Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (38 page)

Yet my conversations with Nodier were beginning to broaden my mind. I used to ask him lots of questions. He was very willing to answer them and I found these conversations so profitable that I asked myself sadly: why wasn't I fated to love a man like this, who would share my liking for study and the exchange of ideas, and whom I could love with my head as well as my heart? I was very sorry when, towards the end of May, he said good-bye to me outside the Sorbonne. He was leaving for Australia where he had found a post; the little dark girl was to follow him out there. Shaking my hand for the last time, he said, in a voice charged with meaning: ‘I wish you every good thing in life.'

At the beginning of March, I passed my examinations in the history of philosophy with flying colours, and on that occasion made the acquaintance of a group of left-wing students. They asked me to sign a petition: Paul Boncour had tabled an army bill decreeing the mobilization of women, and the magazine
Europe
was organizing a protest campaign. I was in a quandary. I was all for
the equality of the sexes; and in case of danger, wasn't it one's duty to do all one could to defend one's country? When I had read the text of the bill, I said: ‘But this is very patriotic!' The large young man who was sending round the petition sniggered: ‘Who wants patriotism?' This was a question I had never asked myself: I didn't know how to reply. They explained to me that the new law, if it came into force, would result in a general mobilization of freedom of conscience, and that decided me: after all, freedom of thought was sacred; and then all the others were signing: so I signed too. I didn't have to be asked twice when it was a question of petitioning for the reprieve of Sacco and Vanzetti; their names didn't mean anything to me, but I was assured that they were innocent: besides, I disapproved of the death penalty.

My political activities didn't go any further and my ideas remained hazy. One thing I knew: I detested the extreme right. One afternoon, a handful of brawling young men had entered the Sorbonne library shouting: ‘Down with wops and Jews!' They were carrying stout canes, and had turned out a few of the darker-skinned students. This triumph of violence and stupidity had shocked and angered me. I detested conformity, all forms of obscurantism, and wanted men to be governed by reason; therefore I was interested in the left. But I disliked all labels: I hated people to be catalogued. Several of my fellow-students were socialists; I thought the word had an evil ring; a socialist couldn't possibly be a tormented soul; he was pursuing ends that were both secular and limited: such moderation irritated me from the outset. The Communists' extremism attracted me much more; but I suspected them of being just as dogmatic and stereotyped as the Jesuits. Nevertheless, about May I struck up a friendship with an ex-student of Alain who was a communist: in those days, such an unlikely conjunction caused no surprise. He praised Alain's lectures, outlined his ideas to me, lent me his books. He also introduced me to Romain Rolland and I became a firm believer in pacifism. Mallet was interested in many other things: in painting, the cinema, the theatre, even the music hall. There was a fire in his eyes and in his voice, and I enjoyed talking to him. I noted in my diary, with some astonishment: ‘I've found out that it's possible to be intelligent
and
take an interest in politics.' In fact, he didn't know much about the theory of politics and didn't teach me anything. I continued to rate social questions lower than problems of metaphysics and morals: what was the use
of bothering about suffering humanity if there was no point in its existence?

This obstinate refusal prevented me from deriving any benefit from my meeting with Simone Weil. While preparing to enter the Normale – the training-college in Paris for professoriates – she was taking the same examinations as myself at the Sorbonne. She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up; she would stroll round the courtyard of the Sorbonne attended by a group of Alain's old pupils; she always carried in the one pocket of her dark-grey overall a copy of
Libres Propos
and in the other a copy of
Humanité.
A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her for having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don't know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world today: the Revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It's easy to see you've never gone hungry,' she snapped. Our relationship did not go any further. I realized that she had classified me as ‘a high-minded little bourgeois', and this annoyed me, just as I used to be annoyed whenever Mademoiselle Litt attributed certain tastes I had to the fact that I was only a child; I believed that I had freed myself from the bonds of my class: I didn't want to be anyone else but myself.

