Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (31 page)

A refusal to use hollow words, false moralizing and its too-easy consolations: the literature of those days was presenting this negative attitude as a positive ethical system. It was turning our disquiet into a crusade; we were seeking for salvation. If we had renounced our class, it was in order to get closer to the Absolute. ‘Sin is God's empty place,' Stanislas Fumet wrote in
Our Baudelaire.
So immoralism was not just a snook cocked at society; it was a way of reaching God. Believers and unbelievers alike used this name. According to some, it signified an inaccessible presence, and to others, a vertiginous absence; there was no difference, and I had no difficulty in amalgamating Claudel and Gide; in both of them,
God was defined, in relationship to the bourgeois world, as the
other
, and everything that was other was a manifestation of something divine. I could recognize the thirst that tortured Nathanaël as the emptiness at the heart of Péguy's Joan of Arc and the leprosy gnawing at the flesh of Violaine; there is not much distance between a superhuman sacrifice and a gratuitous crime, and I saw in Sygne the sister of Lafcadio. The important thing was to use whatever means one could to find release from the world, and then one would come within reach of eternity.

A small number of young writers – Ramon Fernandez, Jean Prévost, and others- turned from these mystical ways in order to try to build a new humanism; I did not follow them. Yet the year before I had read Henri Poincaré with excitement; I was glad to be alive; but humanism – unless it were revolutionary, and the sort that was talked about in the
Nouvelle Revue Française
was not – implies that one can attain the universal and still be a bourgeois: and I had just made the brutal discovery that such a hope was a trap. From then on, I only attached a relative value to my intellectual life, as it had failed to reconcile me with everyone whose respect I wanted. I invoked a superior authority which would allow me to challenge outside judgements: I took refuge in ‘my inmost self' and decided that my whole existence would be subordinate to it.

This change of attitude led me to look upon the future with a different eye: ‘I shall have a happy, fruitful, and fame-crowned life,' I told myself when I was fifteen. Finally I decided a merely fruitful life would do. It still seemed to me very important to serve humanity, but I didn't expect any reward as the opinions of others would not count any more. This renunciation was not hard to make, for fame had only been an uncertain shadow at the end of a long future. As for happiness, I had known what it is, and I had always wanted it. I did not find it easy to give it up. If I decided to abjure happiness, it was because I felt it would always be withheld from me. I could not separate it from love, friendship, tenderness, and I was setting out on an ‘irremediably solitary' enterprise. In order to find happiness, I should have had to go back, to go down in my own estimation: I asserted that all happiness is in itself a fall from grace. How could happiness be reconciled with disquiet? I loved Meaulnes, Alissa, Violaine, and Marcel Arland's
Monique
: I would follow in their footsteps. Besides, there was no ban on being
joyful; I was often visited by joy. I wept many tears during that term, but I also enjoyed tremendous revelations.

*

Although I had passed my literature examination, I had no intention of forgoing Garric's lectures: I went on sitting at his feet every Saturday afternoon. I didn't cool off: I felt the world would no longer have been habitable if I hadn't someone to admire. Whenever I happened to leave Neuilly without Zaza or Thérèse, I used to walk home; I would go along the avenue de la Grande Armée; I used to enjoy playing a game which in those days did not have a great element of risk attached to it: I had to walk straight across the place de l'Étoile without stopping. Then I would push my way through the crowds parading up and down the avenue des Champs-Élysées. And all the time I would be thinking of that man, so different from all others, who lived in an unknown, almost exotic district, Belleville. He was not filled with ‘disquiet', but he wasn't half-asleep like most people: he had found the right road; no home, no profession, no routine; there was no waste in his life: he was alone, he was free; from morning to night he was active, blazing a trail, illuminating the dark of ignorance. How I longed to be as he was! I cultivated the ‘group spirit' and looked upon all the passers-by with love in my heart. When I read in the Luxembourg Gardens and someone came and sat beside me and started a conversation, I eagerly entered into it. At one time I had been forbidden to play with strange little girls, and now I took pleasure in trampling that old taboo in the dust. I was particularly happy when I had contacts with ‘the people', for then it seemed to me that I was putting Garric's instructions into practice. His existence illuminated all my days.

