I thought I saw a way of raising myself in Jacques’ esteem. He knew Robert Garric, who lectured on French literature at the Institut Sainte-Marie. Garric was the founder and director of a movement called Les Équipes Sociales whose aim was to bring culture to the lower social classes: Jacques was one of his adherents, and admired the man very much. If I could succeed in making my new professor take notice of me, he might praise me to Jacques, who might then stop regarding me only as an insignificant schoolgirl. Garric was just over thirty; he had thinning blond hair and spoke in a lovely manner; his voice had just a trace of Auvergne accent; his lecture-commentaries on Ronsard left me spellbound. I took infinite pains over my first essay for him, but only a Dominican nun, who wore ordinary clothes when she attended lectures, was complimented on her work; Zaza and I barely distinguished ourselves from the rest of the class: we both got eleven minus. Thérèse came a long way behind us.
The intellectual level at the Institut Sainte-Marie was much higher than that of the Cours Désir. Mademoiselle Lambert, who was in charge of the advanced students, filled me with respect. She had a degree in philosophy and was about thirty-five; a fringe of black hair gave a severe look to her face, in which her blue eyes had a piercing glitter. But I never had anything to do with her. I was a mere beginner in Greek, and I soon found out that my knowledge of Latin was very small: my professors took no notice of me. As for my fellow-students, I didn’t find them any gayer than my former school companions. They got free board and lodging in return for teaching and keeping order in the secondary classes. The majority of them, already rather long in the tooth, were bitterly aware that they would never marry; their only chance of one day leading a decent existence was to pass their examinations: this became an obsession with them. I tried to talk to one or two of them but they had nothing to say.
In November I began to prepare for the general mathematics paper at the Institut Catholique; the girls sat in the front rows, the boys at the back; to me they all seemed to have the same narrow-minded look on their faces. I was bored by the literature lectures at the Sorbonne; the professors merely repeated in a flat voice the facts they had long ago written in their doctoral theses; Fortunat Strowski would tell us about the plays he had seen during the past week; his jaded animation soon ceased to amuse me. To while away the time I would observe the young men and women students seated all round me on the amphitheatre benches: some of them intrigued and attracted me; when the lecture was over I would often follow with my eyes some unknown young woman whose elegance and grace astounded me: to whom was she going to offer that smile painted on her lips? Brushed in passing by these strange lives, I felt once more the intimate, obscure happiness that I had known as a child on the balcony of our flat in the boulevard Raspail. Only I didn’t dare speak to anyone, and nobody spoke to me.
Grandpapa died at the end of the autumn, after lingering on interminably; my mother shrouded herself in black crêpe and had all my clothes dyed black. This funereal get-up did not improve my appearance; it set me apart, and I felt it condemned me to an austere way of life that was beginning to weigh heavily upon my spirits. The students, both boys and girls, used to parade up and down the boulevard Saint-Michel in laughing gangs; they went to cafés, theatres, cinemas. As for me, after reading learned tomes and translating Catullus all day, I would spend the evenings doing mathematical problems. My parents, by helping to push me, not into marriage, but into a career, were breaking with tradition; nevertheless they still made me conform to it; there was never any question of letting me go anywhere without them, nor of releasing me from family duties.
During the past year, my principal amusement had been my meetings and my conversations with my friends; but now, apart from Zaza, they all bored me stiff. I went three or four times to the study-circle they attended under the supervision of the Abbé Trécourt, but the dreary inanity of the discussions drove me away. My old schoolmates hadn’t changed all that much; I hadn’t either; but before, we had been bound by a common endeavour: our studies; while now our lives were going separate ways; I was pushing forward and developing all the time, whereas they, in order to adapt themselves to their role of marriageable young girls, were beginning to grow dull and stupid. From the outset, I was being separated from them by the diverse paths our future was taking.
