The principal function of Louise and Mama was to feed me; their task was not always an easy one. The world became more intimately part of me when it entered through my mouth than through my eyes and my sense of touch. I would not accept it entirely. The insipidity of milk puddings, porridge, and mashes of bread and butter made me burst into tears; the oiliness of fat meat and the clammy mysteries of shellfish revolted me; tears, screams, vomitings: my repugnance was so deeply rooted that in the end they gave up trying to force me to eat those disgusting things. On the other hand, I eagerly took advantage of that privilege of childhood which allows beauty, luxury, and happiness to be things that can be eaten: in the rue Vavin I would stand transfixed before the windows of confectioners’ shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscopic inflorescence of acidulated fruit-drops – green, red, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasures they promised me. Mama used to pound sugared almonds for me in a mortar and mix the crunchy powder with a yellow cream; the pink of the sweets used to shade off into exquisite nuances of colour, and I would dip an eager spoon into their brilliant sunset. On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on the cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of black-currant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth. I was never attracted to paradises flowing with milk and honey, but I envied Hansel and Gretel their gingerbread house: if only the universe we inhabit were completely edible, I used to think, what power we would have over it! When I was grown-up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweetmeats and made me feel frustrated.
Eating was not only an exploration and an act of conquest – an acquired taste in the real sense of the phrase – but also my most solemn duty: ‘A spoonful for Mama, and another for grandmama. . . . If you don’t eat anything, you won’t grow up into a big girl.’ I would be stood up against the door-frame in the hall and a pencilled line would be drawn level with the top of my head; the new line would then be compared with an earlier one: I had grown two or three centimetres; they would congratulate me, and I would swell with pride. But sometimes I felt frightened. The sunlight would be playing on the polished floor and the white-enamelled furniture. I would look at Mama’s armchair and think: ‘I won’t be able to sit on her knee any more if I go on growing up.’ Suddenly the future existed; it would turn me into another being, someone who would still be, and yet no longer seem, myself. I had forebodings of all the separations, the refusals, the desertions to come, and of the long succession of my various deaths. ‘A spoonful for grandpapa. . . .’ I went on eating, all the same, and I was proud that I was growing; I had no wish to remain a baby all my life. I must have been intensely aware of this conflict to be able to remember in such minute detail a certain book from which Louise used to read me the story of Charlotte. One morning Charlotte found on her bedside chair a huge egg, almost as big as herself, made of pink sugar. This egg fascinated me, too. It was both stomach and cradle, and yet you could eat it. Refusing all other food, Charlotte grew smaller day by day; she became minute: she was nearly drowned in a saucepan, the cook accidentally threw her away into the dustbin, and she was carried off by a rat. She was rescued; Charlotte, now chastened and scared, stuffed herself so greedily she began to swell and swell until she was like a gigantic bladder of lard: her mama took this monstrous balloon-child to the doctor’s. I gloated, but with a new restraint, over the pictures illustrating the diet the doctor had prescribed: a cup of chocolate, a nicely coddled new-laid egg, and a lightly grilled chop. Charlotte returned to normal size and I came out of the adventure safe and sound after having been reduced to a foetus and then blown up to matronly dimensions.
I kept on growing and I realized that my fate was sealed: I was condemned to be an outcast from childhood. I sought refuge in my own reflection. Every morning Louise would curl my hair and I would gaze with satisfaction at my face framed with ringlets: dark hair and blue eyes did not often, so they had told me, go together, and I had already learned to appreciate the value of the unusual. I was pleased with myself, and I sought to please. My parents’ friends encouraged my vanity: they politely flattered me and spoiled me, I would stroke the ladies’ furs and their satin-sheathed bosoms; I admired even more the gentlemen with their moustaches, their smell of tobacco, their deep voices, their strong arms that could lift me nearly up to the ceiling. I was particularly anxious to arouse the interests of the men: I tried to attract their attention by fidgeting and playing the ingénue, seizing any look or word that would snatch me out of my childhood limbo and give me some permanent status in their grown-up world. One evening, in the presence of one of my father’s friends, I rudely shoved away a plate of Russian salad: on a postcard sent to us during the summer holidays this friend asked, with rather laboured wit: ‘Does Simone still like Russian salad?’ The written had even more prestige than the spoken word: I was exultant. I had been taken notice of! The next time we met M. Dardelle, in front of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, I was counting on a renewal of his delicious teasing; I attempted to provoke him to another display of brilliant badinage, but found no response. I tried again, even harder. I was told to keep quiet. I had discovered, to my sharp vexation, the ephemeral nature of fame.
