Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (47 page)

I certainly didn't regret being a woman; on the contrary it afforded me great satisfaction. My upbringing had convinced me of my sex's intellectual inferiority, a fact admitted by many women. ‘A lady cannot hope to pass the selective examination before the fifth or sixth attempt,' Mademoiselle Roulin had told me; she had already had two. This handicap gave my successes a prestige far in excess of that accorded to successful male students: I felt it was something exceptional even to do as well as they did: in fact, I hadn't met a single man student who seemed at all out of the ordinary; the future was as wide open to me as it was to them: they had no advantage over me. Nor did they lay claim to any; they treated me without condescension, and even with a special kindness, for they didn't look upon me as a rival; girls were judged in the contest by the same standards as the boys, but they were accepted as supernumeraries, and there was no struggle for the first places between the sexes. That is why a lecture I gave on Plato brought me unreserved compliments from my fellow-students – in particular from Jean Hippolyte. I was proud of having won their esteem. Their friendliness prevented me from ever taking up that ‘challenging' attitude which later was to cause me so much dismay when I encountered it in American women: from the start, men were my comrades, not my enemies. Far from envying them, I felt that my own position, from the very fact that it was an unusual one, was one of privilege. One evening Pradelle invited to his house his best friends and their sisters. Poupette went with me. All the girls retired to Mademoiselle Pradelle's room; but I stayed with the young men.

Yet I did not renounce my femininity. That evening my sister and I had paid the utmost attention to our appearance. I was in red, she in blue silk; actually we were very badly got-up, but then the other girls weren't all that grand either. In Montparnasse I had caught glimpses of elegant beauties; but their lives were too different from mine for the comparison to overwhelm me; besides, once I was free, with money in my pocket, there would be nothing to stop me imitating them. I didn't forget that Jacques had said I was pretty; Stépha and Fernando had high hopes of me. I liked to look at myself, just as I was, in mirrors; I liked what I saw. In the things we had in common, I fancied that I was no less ill-equipped
than other women and I felt no resentment towards them; so I had no desire to run them down. In many respects I set Zaza, my sister, Stépha, and even Lisa above my masculine friends, for they seemed to me more sensitive, more generous, more endowed with imagination, tears, and love. I flattered myself that I combined ‘a woman's heart and a man's brain'. Again I considered myself to be unique – the One and Only.

The person who took first place in my affections was my sister. She was now taking a commercial art course at an establishment in the rue Cassette where she was very happy. At a concert organized by the school, she dressed up as a shepherdess and sang some old French songs; I thought she was ravishing. Sometimes she would go out for the evening to some party, and when she came home – blonde, pink-cheeked, animated, in her blue tulle dress – our room seemed to light up. We went together to the art exhibitions, to the Salon d'Automne and the Louvre; in the evenings she attended drawing-classes in a studio in Montmartre; I would often go to collect her there and we would walk back home across Paris, carrying on the conversation which had begun when we had first learned to talk; we would continue it in bed before falling asleep, and again the next day as soon as we found ourselves alone together. She played her part in all my friendships, my admirations, and enthusiasms. With Jacques as a hallowed exception, there was no one I was more attached to than to her; she was too close to me to be able to help me in living, but I used to think that without her my life would have lost all its savour. Whenever my feelings took a tragic turn, I would tell myself that if Jacques died I would kill myself, but that if
she
were to vanish from the face of the earth, I shouldn't need to kill myself in order to die.

