Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (9 page)

Few things could disturb my equanimity. I looked upon life as a happy adventure; my faith protected me from the terrors of death: I would close my eyes when my time came, and in a flash the snowy hands of angels would transport me to the celestial regions. In a gilt-edged prize volume, I read a moral fable which set the final seal on my convictions; a little larva which lived at the bottom of a pond began to feel worried; one after the other her companions disappeared into the night of the aquatic firmament: would she, too, one day disappear? Suddenly she found herself on the other side of the dark: she had wings, and she could fly, under the sun's caressing rays, among hosts of marvellous flowers. The analogy, it seemed to me, was irrefutable; a thin azure curtain separated me from paradises resplendent with the true light; time and again I would dispose my limbs upon the carpet, close my eyes and join my hands in prayer, and then command my soul to make her escape. It was only a game; if I had really believed my final hour had come, I should have shrieked with terror. But the idea of death at least did not frighten me. One evening, however, I was chilled to the marrow by the idea of personal extinction. I was reading about a mermaid who was dying by the sad sea waves; for the love of a handsome prince, she had renounced her immortal soul, and was being changed into sea-foam. That inner voice which had always told her ‘Here I am' had been silenced for ever, and it seemed to me that the entire universe had foundered in the ensuing stillness. But – no, it couldn't be. God had given me the promise of eternity: I could not ever cease to see, to hear, to talk to myself. Always I should be able to say: ‘Here I am.' There
could
be no end.

But there
had
been a beginning; that disturbed me sometimes. Children were born, I told myself, by divine decree; but, contrary to all orthodox thought, I set certain limits to the power of the Almighty. This presence within me which told me I was myself and no one else was dependent on nobody; nothing could touch it; it was impossible that anyone, were it God Himself, could have created it; God had merely provided, as it were, the outer wrapping. In the supernatural intervals of space there floated, I was convinced, myriads of invisible, impalpable souls awaiting incarnation. I had been one of them but had unfortunately forgotten everything about that state of bliss; they wandered between heaven and earth, but were never able to recall their wanderings. I realized, with dreadful anguish, that this absence of memory was the same as extinction, nothingness; everything conspired to suggest that, before making my first appearance in my cradle, I had not existed at all. I should have to correct this deficiency: I would capture in flight those will-o'-the-wisps whose delusive radiance illuminated nothing; I would lend them my eyes, I would dissipate their darkness, and the children who would be born the next day would remember. . . . I used to lose myself completely in these dizzy and otiose speculations, and vainly refuse to admit the scandalous divorce of consciousness and time.

I had at least emerged from the shades; but the things all round me remained lost in darkness. I enjoyed those tales in which needles were given ideas proper to needles, and the sideboard was provided with thoughts that were essentially those of a wooden sideboard: but they were, after all, just stories; objects had black, impenetrable hearts, and reposed upon the earth without being remotely aware that they were doing so, and without being able to murmur reassuringly: ‘Here I am.' I have related elsewhere how, at Meyrignac, I stupidly gazed at an old jacket thrown over the back of a chair. I tried to put myself as it were inside the jacket, and say: ‘I am a tired old jacket. It was quite impossible, and I was stricken with panic. In the darkness of the past, in the stillness of inanimate beings I had dire forebodings of my own extinction; I conjured up delusive fallacies, and turned them into omens of the truth, and of my own death.

It was through my own eyes that light was created; during the holidays particularly I revelled in visual discoveries; but from time to time I was beset by gnawing doubts: far from bringing me a
revelation of the world around me, I felt my presence was a blot upon the face of the earth. I did not, of course, imagine that while I was asleep the flowers in the drawing-room went off to a ball, nor that behind shop windows the ornaments and trinkets played out insipid idylls. But I sometimes suspected the familiar countryside of imitating those enchanted forests that disguise themselves as something else when their secrets are about to be violated by an unwelcome intruder: mirages float before his eyes, he loses his way, and the clearings and coppices are able to preserve their mysteries. Hidden behind a tree, I would try in vain to surprise the solitary secret I imagined lay at the heart of every wood. An improving tale entitled
Valentine, or The Demon of Curiosity
made a great impression upon me. A wicked fairy godmother was taking Valentine for a ride in her carriage; she told him that they were passing through an enchanted kingdom, but the blinds had been lowered at the carriage windows, and he was not to lift them; driven on by his evil genius, Valentine disobeyed; but all he could see outside was utter darkness: his inquisitiveness had destroyed the very thing he wanted to see. I was not interested in the rest of the tale; while Valentine was at grips with his particular demon, I was busy waging an anxious war against blind ignorance.

