My experience of humanity was small; lacking insight and the appropriate words, I could not comprehend it all. But nature revealed to me a host of visible, tangible modes of existence which my own had never remotely resembled. I admired the proud isolation of the oak that dominated the landscape garden; I felt sorry for the communal solitude of blades of grass. I knew the innocence of morning and the melancholy of twilight, the triumphs and the defeats, the renewals and the expirations of life. One day, something inside me would find itself in harmony with the scent of the honeysuckle. Every evening I would go and lie among the same heather, and gaze at the shadowy blue undulations of the Monédières; every evening the sun would set behind the same hill: yet the pinks, the reds, the carmines, the purples, and the violets were never the same. From dawn to dusk there hummed over the unchanging plains a life that was everlastingly renewed. In the face of the changing sky, constancy was seen to be something more than routine habit, and growing-up did not necessarily mean denying one’s true self.
Here, once again, I became unique and I felt I was needed: my own eyes were needed in order that the copper-red of the beech could be set against the blue of the cedar and the silver of the poplars. When I went away, the landscape fell to pieces, and no longer existed for anyone; it no longer existed at all.
Yet, much more strongly than in Paris, I could feel all around me the presence of God; in Paris He was hidden from me by people and their top-heavy preoccupations; here I could see blades of grass and clouds that were still the same as when He had snatched them out of primal Chaos, and that still bore His mark. The harder I pressed myself against the earth, the closer I got to Him, and every country walk was an act of adoration. His sovereign power did not cancel out my own authority. He knew all things after His own fashion, that is to say, in an absolute sense: but it seemed to me that He needed my eyes in order that the trees might have their colours. How could a pure spirit have experienced the scorching of the sun, the freshness of the dew, if not through the medium of my own body? He had created this earth for men, and he had created men in order that they might bear witness to its beauty: it was He who had given me the mission with which I had always felt myself to be somehow entrusted. Far from wishing to dethrone me, He assured me that I would go on reigning. Deprived of my presence, Creation sank into a shadowy slumber; by waking it to life again, I was accomplishing the most sacred of all my tasks, whereas grown-ups, the indifferent ones, took God’s laws into their own hands. Every morning as I passed through the white gates and ran down to the underwoods, it was He Himself who was calling me. He was gazing upon me with high satisfaction as I gazed upon this world which He had created in order that I might gaze upon it.
Even when I was racked with hunger, even when I was weary with reading and meditating, I disliked resuming possession of my wretched carcase and returning to the enclosed spaces and the ossified timetables of grown-up life. One evening, however, I went too far. It was at La Grillière. I had read a long time by the edge of a small lake; when it grew too dark to read, I closed the book, which was about the life of St Francis of Assisi. Lying in the grass, I gazed up at the moon; it was shining down on an Umbrian landscape radiant with the first dews of night: I felt breathless with the soft beauty of the moment. I should have liked to snatch it as it fled and fix it for ever on paper with immortal words; there will be other hours like this, I told myself, and I shall learn how never to let it go. I lay flat on my back, unable to move, and with my eyes fixed on the sky. When eventually I opened the billiard room door, dinner was just coming to an end. There was a fine how-d’ye-do; even my father expressed himself very forcibly. Thinking to teach me a lesson, my mother ordered that next day I should not be allowed to go outside the boundaries of the estate. Frankly, I did not dare disobey. I spent the day sitting on the lawns or pacing up and down the avenues with a book in my hand and rage in my heart. Over there, outside, the waters of the lake were ruffling and smoothing, light was hardening and softening on the heath and the hills, but without me, without anyone to see: it was unbearable. ‘If it were raining; if there were some reason for this silly prohibition,’ I told myself, ‘then I could resign myself to it.’ Here, once more, boiling up inside me, was the rebelliousness that had expressed itself in furious convulsions during my early childhood; a word thrown out at random sufficed to disrupt my happiness or prevent the gratification of a desire; and this frustration of oneself and of the world didn’t help anyone in any way. Fortunately, I didn’t get another telling-off like that one. On the whole, as long as I was in time for meals, I could do what I liked with my time.
My holidays prevented me from confusing the joys of contemplation with boredom. In Paris, in museums, I would sometimes cheat; at least I knew the difference between forced admiration and sincere emotion. I also learnt that in order to enter into the secrets of things you first of all have to give yourself to them. Usually my curiosity was insatiable; I believed I could possess something as soon as I knew about it, and that I could get this knowledge in a superficial glance. But in order to make a small part of the countryside my own I wandered day after day along the country lanes, and would stand motionless for hours at the foot of a tree: then the least vibration of the air and every fleeting autumnal tint would move me deeply.
I returned to Paris with bad grace. I would go out on the balcony: there would be nothing but roofs; the heavens would be reduced to a geometrical pattern, the air was no longer a perfume and a caress, but a nothingness in a wilderness of space. The noises of the street did not speak to me. I would stand there with an empty heart, and with my eyes full of tears.
*
Back in Paris, I was again under grown-up supervision. I still accepted without criticism their version of the world. It would be impossible to imagine a more sectarian education than the one I received. School primers, text books, lessons, conversations: all converged upon the same point. I was never allowed to hear, even at a great distance, even very faintly, the other side of the question.