I soon had to admit that this year was not bringing me all I had banked on getting. Cut off from my past, I felt out of place; my life seemed out of joint, and I had still not discovered any really broad new horizons. Up to now, I had made the best of living in a cage, for I knew that one day – and each day brought it nearer – the door of the cage would open; now I had got out of the cage, and I was still inside. What a let-down! There was no longer any definite hope to sustain me; though this prison was one without bars, I couldn’t see any way out of it. Perhaps there was a way out; but where? And when would I find it? Every evening I carried the rubbish bin downstairs; as I emptied out the peelings, the ashes and waste paper into the communal refuse bin, I would look up inquiringly at the patch of sky above the little yard; I would pause at the entry; shop-windows were ablaze with light, cars were dashing along the street, passers-by were passing by; outside, the night was alive. Then I would go back upstairs, loathing the greasy feel of the empty rubbish bin’s handle. Whenever my parents went out to dinner, I would rush down into the street with my sister; we would wander aimlessly around, trying to catch an echo or a reflection of the brilliant festivities from which we were shut out.
My captivity seemed all the more unbearable because I no longer felt happy at home. Her eyes raised imploring heavenwards, my mother would pray for my salvation; she was always moaning about the error of my ways: we had completely lost touch with one another. At least I knew the reasons for her distress. But my father’s reticence astonished and wounded me much more. He should have been taking some interest in my work, in the progress I was making; he might, I thought, have talked to me in a friendly way about the authors I was studying: but he was merely indifferent, and even vaguely hostile, in his attitude towards me. My cousin Jeanne was far from intelligent, but she was very amiable, always smiling and polite; my father never tired of telling everyone that his brother had a delightful daughter; then he would give a sigh. I was very put out. I couldn’t understand what it was that had come between us and was to cast a heavy shadow over my youth.
*
In those days, people of my parents’ class thought it unseemly for a young lady to go in for higher education; to train for a profession was a sign of defeat. It goes without saying that my father was a vigorous anti-feminist: I have already mentioned that he relished the novels of Colette Yver; he considered that a woman’s place was in the home, that she should be an ornament to polite society. Of course, he admired Colette’s literary style and the acting of Simone, but in the same way as he appreciated the beauty of the great courtesans – from a distance; he would not have received them in his house. Before the war, his future had looked rosy; he was expecting to have a brilliant career, to make lucrative investments, and to marry off my sister and myself into high society. He was of the opinion that in order to shine in those exalted spheres a woman should not only be beautiful and elegant but should also be well-read and a good conversationalist; so he was pleased by my early scholastic successes. Physically, I was not without promise; if in addition I could be intelligent and cultured, I would be able to hold my own with ease in the very best society. But though my father liked intelligent and witty women, he had no time for bluestockings. When he announced: ‘My dears, you’ll never marry; you’ll have to work for your livings,’ there was bitterness in his voice. I believed he was being sorry for us; but in our hard-working futures he only saw his own failure; he was crying out against the injustice of a fate which condemned him to have daughters who could not keep up the social position he had given them.
He gave way to the inevitable. The war had ruined him, sweeping away all his dreams, destroying his myths, his self-justificati
ons, and his hopes. I was wrong to think he had resigned himself to the situation; he never stopped protesting against his changed condition. Above all else he prized good education and perfect manners; yet whenever I was with him in a restaurant, in the Métro, or in a train I always felt embarrassed by the loudness of his voice, his gesticulations, and his brutal indifference to the opinion of others; he was trying to show, by this aggressive exhibitionism, that he belonged to a superior class. In the days when he used to travel first class he used every refinement of politeness to prove how well-bred he was; but in third class he would go to the other extreme and ignore the most elementary rules of civility. Nearly everywhere he went he affected a manner that was both bewildered and aggressive, which was intended to signify that his true place was really elsewhere. In the trenches he had quite naturally spoken the same language as his fellows; he was always happy to remind us that one of them had said: ‘When Beauvoir says shit, it becomes a word fit for polite conversation.’ In order to prove his distinction, he began to say ‘shit’ more and more often. Now he rarely associated with people other than those he considered to be ‘common’, and indeed out-commoned the common; as he was no longer looked up to by his equals, he took a bitter pleasure in being looked down upon by his inferiors. On rare occasions – when we went to the theatre, and his friend from the Odéon introduced him to some well-known actress – he would recover all his old airs and graces. But for the rest of the time he succeeded so well in appearing a nonentity that in the end no one but himself could be expected to know he was anything else.
