginning of a darkening cleft which both embarrassed and attracted me. I was not ingenious enough to be able to re-create those pleasurable sensations I had accidentally discovered during my gymnastic lessons; but from time to time the soft touch of downy flesh against my own, or a hand gently stroking my neck, made me shiver with tender anticipation. Too innocent to invent a caress, I had to resort to a subterfuge. Taking the image of the man–mounting-block as my pattern, I would effect the metamorphosis of the human body into an inanimate object. I used to carry it out on myself whenever I cast myself down at the feet of a sovereign lord and master. In order to absolve me, he would lay upon my bended head his judge’s hand: and when I begged for pardon, I experienced sensual delight. But whenever I abandoned myself to these delicious downfalls, I never for one moment forgot that it was just a game. In reality I refused to submit to anybody: I was, and I would always remain, my own master.

I even tended to look upon myself, at least from the childhood level, as the One and Only. Of a sociable disposition, I took pleasure in associating with certain little girls of my acquaintance. We used to have games of Pope Joan or Lotto, and we would exchange books. But in general I hadn’t the slightest respect for any of my little friends, whether boys or girls. I demanded that our play should be in dead earnest, with precise observance of all the rules, and that victory should be bitterly fought for and hardly won; my sister was equal to these exigencies; but the usually ineffectual playfulness and fundamental lack of seriousness of my other partners always exasperated me. I suppose that on the other hand I must often have taxed them beyond all endurance. At one period I used to arrive at the Cours Désir half an hour before class started; I would join in the games of the boarders; one day, seeing me coming across the playground, a little girl flapped her right hand under her chin in an expressive gesture: ‘Oh, it’s her again! She gets my goat!’ This little girl was ugly, stupid, and wore spectacles: I was rather surprised at her outburst but was unable to feel any great annoyance. Another day we went out to the suburbs to visit some friends of my parents whose children had a croquet set. At La Grillière, croquet was our favourite pastime; all through lunch and during the afternoon walk with my parents’ friends and children I kept talking about croquet. I was itching to play. The other children complained to my sister: ‘She gets on our nerves with all that talk about how good she is at croquet!’ When my sister repeated this to me later that evening, I greeted the information with complete indifference. I could not possibly be hurt by stupid children who demonstrated their inferiority by not liking croquet as passionately as I did. Entrenched in our own preferences, our manias, our principles, and our own particular set of values, my sister and I conspired to condemn the silliness of other children. The condescension of grown-ups turns children into a general species whose individual members are all alike: nothing exasperated me more than this. Once at La Grillière, as I was eating some cobnuts, the elderly lady who was Madeleine’s governess announced fatuously: ‘All children adore nuts.’ I made fun of her to Poupette. My personal tastes were not dictated by my age; I was not ‘a child’: I was me, myself.

My sister benefited, as a humble vassal, from the supreme sovereignty which I conferred upon myself: she never disputed my divine right. I used to think that if I had to share that regal authority, my life would lose all meaning. In my class there were twins who understood one another in a way that was almost miraculous. I used to wonder how one could resign oneself to living with a double; I should have been, it seemed to me, only half a person; and I even had the feeling that my experiences, repeated identically in another would have ceased to be my own. A twin would have deprived my existence of the very thing that gave it value: its glorious singularity.

During my first eight years, I knew only one child for whom I had any respect: luckily for me, he did not turn up his nose at me. My bewhiskered great-aunt often used her grandchildren as models for her heroes in La Poupée Modèle. Their names were Titite and Jacques; Titite was three years older than me, Jacques only six months. They had lost their father in a motoring accident; their mother, who had married again, lived at Châteauvillain. During my eighth summer, we paid a rather long visit to my Aunt Alice. The two houses were almost next to one another. I attended the lessons given to my cousins by a sweet, blonde-haired young lady; not as advanced as they were, I was dazzled by Jacques’ brilliant compositions, by his knowledge, his assurance. With his rosy cheeks, his amber eyes, his curly hair bright as freshly fallen horse-chestnuts, he was a very good-looking little boy. On the first floor landing there was a bookcase from which he would select books for me; sitting on the stairs, we would read side by side, I Gulliver’s Travels and he Popular Astronomy. When we went down into the garden, it was always he who invented our games. He had begun the construction of an aeroplane which he had already baptized Old Charlie, in honour of Guynemer; in order to keep him supplied with materials, I collected all the empty tins I could find in the streets.

The aeroplane had not even begun to take shape, but Jacques’ prestige did not suffer. When in Paris, he did not live in an ordinary building, but in an old house on the boulevard Montparnasse where stained-glass windows were made; on the street level were the offices, and above them the flat; the workshops occupied the next floor and the display rooms were at the very top; it was his house, and he did the honours when I visited him with all the authority of a master of men. He would explain to me the processes in the making of stained glass, and point out the differences between stained glass and ordinary vulgar painted stuff; he used to talk to the workmen in a kindly, concerned tone of voice, and I would listen open-mouthed to this little boy who already seemed to have a whole team of grown-ups under his authority: he inspired me with awe. He treated grown-ups as if he were on an equal footing with them, and he even shocked me a little when he treated his grandmother rather roughly. He usually despised girls, and so I valued his friendship all the more. ‘Simone is a precocious child,’ he had declared. The word pleased me vastly. One day with his own hands he made a real stained-glass window whose blue, red, and white lozenges were framed in lead; on it, in black letters, he had inscribed a dedication: ‘For Simone.’ Never had I received such a flattering gift. We decided that we were ‘married in the sight of God’ and I called Jacques ‘my fiancé’. We spent our honeymoon on the merry-go-round’s painted horses in the Luxembourg Gardens. I took our engagement very seriously. Yet when he was away I hardly ever thought about him. I was glad to see him when he came back, but I never missed him at all.

And so the picture I have of myself round about the years of discretion is of a well-behaved little girl, happy and somewhat self-opinionated. I remember one or two things which do not fit into this portrait and lead me to suppose that it wouldn’t have taken very much to upset my self-assurance. When I was eight, I was no longer as hale and hearty as I had been when younger, but had become sickly and timorous. During the classes in gymnastics which I have talked about, I was togged out in a horrid skimpy pair of tights, and I had overheard one of my aunts saying to Mama: ‘She looks like a little monkey.’ Towards the end of the course, the teacher made me join a large mixed class, a group of boys and girls accompanied by a governess. The girls wore pale blue jersey costumes, with short skirts, elegantly pleated; their shining hair, their voices, their manners, everything about them was impeccable. Yet they ran and jumped and laughed and somersaulted with the freedom and daring which I had always associated with street-urchins. I suddenly felt I was clumsy, ugly, a milksop: a little monkey; that was certainly how those children must have looked upon me; they despised me; even worse, they ignored me. I was the helpless witness of their triumph and of my own extinction.

A few months later, a friend of my parents, whose children I didn’t care for very much, took me with them to Villers-sur-Mer. It was the first time I had been away from my sister and I felt mutilated. I found the sea boring; the baths filled me with horror: the water took my breath away; I was terrified. One morning I lay weeping in my bed. Madame Rollin, in some embarrassment, took me on her knees and asked me why I was crying; it seemed to me that we were both acting in a play, and I didn’t know my lines: no, no one had been bullying me, everyone was very nice. The truth was that, separated from my family, deprived of those affections which assured me of my personal worth, cut off from the familiar routine which defined my place in the world, I no longer knew where I was, nor what my purpose was here on earth. I needed to be confined within a framework whose rigidity would justify my existence. I realized this, because I was afraid of changes. But I suffered neither bereavement nor removal from familiar surroundings, and that is one of the reasons why I persisted so long in my childish pretensions.

But my equanimity was sadly disturbed during the last year of the war.