I used to spend quite a lot of time with Lisa, as she had no friends and was always free. One rainy December morning she asked me, as we were leaving one of Laporte's lectures, to go back to the hostel with her. I wanted to go home and work, and so I refused. In the place Médicis, just as I was about to get on the bus, she said in a funny voice: ‘All right then. I'll tell you all about it on Thursday.' I pricked up my ears: ‘Tell me now.' She took me to the Luxembourg Gardens; there was no one in the dripping avenues. ‘You mustn't tell anyone; it's too stupid.' She hesitated: ‘Well, here it is: I should like to marry Pradelle.' I sat down on the wire at the edge of the lawn and stared at her, dumbfounded.
‘I like him so much!' she declared. ‘And I've never liked anyone before!' They were both preparing for the same examination in science, and were attending some of the same philosophy lectures; I hadn't noticed anything special between them when we all went out together; but I knew that Pradelle, with his thick dark lashes and his welcoming smile, made girls fall head over heels in love with him; I had learnt from Clairaut that at least two of his friends' sisters were eating their hearts out for him. For a whole hour in the deserted gardens, under the trees dripping with wet, Lisa talked to me about this new radiance that life had taken on for her. How fragile she looked, in her threadbare coat! I thought her face was attractive under the little hat that looked like an inverted flower, but I doubted whether her rather bony grace would appeal to Pradelle. That evening, Stépha reminded me of how he had appeared bored and had changed the conversation one day when we were talking about Lisa's loneliness and sadness. I tried to sound him. He had just come from a wedding, and we had a bit of an argument: he thought these ceremonies had a certain charm, whereas I thought this public exhibition of a private affair was sickening. I asked him if he ever thought about getting married himself. Vaguely, he replied; but he had very little hope of really loving any woman; he was too exclusively attached to his mother; he even reproached himself for a certain aridity in his feelings towards his friends. I spoke to him about that great upsurge of tenderness which sometimes made my eyes fill with tears. He shook his head: ‘All that's a bit exaggerated.' He himself never exaggerated anything and I was struck by the thought that he would be a difficult person to love. In any case, Lisa obviously meant nothing to him. She told me sadly that at the Sorbonne he did not show the slightest interest in her. We spent the whole of one afternoon at the bar of the Rotonde talking about love and about our loves; from the dance-floor came the strains of a jazz-band and there were voices whispering in the semi-darkness. ‘Unhappiness is a habit of mine,' she said. ‘You're just born like that.' She had never had anything she wanted. ‘And yet, if only I could hold that head between my hands, it would all have been worth it, for always.' She thought of looking for a job in the colonies, of leaving for Saigon or Antananarivo.

I always had fun with Stépha; Fernando was often there when I went up to see her in her room; while she made cocktails with
curaçao he would show me reproductions of Soutine and Cézanne; his own painting, though still rather clumsy, pleased me, and I too admired him for dedicating his whole life to painting without bothering about material difficulties. Sometimes the three of us would go out together. We were enthusiastic about Charles Dullin's performance as Volpone; but we were very critical of Baty in Gantillon's
Départs
at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. At the end of my morning lectures, Stépha would invite me to lunch at the Knam; we would eat Polish dishes to the accompaniment of a Polish orchestra and she would ask me for advice: should she marry Fernando? I used to tell her yes; never had I seen such complete understanding between a man and a woman: they corresponded exactly to my idea of the ideal couple. She was hesitant: there were so many ‘interesting' people in the world! This word exasperated me a little. I didn't feel much attracted by those Romanians and Bulgarians with whom Stépha waged the battle of the sexes. At times my patriotism would come to the fore. One day we were lunching with a German student in a restaurant inside the Bibliothèque Nationale. Blond, with the ritual duelling-scars on his cheeks, he talked in a vindictive manner about the greatness of the Fatherland. I suddenly thought: ‘Perhaps one day he'll be fighting against Jacques and Pradelle,' and I felt a sudden urge to leave the table.