At home, he would bewail the hard times we were having; whenever my mother asked him for housekeeping money, he made a violent scene; he would complain particularly about the sacrifices his daughters imposed upon him: my sister and I had the feeling that we were making unwarranted demands upon his charity. If he showed such bitter impatience with my troubles in ‘the difficult age’, it was because he already had a deep-seated resentment against me. I was not just another burden to be borne: I was growing up to be the living incarnation of his own failure. The daughters of his friends, his brother, and his sister would be ‘ladies’: but not me. Of course, when I passed my school-leaving examinations he rejoiced in my success; it flattered him and lifted a load off his mind: I should have no difficulty in making a living. But I didn’t understand why such bitter vexation should cloud his happiness.
‘What a pity Simone wasn’t a boy: she could have gone to the Polytechnique!’ I had often heard my parents giving vent to this complaint. A student at the Military Academy of Artillery and Engineering, they felt, was already ‘someone’. But my sex debarred them from entertaining such lofty ambitions for me, and my father prudently envisaged a career in the Civil Service: yet he detested all government officials, whose taxes gobbled up his income, and he would tell me, with unconcealed resentment: ‘At any rate, you will have a pension!’ I made things worse for myself by expressing a desire to become a teacher: he approved my choice on practical grounds, but in his heart of hearts he was far from happy about it. He thought all teachers were low-minded pedagogues. At the Collège Stanislas one of his schoolfellows had been Marcel Bouteron, the great Balzac specialist; he used to speak of him with commiseration: he thought it ridiculous that one should spend one’s life writing arid works of scholarship. He made more serious charges against schoolteachers; they belonged to the dangerous sect that had stood in defence of Dreyfus: the intellectuals. Blinded by their book-learning, taking a stubborn pride in abstract knowledge and in their futile aspirations to universalism, they were sacrificing the concrete realities of race, country, class, family, and nationality to those crack-pot notions that would be the death of France and of civilization: the Rights of Man, pacifism, internationalism, and socialism. If I joined their ranks, would I not be adopting their ideas? My father’s native shrewdness turned me at once into a suspect. Later, I was surprised that, instead of prudently shunting my sister on to the same line as myself, he should have chosen for her the hazards of a career in art: he couldn’t bear to think that he was driving both his daughters into the enemy camp.
