Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (53 page)

I took advantage of my free time to go and see people I had more or less neglected. I visited Mademoiselle Lambert, who took fright at my serenity of mind, and Suzanne Boigue, whose conjugal felicity was making her run to seed; I spent a boring time with Riesmann, who was becoming more and more esoteric. Stépha had vanished from the scene during the last two months; she had set up house in Montrouge with Fernando, who had rented a studio there; I assumed that they were ‘living in sin' and that she had stopped seeing me in order to cover up her misconduct. Then she showed up again with a wedding ring on her finger. She called on me at eight o'clock in the morning; we lunched at Dominique's, a Russian restaurant which had opened in Montparnasse a few weeks earlier, and we spent the whole day walking and talking; that evening, I had dinner in her studio, its walls were hung with pale Ukrainian carpets; Fernando was painting from momihg to night, and had made great progress. A few days later, they gave a party to celebrate their marriage; there were Russians, Ukrainians, Spaniards, all of them connected vaguely with painting, sculpture, or music; there was drinking, dancing, singing, and dressing-up. But Stépha would soon be leaving for Madrid with Fernando, and they intended to stay there permanently; she was wholly taken up with preparations for this journey and with domestic worries. Our friendship – which later was to find a new lease of life – survived mainly on memories.

I still went out frequently with Pradelle and Zaza, and now it was I who began to feel I was an intruder: they got along so well together! Zaza still hardly dared give free expression to her hopes, but they gave her courage to stand up to renewed maternal onslaughts. Madame Mabille was busy gerrymandering a marriage for her and kept on at her with merciless persistence. ‘But what have you got against this young man?' she would cry. ‘Nothing, Mama,' Zaza would reply. ‘I just don't love him, that's all.' ‘My dear, it's the man who loves, not the woman,' Madame Mabille explained. She got exasperated: ‘As you've got nothing against the young man, why won't you marry him? Your sister made do with a boy much less intelligent than herself!' Zaza would tell me of these set-to's with her mother more in sorrow than in anger,
for she could not take a light-hearted view of her mother's dissatisfaction with her. ‘I'm so tired of fighting her that two or three months ago I might have given in,' she told me. She thought her suitor was quite nice, but she couldn't see him becoming a friend of Pradelle or myself; he would have seemed out of place among us; she didn't want to take as a husband a man whom she could not look up to as she did to others.

Madame Mabille must have suspected the real reasons for her daughter's obstinacy; when I rang at her front door in the rue de Berri, she received me with an extremely frosty expression on her face; and she was soon objecting to meetings between Zaza and Pradelle. We had made plans for another boating party; the day before it was to take place, I received an express letter from Zaza:

I've just had a talk with Mama which makes it absolutely impossible for me to come boating with you on Thursday. Mama is leaving Paris tomorrow; as long as she is here, I can argue with her and refuse to do what she wants; but I just cannot take advantage of her absence to do something which would cause her grave displeasure. It's very hard for me to give up Thursday evening, for I had hoped then that I might enjoy as wonderful moments as those I spent with you and Pradelle in the Bois de Boulogne. The things Mama told me have upset me so frightfully that I very nearly made up my mind to run away to some convent where I would be left in peace for a while. I'm still considering it; I'm in a state of acute mental distress. . . .

Pradelle was deeply disappointed. ‘Remember me very kindly to Mademoiselle Mabille,' he wrote to me. ‘Surely it would be possible for us to meet, as it were, by accident, so that she would not be breaking her promise?' They met at the Nationale where I had started working again. I had lunch with them and they went off together for a walk afterwards. They were able to see each other alone two or three times after that, and towards the end of July Zaza, dumbfounded, announced that they were in love: they would get married when Pradelle had passed his exams and done his military service. But Zaza dreaded her mother's opposition. I told her not to be so pessimistic. She was no longer a child and Madame Mabille, after all, only wanted her happiness: she would respect the choice she had made. What could she find to object to? Pradelle came from an excellent family, and was a practising Catholic; he would obviously have a brilliant career, and in any
case his university stuthes would make him sure of getting a decent situation: Lili's husband wasn't exactly rolling in money either. Zaza shook her head. ‘That's not the point. In our kind of society, marriages aren't made like that!' Pradelle had got to know Zaza through me: that was a black mark against him from the start. And then the prospect of a long engagement would worry Madame Mabille. But the main thing that Zaza insisted upon was that ‘it wasn't done'. She had decided to wait until the autumn term before speaking to her mother about it; however, she was counting on hearing from Pradelle during the holidays: Madame Mabille would notice the letters arriving, and then what would happen? Despite her uneasiness, when she arrived at Laubardon Zaza felt full of hope. ‘I am convinced of one thing, which enables me to bide my time hopefully, and to go on living, even though it may involve me in many awkward contrarieties,' she wrote to me. ‘Life is marvellous.'