But I struck up a friendship with the Hungarian journalist who burst into Stépha's life towards the end of December. He was very tall and massively built, and in his broad face his thick lips seemed to have difficulty in smiling. He used to talk with great self-satisfaction about his father by adoption who was director of the biggest theatre in Budapest. He was working on a thesis about French melodrama, and was a passionate admirer of French culture, Madame de Staël and Charles Maurras; except for Hungary, he thought all the countries of Central Europe were inhabited by barbarians, particularly the Balkans. He flew into rages whenever he saw Stépha talking to a Romanian. It didn't take much for him to lose his temper: then his hands would shake, his left foot would tap the floor convulsively, and he would have difficulty in getting his words out: I was embarrassed by this lack of self-control. He irritated me too because he was always mouthing the words: refinement, grace, delicacy. He was far from stupid, and I would listen curiously to his disquisitions on cultures and civilizations.
But on the whole I didn't care much for his conversation, and this used to annoy him: ‘If you only knew how witty I can be in Hungarian!' he told me one day, in a voice that was at once furious and frustrated. When he tried to get round me in order to make me plead his case with Stépha, I sent him packing. ‘It's idiotic!' he snarled, his voice full of hatred. ‘All girls love acting as go-betweens when one of their friends has a man interested in her.' I told him roundly that his love for Stépha was nothing to do with me, that it was an egotistical desire for possession and domination; moreover, I couldn't trust it: was he prepared to spend the rest of his life with her? His lips trembled: ‘If you were given a Dresden china figure, you would throw it on the ground to see if it would break or not!' I made no secret of the fact to Bandi – as Stépha called him – that I was Fernando's ally in this affair. ‘I detest that Fernando!' Bandi told me. ‘For one thing, he's a Jew!' I was shocked.

Stépha was rather sorry for him; she thought he was fairly brilliant, and wanted to ‘get him under her thumb', but he pursued her with too much persistency. I realized, on this occasion, that I was, as she had told me, naïve. One evening I went with Jean Mallet to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to see Podrecca's
Piccolo Teatro
which was playing for the first time in Paris. I noticed Stépha there; Bandi had his arm round her, and she was not trying to disengage herself. Mallet was very fond of Stépha, whose eyes he liked to compare to those of a tiger with a dose of morphine: he suggested we should go and say hullo to her. The Hungarian quickly withdrew his arm; she smiled at me without the least embarrassment. I realized then that she treated her boyfriends with rather less severity than she had given me to understand, and I felt angry with her for what seemed to me to be disloyalty, because I didn't know what was meant by ‘flirting'. I was very glad when she finally decided to marry Fernando. Bandi made several violent scenes at that: he would follow her home to her room, despite all her orders to let her alone. Then he calmed down. She stopped coming to the Nationale. He still used to invite me to coffee at Poccardi's but he never talked about her to me again.

After that he settled in France as correspondent to a Hungarian newspaper. Ten years later, on the eve of the declaration of war, I met him at the Dôme. He was going to join up next day in a regiment composed of foreign volunteers. He handed over to me
for safe keeping an object which he prized very highly: it was a travelling clock in the form of a glass sphere. He confessed to me that he was a Jew, an illegitimate child, and a sexual maniac: he could only love women weighing more than fifteen stone; Stépha had been the one exception in his life: he had hoped that, despite her small stature, she would be able to give him, thanks to her intelligence, an illusion of immense size. The war swept him away; he never came back for his clock.

*

From Berlin Zaza wrote me long letters from which I read extracts to Stépha and Pradelle. When she left Paris she had called the Germans ‘Huns', and it was with great trepidation that she set foot in enemy territory:

My arrival at the Fiobel Hospiz was rather awful; I was expecting a women's hostel, but found it was a great caravanserai full of enormous Huns, all quite respectable; when I entered my room the
Mädchen,
as Stépha had told me, handed me a bunch of keys for the wardrobe, the room door, entrance door and finally the street door, in case I should want to come in after four o'clock in the morning. I was so exhausted by the journey, so bewildered by the extent of my freedom and by the immensity of Berlin that I hadn't the courage to go down to dinner and sought refuge, soaking my pillow with tears, in a curious bed without any sheets which consisted only of one huge eiderdown. I slept for thirteen hours, went to Mass in a Roman Catholic church, walked wide-eyed round the streets, and by midday my morale had improved. I've got more used to things by now; there are moments when I'm suddenly seized by an unreasonable longing for my family, for you, for Paris, a sharp and painful stab of homesickness; but I like life in Berlin, I've not had any difficulty with anyone, and I feel that the three months I'm to spend here are going to be most interesting.

She got no help from the French colony, which was composed entirely of the Diplomatic Corps: there were only three French students in Berlin and people found it very surprising that Zaza should have come to spend a term in Germany attending lectures at the University.