Yet the joy he brought me was soon shot through with anxiety. I was still listening to him talk about Balzac, Victor Hugo: I had to admit that I was trying to resuscitate a past that was now dead; I was a listener, but no longer his pupil: I no longer belonged to his life. ‘And in a few weeks I shan't see him any more!' I kept telling myself. I had lost him already. I had never lost anything valuable: when things took their leave of me, I had ceased to attach any importance to them; this time, I was being forced to part with some
thing very precious, and I refused to allow it to happen. No, I said, I will
not.
But my own wishes were without any weight. How could I win the day? I informed Garric that I was going to join one of the Groups, and he thanked me warmly; but he never had anything to do with the feminine sections of the movement. Next year I should probably never meet him again. I found the prospect so unbearable that I began thinking up all kinds of wild ideas; couldn't I pluck up enough courage to speak to him, write to him, tell him that I couldn't live without him? If I ventured to do so, I wondered, what would happen? ‘I'll be able to see him again when the autumn term starts.' This hope had a slightly calming effect. And yet, even while I strove to hold on to him, I was all the time allowing Garric to slip into the background of my life. Jacques was becoming more and more important to me. Garric was a remote idol; but Jacques was concerned about my problems, and I found it pleasant to talk to him. Soon I had to admit that he had first place in my heart.

In those days I preferred to wonder about things rather than to understand them, so I didn't try to ‘place' Jacques or to explain him. It is only now that I find I can tell his story without too much incoherence.

*

Jacques' paternal grandfather had married my grandfather's sister, the bewhiskered great-aunt who wrote little pieces for
La Poupée Modèle.
He was ambitious, and a gambler; he had endangered his fortune in wild speculations. The two brothers-in-law had had a furious quarrel over money matters, and although my grandfather had himself plunged from one bankruptcy into another he used to declare with virtuous aplomb in the days when I called Jacques my fiancé: ‘None of my grand-daughters shall ever marry a Laiguillon.' When Ernest Laiguillon died, the stained-glass works was still a going concern; but it was said in the family that if poor Charlie had not met a premature death in that frightful road accident, he would probably have ruined the business in the end: like his father, he was excessively enterprising, and always had a quite unreasonable faith in his lucky star. It was my Aunt Germaine's brother who undertook to look after the business until his nephew reached his majority; he administered it with the utmost prudence, because,
unlike the Laiguillons, the Flandins were provincials with very limited views, who were satisfied with small returns.

Jacques was two years old when he lost his father; he took after him; he had his gold-flecked eyes, his sensuous mouth, his alert expression; his grandmother Laiguillon idolized him and treated him as the head of the family almost before he could talk: he was to protect Titite and Mama. He took this role very seriously, and his sister and mother worshipped him. But after being a widow for five years, Aunt Germaine married again – a civil servant who lived at Châteauvillain; she took up residence there and gave birth to a son. At first she kept her elder children with her. Then, in the interests of their education, Titite went as a day-boarder to the Cours Valton, and Jacques to the Collège Stanislas; they lived in the apartment in the boulevard Montparnasse, looked after by old Élise. How did Jacques take this abandonment by his mother? Few children were more desperately driven to wear a mask than this little lord, dethroned, exiled, abandoned. He evinced the same ever-smiling regard for his step-father and his half-brother as for his mother and sister; the future was to prove – very much later – that only his affection for Titite was sincere; he probably didn't admit to himself that he felt resentful: but it was not without significance that he used to bully his grandmother Flandin and always manifested towards his mother's side a scorn which verged on hostility. The name of Laiguillon on the shopfront in fine stained-glass letters had to his mind all the splendour of a coat of arms; but if he took such ostentatious pride in it, it was also because he was avenging himself on his mother by acknowledging the superiority of his paternal ancestry.

He had not succeeded in replacing the young husband in his mother's home; to compensate for this, he boldly laid claim to his inheritance at the age of eighteen; having submitted scornfully to the provincial guardianship of his uncle, he now proclaimed himself to be the sole director of the business. That was the explanation for his youthful self-importance. No one ever knew what mental distress, what jealousies, rancours, and perhaps terrors he knew in those lonely top-floor workshops where the dust of the past was a foretaste of his future. But certainly his bounce, aplomb, and bragging concealed a grave distress.