Soon as I would be a traitor to my class; I had already renounced the privileges of my sex, and that was something else my father could not be reconciled to; he was obsessed by the ‘well-bred young lady’ idea: it was a fixation. My cousin Jeanne was the incarnation of this ideal: she still believed that babies were found under cabbages. My father had attempted to keep me in a state of blissful ignorance; he used to say that even when I had reached the age of eighteen he would forbid me to read the Tales of François Coppée; he now accepted the fact that I read whatever I liked: but he couldn’t see much difference between a girl who ‘knew what’s what’ and the Bachelor Girl whose portrait Victor Marguerite had just drawn in a notorious book of that name. If I had only kept up the outward appearances, at least! He might have borne with an exceptional young woman for daughter if only she had taken pains not to appear in any way out of the ordinary: this I couldn’t do. I had left the awkward age behind, and once more I found myself gazing approvingly at my reflection in the mirror; but I cut a poor figure in society. My friends, including Zaza, played their worldly roles with ease; they put in an appearance on their mothers’ at-home days, served tea, smiled and smiled, and talked amiably about nothing; I found smiling difficult, I couldn’t turn on the charm, make cute remarks, or any kind of concession to polite chit-chat. My parents would hold up to me as examples ‘remarkably intelligent’ girls who nevertheless were brilliant ornaments to their mothers’ drawing-rooms. This used to exasperate me because I knew that their way of life had nothing in common with mine: they were mere amateurs; I was a professional. That year I was preparing for examinations in literature, Latin, and general mathematics, and I was learning Greek; I had set this heavy programme myself, for I found difficulties amusing: but precisely in order that I might be able to embark light-heartedly on such an undertaking, it was essential that my studies should not just represent an off-shoot of my life, but should be my entire life itself: the things people talked about did not interest me, I had no subversive ideas; in fact, I hardly had any ideas on anything; but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
On the whole, apart from when the news came that I had passed my exams, I was not an honour to my father; so he attached extreme importance to my diplomas and encouraged me to accumulate them. His insistence on this point convinced me that he was proud to have a brainy woman for a daughter; but the contrary was true: only the most extraordinary successes could have countered his dissatisfaction with me. If for example I had studied for three degrees at once, I would have become a sort of intellectual prodigy, a phenomenon who could not be judged by normal standards; my fate would no longer be a reflection of family failure, but could be explained away as the result of a strange and unaccountable gift.
I obviously didn’t realize this contradiction in my father’s personality: but I soon realized the one implicit in my own situation. I was obeying his wishes to the letter, and that seemed to anger him; he had destined me to a life of study, and yet I was being reproached with having my nose in a book all the time. To judge by his surly temper, you would think that I had gone against his wishes in embarking on a course that he had actually chosen for me. I kept wondering what I had done wrong; I felt unhappy and ill at ease, and nursed resentment in my heart.
*
The best part of the week was Garric’s lecture. I was beginning to admire him more and more. It was rumoured at Sainte-Marie that he could have had a brilliant career at the University; but he had not a scrap of personal ambition; he never finished his thesis and devoted himself body and soul to his Social Welfare Groups; he lived the life of an ascetic in a working-class house in Belleville. He used to give fairly frequent propaganda lectures, and through Jacques’ good offices my mother and I
were admitted to one of them. Jacques took us into a suite of drawing-rooms, richly furnished, in which rows and rows of red plush chairs with gilded woodwork were set out; he found us seats and went off to greet his acquaintances; he seemed to know everybody: how I envied him! It was hot, I was stifling in my mourning garments and I knew no one. Then Garric walked on to the platform; I forgot myself, and everything else; I was spellbound by the authority in his voice. He explained to us that at the age of twenty he had discovered in the trenches the joys of a comradeship which overcame all social barriers; when, after the armistice, he became a student again, he was determined not to be deprived of that comradeship; the segregation which in civilian life separates young middle-class men from working chaps was something he felt like a personal mutilation; besides, he believed that everybody has a right to culture. He believed firmly in the truth of what General Lyautey had said in one of his Moroccan speeches: that beyond all differences, there is a common denominator which links all men. On the basis of this concept, he decided to set up a system of exchanges between students and working-class youths which would release the former from the egotistical solitude and the latter from their ignorance. By learning to understand and love one another they would work side by side to bring the classes together. To loud applause, Garric stated that it is impossible for any kind of social progress to emerge from a conflict whose motive force was class hatred: progress would only come through friendship. He had roped in a few friends who helped him to organize the first cultural centre at Neuilly. They obtained support and subsidies and the movement began to grow: there were now ten thousand members in groups all over France, all young men and women, and two hundred teachers. Garric himself was a firm Roman Catholic, but he did not intend to turn the movement into a religious mission; there were unbelievers among his collaborators; he believed that men should help one another on the human level. At the end, in a voice charged with emotion, he claimed that if people are well-treated they will be good; by refusing to offer the hand of friendship to the lower classes the bourgeoisie were making a grave mistake whose consequences would fall upon their own heads.