I enjoyed my examinations. In the amphitheatres of the Sorbonne I rubbed shoulders with boys and girls who had been educated in schools and colleges and lycées which I had never even heard of: I was struggling free from the Cours Désir and facing up to the realities of life. Having been assured by my teachers that I had done well in the written examination, I approached the oral with complete self-confidence and took a great fancy to myself in my unfashionably long dress of sky-blue voile. In front of those important gentlemen who had gathered on purpose to evaluate my merits, I regained the self-conceit of childhood. The examiner in literature particularly flattered me by talking in quite a conversational manner; he asked me if I were a relative of Roger de Beauvoir; I told him that it was only a pseudonym; he questioned me about Ronsard; as I sat there displaying my learning I was admiring all the time the fine, thoughtful head which he inclined in my direction: at last, I was face to face with one of those superior men whose approbation I so earnestly desired! But in the Latin-modern languages oral the examiner gave me an ironic greeting: ‘Well, mademoiselle! Have you come to pick up a few more diplomas?’ I was rather disconcerted, and I suddenly realized that my performances might have appeared somewhat comical; but I held my own. I was given a pass with ‘distinction’, and my old school-marms, delighted to have this success to their credit, made much of me. My parents were over the moon. Jacques, peremptory as ever, had declared: ‘You must pass with distinction, or else not at all.’ He gave me his warmest congratulations. Zaza passed also, but at that period I was too much occupied with myself to bother much about her.
Clotilde and Marguerite sent me affectionate letters; my mother rather spoilt my pleasure in them by bringing them to me already opened and regaling me with a full description of their contents; but this custom was so well-established that I made no protest. By then we were at Valleuse, in Normandy, staying with some very prim and proper cousins. I didn’t like their place: it was too well-groomed; there were no sunken lanes, no woods; the meadows were surrounded by barbed wire. One evening I crawled under a fence and lay down in the grass: a woman came up to me and asked if I wasn’t feeling well. I returned to the garden, but I felt stifled there. With my father away, Mama and my cousins were all together like birds of a feather, all professing the same highly devout principles without asking any dissident voice to disturb their perfect harmony; speaking freely of spiritual matters in my presence, they seemed to involve me in a complicity which I didn’t dare to challenge: I had the feeling that they were doing violence to my soul. We went by car to Rouen; the afternoon was spent visiting churches, of which there were very many, each one unleashing delirious admiration; the stone tracery in Saint Maclou caused their enthusiasm to rise to a paroxysm of ecstasy: what wonderful work! what skill! what delicacy! I kept my peace. ‘What! You don’t think it’s beautiful?’ they asked me, scandalized. I found it neither beautiful nor ugly: I felt nothing at all. They urged me to look again. I gritted my teeth; I refused to let them thrust words into my mouth. All eyes were turned reproachfully upon my stubbornly silent lips; anger and distress had brought me to the verge of tears. In the end my cousin smoothed things over by explaining fatuously that at my age young people were often in a contrary mood; my torment was over.
Back in the Limousin, I found again the freedom I needed. When I had spent the whole day alone or with my sister, I was quite ready to play mah-jong with the family in the evening. I got my first real taste of philosophy by reading Intellectual Life, by Père Sertilanges, and Ollé-Laprune’s Moral Certainty which bored me considerably.
My father had never tackled the study of philosophy; in my family, as in Zaza’s, it was looked upon with suspicion. ‘What a shame! You talk such good sense, and now they’re going to teach you to talk nonsense!’ one of Zaza’s uncles had told her. But Jacques had been very interested in it. As for me, my hopes were always raised by anything new. I awaited the return to school with impatience.
