At the end of July I went away on holiday. This time I discovered a new aspect of sexual life which was neither a calm sensual delight nor a disturbing deviation from common sense: it was more like childish depravity.
My Uncle Maurice, having existed entirely on fresh green salad for two or three years, had died of stomach cancer after the most atrocious sufferings. My aunt and Madeleine had mourned him long and loud. But eventually they found consolation and life at La Grillière became much gayer than it had been in the past. Robert was able to issue invitations freely to his friends. The scions of the local gentry had just discovered the motor-car and from as far as fifty miles away they would meet to go hunting and dancing. That year Robert was courting a young beauty of about twenty-five who was spending her holidays in a neighbouring town and was obviously dead-set on getting married; Yvonne came to La Grillière nearly every day; she rejoiced in a motley wardrobe; she had loads of hair, and such a fixed, unchanging smile that I was never quite able to decide whether she was deaf or daft. One afternoon in the drawing-room, where the dust-sheets had been removed at last from the furniture, her mother sat down at the piano, and Yvonne, dressed as a Spanish gipsy dancer, plied a fan and rolled her eyes and performed so-called Spanish dances surrounded by a circle of giggling young men and women. After this Andalusian idyll, there were more and more parties at La Grillière and at neighbouring houses. I enjoyed them like anything. Our parents did not take part in them; we could laugh and make as much of a rumpus as we liked. There were parlour games, musical chairs, round dances, and farandoles: dancing became just a game like anything else and no longer upset me. I even found one of my partners very charming; he was a medical student in his last year. Once, in a near-by country house, we stayed awake until dawn; we concocted onion soup in the kitchen; we went in a motor-car to the foot of Mont Gargan which we climbed to see the sunrise; we drank bowls of fresh milk and coffee at an inn; it was my first all-night do. In my letters to Zaza I told her of all this debauchery and she seemed a little scandalized that I should be taking so much pleasure in it and that my mother should have allowed me to. Neither my own virginity nor that of my sister was ever in danger; we were known as ‘the babes’; obviously still a pair of innocents, sex-appeal was not our strong point. Yet the conversations that went on simply crackled with allusions and suggestions whose licentiousness shocked me. Madeleine told us that on our outings and at parties ‘all kinds of things’ went on in motor-cars and behind bushes. The young ladies were careful to remain young ladies. But Yvonne neglected to take this elementary precaution, and Robert’s friends, who one after the other had done what they liked with her, were obliging enough to warn my cousin, and the marriage did not take place. The other girls knew the rules of the game, and stuck to them; but their prudence did not mean that they were unable to enjoy some very agreeable interludes. Doubtless these were not altogether illicit: those girls who were over-scrupulous trotted off to confession next morning; then, their souls washed free of sin, they could go on being themselves again. I should have very much liked to find out how it was that when two mouths came in contact people got voluptuous feelings: often, looking at the lips of a young man or a young woman, I would feel amazed, just as when I used to gaze at the live rail in the Métro or at a forbidden book – what could it be? The information Madeleine proffered was always rather odd: she explained to me that physical pleasure depends on one’s personal tastes: her friend Nini couldn’t do anything unless her partner kissed or tickled the soles of her feet. I wondered, with sickening curiosity, whether my own body contained hidden springs from which one day unpredictable sensations would suddenly leap to life.
Not for anything in the world would I have indulged in even the most harmless experiment. The behaviour which Madeleine described I found revolting. Love, in my view, had nothing to do with the body; but I would not allow that the body should find release in furtive fumblings from which all love was absent. I didn’t take my intransigence in this matter as far as Antoine Redier, the editor of the Revue Française where my father worked, who had in one of his novels drawn the touching portrait of a really young woman: she had once allowed a man to steal a kiss, and, rather than tell her fiancé of this dastardly act, she gave him up. I thought this story was a scream. But when one of my friends, the daughter of a general, told me, not without a certain sadness, that every time she went out dancing at least one of her partners kissed her, I blamed her for letting him. I thought it was sad, incongruous, and after all quite wrong to surrender one’s lips to just anybody. Doubtless one of the reasons for my prudery lay in the disgust, mingled with terror, that the grown male usually inspires in virgins; above all I dreaded my own feelings and their unpredictable caprices; the disturbance I had felt during the dancing class exasperated me because it had come on without my wanting it to; I couldn’t allow myself to think that by a mere contact, a pressure, a squeeze, I could be bowled over by the first man who wanted to take advantage of me. The day would come when I would swoon in the arms of a man: but I would choose the moment and my decision would be justified by the violence of my love. On this rationalist self-sufficiency were superimposed the myths I had been taught. I had cherished that immaculate host, my soul; my memory was still full of images of mud-stained ermine, of trampled lilies; if physical pleasure was not transmuted by the fires of passionate love, it was a defilement. On the other hand, I was an extremist; with me, it had to be ‘all, or nothing’. If I loved a man, it would be for ever, and I would surrender myself to him entirely, body and soul, heart and head, past, present, and future. I refused to tamper with emotions and sensations which had no place in this scheme. To tell the truth I had no opportunity to test the firmness of these principles, because no seducer came along to try to get round them.