I learnt history as unquestioningly as I did geography, without ever dreaming that there might be more than one view of past events. When I was very small, we visited the Musée Grévin where I was very moved by the martyrs delivered up to the lions and by the noble countenance of Marie-Antoinette. The emperors who had persecuted the Christians, the stocking-knitters and the sans-culottes of the French Revolution seemed to me to be the most odious incarnations of Evil. Good was represented by the Church and by ‘la France’. In my lessons I was taught about Popes and Lateran Councils, but I was much more interested in the destiny of my country: her past, her present, and her future gave rise to numerous discussions at home; Papa enjoyed the works of Madelin, Lenôtre, and Funck-Brentano. I was made to read quantities of historical tales and romances, and the entire collection of Memoirs in Madame Carette’s expurgated edition. About the age of nine, I had wept over the misfortunes of Louis XVII and admired the heroism of the insurgent Breton royalists. But I very soon dismissed the monarchy; I found it absurd that power should be given to hereditary rulers who were for the most part imbeciles. It would have seemed more natural to me if the Government had been entrusted to those who were most competent to govern. In our land, I knew, this was unfortunately not the case. We were fated to get scoundrels for our leaders, and so France, fundamentally superior to all other nations, did not occupy her rightful place in the world. Certain of Papa’s friends maintained that England and not Germany was our hereditary enemy; but that was as far as their dissensions went. They agreed that the existence of any foreign country should be considered ludicrous as well as dangerous. ‘La France’, a victim of Wilson’s criminal idealism, her future threatened by the brutal realism of Boche and Bolshevik was heading for disaster because she lacked firm leadership. My father, who was steadily eating up his capital, saw ruin staring humanity in the face: Mama chorused her agreement. There was the red peril; there was the yellow peril: soon a new wave of barbarism was spreading from the four
corners of the earth and from the lowest depths of society; revolution would precipitate the world into chaos. My father used to prophesy these calamities with a passionate vehemence that filled me with consternation; this future that he painted in such lurid colours was my future; I loved life: I couldn’t accept that tomorrow it would be filled with hopeless lamentation. One day, instead of letting the flood of words and images of devastation roll over my head, I hit upon an answer: ‘Whatever happens,’ I said, ‘it will be men who win the final victory.’ One might have thought, to listen to my father, that there were deformed monsters waiting to tear humanity to pieces. But the two opposing sides would be composed of human beings! After all, I thought, it is the majority who will win the day; the dissatisfied will be in the minority; if happiness changes hands, that’s no catastrophe. The Other Side had suddenly ceased to appear as Evil incarnate: I could not see why we should a priori prefer those interests which were said to be mine to his interests. I breathed again. The world was not, after all, in danger.
It was mental distress that had provoked my outburst: I had found a way out of my despair because I ardently desired it and sought for it. But my security and my comfortable illusions made me insensitive to social problems. I was very far from disputing the established order of things.
To say the very least, property, it seemed to me, was a sacred right; I assumed that there was a consubstantial unity between the proprietor and his possessions, just as formerly I had considered words and their meanings to be integral parts of one another. When I said: my money, my sister, my nose, I was in all three cases consolidating a bond which no will could destroy because it existed above and beyond all conventional ideas. I was told that in order to construct the railway to Uzerche the State had expropriated a certain number of small farmers and landed gentry: I could not have been more horrified if it had shed their blood. Meyrignac belonged to my grandfather as absolutely as his own life.
On the other hand, I had to admit that the brute fact of wealth should not be allowed to confer special rights or any extrinsic credit upon its possessor. The Gospel exalts poverty. I respected Louise far more than many a rich lady. I was indignant that Madeleine refused to say good morning to the bakers who came in their carts to deliver bread at La Grillière. ‘It is up to them to address me first,’ she declared. I believed in the absolute equality of human beings. One summer at Meyrignac I read a book which recommended universal suffrage. Up went my head: ‘But it’s shameful that poor people should not be allowed to have the vote!’ I cried. Papa smiled. He explained to me that a nation is a collection of private properties; and it is those who own them who naturally have the task of administering them. He ended by quoting Guizot’s maxim: ‘Get rich!’ His exposition of the problem puzzled me. Papa had not succeeded in getting rich: would he have been willing to be deprived of his rights as a voter? If I protested against this particular injustice, it was in the name of the very set of values which he himself had taught me to observe. He did not hold that a man’s qualities can be measured by the amount of money he has in the bank; he was always making fun of the ‘new rich’. No, according to him, the élite were those who had intelligence, culture, and a sound education; they should be able to spell correctly and have ‘the right ideas’. I readily agreed with him when he said his objection to universal suffrage was based upon the fact that the majority of the electorate were stupid and ignorant: only ‘enlightened’ people ought to have a say in the matter. I bowed to his logic which was supported by an empirical truth: ‘enlightenment’ is the prerogative of the bourgeoisie. Certain individuals from the lower classes might perform feats of intellectual prowess, but they would always retain something of their original lowly condition, and they are usually, in any case, people with ‘wrong’ ideas. On the other hand, every man who came from a good family had ‘that certain something’ which distinguished him from the common herd. I was not too shocked at the idea that personal merit depended on the chance of birth, since it was the will of God that decided what our fate would be. But in any case it seemed obvious to me that morally, and therefore absolutely, the class to which I belonged was far superior to the rest of society. Whenever I went with Mama to call on grandfather’s tenant-farmers, the stink of manure, the dirty rooms where the hens were always scratching and the rusticity of their furniture seemed to me to reflect the coarseness of their souls; I would watch them labouring in the fields, covered in mud, smelling of sweat and earth, and they never once paused to contemplate the beauty of the landscape; they were ignorant of the splendours of the sunset. They didn’t read, they had no ideals; Papa used to say, though quite without animosity, that they were ‘brutes’. When he read me Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, I promptly adopted his idea that the brains of the lower classes were made differently from ours.