Though they were sometimes agonizing, my fits of disquiet quickly passed away. The world was vouched for by the presence in it of grown-ups, and I only rarely attempted to penetrate its mysteries without their assistance. I preferred to follow them through the imaginary universes which they liked to create around me.

I used to squat in the hall, in front of the imitation-rustic corner cupboard on which stood a carved wood clock that concealed in its dusty interior two copper weights shaped like pine-cones and all the dark and backward abysms of time; beside it, in the wall, there was a hot air vent; through its gilded grating I could smell nauseating gusts of tepid air rising from the lower depths. This yawning chasm and the stillness measured by the solemn ticking of the clock used to fill me with awful apprehension. I found reassurance in books: they said what they had to say, and didn't pretend to say anything else; when I was not there, they were silent; if I opened one, it said exactly what it meant: if there was a word I didn't understand, Mama would explain it to me. Lying flat on the Turkey carpet, I used to read Madame de Ségur, Zénaïde Fleuriot,
Perrault's fairy-tales, Grimm, Madame d'Aulnoy, the Bavarian author of children's tales, Canon Schmid, the books of Töpffer and Bécassine, the adventures of the Fenouillard family and those of Sapper Camember,
Sans famille,
Jules Verne, Paul d'Ivoi, André Laurie, and the series of little pink books, the ‘Livres Roses' published by Larousse, which contained legends and folk tales from every country in the world, and which during the war included stories of the great heroes.

I was given only children's books, and they were chosen for me with the greatest care; they were based on the same moral standards as those observed by my parents and teachers; the good were rewarded, and the wicked punished; misadventures befell only those who were vain, ridiculous, and stupid. I accepted the fact that these essential principles were safeguarded for my benefit; usually I did not try to find any relationship between reality and the fantasies I read in books; they amused me, but as it were at a distance, as I would be amused by a Punch and Judy show; that is why, despite the strange ulterior significance that adults ingeniously discover in them, the novels of Madame de Ségur never caused me the slightest astonishment. Madame Bonbec, General Dourakine, together with Monsieur Cryptogame, the Baron de Crac and Bécassine were only animated puppets. A story was something nice in itself, like a marionette show or a pretty picture; I was aware of the necessity informing these constructions which have a beginning, a development, and an end, and in which words and phrases shine with their own peculiar radiance, like colours in a picture. But occasionally a book would speak to me more or less vaguely about the world around me or about myself: then it would make me wonder, or dream, and sometimes it would shake my convictions. Andersen taught me what melancholy is; in his tales, objects suffer from neglect, are broken and pine away without deserving their unhappy fate; the little mermaid, before she passed into oblivion, was in agony at every step she took, as if she were walking on red-hot cinders, yet she had not done anything wrong: her tortures and her death made me sick at heart. A novel I read at Meyrignac, which was called
The Jungle Explorers
, gave me a nasty shock. The author related his extravagant adventures sufficiently well to make me feel I was actually taking part in them. The hero had a friend called Bob, who was rather stout, a good trencherman and absolutely devoted to his companion in danger;
he won my sympathies at once. They were imprisoned in an Indian jail: they discovered a subterranean passage just wide enough to let a man crawl along. Bob went first; suddenly he uttered a terrible scream: he had encountered a python. With loudly beating heart and clammy palms I witnessed the grim tragedy: the serpent devoured good old Bob! This story obsessed me for a long time. The mere idea of being swallowed alive was enough to make my blood run cold; but I should have been less shaken if I had disliked the victim. Bob's frightful death made nonsense of all the rules of life: it was obvious, now, that anything could happen.