Psychology, logic, moral philosophy, metaphysics: this was Abbé Trécourt’s programme, four hours a week. All he did was to hand us back our essays, dictate a fair copy, and make us recite the chapter we had been asked to learn in the text book. Whatever the problem was, the author, the Révérend Père Lahr, made a rapid summary of human errors and instructed us in the truth according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Nor did the Abbé himself bother much about the finer points of the subject. In order to confute idealistic theories he would cite the evidence of the sense of touch, and use this as an argument against the possibly illusory nature of human sight. He would pound on the table as he stated: ‘What is, is!’ The reading list he gave us was quite unappetizing: Ribot’s Attention, Gustave Lebon’s Crowd Psychology, and Fouillée’s The Power of Ideas. Nevertheless I conceived a passion for philosophy. I found the problems that had intrigued me in childhood treated in books by serious gentlemen; suddenly the grown-up universe was no longer indisputably the only one; there was another side to it, a shady side; doubts were allowed to creep in: if only we went far enough, there’d be nothing left of it! We did not, of course, go too far, but even so it was rather extraordinary, after twelve years of dreary dogmatism, to find a discipline which asked questions and asked them of me. For suddenly it was I myself who was involved in these matters, and until then I had only been treated to commonplaces, as if I were a person of no account. Take my mind – where did it come from? Where did it get its powers? Condillac’s statue made me pause, and gave me as dizzy flights of speculation as the old jacket I had when I was seven years old. I was flabbergasted to see the coordinates of the universe, too, begin to vacillate: Henri Poincaré’s speculations on the relativity of space and time and measurement plunged me into infinities of meditation. I was deeply impressed by the pages in which he evokes the passage of mankind through the universe, the blind universe: no more than a flash in the dark, but a flash that is everything! For a long time I was haunted by the image of this great fire blazing down the sightless dark.
The thing that attracted me about philosophy was that it went straight to essentials. I had never liked fiddling detail; I perceived the general significance of things rather than their singularities, and I preferred understanding to seeing; I had always wanted to know everything; philosophy would allow me to appease this desire, for it aimed at total reality; philosophy went right to the heart of truth and revealed to me, instead of an illusory whirlwind of facts or empirical laws, an order, a reason, a necessity in everything. The sciences, literature, and all the other disciplines seemed to me to be very poor relations to philosophy.
Yet as day followed after day we did not seem to be learning anything very wonderful. But we managed to keep boredom at bay by the tenacity with which Zaza and I stated our opinions in class discussions. There was a particularly lively debate on the subject of the love which we call platonic and the love which we call – well, better just call it love. One of our classmates had cited Tristan and Isolde as platonic lovers. At this, Zaza burst out laughing: ‘Platonic! Tristan and Isolde! Not on your life!’ she declared, with a knowing air that disconcerted the whole class. The poor Abbé brought the lesson to a close by exhorting us all to make a ‘sensible’ match. ‘After all,’ he argued, ‘you don’t marry a young man simply because the colour of his tie suits him.’ We decided to let him get away with that ridiculous remark. But we were not always quite so accommodating; when a subject interested us we discussed it with great intensity. We respected things, and believed that words like patriotism, duty, good, and evil had a meaning; we were simply trying to define that meaning; we weren’t trying to destroy anything, but we liked to argue in a rational way. We thought it was bad enough to be called ‘wrong-headed’. Mademoiselle Lejeune, who was present at all our philosophy lessons, declared that we were treading a dangerous and downward path. In the middle of our final year the Abbé had a little talk with each of us individually, and beseeched us not to let our hearts shrivel up; if we did, we would in the end resemble our schoolmistresses: th
ey were saintly women, but it would be better if we did not follow in their footsteps. I was touched by his well-meant words, surprised by his aberration: I assured him that I had no intention of entering the religious confraternity. The thought of it filled me with a disgust which surprised even Zaza; despite her mockery, she still retained some affection for our old school-marms and I rather scandalized her when I told her that I would leave them without the slightest regret.