*

When he returned to Paris at the beginning of July, Herbaud sent me a note inviting me to spend the evening with him. My parents disapproved of my going out with a married man, but by now I had so very nearly escaped from their sphere of influence that they had practically given up interfering in my life. So I went to see
Le Pèlerin
with Herbaud, and afterwards we had supper at Lipp's. He brought me up to date with the Eugene's latest adventures, and taught me ‘Brazilian écarte', a game he had invented which would enable him to win all the time. He told me that his ‘comrades' were expecting me on Monday morning at the Cité Universitaire; they were counting on me to help them work on Leibniz.

I was feeling a bit scared when I entered Sartre's room; there were books all over the place, cigarette ends in all the corners and the air was thick with tobacco smoke. Sartre greeted me in a worldly manner; he was smoking a pipe. Nizan, who said nothing, had a cigarette stuck in the corner of his one-sided smile and was quizzing me through his pebble lenses, with an air of thinking more than he cared to say. All day long, petrified with fear, I annotated the ‘metaphysical treatise' and in the evening Herbaud took me back home.

I went back each day, and soon I began to thaw out. Leibniz was
boring, so we decided that we knew enough about him. Sartre took it upon himself to expound Rousseau's
The Social Contract
upon which he had very decided opinions. To tell the truth, it was always he who knew most about all the authors and all the aspects of our syllabus: we merely listened to him talking. I sometimes attempted to argue with him; I would rack my brains to find objections to his views. ‘She's a sly puss!' Herbaud would laugh, while Nizan would scrutinize his finger-nails with an air of great concentration; but Sartre always succeeded in turning the tables on me. It was impossible to feel put-out by him: he used to do his utmost to help us to benefit from his knowledge. ‘He's a marvellous trainer of intellects,' I noted. I was staggered by his generosity, for these sessions didn't teach him anything, and he would give of himself for hours without counting the cost.

We did most of our work in the mornings. In the afternoons, after lunching at the restaurant in the Cité, or at Chabin's near the Parc Montsouris, we would take lots of time off. Nizan's wife, a beautiful, exuberant brunette, would often join us. There was the fun-fair at the Porte d'Orléans. We would play at the pin-table machines, at miniature football; or we would try the shooting-gallery, and I won a huge pink vase on the Wheel of Fortune. We would all cram into Nizan's little car and go for a spin round Paris, stopping here and there for a glass of beer at a pavement café. I explored the dormitories and the students' dens at the École Normale, and made the traditional climb over the roofs. During these escapades, Sartre and Herbaud would sing at the tops of their voices; they usually made up the songs themselves; they composed a motet on one of Descartes' chapter headings: ‘Concerning God: wherein is given further proof of his existence.'
*
Sartre had a fine voice and an extensive repertoire, including
Old Man River
and all the current jazz hits; at the École Normale, he was famed for his comic gifts: it was always he who took the part of Monsieur Lanson, the principal, in the annual Students' Revue, and he scored great successes in
La Belle Hélène
and romantic operettas of the 1900s. When he had done the donkey's share of the work for the day, he would put on a record, and we would listen to Sophie
Tucker, Layton and Johnstone, Jack Hylton, the Revellers, and to Negro Spirituals. Every day the walls of his room were adorned by fresh drawings: metaphysical animals; the latest exploits of the Eugene. Nizan specialized in portraits of Leibniz, whom he preferred to depict as a priest, or wearing a Tyrolean hat, and bearing on his backside the imprint of Spinoza's hoof.

Sometimes we would abandon the Cité for Nizan's study. He lived with his wife's parents in a house in the rue Vavin whose façade was covered with glazed earthenware tiles. On the walls of his study there was a large portrait of Lenin, a Cassandre poster and the Venus of Botticelli; I admired his ultra-modern furniture and his very carefully chosen books. Nizan was the most go-ahead member of the trio; he had already had a book published, belonged to various literary circles and had joined the Communist Party; he introduced us to Irish literature and the new American novelists. He was abreast of all the latest fashions in the arts, and even ahead of them. He took us to the dreary Café de Flore ‘to do the old Deux Magots in the eye', he said, gnawing at his fingernails like a mischievous rat. He was working on a pamphlet attacking ‘official' philosophies, and was also engaged in writing a book on ‘Marxist Wisdom'. He rarely laughed, but often treated us to his ferocious lop-sided smile. His conversation delighted me, but I found him difficult to talk to because of his air of disdainful abstraction.