Despite their conventionality, my books helped to broaden my horizons; besides, I was charmed to be an apprentice to the sorcery that transmutes printed symbols into stories; and it was natural that I should want to reverse the magical process. Seated at a little table, I would transfer to paper sentences that were winding about in my head: the white sheet would be covered with violet blotches which purported to tell a story. The silence all round me in the room took on an aura of solemnity: I felt I was officiating at a solemn rite. As I did not look to literature for a reflection of reality, I never had the idea that I might write down my own experiences or even my dreams; the thing that amused me was to manipulate an object through the use of words, as I once used to make constructions with building-blocks; only books, and not life in all its crudity, could provide me with models: I wrote pastiche. My first work was entitled
The Misfortunes of Marguerite.
The heroine, from Alsace, and an orphan to boot, was crossing the Rhine with a brood of sisters and brothers in order to escape to France. But then I was piqued to learn that the river doesn't run where it ought to have, and my novel was abandoned. So then I dished up in a slightly different form
La Famille Fenouillard
which we all admired very much in our house: Monsieur and Madame Fenouillard with their two little daughters were a sort of blue-print for our own family. One evening Mama read to Papa my new story, which I had entitled
La Famille Cornichon.
It made her laugh, and he had smiled his approval. Grandpapa presented me with a volume bound in a yellow cover whose pages were entirely blank; Aunt Lili copied my story into this little book in her neat convent script: I gazed with pride upon this almost real object which owed its existence to me. I composed two or three other works which did not have quite the same success. Sometimes I contented myself
with inventing titles for my future works. When we went to the country, I would play at being a bookseller; I entitled the silvery leaf of the birch
The Azure Queen,
and the varnished leaf of the magnolia
Flower of the Snows;
I arranged some scholarly displays of my stock. I wasn't sure whether when I was grown-up I wanted to write books or sell them, but in my view they were the most precious things in the world. My mother subscribed to a circulating library in the rue Saint-Placide. Impassable barriers prohibited my entry into those book-lined corridors which seemed to extend to infinity like the tunnels in the Métro. I admired the old ladies in their whalebone collars who were able to spend the rest of their days handling the volumes in their black bindings with titles displayed on a red or orange rectangle on the spine. Buried away in the silence, and masked by the sombre monotony of their bindings, all the words in the world were there, waiting to be deciphered. I dreamed of shutting myself away in those dusty avenues, and never coming out again.

About once a year we went to the Châtelet theatre. Alphonse Deville, the city councillor to whom my father had been secretary in the days when they had both been lawyers, used to place at our disposal the box reserved for members of the city council. So I saw
La Course au bonheur
and
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
, and other spectacular productions. I loved the red curtain, the lights, the scenery, and the flower ballet; but the adventures taking place on the stage were of only minor interest to me. The actors were too real, and at the same time not real enough. The most sumptuous finery had not an iota of the brilliance of a carbuncle in a fairy-tale. I used to clap my hands and gasp with wonder, but in my heart of hearts I preferred a quiet afternoon alone with my books.

As for the cinema, my parents looked upon it only as a vulgar entertainment. They thought Charlie Chaplin was very childish, even for children. However, a friend of my father's having procured for us an invitation to see a private showing of a film, we went one morning to see
L'Ami Fritz
: everyone agreed that the film was charming. A few weeks later we saw, under the same privileged conditions,
Le Roi de Camargue.
The hero, engaged to a sweet blonde heroine, a simple peasant girl, was riding along the edge of the sea; he met a naked gipsy with smouldering eyes who slapped his horse's neck; for a long while they stared at one another in
amazement; later he went into a little house with her in the middle of the marshes. At this point I noticed my mother and grandmother exchanging looks of alarm; in the end I gathered from their distraught mien that this story was not suitable for my tender years: but I couldn't quite understand why. While the blonde heroine was running desperately over the marshes, to be swallowed up by them in the end, I did not realize that the most frightful of all sins was being committed between the hero and the lovely dark gipsy. But her proud self-abandon had made no impression on me at all. In
The Golden Legend
and in the tales of Canon Schmid I had come across even more voluptuously naked scenes. But from then on, we did not go to the cinema.