I don't really know why I had anything to do with Blanchette Weiss. She was short and stout, and in a face bursting with self-sufficiency her two malevolent little eyes were always darting here and there; but I was fascinated by her gift of the gab and her command of philosophical jargon; she rattled off student gossip and metaphysical speculations with a volubility which I mistook for intelligence. As finite modes are unable to communicate without the intervention of the infinite, therefore all human love, she explained, is sin; she considered herself entitled to assume the absolute authority of the infinite in her disparagement of all the people she knew. I was amused to learn from her something about the ambitions, the little foibles, the weaknesses and vices of our professors, and our fellow-students. ‘I have the soul of a Proustian
caretaker,' she declared complacently. Rather inconsistently, she charged me with clinging to my nostalgia for the absolute: ‘Now me, I create my own system of values,' she stated. What could they be? On this point she was somewhat vague. She attached the greatest importance to her inner life: I agreed with her there; she disdained wealth; so did I; but she explained to me that in order to be able to keep one's mind off money it was necessary to have enough for one's needs, and that she would probably consent to a marriage of convenience: I was disgusted. I also found that she suffered from a curious kind of narcissism; all curled and bedizened she thought she looked the living image of Clara d'Ellébeuse. Despite all this, I had such a longing to have someone I could ‘exchange ideas' with that I used to see her fairly frequently.

But Zaza was still my only real friend. Unfortunately her mother was beginning to look upon me with a rather jaundiced eye. It was under my influence that Zaza preferred studying to domestic life, and I was lending her scandalous books. Madame Mabille detested Mauriac: she took his portrayals of bourgeois homes as a personal insult. She didn't trust Claudel, whom Zaza liked because he helped her to reconcile heaven and earth. ‘You would be better occupied reading the Fathers of the Church,' Madame Mabille bad-temperedly remarked. She came several times to our house to complain to my mother about me and made it quite clear to Zaza that she wished we would see less of each other. But Zaza stood firm; our friendship was one of those things she would not give up. We used to see each other very often. We used to study Greek together; we would go to concerts and art exhibitions. Sometimes she would play the piano for me – Chopin and Debussy. We often went for long walks. One afternoon, having screwed an unwilling permission out of my mother, Zaza took me to a hairdresser and I had my hair cut off. I didn't gain much by this, because my mother was furious that I had forced her hand, and refused to allow me the luxury of having my hair set. From Laubardon where she was spending the Easter holidays, Zaza sent me a letter which moved me to the depths of my being: ‘Since the age of fifteen I had lived in great moral solitude; it hurt me to feel so lost and isolated: you have broken that solitude.' This didn't prevent her from being plunged just then ‘in the depths of despair'. She wrote: ‘Never have I felt so overwhelmed by myself.' She added: ‘I've lived too long with my eyes turned towards the past and unable to tear my
self away from the wonder of my childhood memories.' Again I took this for granted. I thought it was natural that one should be unwilling to grow up.

It was a great relief to me not to see Jacques any more; I was no longer torturing myself over him. The first rays of spring sunshine were taking the nip of winter out of my blood. While I continued to work hard, I decided that I would have a little amusement. I went fairly often to the cinema in the afternoons; I usually went to the Studio des Ursulines, the Vieux-Colombier, and the Ciné-Latin; this was a little hall with wooden seats situated behind the Panthéon; a piano accompanied the films; the seats weren't dear and they showed revivals of the best films of the last few years; it was there that I saw
The Gold Rush
and many other Chaplin films. On certain evenings my mother would accompany my sister and me to the theatre. I saw Jouvet in
Le Grand Large
, in which Michel Simon was making his first appearance, Dullin in
La Comédie du bonheur
and Madame Pitoëff as St Joan. I used to look forward to these outings for days; they irradiated my week. I can tell how much importance I attached to them when I think of how hardly the austerity of the first two terms weighed upon me. Now, during the daytime, I would visit all the exhibitions, and go for long prowls round the galleries of the Louvre. I would wander all over Paris, my eyes no longer brimming with tears, but looking at everything. I loved those evenings when, after dinner, I would set out alone on the Métro and travel right to the other side of Paris, near Les Buttes Chaumont, which smelt of damp and greenery. Often I would walk back home. In the boulevard de la Chapelle, under the steel girders of the overhead railway, women would be waiting for customers; men would come staggering out of brightly lit bistros; the fronts of cinemas would be ablaze with posters. I could feel life all round me, an enormous, ever-present confusion. I would stride along, feeling its thick breath blow in my face. And I would say to myself that after all life is worth living.

