Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (28 page)

At home, he would bewail the hard times we were having; whenever my mother asked him for housekeeping money, he made a violent scene; he would complain particularly about the sacrifices his daughters imposed upon him: my sister and I had the feeling that we were making unwarranted demands upon his charity. If he showed such bitter impatience with my troubles in ‘the difficult age', it was because he already had a deep-seated resentment against me. I was not just another burden to be borne: I was growing up to be the living incarnation of his own failure. The daughters of his friends, his brother, and his sister would be ‘ladies': but not me. Of course, when I passed my school-leaving examinations he rejoiced in my success; it flattered him and lifted a load off his mind: I should have no difficulty in making a living. But I didn't understand why such bitter vexation should cloud his happiness.

‘What a pity Simone wasn't a boy: she could have gone to the Polytechnique!' I had often heard my parents giving vent to this complaint. A student at the Military Academy of Artillery and Engineering, they felt, was already ‘someone'. But my sex debarred them from entertaining such lofty ambitions for me, and my father prudently envisaged a career in the Civil Service: yet he detested all government officials, whose taxes gobbled up his income, and he would tell me, with unconcealed resentment: ‘At any rate,
you
will have a pension!' I made things worse for myself by expressing a desire to become a teacher: he approved my choice on practical grounds, but in his heart of hearts he was far from happy about it. He thought all teachers were low-minded pedagogues. At the Collège Stanislas one of his schoolfellows had been Marcel Bouteron, the great Balzac specialist; he used to speak of him with commiseration: he thought it ridiculous that one should spend one's life writing arid works of scholarship. He made more serious
charges against schoolteachers; they belonged to the dangerous sect that had stood in defence of Dreyfus: the intellectuals. Blinded by their book-learning, taking a stubborn pride in abstract knowledge and in their futile aspirations to universalism, they were sacrificing the concrete realities of race, country, class, family, and nationality to those crack-pot notions that would be the death of France and of civilization: the Rights of Man, pacifism, internationalism, and socialism. If I joined their ranks, would I not be adopting their ideas? My father's native shrewdness turned me at once into a suspect. Later, I was surprised that, instead of prudently shunting my sister on to the same line as myself, he should have chosen for her the hazards of a career in art: he couldn't bear to think that he was driving both his daughters into the enemy camp.

Soon as I would be a traitor to my class; I had already renounced the privileges of my sex, and that was something else my father could not be reconciled to; he was obsessed by the ‘well-bred young lady' idea: it was a fixation. My cousin Jeanne was the incarnation of this ideal: she still believed that babies were found under cabbages. My father had attempted to keep me in a state of blissful ignorance; he used to say that even when I had reached the age of eighteen he would forbid me to read the
Tales
of François Coppée; he now accepted the fact that I read whatever I liked: but he couldn't see much difference between a girl who ‘knew what's what' and the
Bachelor Girl
whose portrait Victor Marguerite had just drawn in a notorious book of that name. If I had only kept up the outward appearances, at least! He might have borne with an exceptional young woman for daughter if only she had taken pains not to appear in any way out of the ordinary: this I couldn't do. I had left the awkward age behind, and once more I found myself gazing approvingly at my reflection in the mirror; but I cut a poor figure in society. My friends, including Zaza, played their worldly roles with ease; they put in an appearance on their mothers' at-home days, served tea, smiled and smiled, and talked amiably about nothing; I found smiling difficult, I couldn't turn on the charm, make cute remarks, or any kind of concession to polite chit-chat. My parents would hold up to me as examples ‘remarkably intelligent' girls who nevertheless were brilliant ornaments to their mothers' drawing-rooms. This used to exasperate me because I knew that their way of life had nothing in common with mine: they were mere amateurs; I was a professional. That year I was preparing for
examinations in literature, Latin, and general mathematics, and I was learning Greek; I had set this heavy programme myself, for I found difficulties amusing: but precisely in order that I might be able to embark light-heartedly on such an undertaking, it was essential that my studies should not just represent an off-shoot of my life, but should be my entire life itself: the things people talked about did not interest me, I had no subversive ideas; in fact, I hardly had any ideas on anything; but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

On the whole, apart from when the news came that I had passed my exams, I was not an honour to my father; so he attached extreme importance to my diplomas and encouraged me to accumulate them. His insistence on this point convinced me that he was proud to have a brainy woman for a daughter; but the contrary was true: only the most extraordinary successes could have countered his dissatisfaction with me. If for example I had studied for three degrees at once, I would have become a sort of intellectual prodigy, a phenomenon who could not be judged by normal standards; my fate would no longer be a reflection of family failure, but could be explained away as the result of a strange and unaccountable gift.