It was bitterly cold that winter and coal was unobtainable; in our ill-heated apartment I would vainly press my chilblained fingers on the tepid radiator. The period of restrictions had begun. Bread was grey, or else suspiciously white. Instead of hot chocolate in the mornings we had insipid, watery soups. My mother used to knock up omelettes without eggs and cook up ‘afters’ with margarine and saccharine, as there was very little sugar; she dished up chilled beef, horse-meat steaks, and dreary vegetables: ‘Chinese’ and ‘Jerusalem’ artichokes, ‘Swiss’ chard and other obscure members of the beet, turnip, and parsnip families. To make the wine pan out, Aunt Lili fabricated an abominable fermented beverage from figs, which was known as ‘figgy-wiggy’. Meals lost all their old gaiety. The sirens often started wailing during the night; street lamps would go out and windows would be blacked-out; we would hear people running and the irritable voice of the air-raid warden, Monsieur Dardelle, crying: ‘Put that light out!’ My mother made us go down to the cellar once or twice; but as my father obstinately refused to leave his bed, she, too, finally decided not to bother. A number of tenants from the upper storeys used to come and take shelter in our hall; we put out armchairs for them in which they fitfully dozed. Sometimes friends of our parents, held up by the raid, would prolong a bridge party into the small hours of the morning. I enjoyed all this disorder, with the silent city lying behind the blacked-out windows suddenly coming to life again after the ‘all clear’. The annoying thing was that my grandparents, who had a fifth-floor flat near the Lion de Belfort, took the alerts seriously; they used to rush down to the cellar, and the next morning we had to go and make sure they were safe and sound. At the first boom from Big Bertha, grandpapa, convinced that the Germans were about to arrive at any moment, dispatched his wife and daughter to Charité-sur-Loire: when the fatal moment came, he himself was to fly on foot to Longjumeau. Grandmama, exhausted by her husband’s panic-stricken activity, fell ill. She had to be brought back to Paris for medical attention: but as she would no longer have been able to leave her fifth-floor flat during a bombardment, she was installed in our apartment. When she arrived, accompanied by a nurse, her flushed cheeks and empty stare frightened me: she could not speak and did not recognize me. She was given my room, and Louise, my sister, and I camped out in the drawing-room. Aunt Lili and grandpapa took their meals with us. Grandpapa, in his booming voice, would prophesy disaster or else would announce that he’d had a sudden stroke of good fortune. His catastrophism was in fact paralleled by an extravagant optimism. He had large banking interests in Verdun, and his speculations had ended in bankruptcy in which his capital and that of a good number of his clients had been swallowed up. But he still continued to have the utmost confidence in his lucky star and in his financial acumen. At the moment, he was running a boot and shoe factory which, thanks to army orders, was going fairly well; but this modest enterprise did not satisfy his passion for making business deals, considering offers, and thinking up new ways of getting rich quick. Unfortunately for him, he could no longer play about with adequate sums of money without the consent of his wife and children: he used to try to enlist my father’s support. One day grandpapa brought him a small gold bar which an alchemist had made from a lump of lead before his very eyes: the secret of this astounding process was to make millionaires of us all, if only we would guarantee an advance to the inventor. Papa gave a disbelieving smile, grandpapa went purple in the face, Mama and Aunt Lili took sides, and everybody started shouting. This sort of scene often happened. Overwrought, Louise and Mama quickly ‘got on their high horse’; they would ‘have words’; it even used to come to the point where Mama quarrelled with Papa; she would scold my sister and me and box our ears for the slightest thing. But I’d grown a little older: I was no longer five years old, and the days were past when a row between my parents seemed to be the end of the world; nor did I fail to distinguish between impatience and injustice. All the same, at night, when through the glass door separating the dining-room from the drawing-room I heard the cries of hatred and anger, I hid my head under the bedclothes, and my heart would grow heavy. I would think of the past as a long-lost paradise. Would we ever find it again? The world no longer seemed the safe place I had once thought it to be.

It was my gradually developing powers of imagination that made the world a darker place. Through books, communiqués, and the conversations I heard, the full horror of the war was becoming clear to me: the cold, the mud, the terror, the blood, the pain, the agonies of death. We had lost friends and cousins at the front. Despite the promises of heaven, I used to choke with dread whenever I thought of mortal death which separates for ever all those who love one another. People said sometimes in front of my sister and myself: ‘They are lucky to be children! They don’t realize. . . .’ But deep inside I would be shouting: ‘Grown-ups don’t understand anything at all about us!’ Sometimes I would feel overwhelmed by something so bitter and so very definite that no one, I was sure, could ever have known distress worse than mine. Why should there be so much suffering? I would ask myself. At La Grillière, German prisoners and a young Belgian refugee who had been excused army service on the grounds of obesity supped their broth in the kitchen side by side with French farm labourers: they all got on very well together. After all, the Germans were human beings; they, too, could be wounded and bleed to death. Why should things be like this? I began praying desperately for an end to our misfortunes. Peace was to me more important than victory. I was going upstairs with Mama one day, and talking to her: she was telling me that the war would probably be over soon. ‘Oh, yes!’ I cried, ‘let it be over soon! No matter how it ends as long as it’s over soon!’ Mama stopped and gave me a startled look: ‘Don’t you say things like that! France must be victorious!’ I felt ashamed, not just of having allowed such an enormity to escape my lips, but even of having thought of it. All the same, I found it hard to admit that an idea or an opinion could be ‘wrong’. Underneath our flat, opposite the peaceful Dôme where Monsieur Dardelle played dominoes, a rowdy café had just opened, called La Rotonde. You could see short-cropped, heavily made-up women going in, and curiously dressed men. ‘It’s a joint for wogs and defeatists,’ declared my father. I asked him what a defeatist was. ‘A bad Frenchman who hopes for the defeat of France,’ he replied. I couldn’t understand: thoughts come and go in our heads after their own fashion; you don’t believe what you do on purpose. But my father’s outraged tones and my mother’s scandalized face left me in no doubt that it doesn’t always do to say aloud those disquieting words which you find yourself whispering below your breath.

My hesitant pacifism did not prevent me from being proud of my parents’ patriotism. Alarmed by the bombs and by Big Bertha, the majority of the pupils in my school left Paris before the end of the academic year. I was left alone in my class with a great silly twelve-year-old girl; we would sit at the big table facing Mademoiselle Gontran; she paid special attention to me. I took particular pleasure in those classes, which were as solemn as public lectures and as intimate as private lessons. One day, when I arrived with my sister and Mama at the school, we found the building empty: everyone had dashed dowṅ into the cellars. We were highly amused. Our own courage and spirit in the face of danger showed plainly that we were beings apart.

Grandmama recovered her wits and went back to her own house. During the holidays and when we returned to school I heard a lot about two traitors who had tried to betray France to Germany: Malvy and Caillaux. They should have been shot but weren’t; anyhow, their plans were foiled. On the 11th of November I was practising the piano under Mama’s supervision when the bells rang out for the Armistice. Papa put on his civilian clothes again. Mama’s brother died, shortly after being demobilized, of Spanish influenza. But I had hardly known him, and when Mama had dried her tears, happiness returned – for me at any rate.

*

At home, nothing was ever wasted: not a crust, not a wafer of soap, not a twist of string; free tickets and opportunities for free meals were always seized with avidity. My sister and I wore our clothes until they were threadbare, and even after that. My mother never wasted a second; she would knit while she was reading; when she talked to my father or to friends she would be sewing, patching, or embroidering; when she travelled by tram or by the Métro she would crochet miles of ‘tatting’ with which she ornamented our petticoats. In the evenings, she did her accounts; for years, every penny that passed through her hands had been noted down in a big black ledger. I used to think that not only in my own family but everywhere time and money were so exactly measured that they had to be distributed with the greatest economy and strictness: this idea appealed to me, because I wanted to see a world free from all irregularities. Poupette and I often used to play at being explorers lost in a desert or castaways on a desert island; or, in a besieged town, we would be gallant defenders dying of starvation: we used to perform miracles of ingenuity in order to draw the maximum of profit from our most infinitesimal resources; it was one of our favourite themes in our play. Everything must be put to use: I felt I must carry out this command to the letter. In the little notebooks in which I used to write down each week a résumé of my lessons, I began to cover every page with minute script, taking care not to leave the smallest blank space anywhere. My teachers were puzzled: they asked my mother if I had a mean streak. I got over that mania fairly quickly: gratuitous economy is a contradiction in terms, and it isn’t interesting or amusing. But I remained convinced that one must make use of everything, and of one’s self, to the utmost. At La Grillière there were often unoccupied moments before and after meals or at the end of Mass; I would fret and fidget: ‘Can’t that child sit still for just one minute?’ my Uncle Maurice would mutter impatiently. My parents and I used to laugh at him when he talked that way: my father and mother condemned idleness. I found it all the more reprehensible because it bored me so. Duty therefore was mixed with pleasure. That is why, at this period, my existence was such a happy one: I simply had to do just as I liked, and everyone was delighted with me.

The Cours Désir – or, to give it its full name, the Adeline Désir Institute – had boarders, day-boarders, special day-pupils, and others who, like myself, simply followed the lessons; twice a week there were the General Culture classes, which lasted for two hours; I took as extras English, the piano, and the catechism. My neophyte awe had not abated: the moment Mademoiselle entered the classroom, every second became holy. Our teachers didn’t tell us anything wildly exciting; we would recite our lessons, and they would correct our exercises; but I asked for nothing more than that my existence should be publicly sanctioned by them. My merits were inscribed in a register which perpetuated their memory. I had to surpass myself all the time, or at least to equal my previous achievement. There was always a fresh start to be made; to have failed would have filled me with consternation, and victory exalted me. These glittering moments shone like beacons down the year: each day was leading me further on. I felt sorry for grown-ups whose uneventful weeks are feebly irradiated by the dullness of Sundays. To live without expecting anything seemed to me frightful.

I expected, and I was expected. I was responding ceaselessly to a necessity which spared me from asking: why am I here? Seated at Papa’s desk, doing an English translation or copying out an essay, I was occupying my rightful place on earth and doing what I should be doing. The formidable array of ash-trays, ink-stands, paper-knives, pens, and pencils scattered round the pink blotting-pad played their own parts in that unalterable necessity, which informed my entire world, and the world itself. From my study armchair I listened to the harmony of the spheres.