I loved the country so much that the farmer’s life seemed to me a very happy one. If I had ever had a glimpse into the labourer’s way of life, I could hardly have failed to doubt the correctness of my assumptions; but I knew nothing of it. Before her marriage, Aunt Lili, with no work of her own, occupied her time with ‘good works’. She sometimes took me with her to give toys to specially chosen under-privileged children; the poor did not seem to me to be very unhappy. There were many kindly souls who gave them charity and the sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul devoted themselves especially to their service. There were a few discontented ones among the poor: they were the would-be poor, who stuffed themselves with roast turkey at Christmas, or wicked ones who drank. Some books – Dickens’s novels and Hector Malot’s Sansfamille-described the hard life of the poor; I thought the miner’s lot, cooped up all day in dark pits, and at the mercy of any sudden fall of rock, was terrible. But I was assured that times had changed. The workers worked much less, and earned much more; since the advent of trade unions, the real victims had been the employers. The workers, who were much luckier than we were, didn’t have to ‘keep up appearances’ and so they could treat themselves to roast chicken every Sunday; their wives bought the best cuts in the markets and could even afford silk stockings. They were used to hard work and squalid homes: these things did not distress them as they would us. Their recriminations were not justified by the facts. ‘Besides,’ my father would say, raising his shoulders, ‘they’re not dying of starvation!’ No, if the workers hated the bourgeoisie, it was because they were conscious of our superiority. Communism and socialism were the results of envy. ‘And envy,’ my father would add, ‘is not a pretty thing.’
I only once came in contact with real destitution. Louise and her husband, the slater, lived in a room in the rue Madame, a garret right at the top of the house; she had a baby and I went to visit her with my mother. I had never set foot in a sixth-floor back before. The dreary little landing with its dozen identical doors made my heart sink. Louise’s tiny room contained a brass bedstead, a cradle, and a table on which stood a small oil stove; she slept, cooked, ate, and lived with her husband and child between these four walls; all round the landing there were families confined to stifling little holes like this; the comparative promiscuity in which I myself had to live and the monotony of bourgeois life oppressed my spirits. But here I got a glimpse of a universe in which the air you breathed smelt of soot, in which no ray of light ever penetrated the filth and squalor: existence here was a slow death. Not long after that, Louise lost her baby. I cried for hours: it was the first time I had known misfortune at first hand. I thought of Louise in her comfortless garret without her baby, without anything: such terrible distress should have shaken the world to its foundations. ‘It’s not right!’ I told myself. I wasn’t only thinking of the dead child but also of that sixth-floor landing. But in the end I dried my tears without having called society in question.
It was very difficult for me to think for myself, for the standard of values I was taught was both monolithic and incoherent. If my parents had had differences of opinion, I could have compared those opinions. Or one firm line of argu
ment would have given me something to get my teeth in. But brought up as I was on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was always getting bogged down in contradictions. Neither my mother nor my teachers doubted for a moment that the Pope was elected by the Holy Spirit; yet my father thought His Holiness should not interfere in world affairs and my mother agreed with him; Pope Leo XIII, by devoting encyclicals to ‘social questions’ had betrayed his saintly mission; Pius X, who had not breathed a word about such things, was a saint. So I had to swallow the paradox that the man chosen by God to be His representative on earth had not to concern himself with earthly things. France was the elder daughter of the Roman Catholic Church; she owed obedience to her mother. Yet national values came before Catholic virtues; when a collection was being made at Saint-Sulpice for ‘the starving children of Central Europe’, my mother was indignant and refused to give anything for ‘the Boche’. In all eventualities, patriotism and concern for maintaining the established order of things were considered more important than Christian charity. Telling lies was an offence against God; yet Papa could claim that in committing a forgery Colonel Henry had acted like an upright man. Killing was a crime, but the death-penalty must not be done away with. At an early age I was indoctrinated in the compromises of casuistry and sophistry, to make a clear distinction between God and Caesar and to render unto each his due; all the same, it was most disconcerting to find that Caesar always got the better of God. When we view the world at the same time through the verses of the Gospel and through the columns of the daily press, the sight tends to get blurred. There was nothing else I could do but to take refuge, with lowered head, under the wing of authority.