My school life was coming to an end, and something else was going to begin: what would it be? In Les Annales I read a lecture which set me day-dreaming; a former student at the teachers’ training college for women at Sèvres was recalling her experiences there: she described the gardens in which beautiful young women, athirst for knowledge, went walking by moonlight, the sound of their voices mingling with the murmur of fountains. But my mother didn’t like the idea of the École Normale Supérieure at Sèvres. And when I came to think about it, I hardly wanted to shut myself up with a lot of women away from Paris. So what should I do? I dreaded the arbitrary side of any choice. My father, who at the age of fifty had the painful prospect of an uncertain future ahead of him, wanted me to have some sort of security above everything else; he thought I should go into the Civil Service, which would provide me with a fixed salary and a pension on retirement. Someone recommended the School of Palaeography and Librarianship – l’École des Chartes. I went with my mother to an interview with a lady behind the scenes at the Sorbonne. We went along seemingly endless corridors lined with books; here and there were doors leading to offices full of filing cabinets. As a child I had always dreamed of working in this dusty ante-room of learning, and today I felt as if I were penetrating into the Holy of Holies. The lady we went to see described to us the attractions and also the difficulties of librarianship; I was put off by the thought of having to learn Sanskrit; I wasn’t interested in dry-as-dust erudition. What I should have liked was to continue my study of philosophy. I had read in an illustrated magazine an article about a woman philosopher who was called Mademoiselle Zanta: she had taken her doctorate; she had been photographed, in a grave and thoughtful posture, sitting at her desk; she lived with a young niece whom she had adopted: she had thus succeeded in reconciling her intellectual life with the demands of feminine sensibility. How I should love to have such flattering things written one day about me! In those days the women who had a degree or a doctorate in philosophy could be counted on the fingers of one hand: I wanted to be one of those pioneers. From a practical point of view, the only career that would be open to me if I had a degree in philosophy was teaching: I had nothing against that. My father did not object to this plan; but he wouldn’t hear of my giving private tuition in pupils’ homes: I would have to get a post in a lycée. Why not? This solution was very much to my taste, and also set his mind at rest. My mother went in fear and trembling to tell my teachers of my decision; their faces went rigid with disapproval. They had given their lives to combating secular institutions and to them a state school was nothing better than a licensed brothel. In addition, they told my mother that the study of philosophy mortally corrupts the soul: after one year at the Sorbonne, I would lose both my faith and my good character. Mama felt worried. As a degree in classics held out greater possibilities – or so my father thought – and as there was a possibility that Zaza might be allowed to follow a few of the courses, I agreed to sacrifice philosophy for literature. But I was still determined to teach in a lycée. How scandalous! Eleven years of sermons, careful grooming, and systematic indoctrination, and now I was biting the hand that had fed me! It was with complete unconcern that I read in my teachers’ eyes their opinion of my ingratitude, my unworthiness, my treachery: I had fallen into the hands of Satan.
In July, I passed in elementary mathematics and philosophy. The Abbé’s teaching had been so feeble that my dissertation, which he would have marked at 16, only scraped through with 11. I made up for this in my science papers. On the eve of the oral, my father took me to the Théâtre de Dix-Heures, where I saw Dorin, Colline, and Noël-Noël; I enjoyed myself immensely. How glad I was that I had finished with the Cours Désir! Yet a few days later, finding myself alone in the apartment, I was overcome by a strange uneasiness; I stood planted in the middle of the hall, feeling as utterly lost as if I had been transported to another planet! No family, no friends, no ties, no hope. My heart had died and the world was empty: could such an emptiness ever be filled? I was afraid. And then time started to flow again.
*
There was one respect in which my education had failed completely: despite all the books I had read, I was the most awful greenhorn. I was about sixteen when an aunt took my sister and me to the Salle Pleyel to see a film called La Croisière jaune. The house was full, and we had to stand at the back. I was surprised when I began to feel hands fumbling round my thin woollen coat, feeling me through the material; I thought somebody must be trying to pick my pockets or steal my handbag; I held on tightly to it; the hands continued to rub against me: it was absurd. I didn’t know what to do or say: I just let them go on. When the film was over and the lights went up, a man wearing a brown trilby sniggered and pointed me out to a friend of his, who also started to snigger. They were laughing at me: why? I couldn’t make it out at all.
A little later, someone – I can’t remember who – sent me to a religious book-shop near Saint-Sulpice to purchase an article for a church youth club. A timid young fair-haired shop-assistant, wearing a long black overall, came forward and politely asked what I required. He walked away towards the back of the shop, beckoning me to follow; I went and stood beside him. He opened his overall, exposing something pink and erect; his face was devoid of expression and for a moment I stood there nonplussed; then I turned on my heels and fled. His preposterous gesture bothered me less than Charles VI’s display of madness on the stage of the Odéon, but it left me with the feeling that the oddest things could happen to me without any warning. After that, whenever I found myself alone with a strange man – in a shop or on a platform of the Métro – I always felt a little apprehensive.