But I did not carry out all my tasks with the same eagerness. My wish to conform had not entirely killed in me certain desires and repulsions. At La Grillière, whenever Aunt Hélène served pumpkin pie, I would rush from the table in tears rather than touch it; neither threats nor thumpings could persuade me to eat cheese. I was obstinate in other, more important matters. I couldn’t tolerate being bored: my boredom soon turned to real distress of mind; that is why, as I have remarked, I detested idleness; but tasks which paralysed my body without occupying my mind left me with the same feeling of emptiness. Grandmama succeeded in interesting me in tapestry work and embroidery; it was a question of accommodating the wool or cotton to a printed pattern on canvas, and this task used to keep me fairly well occupied; I cobbled up a dozen antimacassars and covered one of the chairs in my room with hideous tapestry. But I always made a mess of hems, ‘whipped’ seams, darning and mending, scallops, buttonhole and cross-stitch, raised satin-stitch and knotted-bar work. In order to stimulate my interest, Mademoiselle Fayet told me a little story: an eligible young man was being regaled with the list of a certain young lady’s talents; she was a musician, and well-read, and gifted with hundreds of attractive qualities. ‘Can she sew?’ he inquired. Saving the respect I owed to my teacher, I found it quite ridiculous that I should be expected to conform to the requirements of an unknown young man. My skill with the needle did not improve. In every aspect of learning and culture, the more eager I was to learn, the more tiresome did I find the mechanics of study. When I opened my English text books, I seemed to be setting out on a journey, and I studied them with passionate absorption; but I could never take the trouble to acquire a correct accent. I enjoyed sight-reading a sonatina: but I could never bring myself to learn one by heart; my scales and Czerny exercises were always a scramble, so that in the pianoforte examinations I was always near the bottom. In solfeggio and musical theory I was hopeless: I sang either sharp or flat, and was a wretched failure in musical dictation. My handwriting was so shapeless that I had to have private lessons, which did not make any great improvement. If I had to trace the course of a river or the outline of a country, I was so clumsy that I was absolved from all blame for the messes I made. This characteristic was to remain with me all my life. I bungled all practical jobs and I was never any good at work requiring finicky precision.

It was not without some vexation that I became aware of my deficiencies; I should have liked to excel in everything. But they were too deeply rooted in my nature to be amenable to ephemeral spurts of will-power. As soon as I was able to think for myself, I found myself possessed of infinite power, and yet circumscribed by absurd limitations. When I was asleep, the earth disappeared; it had need of me in order to be seen, discovered, and understood; I was, I felt, charged with a mission which I carried out with pride; but I did not assume that my imperfect body could have any part in it: on the contrary, as soon as my physical activities intervened, things tended to go wrong. Doubtless in order to express the full truth of any piece of music it was necessary to play it ‘with expression’, and not to massacre it: but in any case, it would never, under my stumbling fingers, attain the fullest pitch of perfection, so why should I wear myself out trying to master it ? Why should I want to develop capabilities which would always remain fatally limited, and have only a relative importance in my life? The modest results of so much effort repelled me, for I had only to look, to read, and to think in order to reach the absolute. When I translated an English text, I discovered in it the one, complete, universal meaning, whereas the th sound was only one modulation among millions of others in my mouth: I really couldn’t bother my head about that. The urgency of my self-appointed task debarred me from wasting time on such futilities: there were so many things to be learned! I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars. When I was compelled to do tiresome exercises, my mind cried out at the barren waste of my gifts, and I used to think that I was losing precious time. I was frustrated and filled with guilt: I got through such impositions as quickly as possible, bashing them out on the rocks of my impatience.

I think I must also have considered the task of the executant to be a very minor one, because it seemed to me to be concerned only with appearances. Fundamentally I believed that the essential truth of a sonata could be discovered in the notes on the stave, as immutable and eternal as the truth of Macbeth in a printed book. The task of the creator was something quite superior. I thought it was wonderful that you could bring into the world something real, something new. There was only one region in which I could venture my creative talent: literature. Drawing was no more than copying, and I didn’t care for art, all the more so because I was not very good at it: I reacted to the general appearance of an object without paying much attention to its details; I could never succeed in drawing even the simplest flower. In compensation, I knew how to use language, and as it expressed the essence of things, it illuminated them for me. I had a spontaneous urge to turn everything that happened to me into a story: I used to talk freely, and loved to write. If I was describing in words an episode in my life, I felt that it was being rescued from oblivion, that it would interest others, and so be saved from extinction. I loved to make up stories, too: when they were inspired by my own experience, they seemed to justify it; in one sense they were of no use at all, but they were unique and irreplaceable, they existed, and I was proud of having snatched them out of nothingness. So I took a great deal of trouble over my French compositions: I even copied some of them into my ‘book of gold’.

When July came round, the prospect of the long holiday in the country enabled me to say good-bye to the Cours Désir without too much regret. But when we returned to Paris I would feverishly await the first day of school. I would sit in the leather armchair beside the black pear-wood bookcase, and make the spines of my new books crack gently as I opened them for the first time; I would sniff their special smell, look at the pictures and the maps, skim through a page of history: I used to wish that with the wave of a wand I could make all the characters and all the landscapes hidden in the shade of the black and white pages spring to life. The power I had over them intoxicated me as much as their silent presence.

Apart from my school work, reading was the great passion of my life. Mama now got her books from the Bibliothèque Cardinale, in the place Saint-Sulpice. A table loaded with reviews and magazines occupied the centre of a large room beyond which extended corridors lined with books: the clients had the right to wander where they pleased. I experienced one of the greatest joys I ever knew as a child the day when Mama announced that she was taking out a personal subscription for me. I stood with arms akimbo in front of the section marked ‘Works suitable for Children’, in which there were hundreds of volumes. ‘All this belongs to me! ‘I said to myself, bewildered by such a profusion of riches. The reality surpassed my wildest dreams: before me lay the entry to a rich and unknown paradise. I took a catalogue home with me: assisted by my parents, I made a selection from the works marked ‘J’ for juvenile, and I drew up lists of the books I required; each week I hovered, with delicious hesitations, over a multiplicity of desirable choices. In addition, my mother sometimes took me to a little bookshop near the school, to buy English novels; they were a ‘good buy’, because it took me a long time to get through them. I took great pleasure in lifting, with the aid of a dictionary, the dark veil of foreign words; descriptions and stories retained a certain mystery; I used to find them more charming and more profound than if I had merely read them in French.

That year my father made me a present of L’Abbé Constantin in a beautiful edition illustrated by Madeleine Lemaire. One Sunday he took me to the Comédie Française to see the play which had been adapted from the novel. For the very first time I was admitted to a real theatre, one that was frequented by grown-ups: quivering with excitement, I took my place on the red plush seat and listened to the actors with religious attention: I was rather disappointed in them; Cécile Sorel’s dyed hair and affected manner of speaking did not correspond at all to the image I had in my mind of Madame Scott. Two or three years later, weeping at Cyrano, sobbing over L’Aiglon, vibrating to Britannicus, I was to give myself up body and soul to the magic of the stage. But on that first afternoon what delighted me was less the performance than being taken out by my father; to be attending, alone with him, the performance of a play he had chosen specially for me, created such a feeling of intimacy between us that for a few hours I had the intoxicating impression that he belonged to me alone.

About this period, my feelings for my father took a loftier turn. He was often worried. He said that Foch had let himself be talked into giving way to the Germans. He talked a lot about the Bolsheviks, whose name dangerously resembled that of the Boche and who had, he said, ruined him; he was so pessimistic about the future that he didn’t dare set up in business as a lawyer again. He accepted the post of co-director in my grandfather’s factory. He had already suffered many disappointments; as a consequence of my grandfather’s bankruptcy, my mother’s dowry had never been paid over to him. Now, his career finished, the Russian stocks which had brought in the larger part of his income having slumped disastrously, he regretfully placed himself in the category of the ‘newly-poor’. He nevertheless managed to preserve a good-tempered equanimity, and would rather seek the reason for his misfortunes in the state of the world than waste his time in self-pity: I was moved by the spectacle of a man of such superior attainments adapting himself so simply to the shabbiness of his new position in the world. I saw him one day playing, in a charity show, the leading part in La Paix chez soi by Courteline. He played the role of a hard-up newspaper hack, beset by money troubles and by the extravagant caprices of a child-wife; the latter bore no resemblance to Mama; nevertheless, I identified my father with the character he played; he gave his interpretation a disillusioned irony which moved me almost to tears; there was melancholy in his resignation: the hidden wound I sensed in him added to his stature. I adored him, with a romantic fervour.

On fine summer evenings he would sometimes take us for a walk after dinner in the Luxembourg Gardens; we would have ices on the terrace of a café in the place Médicis, then we would stroll back through the gardens as the bugle call warned us that the gates were about to be closed. I envied the Senators their nocturnal reveries in the deserted avenues. My daily routine was as inalterable as the rhythm of the seasons: the slightest deviation transported me almost into the realms of fantasy. To be walking in the tranquil twilight, at a time when Mama was usually bolting the front door for the night, was as startling and as poetical as finding a hawthorn in flower in the middle of winter.

There was one quite extraordinary evening when we were drinking hot chocolate on the terrace of the Café Prévost, near the offices of Le Matin. An electric sign on the top of the building was giving the progress of the fight between Dempsey and Carpentier in New York. The street corners were black with people. When Carpentier was knocked out, men and women burst into tears; I went home filled with pride at having been the witness of such a great event. But I was no less happy when we spent the evening at home in Papa’s cosy study while he read us Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrickon; or we would each read our own book. I would look at my parents and my sister, and feel my heart flood with affectionate warmth. ‘Us four!’ I would say to myself, in silent rapture. And I would think: ‘How happy we are.’

