Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (3 page)

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.