My behaviour conformed to the morality implicit in my environment; but with one important exception; I insisted that men should be subject to the same laws as women. Aunt Germaine had complained to my parents, in veiled terms, that Jacques knew too much about life. My father, the majority of writers, and the universal consensus of opinion encouraged young men to sow their wild oats. When the time came, they would marry a young woman of their own social class; but in the meanwhile it was quite in order for them to amuse themselves with girls from the lowest ranks of society – women of easy virtue, young milliners’ assistants, work-girls, sewing-maids, shop-girls. This custom made me feel sick. It had been driven into me that the lower classes have no morals: the misconduct of a laundry-woman or a flower-girl therefore seemed to me to be so natural that it didn’t even shock me; I felt a certain sympathy for those poor young women whom novelists endowed with such touching virtues. Yet their love was always doomed from the start; one day or other, according to his whim or convenience, their lover would throw them over for a well-bred young lady. I was a democrat and a romantic; I found it revolting that, just because he was a man and had money, he should be authorized to play around with a girl’s heart. On the other hand, I was up in arms in defence of the pure-hearted fiancée with whom I identified myself. I saw no reason why my future partner in life should permit himself liberties which I wouldn’t allow myself. Our love would only be inevitable and complete if he had saved himself for me as I had saved myself for him. Moreover, our sexual life, and that of the whole world, should be in its very essence a serious affair; otherwise I should be forced to change my own attitude, and as I was at the moment unable to do so, I should have been thrown into the greatest confusion. Therefore, despite public opinion, I persisted in my view that both sexes should observe the same rules of chastity and continence.
*
At the end of September, I spent a week with a friend. Zaza had occasionally invited me to Laubardon; the difficult journey and my tender age had always militated against accepting. But now I was seventeen, and Mama agreed to put me on a train which would take me from Paris direct to Joigny, where my hosts would come to meet me. It was the first time I had travelled alone; I had put m
y hair up, I was wearing a little grey felt hat, I was proud of my independence, and slightly worried: at every station I was on the lookout: I should not have liked to find myself alone in a compartment with a strange man. Thérèse was waiting for me on my arrival. She was a melancholy adolescent who had lost her father and led an existence of perpetual mourning with her mother and half a dozen elder sisters. Pious and sentimental, she had decorated her room with yards and yards of billowing white muslin; Zaza hadn’t been able to suppress a smile when she saw it. Thérèse envied me my comparative freedom and I believe that to her I was the incarnation of the gay outside world. She spent the summer in a huge brick château, rather grand, but very gloomy, surrounded by magnificent forests. In the high timber and on the flanks of hills covered with vineyards I discovered an entirely new kind of autumn: violet, orange, scarlet, with great splashes of gold all over it. When we went for walks, we talked about our studies and the new academic year that was about to begin: Thérèse had obtained permission to attend a few lectures on Latin and literature with me. I was determined to work hard. Papa would have liked me to take both literature and law, ‘which would always come in useful’, but I had skimmed through the Napoleonic Code at Meyrignac and this had put me off the study of law. Then my science teacher was urging me to try for the general mathematics paper, and I liked the idea: I would prepare for this certificate at the Institut Catholique. As for literature, it had been decided, at the instigation of Monsieur Mabille, that we would follow lectures in a college at Neuilly run by Madame Daniélou; in this way our connexions with the Sorbonne would be reduced to the minimum. Mama had had a talk with Mademoiselle Lambert, Madame Daniélou’s principal assistant: if I went on working hard, I could easily go on to take my degree. I received a letter from Zaza: Mademoiselle Lejeune had written to her mother, warning her of the frightful crudities in the Greek and Latin classics; Madame Mabille had replied that she was more afraid of the influences that unbridled romanticism might have upon a young girl’s imagination than of the healthy realism of the classics. Robert Garric, who was to be our literature professor, an ardent Catholic of a spiritual probity that was above suspicion, had assured Monsieur Mabille that it was possible to take a degree without being damned eternally. And so all my dearest wishes were being realized: a new life was opening out before me, but I would still be sharing it with Zaza.