A child is a rebel: he wanted to be calm and respectable as a grown man. He didn't have to fight for his freedom, but had to
protect himself from it: he imposed upon himself standards and prohibitions which a living father might have dictated to him. He was exuberant, devil-may-care, insolent, and at the college he often got into hot water for his bad behaviour; he laughed one day as he showed me in one of his exercise-books a teacher's comment which reproached him for making ‘divers odd noises in Spanish'; he did not set himself up as a Little Lord Fauntleroy: he was a grown-up whose maturity allowed him to infringe any discipline which he felt was too childish. At the age of twelve he improvised a comic charade at home, and dumbfounded his audience with a moral fable on marriages of convenience; he took the part of a young man who refuses to marry a girl without a dowry. ‘If I am to set up a home,' he explained, ‘I must be able to guarantee my children sufficiently easy circumstances.' When he was an adolescent, he never questioned the established order. How could he have rebelled against a phantom shade which he alone kept from falling into nothingness? A good son and a considerate brother, he remained faithful to the role that had been assigned to him by a voice from beyond the tomb. He used to make a great display of his respect for bourgeois institutions. One day, talking about Garric, he told me: ‘He's a good sort; but he should marry and have a profession.' ‘Why?' I asked. ‘A man should have a profession.' He took his future responsibilities very much to heart. He attended lecture-courses on decorative art and law, and began learning the business in the musty smelling ground-floor offices; business and law bored him, but he liked to draw; he learnt wood-engraving and he was passionately interested in painting. Only there could be no question of him taking it up as a profession; his uncle, who knew nothing about the fine arts, ran the business very well; Jacques' work would not differ in any way from that of all small business men. He found consolation for this in taking up again his father and grandfather's ambitious projects; he wasn't going to be contented with a modest clientele of country priests; Laiguillon stained-glass windows would be of a high artistic quality that would be the wonder of the world, and the little factory would become an important business. His mother and my parents were worried: ‘He'd do far better to leave the management of the business to his uncle,' said my father. ‘He'll ruin the firm.' The fact was that in Jacques' eagerness there was something suspect; his eighteen-year-old's seriousness was too much like the grown-upness he had shown when he was only eight
not to seem put on. He strained after conformity as if he had never belonged by right of birth to the caste he claimed kinship with. This was because he had failed to become an effective substitute for his father: he could only hear his own voice, and this lacked all authority. He carefully avoided any dispute about the propriety of his acts, all the more so as he never really thought very deeply about them. Never did his super-ego coincide with the personage he so boisterously incarnated: the elder Laiguillon.

I realized this flaw in his personality. I came to the conclusion that Jacques, too, had taken up the one attitude which seemed to me to be permissible: he, too, was a seeker crying aloud in the wilderness. No amount of vehement language could convince me of the sincerity of his ambition; nor could his more measured tones make his resignation seem real. Far from associating with ‘respectable' people, he went as far as to refuse to employ all the stratagems of anti-conformism. His blasé, sulky face, his evasive eyes, the books he had lent me, his half-confidences – everything convinced me that he lived with his face turned towards an uncertain future. He liked
Le Grand Meaulnes,
and had made me love it: I identified him with Meaulnes. I saw in Jacques the perfect incarnation of Disquiet.

I went to dine fairly frequently at his home in the boulevard Montparnasse. I didn't mind these evenings out. Unlike the rest of my family, Aunt Germaine and Titite did not consider that I had turned into a monster; when I was with them in the great drawing-room with the shaded lights which had been familiar to me since my childhood, I took up the threads of my life again: I no longer felt branded nor banished. I used to have little confidential chats with Jacques which seemed to draw us even closer together. My parents did not disapprove of our association. Their attitude towards Jacques was ambiguous: they held it against him that he hardly ever came to our house now, and that he spent more time with me than with them; they accused him, too, of ingratitude. Yet Jacques was certain to be comfortably off in life: what a catch it would be for a girl without a dowry if he were to marry me! Every time my mother mentioned his name, she allowed herself a discreetly controlled smile: I was furious that they should be trying to transform into a bourgeois business deal an understanding based on a common refusal to recognize bourgeois views; all the same, I found their official recognition of our friendship very convenient because it authorized me to be alone with Jacques.