I began to have ambitions again. Despite my friendships and my uncertain love-affair, I still felt very much alone; there was no one who knew me or loved me completely, for myself alone; no one was, nor, I thought could anyone ever be ‘someone definite and complete' to me. Rather than go on suffering because of this, I again took refuge in pride. My isolation was a sign of my superiority; I no longer had any doubts about that: I was somebody, and I
would do great things. I thought up themes for novels. One morning in the library at the Sorbonne, instead of doing Greek translation, I began ‘my book'. I had to study for the exams in June; I hadn't enough time; but I calculated that next year I would have more free time and I made a promise to myself that I would then without more ado write my very own book ‘It is to be a work,' I told myself in my diary, ‘which will
tell all.
' I often insisted in my journal on this necessity to ‘tell all', which makes a curious contrast with the paucity of my experience. Philosophy had increased my tendency to seize the essence, the root, the totality of things; and as I was living in a world of abstractions I believed that I had discovered, once and for all, the truth of life. From time to time I would suspect that there was more to it than I had so far discovered: but only very occasionally. My superiority over other people came precisely from the fact that I didn't let anything get past me: the peculiar value of my work would be the result of this exceptional privilege.

Sometimes I would have scruples; I would recall that all is vanity: but I would disregard them. In imaginary dialogues with Jacques I would challenge his ‘What's the use?' I had only one life to live, I wanted it to be a success, nobody would stop me, not even he. I did not abandon my view of the absolute; but as there didn't seem to be much to be gained in that quarter I decided not to bother about it. I was very fond of Lagneau's phrase: ‘I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.' As I was going to continue to exist, once this despair had been established I had to live as best I could here below, that is, do what I liked.

I was rather surprised to find I could so easily do without Jacques, but the fact is that I didn't miss him at all. My mother told me at the end of April that he was surprised not to see me any more. I went to see him: I didn't feel anything. It seemed to me that this affection could no longer be called love, and I even found it rather tiresome. ‘I no longer even want to see him. I can't help it if he makes me tired, even when he's at his best.' He was no longer writing his novel; he would never write it. ‘I should feel I had prostituted myself,' he told me haughtily. A drive in his car and a conversation in which he seemed to be sincerely ashamed of himself brought me closer to him again. After all, I told myself, I have no right to blame him for an inconsequence which is that of life itself: it leads us to certain conclusions and then reveals their
emptiness. I reproached myself for being so severe with him. ‘He is better than his life,' decided. But I was afraid lest in the end his life should leave its stains upon him. Sometimes I would be filled with dire foreboding: ‘I feel bad when I think about you, Jacques; I don't know why, but your life is a tragic one.'

*

The June examinations were approaching; I was ready for them and tired of working; I relaxed a little. I indulged in my first escapade. On the pretext that there was a charity performance at Belleville, I got permission from my mother to stay out until midnight, and twenty francs. I took a seat in the gallery for a performance of the Russian Ballet. When twenty years later I suddenly found myself alone at two o'clock in the morning in Times Square, I was less dazzled than I was that evening up in the gods in the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt. Below me, silks, furs, diamonds, perfumes, and the chatter of a brilliant, packed house. Whenever I went out with my parents or the Mabilles, an impenetrable glass would be interposed between me and the world: but now, here I was revelling in one of those great nocturnal festivities whose reflected glow I had so often gazed at longingly in the heavens. I had wormed my way in, unknown to all my acquaintances, and the people I was rubbing shoulders with didn't know who I was. I felt invisible and endowed with the power to be everywhere at once, like a sprite. That evening they were dancing Sauguet's
La Chatte,
Prokofieff's
Pas d'acier,
The Triumph of Neptune,
and all kinds of other marvels. Scenery, costumes, music, dancing: the whole thing astounded me. I don't think I'd ever been so dazzled and enchanted by anything since I was five.