A new life; a different life: I was even more excited than on the eve of my first day at school. Lying on dead leaves, my eyes dazed by the passionate colours of the vineyards, I kept repeating those austere words: degree, doctorate. And all barriers, all prison walls were being broken down. I was moving forwards, under an open sky, across the reality of life. The future was no longer just an impossible dream: I was touching it now. There would be four or five years of study, and then a whole way of life which I would build up with my own hands. My life would be a beautiful story come true, a story I would make up as I went along.
BOOK THREE
I INAUGURATED my new existence by ascending the stairs to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. I took my seat, in the section reserved ‘for ladies only’, at a large table covered, like those in the Cours Désir, with black imitation leather, and I plunged straight into The Human Comedy and The Memoirs of a Man of Quality. Opposite me, her face shadowed by a huge hat covered with birds, a middle-aged lady was looking through old volumes of The Official Gazette; she was muttering and laughing to herself. In those days, anyone could use the library; all kinds of queer people and near-tramps used to take refuge there; they would talk to themselves, hum snatches of song, and gnaw at dry crusts of bread; there was one who used to walk up and down wearing a paper hat. I felt very far removed from the ‘lecture-study room’ at my old school: at last I had flung myself into the hurly-burly of real life. ‘This is it! I’m a student now!’ I gleefully kept reminding myself. I was wearing a tartan dress; it was new and made to measure, but I had taken up the hem myself; as I went about the library consulting the catalogue I felt I must be looking simply stunning.
On the syllabus that year were Lucretius, Juvenal, the Heptameron, and Diderot; if I had still been as ignorant as my parents would have liked on certain matters, the shock would have been a brutal one: they realized this. One afternoon, when I was alone in the study, my mother came in and sat down opposite me; she hesitated, blushed, and then said: ‘There are certain things you ought to know!’ I blushed too: ‘I know all about that,’ I hurriedly replied. She displayed no curiosity as to where I had obtained my knowledge, and to our mutual relief the conversation was not pursued any further. A few days later she called me into her room and asked me, with some embarrassment, ‘how I stood from the religious point of view’. My heart began to pound: ‘Well,’ I said, ‘for some time now I haven’t believed in God.’ Her face fell: ‘My poor darling!’ she said. She went to shut the door, so that my sister might not overhear the rest of our conversation; in a pleading voice she embarked on a demonstration of the truth of God’s existence; then, with a helpless gesture, her eyes full of tears, she stopped suddenly. I was sorry to have hurt her, but I felt greatly relieved: at last I would be able to live without a mask.
One evening as I got off the bus I saw Jacques’ car in front of the house; he had bought a small one a few months before. I took the stairs four at a time. Jacques was coming to see us less frequently than he used to do; my parents couldn’t forgive his literary tastes, and probably he was rather sick of their heavy banter. According to my father, it was only the idols of his youth who had any talent; only intellectual snobbery could explain the success of modern French and foreign authors. He put Alphonse Daudet far above Dickens; whenever there was talk of the Russian novel he would despairingly shrug his shoulders. One evening, a student from the Conservatoire who was rehearsing with him a play by Monsieur Jeannot entitled Return to Earth impetuously declared: ‘One must bow very low to the genius of Ibsen!’ My father burst out laughing: ‘You won’t get me bowing to him!’ Whether English, Slav, or Scandinavian, he thought all works of art from abroad were boring, badly constructed, and childish. As for the avantgarde writers and painters, they were cynical speculators in human folly. My father appreciated the naturalism of certain young actors like Gaby Morlay, Fresnay, Blanchard, and Charles Boyer. But he thought the experiments of Copeau, Dullin, and Jouvet were quite uncalled-for, and he detested ‘those Bolshies’, the Pitoëffs. He thought that anyone who didn’t share his opinions was un-French and unpatriotic. So Jacques steered clear of discussion and argument; he was talkative, and a great charmer; he would exchange light banter with my father, and pay court to my mother in the gayest fashion: but he took care never to say anything important. I regretted this very much, because whenever by chance he dropped his guard he would say things that intrigued and interested me; I no longer found him at all pretentious; he knew far more than I did about the world, about human affairs, painting, and literature; I should have liked him to give me the benefit of his experience. That evening, as usual, he treated me like a little girl; but there was such kindness in his voice and in his smiles that I felt very glad simply to have seen him again. When I laid my head on my pillow that night, my eyes filled with tears. ‘I weep, therefore I love,’ I told myself, with rapturous melancholy. I was seventeen: it was the age for that sort of thing.