There was only one thing that sometimes cast a shadow on this happy state: I knew that one day this period in my life would come to an end. It seemed unbelievable. When you have loved your parents for twenty years or so, how can you leave them to live with a stranger, without dying of unhappiness? And how, when you have done without him for twenty years, can you up and love a man who is nothing to you? I asked Papa about it. ‘A husband is something different,’ he replied, with a little smile that did nothing to enlighten me. I always looked upon marriage with disfavour. I didn’t look upon it as servitude, for my own mother had nothing of the slave about her; it was the promiscuity of marriage that repelled me. ‘At night when you go to bed, you won’t be able to have a good cry in peace!’ I would tell myself in horror. I don’t know if my happiness was broken by fits of sadness, or whether I used to weep in the night for the sheer pleasure of it; I rather think that my tears were a borderline case: if I had forced myself to restrain them, I should have been denying myself that minimum of personal liberty which I needed so badly. All day long, I felt that people’s eyes were upon me; I liked and even loved the people around me, but when I went to bed at night I felt a sharp sense of relief at the idea of being able to live at least for a little while without being watched by others; then I could talk to myself, remember things, allow my emotions a free rein and hearken to those tender inner promptings which are stifled by the presence of grown-ups. I should have felt it quite unbearable to be deprived of this respite. I needed to escape at least for a few moments from all parental solicitude and talk quietly to myself without interruptions from anyone.

*

I was very pious; I made my confession twice a month to Abbé Martin, received Holy Communion three times a week and every morning read a chapter of The Imitation of Christ; between classes, I would slip into the school chapel and, with my head in my hands, I would offer up lengthy prayers; often in the course of the day I would lift up my soul to my Maker. I was no longer very interested in the Infant Jesus, but I adored Christ to distraction. As supplements to the Gospels, I had read disturbing novels of which He was the hero, and it was now with the eyes of a lover that I gazed upon His grave, tender, handsome face; I would follow, across hills covered with olive groves, the shining hem of His snow-white robe, bathe His naked feet with my tears; and He would smile down upon me as He had smiled upon the Magdalen. When I had had my fill of clasping His knees and sobbing on His blood-stained corpse, I would allow Him to ascend into heaven. There He became one with that more mysterious Being to whom I owed my existence on earth, and whose throne of glory would one day, and for ever, fill my eyes with a celestial radiance.

How comforting to know that He was there! I had been told that He cherished every single one of His creatures as if each were the one and only; His eye was upon me every instant, and all others were excluded from our divine conversations; I would forget them all, there would be only He and I in the world, and I felt I was a necessary part of His glory: my existence, through Him, was of infinite price. There was nothing He did not know: even more definitely than in my teachers’ registers my acts, my thoughts, and my excellences were inscribed in Him for eternity; my faults and errors too, of course, but these were washed so clean in the waters of repentance that they shone just as brightly as my virtues. I never tired of admiring myself in that pure mirror that was without beginning or end. My reflection, all radiant with the joy I inspired in God’s heart, consoled me for all my earthly shortcomings and failures; it saved me from the indifference, from the injustice and the misunderstandings of human nature. For God was always on my side; if I had done wrong in any way, at the very instant that I dropped upon my knees to ask His forgiveness He breathed upon my tarnished soul and restored to it all its lustre. But usually, bathed as I was in His eternal radiance, the faults I was accused of simply melted away; His judgement was my justification. He was the supreme arbiter who found that I was always right. I loved Him with all the passion I brought to life itself.

Each year I went into retreat for several days; all day long, I would listen to my priest’s instructions, attend services, tell my beads and meditate; I would remain at school for a frugal repast, and during the meal someone would read to us from the life of a saint. In the evenings, at home, my mother would respect my silent meditations. I wrote down in a special notebook the outpourings of my immortal soul and my saintly resolutions. I ardently desired to grow closer to God, but I didn’t know how to go about it. My conduct left so little to be desired that I could hardly be any better than I already was; besides, I wondered if God was really concerned about my general behaviour. The majority of faults that Mama reprimanded my sister and me for were just awkward blunders or careless mistakes. Poupette was severely scolded and punished for having lost a civet-fur collar. When, fishing for shrimps in ‘the English river’, I fell into the water, I was overcome with panic at the thought of the telling-off I felt was in store for me; fortunately I was let off that time. But these misdemeanours had nothing to do with Sin, and I didn’t feel that by steering clear of them I was making myself any more perfect. The embarrassing thing was that God forbade so many things, but never asked for anything positive apart from a few prayers or religious practices which did not change my daily course in any way. I even found it most peculiar to see people who had just received Holy Communion plunging straight away into the ordinary routine of their lives again; I did the same, but it embarrassed me. Taken all in all, it seemed to me that believers and non-believers led just the same kind of life; I became more and more convinced that there was no room for the supernatural in everyday life. And yet it was that other-worldly life that really counted: it was the only kind that mattered. It suddenly became obvious to me one morning that a Christian who was convinced of his eternal salvation ought not to attach any importance to the ephemeral things of this world. How could the majority of people go on living in the world as it was? The more I thought about it, the more I wondered at it. I decided that I, at any rate, would not follow their example: my choice was made between the finite and the infinite. ‘I shall become a nun,’ I told myself. The activities of sisters of charity seemed to me quite useless; the only reasonable occupation was to contemplate the glory of God to the end of my days. I would become a Carmelite. But I did not make my decision public: it would not have been taken seriously. I contented myself with the announcement that I did not intend to marry. My father smiled: ‘We’ll have plenty of time to think about that when you’re fifteen years old.’ In my heart of hearts I resented his smile. I knew that an implacable logic led me to the convent: how could you prefer having nothing to having everything?

This imaginary future provided me with a convenient alibi. For many years it allowed me to enjoy without scruple all the good things of this world.

*

My happiness used to reach its height during, the two and a half months which I spent every summer in the country. My mother was always more relaxed there than in Paris; my father devoted more time to me then; and I enjoyed a vast leisure for reading and playing with my sister. I did not miss the Cours Désir: that feeling of necessity which study gave my life spilled over into the holidays My time was no longer strictly measured by the exigencies of a timetable; but its absence was largely compensated for by the immensity of the horizons which opened themselves before my curious eyes. I explored them all unaided: the mediation of grownups no longer interposed a barrier between the world and myself. The solitude and freedom which were only rarely mine during the course of the year were now almost boundless, and I had my fill of them. In the country all my aspirations seemed to be brought together and realized; my fidelity to the past and my taste for novelty, my love for my parents and my growing desire for independence.

At first we usually spent a few weeks at La Grillière. The castle seemed to me to be vast and very old; it had been built barely fifty years ago, but none of the objects – furniture or ornaments – that had been brought there half a century ago were ever changed or taken away. No hand ventured to sweep away the relics of the past: you could smell the odour of vanished lives. A collection of hunting horns hanging in the tiled hall, all of them made of shining copper, evoked – erroneously, I believe – the magnificence of bygone stag-hunts. In what was called the ‘billiard room’, which was where we usually foregathered, stuffed foxes, buzzards, and kites perpetuated this bloodthirsty tradition. There was no billiard table in the room, but it contained a monumental chimney-piece, a bookcase, always carefully locked, and a large table strewn with copies of hunting magazines; there were pedestal tables laden with yellowing photographs, sheaves of peacock feathers, pebbles, terracotta ornaments, barometers, clocks that would never go and lamps that were never lit. Apart from the dining-room, the other rooms were rarely used: there was a drawing-room, embalmed in the stink of moth balls, a smaller drawing-room, a study and a kind of office whose shutters were always closed and that served as a kind of lumber room or glory-hole. In a small box-room filled with a pungent smell of old leather lay generations of riding boots and ladies’ shoes. Two staircases led to the upper storeys where there were corridors leading to well over a dozen rooms,’ most of them disused and filled with dusty bric-à-brac. I shared one of them with my sister. We slept in fourposter beds. Pictures cut out of illustrated magazines and amateurishly framed decorated the walls.

The liveliest place in the house was the kitchen, which occupied half the basement. I had my breakfast there in the mornings: café au lait and wholemeal bread. Through the window high in the wall you could see hens parading; guinea-fowl, dogs, and sometimes human feet passed by. I liked the massive wood of the table, the benches and the chests and cupboards. The cast-iron cooking range threw out sparks and flames. The brasses shone: there were copper pots of all sizes, cauldrons, skimming ladles, preserving pans, and warming pans; I used to love the gaiety of the glazed dishes with their paint-box colours, the variety of bowls, cups, glasses, basins, porringers, hors d’œuvre dishes, pots, jugs, and pitchers. What quantities of cooking pots, frying pans, stock pots, stewpans, bains-marie, cassolettes, soup tureens, meat dishes, saucepans, enamel mugs, colanders, graters, choppers, mills, mincers, moulds, and mortars – in cast-iron, earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, aluminium, and tin! Across the corridor, where turtle doves used to moan, was the dairy. Here stood great vats and pans of varnished wood and glazed earthenware, barrel-churns made of polished elm, great blocks of pattern-patted butter, piles of smooth-skinned cheeses under sheets of white muslin: all that hygienic bareness and the aroma of breast-fed babies made me take to my heels. But I liked to visit the fruit loft, where apples and pears would be ripening on wicker trays, and the cellar, with its barrels, bottles, hams, huge sausages, ropes of onions, and swags of dried mushrooms. Whatever luxury there was at La Grillière was to be found down there in the nether regions. The grounds were as dull as the upper parts of the house: not a single bed of flowers, not one garden seat, not even a sunny comer to sit and read in. Opposite the great central flight of stone steps there was a fishing stream where servants often did the household wash with a great whacking of wooden beaters; a lawn fell steeply away to an edifice even older than the château itself: the ‘back place’, as it was called, full of old harness and thick with spiders’ webs. Three or four horses could be heard whinnying in the adjacent stables.