I obviously didn't realize this contradiction in my father's personality: but I soon realized the one implicit in my own situation. I was obeying his wishes to the letter, and that seemed to anger him; he had destined me to a life of study, and yet I was being reproached with having my nose in a book all the time. To judge by his surly temper, you would think that I had gone against his wishes in embarking on a course that he had actually chosen for me. I kept wondering what I had done wrong; I felt unhappy and ill at ease, and nursed resentment in my heart.

*

The best part of the week was Garric's lecture. I was beginning to admire him more and more. It was rumoured at Sainte-Marie that he could have had a brilliant career at the University; but he had not a scrap of personal ambition; he never finished his thesis and devoted himself body and soul to his Social Welfare Groups; he
lived the life of an ascetic in a working-class house in Belleville. He used to give fairly frequent propaganda lectures, and through Jacques' good offices my mother and I were admitted to one of them. Jacques took us into a suite of drawing-rooms, richly furnished, in which rows and rows of red plush chairs with gilded woodwork were set out; he found us seats and went off to greet his acquaintances; he seemed to know everybody: how I envied him! It was hot, I was stifling in my mourning garments and I knew no one. Then Garric walked on to the platform; I forgot myself, and everything else; I was spellbound by the authority in his voice. He explained to us that at the age of twenty he had discovered in the trenches the joys of a comradeship which overcame all social barriers; when, after the armistice, he became a student again, he was determined not to be deprived of that comradeship; the segregation which in civilian life separates young middle-class men from working chaps was something he felt like a personal mutilation; besides, he believed that everybody has a right to culture. He believed firmly in the truth of what General Lyautey had said in one of his Moroccan speeches: that beyond all differences, there is a common denominator which links all men. On the basis of this concept, he decided to set up a system of exchanges between students and working-class youths which would release the former from the egotistical solitude and the latter from their ignorance. By learning to understand and love one another they would work side by side to bring the classes together. To loud applause, Garric stated that it is impossible for any kind of social progress to emerge from a conflict whose motive force was class hatred: progress would only come through friendship. He had roped in a few friends who helped him to organize the first cultural centre at Neuilly. They obtained support and subsidies and the movement began to grow: there were now ten thousand members in groups all over France, all young men and women, and two hundred teachers. Garric himself was a firm Roman Catholic, but he did not intend to turn the movement into a religious mission; there were unbelievers among his collaborators; he believed that men should help one another on the human level. At the end, in a voice charged with emotion, he claimed that if people are well-treated they will be good; by refusing to offer the hand of friendship to the lower classes the bourgeoisie were making a grave mistake whose consequences would fall upon their own heads.

I drank in his words; they did not rock my universe to its foundations, they were not at variance with my own ideas, and yet they seemed to strike an absolutely new note. Of course, in my daily life, devotion to duty was always being cracked up, but it was not deemed necessary for such devotion to extend beyond the family circle, outside whose limits men were not regarded as our brothers. Working men in particular belonged to a species as dangerously foreign to our environment as the Boche and the Bolshevik. Garric had swept away these barriers: the world was now a great community in which all men were my brothers. I was thrilled by the movement's watchwords: I had to repudiate all barriers and all artificial divisions between the classes, renounce my own class, and step outside myself. I could not imagine a service more beneficial to humanity than the dissemination of sweetness and light. I promised myself that I would join one of the ‘Groups'. But above all else I marvelled at the example which Garric gave me. At last I had met a man who instead of submitting to fate had chosen for himself a way of life; his existence, which had an aim and a meaning, was the incarnation of an idea, and was governed by its overriding necessity. That plain face with its lively but unassuming smile was the face of a hero, a superman.

I went back home in a state of exaltation; I was taking off my black coat and hat in the hall when I suddenly stood stock still; with my eyes fixed on the threadbare carpet, I heard an imperious voice within me saying: ‘My life must be of service to humanity! Everything in my life must be of service!' I was stunned by the clear necessity of the call: innumerable tasks awaited me; it would need the whole strength of my being; if I allowed myself the slightest slackening of purpose, I would be betraying my trust and wronging humanity. ‘Everything I do must be of service!' I told myself, with a tightening of the throat; it was a solemn vow, and I uttered it with as much feeling as if I had been pledging my whole future irrevocably in the face of heaven and earth.