How was it that I managed to fit in with them so quickly? Herbaud had taken care not to shock me, but when they were all together the three ‘comrades' didn't pull their punches. Their language was aggressive, their thought categorical, their judgements merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge: I had no difficulty in agreeing with them on that score. But I was still, in many respects, the dupe of bourgeois humbug;
they
jabbed a pin in every inflated idealism, laughed high-minded souls to scorn–in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the ‘inner life', the marvellous, the mysterious, and the precious all fell under their lashing contempt; on every possible occasion – in their speech, their attitudes, their gestures, their jokes – they set out to prove that men were not rarefied spirits but bothes of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life. A year before, they would have scared me; but I had made much progress since the beginning of the academic year and I very often
felt the need of stronger meat than that to which I was accustomed. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because they didn't try to disguise its realities; in the end, all they asked of me was that I should dare to do what I had always longed to do: look reality in the face. It did not take me long to make up my mind to do so.

*

‘I'm delighted that you should be getting on so well with the comrades,' Herbaud said. ‘But all the same. . . .' ‘I know what you mean,' I answered. *
You
are different.' He smiled. ‘
You
will never be one of them,' he added. ‘You're not a comrade, you're the Beaver.' He told me he was as jealous in friendship as he was in love and demanded preferential treatment. He insisted on having the first place in my friendship with the ‘comrades'. When the question of our all going out together came up one evening, he shook his head: ‘No. This evening I am taking Mademoiselle de Beauvoir to the cinema.' ‘Oh, very well,' said Nizan with a sardonic smile, and Sartre graciously gave his consent. Herbaud was feeling depressed that day because he was afraid he had failed in the competitive examination, and because of obscure reasons connected with his wife. After seeing a Buster Keaton film, we went to a small café, but conversation flagged. ‘I hope you're not bored?' he inquired with a touch of anxiety and more than a touch of stuthed charm. No; but his preoccupations made him seem rather remote. We were drawn together again during the day I spent with him ostensibly helping him to translate
The Ethics of Nicomachus.
He had rented a room in a small hotel in the rue Vanneau and that was where we worked, though not for long, because Aristotle bored us to tears. He made me read him some fragments of Saint-John Perse's
Anabase
which I had never heard of before, and showed me reproductions of Michelangelo's
Sibyls
. Then he talked to me about the differences between him and Sartre and Nizan. He openly enjoyed the good things of life: works of art, nature, travel, love-affairs, sensual pleasures. ‘
They
always want to find a reason for everything, especially Sartre,' he told me. He added, on a note of apprehensive admiration: ‘Except when he's asleep, Sartre
thinks
all the timel' He agreed that Sartre should spend the evening of the
Fourteenth of July with us. After dinner in an Alsatian restaurant we sat on the lawn in the Cité Universitaire and watched the fireworks. Then Sartre, whose munificence was legendary, took us in a taxi to the Falstaff in the rue Montparnasse, where we were lushed up with cocktails until two o'clock in the morning. They put themselves out to see who could be nicer to me and regaled me with a host of stories. I was in a seventh heaven of delight. My sister had been mistaken: I thought Sartre was even more amusing than Herbaud; nevertheless we all agreed that Herbaud should have first place in my affections, and out in the street he very ostentatiously took my arm. Never did he give such obvious proofs of his affection as in the days that followed. ‘I really do like you very much, Beaver,' he would tell me. Once when I was to dine with Sartre and Nizan when he was not free to join us he asked me, with a possessive tenderness: ‘You'll think about me this evening, won't you?' I was sensitive to the smallest inflexions in his voice, and also to his frowns of displeasure. One afternoon as I was talking to him in the entrance hall of the Nationale, Pradelle came up to us and I was delighted to see him. Herbaud said good-bye very angrily and stormed away. All that afternoon I ate my heart out over him. That evening I met him again: he was very pleased with the effect his conduct had had on me. ‘Poor little Beaver! Was I not nice to her?' he gaily inquired. I took him off to the Stryx which he thought ‘madly gay', and I told him about my escapades there. ‘You're out of this world!' he laughed. He talked about himself, about his country childhood, his coming to Paris, his marriage. We had never talked so intimately before. But we were feeling worried, because the next day we were to get the results of the written papers. If Herbaud had failed, he would leave at once for Bagnoles-de-l'Ome. Whatever happened, next year he would take a post in the provinces or abroad. He promised to come and see me during the holidays, in the Limousin. But something had come to an end.