My uncle, my aunt, and my cousins led an existence which fitted this setting very well. Starting at six o’clock in the morning, Aunt Hélène would make a thorough inspection of all the cupboards. With so many servants at her disposal, she didn’t have to do any housework; she rarely did any cooking, never sewed, and never read a book, and yet she always complained of never having a minute to herself: she never stopped poking about, from the cellars to the attic. My uncle would come downstairs about nine o’clock; he would polish his leggings in the harness-room, and then go off to saddle his horse. Madeleine would look after her pets. Robert stayed in bed. Lunch was always late. Before sitting down to table, Uncle Maurice would season the salad with meticulous care and toss it with wooden spatulas. At the beginning of the meal there would be a passionate discussion about the quality of the cantaloups; at its end, the flavours of different kinds of pears would be thoroughly compared. In between, much would be eaten and but few words spoken. Then my aunt would go back to her cupboard inspection, and my uncle would stump off to the stables, laying about him with his hunting-crop. Madeleine would join Poupette and me in a game. Robert usually did nothing at all; sometimes he would go trout-fishing; in September he would hunt a little. A few elderly, cut-rate tutors had tried to din into him the rudiments of arithmetic and spelling. Then an oldish lady with yellowed skin devoted herself to Madeleine, who was less of a handful and the only one in the family ever to read a book. She used to gorge herself on novels, and had dreams of being very beautiful and having lots of loving admirers. In the evenings, everyone would gather in the billiard room; Papa would ask for the lamps to be lit. My aunt would cry out that it was still quite light, but in the end would give way and have a small oil lamp placed on the centre table. After dinner, we would still hear her trotting about in the dark corridors. Robert and my uncle, with glazed eyes, would sit rigidly in their armchairs waiting silently for bed-time. Very occasionally one of them would pick up a sporting magazine and flick desultorily through it for a few minutes. The next morning, the same kind of day would begin all over again, except on Sundays, when, after all the doors had been locked and barred, we would all climb into the dog-cart and go to hear Mass at Saint-Germain-les-Belles. My aunt never had visitors, and she never paid visits herself.

This way of life suited me very well. I used to spend the best part of my days on the croquet lawn with my sister and cousin, and the rest of the time I would read. Sometimes we would all three of us set off to look for mushrooms in the chestnut plantations. We ignored the insipid meadow varieties, the tawny grisettes and the tough, crinkled chanterelles as well as the clumps of wild chicory: we studiously avoided the lurid Devil’s Boletus with its red-veined stem and the sham flap-mushroom which we recognized by their dull colour and their rigid look. We despised mature ceps whose flesh was beginning to go soft and produce greenish whiskers. We only gathered young ones with nicely curved stalks and caps covered with a fine nigger-brown or blueish nap. Rummaging in the moss and parting fans of bracken and ferns, we would kick to pieces the puff-balls, which when they burst gave off clouds of filthy dust. Sometimes we would go with Robert to fish for fresh-water crayfish; or in order to get food for Madeleine’s peacocks we would dig up ant-hills and wheel away barrow-loads of whiteish eggs.

The big waggonette was no longer allowed to leave the coachhouse. In order to get to Meyrignac we had to spend an hour sitting in a little train that stopped every ten minutes, pile our luggage on a donkey cart and then walk over the fields to the house: I couldn’t imagine any more agreeable place on earth to live. In one sense, our life there was an austere one. Poupette and I had no croquet or any other kind of outdoor amusement; my mother had refused, I don’t know why, to let my father buy us bicycles. We couldn’t swim, and besides the River Vézère was some distance away. If occasionally we heard the sound of a motor-car coming up the drive, Mama and Aunt Marguerite would hurriedly leave the garden to go and tidy themselves up; there were never any children among the visitors. But I could do without frivolous distractions. Reading, walking, and the games I made up with my sister were all I wanted.

The chief of my pleasures was to rise early in the morning and observe the awakening of nature; with a book in my hand, I would steal out of the sleeping house and quietly unlatch the garden gate: it was impossible to sit down on the grass, which would be all white with hoar-frost; I would walk along the drive, beside the meadow planted with specially chosen trees that my grandpapa called ‘the landscape garden’; I would read a little from time to time, enjoying the feeling of the sharp air softening against my cheeks; the thin crust of rime would be melting on the ground; the purple beech, the blue cedars, and the silvery poplars would be sparkling with the primal freshness of the first morning in Eden: and I was the only one awake to the beauty of the earth and the glory of God, which mingled agreeably deep inside me with a dream of a bowl of hot chocolate and warm buttered toast. When the bees began to hum and the green shutters were opened on the sunny fragrance of wistaria, I felt I was already sharing a secret past with the day that for the others was only just beginning. After the round of family greetings and breakfast, I would sit at a metal table under the catalpa tree and get on with my ‘holiday tasks’. I liked those moments when, pretending to be busied with some easy exercise, I let my ear be beguiled by the sounds of summer: the fizzing of wasps, the chattering of guinea-fowls, the peacocks’ strangulated cry, the whisperings of leaves; the scent of phlox mingled with the aromas of caramel and coffee and chocolate that came wafting over to me from the kitchen; rings of sunlight would be dancing over my exercise book. I felt I was one with everything: we all had our place just here, now, and for ever.

Grandpapa would come down about noon, his chin freshly shaven between his white side-whiskers. He would read the Écho de Paris until lunch-time. He liked good solid food: partridge with crisply steamed cabbage, chicken vol-au-vent, duck stuffed with olives, saddle of hare, pâtés, flans, tarts, marzipans, shapes, and trifles. While the ancient horned gramophone played a selection from Les Cloches de Corneville, he would be joking with Papa. They would chaff each other all through the meal, laughing, declaiming, singing even; again and again they would trot out the memories, anecdotes, quotations, witticisms, and nonsense-talk of the family folk-lore. After that, I usually went walking with my sister; scratching our legs on gorse and our arms on brambles, we would explore for miles around the chestnut groves, the fields, the moors. We made great discoveries: ponds; a waterfall; at the centre of a lonely heath, blocks of grey granite which we climbed to get a glimpse of the blue line of the Monédières. As we rambled along, we would sample the hazelnuts and brambleberries in the hedges, arbutus berries, cornel berries, and the acid berries of the berberis; we had bites out of apples from every orchard; but we were careful not to suck the milk of the wild-spurge or to touch those handsome bright-red spikes which are the proud bearers of the enigmatic name ‘Solomon’s Seal’. Drowsy with the scent of freshly mown hay, with the fragrance of honeysuckle and the smell of buckwheat in flower, we would lie down on the warm moss or the grass and read. I also sometimes used to spend the afternoons on my own in the landscape garden, when I would read and read to my heart’s content as I watched the trees’ shadows lengthening and the butterflies tumbling over and over one another.

On rainy days, we stayed in the house. But while I chafed at restraints imposed by other people’s wills, I felt no resentment at those inflicted on me by things like the weather. I liked being in the drawing-room with its armchairs upholstered in green plush, its french windows draped with yellowed muslin; on the marble chimneypiece, on the occasional tables and sideboards, quantities of dead things were slowly mouldering away; the stuffed birds were moulting, the everlasting dried flowers were crumbling to dust and the sea-shells were turning a dull, lifeless grey. I would climb on a stool and ransack the library shelves; there I could always find some novel by Fennimore Cooper or some Pictorial Magazine, its pages badly foxed, which I had not seen before. There was a piano, several of whose notes did not play or were completely out of tune; Mama would prop up on the music-stand the vocal score of the Grand Mogul or the Noces de Jeannette and warble grandfather’s favourite airs: he would join in all the choruses with us.