I had never liked wasting time; yet now I reproached myself with having led an irresponsible existence, and henceforward I made scrupulous use of every minute. I slept less; my toilet was no more than ‘a lick and a promise'; there was no longer any question of looking at myself in mirrors: I hardly ever brushed my teeth, and never cleaned my nails. I abjured all frivolous reading matter, idle gossip, and all forms of amusement; if my mother had not objected
I should have given up my Saturday morning games of tennis. I always brought a book to meals; I would be learning Greek verbs or trying to find the solution to a problem. My father got annoyed but I persisted, and in the end he gave up in disgust. When my mother was receiving friends, I refused to enter the drawing-room; sometimes she would fly into a temper, and I would give in; but I would sit perched on the edge of my chair, gritting my teeth, and with such a furious expression on my face that she very quickly sent me away again. In my family and among my friends there was great astonishment at my untidiness, my stubborn silences, and my lack of politeness; I soon got the reputation of being a kind of monster of incivility.

Without any doubt it was for the most part resentment that made me adopt this attitude; my parents did not find me to their liking, and so I deliberately made myself unpleasant. My mother dressed me badly and my father was always reproaching me with being badly dressed: so I became a slut. They were not attempting to understand me: so I took refuge in silence and odd behaviour; I wanted to make myself impervious to my surroundings. At the same time I was warding off boredom. My temperament was not suited to resignation; by taking to inordinate lengths the austerity that was my lot, it became a vocation; cut off from all pleasures, I chose the life of an ascetic; instead of dragging myself wearily through a monotony of days, I set out in stubborn silence, with set face, towards an invisible goal. I wore myself out with work, and my exhaustion gave me a feeling of fulfilment. My excesses also had a positive sense. For a long time now I had been promising myself that I would break away from the frightful banality of my daily life: Garric's example transformed this vague hope into grim determination. I refused to be patient any longer; without further ado I set my feet upon the way to heroic heights.

Every time I saw Garric, I renewed my vows. Sitting between Thérèse and Zaza, I would await, with bated breath, the moment of his appearance. My companions' indifference to him amazed me: I felt that one should be able to hear the beating of every heart. Zaza's admiration for Garric was not without reservation; it exasperated her that he should always arrive late. ‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings,' she wrote on the blackboard one day. He would come in, sit down, and cross his legs under the table, exposing mauve sock-suspenders: she was critical of such free-and-easy
manners. I couldn't understand why she fussed over these trifles, but I was glad she did, all the same; I couldn't have borne it if someone else had hung upon my hero's every word and smile with as much devotion as I did. I should have liked to know everything about him. In my childhood I had been trained in the techniques of meditation; I made use of them in attempts to imagine what I called, after an expression employed often by himself, his ‘interior landscape'. But I had very little to go on: his lectures, and the rather hastily written reviews he wrote for
La Revue des Jeunes
; and in any case I was often too ignorant to be able to make the best use of my information. There was one writer whom Garric was always quoting: Péguy; who was he? Who was this Gide whose name he had uttered one afternoon, almost furtively, and with a smile that seemed to ask forgiveness for his audacity? After the class, he would go into Madame Lambert's study: what did they talk about? Would I one day be worthy to speak to Garric as to an equal? I occasionally lost myself in speculations. ‘Girls like you, Hellé, are made to be the companions of heroes.' I was crossing the place Saint-Sulpice when suddenly this prophecy from my childhood blazed across the rainy twilight. Had Marcelle Tinayre foretold my future? Hellé, who at first had been dazzled by a rich, easy-going young poet, had eventually transferred her allegiance to a virtuous and noble-hearted missionary much older than herself. Today I felt that Garric's merits eclipsed Jacques' personal charm: had I met Mr Right? I hardly dared entertain the thought. It was somehow shocking to think of Garric being married. All I wanted was to have a small place in his life and I redoubled my efforts to gain his approval. I succeeded. A dissertation on Ronsard, the analysis of one of the
Sonnets à Hélène
and a lecture on d'Alembert earned me heady praise. With Zaza second, I went to the top of the class and Garric planned that we would take the literature paper at the beginning of the summer term.