I was generally spared this sort of disappointment. At home, the slightest incident became the subject of vast discussions; my stories were listened to with lavish attention, and my witticisms were widely circulated. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and a host of other relatives guaranteed my continuing importance. In addition, a whole race of supernatural beings were for ever bent over me, I was given to understand, in attitudes of divine solicitude. As soon as I could walk, Mama had taken me to church: she had shown me, in wax, in plaster, and painted on the walls, portraits of the Child Jesus, of God the Father, of the Virgin, and of the angels, one of which, like Louise, was assigned exclusively to my service. My heaven was constellated with a myriad benevolent eyes.
Here below, Mama’s sister and mother tended to my physical needs. Grandmama had rosy cheeks, white hair, and trembly diamond ear-rings; she sucked wine-gum pastilles, hard and round as boot buttons, whose translucent colours enchanted me; I loved her because she was old; and I loved Aunt Lili because she was young: she lived with her parents, like a little girl, and I felt she was closer to me than the other adults. Red-faced, bald-headed, his chin daubed with a prickly, frothy grey scum, grandpa used to dance me dutifully up and down on his foot, but his voice was so gruff one never knew whether he was speaking in fun or in anger. I lunched with them every Thursday: rissoles, blanquette, ‘shape’ – known in our family as ‘floating island’ – grandmama always had a treat for me. After the meal grandpapa would doze in a tapestry armchair, and I, underneath the table, played the sort of games that make no noise. Then he would go out, and grandmama would bring out of the cupboard the metal humming-top into which we slipped, while it was spinning, circles of multi-coloured cardboard: in the backside of a lead figure she called ‘Mister Skitters’, she would light a white capsule out of which poured long coils of twisting brown matter. She played dominoes with me, and beggar-my-neighbour and spillikins. I felt stifled in that dining-room, which was as overcrowded as an antique dealer’s back shop; not an inch of wall was left bare: there were tapestries, porcelain plates, dingy oil paintings; a stuffed turkey hen displayed on a heap of very green cabbages; the side tables were covered with velvet and plush and lace; the aspidistras imprisoned in burnished copper flower-pot bowls filled
me with sadness.
Sometimes Aunt Lili took me out; I don’t know how it happened, but on several occasions she took me to a horse show. One afternoon, sitting beside her in the stands at Issy-les-Moulineaux, I saw biplanes and monoplanes see-sawing through the sky. We got on well together. One of my earliest and most pleasant memories is of the time we stayed at Châteauvillain in the Haute-Marne, with one of grandmama’s sisters. Old Aunt Alice, having lost long ago her husband and daughter, was mouldering slowly away, in a deaf and lonely old age, inside a great house surrounded by a huge garden. The little town, with its narrow streets, its low houses, looked as if it had come straight out of one of my fairy-story books; the shutters, in which trefoil and heart shapes had been cut, were held back against the walls by hooks representing little figures; the door knockers were hands; a monumental gate opened on a park in which there were fallow deer; wild honeysuckle wreathed itself round a ruined stone tower. The old ladies of the town made a great fuss of me. Mademoiselle Élise gave me gingerbread hearts; Mademoiselle Marthe had a magic mouse in a glass box: you wrote a question on a card and pushed it through a slot: the mouse spun round and round, then pointed its nose at a certain compartment in the box, in which was the answer to the question, printed on a slip of paper. The thing that amazed me most of all was the eggs with designs drawn on them in charcoal which were laid by Doctor Masse’s hens; I picked them up with my own hands, which allowed me to reply, rather smartly, to a sceptical little friend: ‘But I picked them up with my own two hands!’ I liked the neatly trimmed yews in Aunt Alice’s garden, the sacramental odour of box, and, in a thatched arbour, an object as delightfully equivocal as a watch made of raw meat – a rock which was also a table, a stone table. One morning there was a thunderstorm; I was playing with Aunt Lili in the dining-room when the house was struck by lightning; it was a serious accident, which filled me with pride: every time something happened to me, I had the feeling that I was at last someone. I enjoyed an even more subtle satisfaction. On the wall of the outside water closets clematis was growing; one morning, Aunt Alice called me to her in her dry, squeaky voice; a flower was lying on the ground; she accused me of having picked it. Picking flowers in the garden was a crime whose gravity I was well aware of; but I hadn’t done it, and I denied the accusation. Aunt Alice didn’t believe me. Aunt Lili defended me with vigour. She was the representative of my parents, and my only judge. Aunt Alice, with her speckled old face, belonged to the race of wicked fairies who persecute little children; I witnessed with great complacency the struggle waged for my benefit by the forces of good against the forces of error and injustice. In Paris my parents and grandparents indignantly took up arms in my defence, and I was able to savour the triumph of virtue.
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.