When the weather was fine, I would go for a walk in the gardens after dinner; with the Milky Way overhead, I would smell the heart-stirring fragrance of the magnolias and keep an eye open for shooting stars. Then, a lighted candle in my hand, I would go up to bed. I had a room to myself; it gave on to the yard, overlooking the wood-shed, the laundry, and the coach-house which sheltered a victoria and a berlin, as out-of-date to me as the carriages of olden times. I was charmed by the smallness of the room: there was a bed, a chest of drawers, and, standing on a sort of locker, the wash bowl and water jug. It was a cell, made to my own measure, like the little niche under Papa’s desk where I once used to hide myself away. Although my sister’s company did not weigh upon me in any way, solitude exalted me. When I was going through one of my saintly periods, a room to myself allowed me to enjoy the mortifying bliss of sleeping on the bare floor. But above all, before going to bed I would stand a long time at my casement, and often I would rise in the middle of the night to look out upon the night breathing softly in its sleep. I would lean out and plunge my hands in the fresh leaves of a clump of cherry laurels; the water from the spring would be gurgling over a mossy stone; from time to time a cow would kick her hoof against the door of the byre: I could almost smell the odour of straw and hay. Monotonous and dogged as the beat of the heart would sound the stridulations of a grasshopper; against the infinite silence and the sky’s infinities I used to feel that the earth itself was echoing that voice within me which kept on whispering: ‘Here I am.’ My heart oscillated between its living warmth and the frigid blazing of the stars. There was God up there, and He was watching me; under the breeze’s soft caress I was intoxicated by the heady perfumes of the night, by this celebration in my blood that brought eternity within my reach.

*

There was one phrase grown-ups were always using: ‘It’s not proper!’ I was rather uncertain as to what the true significance of this expression could be. At first I had taken it to have a scatological connotation. In Madame de Ségur’s Les Vacances, one of the characters told a story about a ghost, a nightmare ending in soiled sheets which shocked me as much as it did my parents. It was not proper. At that period of my life I associated indecency with the baser bodily functions; then I learnt that the body as a whole was vulgar and offensive: it must be concealed; to allow one’s underclothes to be seen, or one’s naked flesh – except in certain well-defined zones – was a gross impropriety. Certain vestimentary details and certain attitudes were as reprehensible as exhibitionist indiscretions. These prohibitions were aimed particularly at the female species; a real ‘lady’ ought not to show too much bosom, or wear short skirts, or dye her hair, or have it bobbed, or make up, or sprawl on a divan, or kiss her husband in the underground passages of the Métro: if she transgressed these rules, she was ‘not a lady’. Impropriety was not altogether the same as sin, but it drew down upon the offender public obloquy that was infinitely worse than ridicule. My sister and I felt very strongly that something of importance was being concealed behind a blandly deceptive front, and in order to protect ourselves against this mysterious something, we would promptly ridicule it. In the Luxembourg Gardens, we would nudge each other if we passed a pair of lovers. Impropriety to my way of thinking was related, though only extremely vaguely, to another enigma: ‘unsuitable’ reading matter. Sometimes, before giving me a book to read, my mother would pin a few pages together; in Wells’s The War of the Worlds I found a whole chapter had been placed under the ban. I never took the pins out, but I often wondered: what’s it all about? It was strange. Grown-ups talked freely in front of me; I went about the world without encountering any insurmountable obstacles; and yet under this surface transparency something was hidden; what? where? In vain my troubled gaze would ransack my expanding horizons, trying to seek out the occulted zone that was not masked by any screen and that yet remained invisible.

One day as I was working at my father’s desk, I noticed at my elbow a novel with a yellow paper cover: Cosmopolis. I was tired and quite unthinkingly, with a purely mechanical gesture, I opened it; I had no intention of reading it, but it seemed to me that even without having consciously to connect the words and make them into phrases I could, at a quick glance, discover the flavour of its secret contents. Mama was suddenly towering over me. ‘What are you doing?’ I stammered something. ‘You must not!’ she cried, ‘you must not touch books that are not meant for you.’ Her voice had a pleading note and in her face I could read an anxiety which convinced me more than any reprimand could have done: a terrible danger was lying in wait between the pages of Cosmopolis, ready to spring out at me. I promised fervently never to do such a thing again. My memory has linked this episode indissolubly with a much earlier incident: when I was very tiny, sitting in that very same armchair, I had shoved my finger in the black hole of the electric point; the shock had made me cry out with surprise and pain. While my mother was talking to me did I look at the black circle in the middle of the porcelain plug, or did I not make the connexion until later? In any case, I had the impression that any contact with the Zolas and the Bourgets in the library would subject me to an unforeseeable and thundering shock. Just like the ‘live’ rail in the Métro which used to fascinate me because the eye slid along its burnished surface without being able to detect the least sign of its murderous energy, old books with illegible spines filled me with trepidation because there was nothing to give me warning of their baleful influence.

During the retreat I made before making my First Communion, the man of God, in order to put us on our guard against the temptations of curiosity, told us a story which only succeeded in stimulating my own inquisitiveness. A little girl, remarkably precocious and intelligent, but brought up by parents who had not been sufficiently vigilant, had one day come to make her confession: she had read so many bad books that she had lost her faith and grown utterly weary of existence. He tried to give her hope again, but she was too seriously contaminated: a few days later, he heard that she had committed suicide. My first reaction was a wave of jealous admiration for this little girl, only a year older than myself, who had known so much more than I. Then I found myself bogged down by perplexities. Faith was my insurance against hell: I dreaded it too much ever to commit a mortal sin; but if you ceased to believe, then all the infernal regions lay gaping at your feet: could such a terrible misfortune happen to you if you had not deserved it? The little girl who had committed suicide had not even been guilty of the sin of disobedience; she had simply exposed herself very carelessly to obscure forces that had played havoc with her tender soul; why had God not come to her aid? And how was it that words manipulated by mortal men were able to destroy the manifestations of the supernatural? The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life; if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn’t going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense.

Apparently it wasn’t age alone that counted: Aunt Lili could only read books written ‘for young ladies’; Mama had snatched a copy of Claudine at School out of the hands of Louise, and that evening, commenting on the incident to Papa, she had said: ‘Fortunately she hadn’t the least idea what it was about!’ Marriage was the antidote which allowed you to partake freely and without danger of the sometimes highly suspect fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: but I simply couldn’t understand why. I never dreamed of discussing these problems with my friends. One girl had been expelled from the school because she had had ‘evil conversations’ with some of the other girls; I took a virtuous pride in the thought that if she had tried to draw me into one of her infamous tête-à-têtes I should have turned a deaf ear.

Yet my cousin Madeleine read whatever she liked. Papa had been highly indignant one day when he had caught her, at the age of twelve, deep in The Three Musketeers: Aunt Hélène had merely shrugged her shoulders helplessly. Gorged with novels that were considered ‘too old’ for her, Madeleine did not appear to be contemplating suicide. In 1919, my parents found in the rue de Rennes a less expensive apartment than the one in the boulevard Montparnasse, and left my sister and me at La Grillière during the first fortnight in October while they moved house. We were alone with Madeleine from morning to night, and one day, quite out of the blue, after a game of croquet, I asked her what the mystery of all these forbidden books could be; I didn’t wish for a revelation of their contents; I simply wanted to know why they were forbidden us.

We had laid aside our mallets and the three of us were reclining in the grass at the edge of the croquet-lawn. Madeleine hesitated at first, then giggled, and began to enlighten us. She pointed out to us that her pet dog had two balls between his hind legs. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘men have them, too!’ In a collection of stories she had read a certain very melodramatic tale, in which a marchioness who was jealous of her husband had his ‘balls’ cut off while he was asleep. This caused his death. I found this anatomy lesson was quite beside the point, and without realizing that I was indulging in an ‘evil conversation’ I urged Madeleine to be more forthcoming: what else was there? She then explained the meanings of the words ‘lover’ and ‘mistress’: if Mama and Uncle Maurice loved one another, she would be his mistress, and he would be her lover. She did not make clear what was meant by ‘love’, and so her incongruous hypothesis, while disconcerting me, did not enlighten me in any way. I only began to take an interest in what she was saying when she tried to explain to me how children were born; the intervention of the divine will in this phenomenon had long ago ceased to satisfy me, because I knew that, miracles apart, God’s influence could work only through natural causality: the things of this world required a worldly explanation. Madeleine confirmed all my suspicions: babies are formed in their mother’s womb; a few days earlier, while she was skinning a rabbit, the cook had found six little rabbits inside it. When a woman is expecting a baby, she is said to be pregnant, and her stomach swells up. Madeleine did not give us any other details. She went on to announce, however, that within a year or two certain things would happen inside my body; I should have my ‘whites’ and then I would bleed every month and I should have to wear some kind of bandage between my thighs. I asked if these emissions would be called my ‘reds’, and my sister was worried about how she would manage with all those bandages: how would she make water? These questions exasperated Madeleine; she said we were a couple of ninnies, lifted her shoulders in an expressive despair, and went off to feed her chickens. Perhaps she sensed our childish unpreparedness and considered us unworthy of a more elaborate initiation. I was dumbfounded by it all; I had imagined that the secrets so carefully guarded by grown-ups must be of a much loftier significance. On the other hand, Madeleine’s sniggeringly confidential manner was hardly in keeping with the curious triviality of her revelations; there was something not quite right, but I didn’t know what. She had not attempted to explain the problem of conception upon which I meditated deeply during the next few days; having grasped that cause and effect are of necessity intimately bound up with one another, I could not accept that it was the ceremony of marriage which caused a creature of flesh and blood to grow in a woman’s stomach; there must be some sort of organic function which took place between the husband and the wife. The behaviour of animals might have shed some light on the problem: I had seen a big Alsatian glued to the hind quarters of Madeleine’s little fox-terrier Criquette, while Madeleine, in tears, attempted to separate them. ‘Her puppies will be too big: Criquette will die!’ she howled. But I did not associate these animal frolics – no more than I did those of fowls and flies – with human behaviour. The expressions ‘ties of blood’, ‘children of the same blood’, ‘blood relationship’, ‘one’s own flesh and blood’, and ‘blood is thicker than water’ suggested to me that on the wedding-day, once and for all, a little of the husband’s blood was transfused into his partner’s veins; I imagined the married pair standing beside one another with the man’s right wrist bound to the woman’s left wrist: it would be a solemn operation presided over by the priest and a few chosen witnesses.