At the beginning of my philosophy course, Madame Mabille persuaded Mama to let me take dancing lessons. Once a week Zaza and I would go to a dancing academy where girls and boys, under the supervision of an elderly lady, practised dance-steps. In those days I used to get myself up in a dress of sky-blue silk stockinette handed down to me from my cousin Annie, which fitted where it touched. All make-up was forbidden me. In our family, only my cousin Madeleine defied this ban on cosmetics. When she reached the age of sixteen she began to tart herself up discreetly. Papa, Mama, and Aunt Marguerite would point scandalized fingers at her: ‘Madeleine! You’ve been putting powder on!’ ‘No, Aunt, I swear I haven’t!’ she would protest coquettishly, in an affected, babyish tone of voice. Along with the grown-ups, I laughed at her: any kind of artifice was always ‘ridiculous’. Every morning they would harp on the same theme: ‘It’s no use trying to deny it, Madeleine, you’ve been putting powder on again; you can see it a mile off.’ One day – she was then eighteen or nineteen – she got fed-up and retorted: ‘Well, why shouldn’t I?’ She had finally admitted it: triumph for the grown-ups! But her reply gave me something to think about. In any case, we were far from living in a state of nature. In our family, the grown-ups claimed that ‘make-up spoils the complexion’. But my sister and I often remarked to one another when we saw our aunts’ raddled features that their prudence had not brought them any great reward. But I didn’t attempt to argue them into letting me use cosmetics. So I used to arrive at the dancing academy in a dowdy old frock, with badly brushed hair, well scrubbed cheeks, and a shiny nose. I couldn’t do anything with my body; I couldn’t even swim or ride a bicycle: I felt as awkward and self-conscious as the day I had tried to show off my charms in the role of a Spanish dancer. I began to detest those dancing lessons, but for another reason. When my partner held me in his arms and held me to his chest, I felt a funny sensation that was rather like having butt
erflies in the stomach, but which I didn’t find quite so easy to forget. When I got back home, I would throw myself in the leather arm chair, overpowered by a curious languor that I couldn’t put a name to and that made me want to burst into tears. On the pretext that I had too much work, I gave up going to the dancing class.
Zaza was rather more sophisticated. ‘When I think that our mothers are watching us dance, and never suspecting a thing, poor innocents!’ she said to me one day. She used to tease her sister Lili and her older girl cousins: ‘Go on! You’re not going to tell me you’d enjoy it just as much if you were dancing among yourselves or with your brothers! ‘I thought she must connect the pleasure of dancing with something I had only the vaguest notions of – flirting. At the age of twelve, I had in my ignorance had an inkling of what physical desire and hugging and squeezing meant, but at seventeen, though in theory I was much better informed, I didn’t even know what the trouble was all about.
I don’t know whether there was a certain amount of self-deception in my ingenuousness: whatever it was, sexuality frightened me. Only one person, Titite, had ever made me realize that physical love may be enjoyed as the most natural thing in the world; her exuberant physique knew no shame, and when she used to recall the first night of her marriage, the desire that shone from her eyes made her even more beautiful. Aunt Simone insinuated that she had ‘gone too far’ with her fiancé; Mama wouldn’t hear of it; I found their arguments quite beside the point; whether married or not, the embraces of these two good-looking young people did not shock me at all: they loved one another, and that was enough. But this isolated example was not sufficient to break down the taboos that had been erected round me. Not only had I never – since our holiday at Villers-set my foot on a bathing-beach or entered a public swimming-bath or gymnasium, so that in my mind nudity was confused with indecency; but in the environment in which I lived no open reference to bodily functions and no untoward physical act was allowed to tear aside the veil drawn over sex by custom and convention. How could adults, who kept their bodies so carefully covered up, and who restricted themselves to a cautious public exchange of words and gestures, how could they suddenly abandon themselves to the crude indecency of animal instincts and pleasures? During my last year at school, Marguerite de Théricourt came to tell Mademoiselle Lejeune of her forthcoming marriage: she was marrying a rich titled business associate of her father’s, a man much older than herself, whom she had known since she was a baby. Everyone congratulated her, and she radiated a candid happiness. The word ‘marriage’ exploded in my brain and I was even more dumbfounded than the day when, in the middle of a lesson, a schoolmate had begun to bark like a dog. How could one superimpose the image of a pink, soft body lying with a naked man upon this well-behaved young lady with the studied smile standing there in a smart hat and neatly buttoned gloves? I didn’t go as far as to undress Marguerite in my mind’s eye: but I saw her in a long, transparent nightdress, her hair spread out over the pillow, offering up her body. Such inconsequential immodesty verged on madness. Either sex was a brief disorder of the brain, or Marguerite was not the same well-bred young person who was escorted everywhere by a chaperone; appearances were deceptive, and the world I had been taught to believe in was a pack of lies. I was inclined to accept the latter hypothesis, but I had been deceived, and had deceived myself, too consistently and too long; my doubts could not disperse the illusion I had got so used to: the real Marguerite was the one before me wearing her hat and gloves. Whenever I imagined her half-naked and exposed to the eyes of a man, I felt myself whirled away in a hot storm of sensations which shattered every normal standard of morality and good sense.