Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (2 page)

This is the fifty-year-old author smiling at her youthful dreams, but in fact she never lost them, and she was right not to. It's impossible to read about Simone de Beauvoir's life without thinking about your own. You find yourself wanting to live more courageously, with more commitment and passion. She makes you want to read more books, travel across the world, fall in love again, take stronger political stands, write more, work harder, play more intensely, and look more tenderly at the beauty of the natural world. That is a beautiful gift.

—Hazel Rowley

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.