Although they had been rather confusing, Madeleine’s bits of gossip must have disturbed us profoundly, because my sister and I then abandoned ourselves to wild verbal debaucheries. Aunt Hélène, so gentle and so little prone to moralizing, with her air of always being somewhere else, did not intimidate us at all. We started saying all sorts of things in front of her that were ‘not nice’ or ‘not proper’. In the drawing-room with its dust-sheeted furniture she would sometimes seat herself at the piano and sing us the songs of 1900, of which she had a large collection; we always chose the most questionable ones and took great delight in carolling: ‘The white breasts are lovelier by far – to my hungry mouth – than the wild strawberries of the woods – and their milk I suck . . .’ The beginning of this particular ballad intrigued us very much: was it to be interpreted literally? Do men sometimes drink the milk from women’s breasts? Is it one of a ‘lover’s’ secret rites? In any case, the lines were decidedly ‘improper’. We wrote them with our fingers on steamy window panes and recited them at the tops of our voices in front of Aunt Hélène; we pestered her with ‘unsuitable’ questions, at the same time hinting that the grown-ups couldn’t take us in any longer. I think that our disordered exuberance was in fact highly organized; we were not accustomed to clandestinity, and we wanted to warn the grown-ups that we had rumbled their secrets; but we lacked the courage and so we felt the need to let off steam in some other way: our frankness took the form of provocation. When we got back to Paris, my sister, less inhibited than myself, ventured to ask Mama if babies came out of one’s navel. ‘Why do you ask such silly questions?’ my mother said, rather tartly. ‘You know everything already.’ Aunt Hélène had apparently tipped her off. Relieved at having negotiated this initial barrier we pressed Mama for more details; she gave us to understand that little babies came out of the anus, quite painlessly. She spoke in a detached tone of voice; but we were not encouraged to make further inquiries: I never again discussed these problems with her, and she never said another word to us about them.

I can’t remember having pondered very long over the phenomena of pregnancy and child-birth: nor did I associate them at all with my own future; I was averse to marriage and maternity, and so I felt they did not concern me. But our so-called initiation disturbed me in another way. It had left many mysteries unexplained. What relationship was there between this serious affair, the birth of a child, and things that were ‘not nice’ or ‘not proper’? If there were none, then why did Madeleine’s tone of voice and Mama’s own reticence force us to suppose there was one? It had been only at our instigation that Mama had spoken to us, and very summarily, about these things, and she had said nothing about marriage. Physiological facts are as much a part of common knowledge as the rotation of the earth: what was it prevented her from telling us about them as about everything else? On the other hand, if forbidden books contained, as my cousin had suggested, only rather comical indecencies, what great harm was there in them? I did not actually ask myself these questions, but they tormented me all the same. It must be that the body was by reason of its own nature a dangerous object when every allusion to its existence, whether serious or frivolous, seemed fraught with peril.

Assuming that something was being deliberately concealed behind the grown-ups’ veil of silence, I did not charge them with making a fuss about nothing. But I had lost all my illusions as to the nature of their secret: they had no access to occult spheres where the white radiance of eternity shone brighter for them than it did for us, or where the horizon was vaster than that of my smaller world. My disillusionment served to reduce the universe and mankind to a trivial day-to-day level. I did not realize it immediately, but the prestige of grown-ups had suffered a considerable diminution in my esteem.

*

I had been taught the vanity of vanity and the futility of futility; I should have been ashamed to attach importance to dress and to preen myself in front of a looking-glass; all the same, when circumstances authorized it, I found myself looking upon my reflection not with disfavour. Despite my timidity, I aspired, as in my early infancy, to play the leading roles in life. On the day of my First Communion, I had a resounding success. I had long been familiar with the Lord’s Table, and felt I could now enjoy without any pangs of conscience the profane delights of the festive occasion. My robe, lent by a cousin, was nothing extraordinary; but instead of the usual tulle head-dress, the pupils of the Cours Désir wore a wreath of roses; this detail indicated that I did not belong to the common herd of children in the parish. Abbé Martin administered the host to a very select company; moreover, I was chosen to be the one to renew in the name of all my companions the solemn vows by which we had renounced, on our christening day, the pomps and vanities and evil works of the Arch Fiend. My aunt Marguerite gave in my honour a magnificent lunch at which I, as guest of honour, importantly presided. In the afternoon there was a tea-party at home and I displayed upon the grand piano all the gifts I had received. I was fêted and congratulated, and I was very pleased with myself: I thought I was looking particularly lovely. That night it was with great regret that I laid my finery aside; I comforted myself a little by entertaining the idea of marriage for a moment or two: the day would come when, clad in white satin, in a blaze of candles and under great blasts of organ-music I would be changed once again into a queen.

The following year, I was delighted to take over the lesser role of bridesmaid. Aunt Lili was getting married. The ceremony was without ostentation; but my own get-up enchanted me. I loved the silky feel of my blue foulard dress; my hair was tied with a black velvet ribbon and I wore a sunbonnet of natural straw garlanded with poppies and corn-flowers. My escort was a good-looking boy of nineteen who talked to me as if I were a grown-up person: I was quite certain that he found me irresistible.

I began to take an interest in the sort of figure I thought I should cut in life. Besides the more serious works and adventure stories which I borrowed from the circulating library, I also read the novels in a popular series called ‘La Bibliothèque de ma Fille’, which had enlivened my mother’s adolescence and now occupied a whole shelf in my bedroom cupboard. When I was at La Grillière, I was allowed to read Les Veillées des chaumières and the volumes in the ‘Stella’ collection which enthralled Madeleine so much: Delly, Guy Chantepleure, La Neuvaine de Colette, Mon oncle et mon curé: these virtuous idylls I did not find very amusing; I thought their heroines were silly, their lovers insipid; but there was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott. The March girls were Protestants, their father was a pastor and their mother had given them as a bedside book not The Imitation of Christ but The Pilgrim’s Progress: these slight differences only made the things we had in common with the March girls stand out all the more. I was moved when Meg and Jo had to put on their poor brown poplin frocks to go to a matinée at which all the other children were dressed in silk; they were taught, as I was, that a cultivated mind and moral righteousness were better than money; their modest home, like my own, had about it – I don’t know why – something quite exceptional. I identified myself passionately with Jo, the intellectual. Brusque and bony, Jo clambered up into trees when she wanted to read; she was much more tomboyish and daring than I was, but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her love of books. She wrote: in order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories. I don’t know if I dreamed of reviving my old friendship with Jacques, or if, rather more vaguely, I was longing for the barrier between my own world and the world of boys to be broken down, but the relationship between Jo and Laurie touched me to the heart. Later, I had no doubt, they would marry one another; so it was possible for maturity to bring to fruition, instead of denying them, the promises made in childhood; this thought filled me with renewed hope. But the thing that delighted me most of all was the marked partiality which Louisa Alcott manifested for Jo. As I have said, I detested the sort of grown-up condescension which lumped all children under the same heading. The defects and qualities which authors gave their young heroes seemed usually to be inconsequential accidents: when they grew up they would all be good as gold: moreover it was only their personal morality that distinguished them one from the other, never their intelligence; it was almost as if from this point of view their age had made them all equal. But in Little Women Jo was superior to her sisters, who were either more virtuous or more beautiful than herself, because of her passion for knowledge and the vigour of her thought; her superiority was as outstanding as that of certain adults, and guaranteed that she would have an unusual life: she was marked by fate. I, too, felt I was entitled to consider my taste for reading and my scholastic successes as tokens of a personal superiority which would be borne out by the future. I became in my own eyes a character out of a novel. I invented all kinds of romantic intrigues that were full of obstacles and setbacks for the heroine. One afternoon I was playing croquet with Poupette, Jeanne, and Madeleine. We were wearing beige pinafores with red scallops and embroidered with cherries. The clumps of laurel were shining in the sun, and the earth smelt good. Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up. I decided that my sister and my cousins, who were prettier, more graceful, and altogether nicer than myself would be more popular than I; they would find husbands, but not I. I should feel no bitterness about it; people would be right to prefer them to me; but something would happen which would exalt me beyond all personal preference; I did not know under what form, or by whom I should be recognized for what I was. I imagined that already there was someone watching the croquet lawn and the four little girls in their beige pinafores: the gaze rested on me and a voice murmured: ‘She is not as other girls.’ It was utterly ridiculous to compare me with a sister and cousins so lacking in all pretensions. But I aspired, through them, to those higher modes of being where I should be with my equals. I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.

But it was only rarely that I gave myself up to these proud revindications of my personality: the great esteem in which I was held made them unnecessary. And if sometimes I thought I was an exceptional young person, I no longer looked upon myself as unique. Henceforward my self-sufficiency was tempered by feelings inspired by someone else outside my family. I had had the good fortune to find a friend.

*

The day I entered the fourth-first form – I was then rising ten – the seat next to mine was occupied by a new girl: she was small, dark, thin-faced, with short hair. While we waited for Mademoiselle to come in, and when the class was over, we talked together. She was called Elizabeth Mabille, and she was the same age as myself. Her schooling, begun with a governess, had been interrupted by a serious accident: in the country, while roasting some potatoes out in the open, her dress had caught fire; third-degree bums on her thighs had made her scream with agony for night after night; she had had to remain lying down for a whole year; under her pleated skirt, her flesh was still puffed up. Nothing as important as that had ever happened to me; she at once seemed to me a very finished person. The manner in which she spoke to the teachers astounded me; her natural inflexions contrasted strongly with the stereotyped expressionless voices of the rest of the pupils. Her conquest of me was complete when, a few days later, she mimicked Mademoiselle Bodet to perfection; everything she had to say was either interesting or amusing.

Despite certain gaps in her knowledge due to enforced inactivity, Elizabeth soon became one of the foremost in the class; I only just managed to beat her at composition. Our friendly rivalry pleased our teachers: they encouraged our association. At the musical and dramatic performance which was given every year round about Christmas, we played in a sketch. I, in a pink dress, my hair all in ringlets, impersonated Madame de Sévigné as a little girl; Elizabeth took the part of a high-spirited boy cousin; her young man’s costume suited her, and she enchanted the audience with her vivacity and ease. The rehearsals, our repeated conversations in the glow of the footlights drew us closer and closer together; from then on we were called ‘the two inseparables’.

My father and mother had long discussions about the different branches of various families they had heard of called Mabille; they decided that there was some vague connexion between Elizabeth’s parents and themselves. Her father was a railway engineer, and held a very high post; her mother, née Larivière, belonged to a dynasty of militant Catholics; she had nine children and was an active worker for charity. She sometimes put in an appearance at our school in the rue Jacob. She was a handsome woman of about forty, dark-haired, with flashing eyes and a studied smile, who wore a black velvet ribbon adorned with an old-fashioned piece of jewellery round her neck. She softened her regal bearing with a deliberate amiability of manner. She completely won Mama over by addressing her as ‘petite madame’ (my dear lady) and by telling her that she could easily have mistaken her for my elder sister, Elizabeth and I were allowed to go and play in each other’s homes.

On my first visit to her home in the rue de Varennes my sister went with me and we were both scared out of our wits. Elizabeth – who was known in the family circle as Zaza – had an elder sister, a grown-up brother, six brothers and sisters younger than herself, and a whole horde of cousins and friends. They would run and jump about, clamber on the tables, overturn the furniture and shout all the time at the tops of their voices. At the end of the afternoon, Madame Mabille entered the drawing-room, picked up a fallen chair and smilingly wiped perspiring brows; I was astonished at her indifference to bumps and bruises, stained carpets and chair covers and smashed plates; she never got cross. I didn’t care much for those wild games, and often Zaza too grew tired of them. We would take refuge in Monsieur Mabille’s study, and, far away from the tumult, we would talk. This was a novel pleasure for me. My parents used to talk to me, and I used to talk to them, but we never talked together; there was not sufficient distance between my sister and myself to encourage discussion. But with Zaza I had real conversations, like the ones Papa had in the evenings with Mama. We would talk about our school work, our reading, our common friends, our teachers, and about what we knew of the world: we never talked about ourselves. We never exchanged girlish confidences. We did not allow ourselves any kind of familiarity. We addressed each other formally as ‘vous’ (never ‘tu’) and, excepting at the ends of letters, we did not give each other kisses.

Zaza, like myself, liked books and studying; in addition, she was endowed with a host of talents to which I could lay no claim. Sometimes when I called at the rue de Varennes I would find her busy making shortbread or caramels; or she would spike on a knitting-needle quarters of orange, a few dates, and some prunes, and immerse the lot in a saucepan full of a syrupy concoction smelling of warm vinegar: her imitation fruits looked just as delicious as those made by a real confectioner. Then she used to hectograph a dozen or so copies of a Family Chronicle which she edited and produced herself each week for the benefit of grandmothers, uncles, and aunts who lived outside Paris. I admired, as much as the liveliness of her tales, her skill in making an object which resembled very closely a real newspaper. She took a few piano lessons with me, but very soon became much more proficient and moved up into a higher grade. Puny-armed and skinny-legged, she nevertheless was able to perform all sorts of contortions; when the first fine days of spring came along, Madame Mabille would take us out to a grassy, wildflower suburb – I believe it was Nanterre – and Zaza would run into a field and do the cartwheel, the splits, the crab, and all kinds of other tricks; she would climb trees and hang down from branches by her heels. In everything she did, she displayed an easy mastery which always amazed me. At the age of ten she would walk about the streets on her own; at the Cours Désir she showed no signs of my own awkwardness of manner; she would talk to the ladies of the establishment in a polite but nonchalant way, almost as if she were their equal. One year at a music recital she did something while she was playing the piano which was very nearly scandalous. The hall was packed. In the front rows were the pupils in their best frocks, curled and ringleted and beribboned, who were awaiting their turn to show off their talents. Behind them sat the teachers and tutors in stiff black silk bodices, wearing white gloves. At the back of the hall were seated the parents and their guests. Zaza, resplendent in blue taffeta, played a piece which her mother thought was too difficult for her; she always had to scramble through a few of the bars: but this time she played it perfectly, and, casting a triumphant glance at Madame Mabille, put out her tongue at her! All the little girls’ ringlets trembled with apprehension and the teachers’ faces froze into disapproving masks. But when Zaza came down from the platform her mother gave her such a light-hearted kiss that no one dare reprimand her. For me this exploit surrounded her with a halo of glory. Although I was subject to laws, to conventional behaviour, to prejudice, I nevertheless liked anything novel, sincere, and spontaneous. I was completely won over by Zaza’s vivacity and independence of spirit.

I did not immediately consider what place this friendship had in my life; I was still not much cleverer than I was as a baby at realizing what was going on inside me. I had been brought up to equate appearances with reality; I had not learned to examine what was concealed behind conventions of speech and action. It went without saying that I had the tenderest affection for all the members of my family, including even my most distant cousins. For my parents and sister I felt love, a word that covered everything. Nuances and fluctuations of feeling had no claim to existence in my world. Zaza was my best friend: and that was all. In a well-regulated human heart friendship occupies an honourable position, but it has neither the mysterious splendour of love, nor the sacred dignity of filial devotion. And I never called this hierarchy of the emotions into question.

*

That year, as in all other years, the month of October brought with it the exciting prospect of the return to school. The new books cracked when I opened them, and smelt just as good; seated in the leather armchair, I gloated over what the future had in store for me.

None of my expectations were realized. In the Luxembourg Gardens there were the bonfire smells and the yellowing leaves of autumn: they failed to move me; the blue of heaven had been dimmed. The classes bored me; I learnt my lessons and did my homework joylessly, and pushed my way sullenly through the front door of the Cours Désir. It was my own past coming to life again, and yet I did not recognize it: it had lost all its radiant colours; my life was dull and monotonous. I had everything, yet my hands were empty. I was walking along the boulevard Raspail with Mama and I suddenly asked myself the agonizing question: ‘What is happening to me? Is this what my life is to be? Nothing more? And will it always be like this, always?’ The idea of living through an infinity of days, weeks, months, and years that were void of hope completely took my breath away: it was as if, without any warning, the whole world had died. But I was unable to give a name to this distress either.

For ten to fifteen days I dragged myself somehow, on legs that seemed as weak as water, from hour to hour, from day to day.

One afternoon I was taking my things off in the cloakroom at school when Zaza came up to me. We began to talk, to relate various things that had happened to us, and to comment on them; my tongue was suddenly loosened, and a thousand bright suns began blazing in my breast; radiant with happiness, I told myself: ‘That’s what was wrong; I needed Zaza!’ So total had been my ignorance of the workings of the heart that I hadn’t thought of telling myself: ‘I miss her.’ I needed her presence to realize how much I needed her. This was a blinding revelation. All at once, conventions, routines, and the careful categorizing of emotions were swept away and I was overwhelmed by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code. I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a waterfalling cataract, as naked, beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff. A few days later, arriving at school in good time, I looked in stupefaction at Zaza’s empty seat. ‘What if she were never to sit there again, what if she were to die, then what would happen to me?’ It was rather frightening: she came and went unconcernedly in my life, and all my happiness, my very existence, lay in her hands. I imagined Madame Gontran coming in, her long black skirts sweeping the floor, and saying: ‘Children, let us pray; your little companion, Elizabeth Mabille, was called away to the arms of God last night.’ Well, if that were to happen, I told myself, I should die on the spot. I would slide off my seat and fall lifeless to the ground. This rationalization gave me comfort. I didn’t really believe that God in His divine wisdom would take my life; neither did I really believe that I was afraid of Zaza dying. I had gone as far as to admit the extent of the dependence which my attachment to her placed upon me: I did not dare envisage all its consequences.

I didn’t require Zaza to have any such definite feelings about me: it was enough to be her best friend. The admiration I felt for her did not diminish me in my own eyes. Love is not envy. I could think of nothing better in the world than being myself, and loving Zaza.