The two major categories into which my universe was divided were Good and Evil. I inhabited the region of the good, where happiness and virtue reigned in indissoluble unity. I experienced certain forms of pain, it is true, that seemed to me unmerited: I sometimes bumped my head or grazed my elbow; an outbreak of eczema disfigured my face: a doctor cauterized my pimples with silver nitrate and I yelled. But these accidents were quickly forgotten, and they did not upset my belief that man experiences joy or pain according to his merits.
Living in such intimate contact with virtue, I knew that there were degrees and shades of goodness. I was a good little girl, and I had my faults; my Aunt Alice was always praying; she would surely go to heaven, and yet she had been very unjust to me. Among the people to whom I owed love and respect, there were some whom my parents censured for some reason or other. Even grandpapa and grandmama did not escape their criticism: they had fallen out with some cousins whom Mama often visited and whom I found very nice. I disliked the very word ‘quarrel’: why did people quarrel? and how? The word ‘wrangle’, too, unpleasantly reminded me of tangled hanks of wool. Wrangling and quarrelling seemed to me most regrettable activities. I always took my mother’s side. ‘Whom did you go to see yesterday?’ my Aunt Lili would ask me. ‘I shan’t tell you: Mama told me not to.’ She would then exchange a significant look with her mother. They sometimes made disagreeable remarks like: ‘Your Mama’s always going somewhere, isn’t she?’ Their spiteful tone discredited them in my eyes, and in no way lowered Mama in my own estimation. But these remarks did not alter my affection for them. I found it natural, and in a sense satisfactory that these secondary characters should be less irreproachable than those supreme divinities – Louise and my parents – who alone could be infallible.
A sword of fire separated good from evil: I had never seen them face to face. Sometimes my parents’ voices took on a rancorous note: judging by their indignation and anger, I realized that even in their own most intimate circle there were some really black sheep: I didn’t know who these were, or what their crimes might be. Evil kept a respectful distance. I could imagine its agents only as mythical figures like the Devil, the wicked fairy Carabosse and the Ugly Sisters: not having encountered them in the flesh, I reduced them to pure essences; Evil did wrong, just as fire bums, inexcusably and inevitably; hell was its natural habitat, and endless torment its proper fate; it would have seemed sacrilegious to feel pity for its pain. Indeed, the red-hot iron boots which the Seven Dwarfs made Snow-White’s stepmother wear and the flames burning Lucifer in hell never evoked in my mind the image of physical suffering. Ogres, witches, demons, stepmothers, and torturers – all these inhuman creatures symbolized an abstract power and their well-deserved defeat was illustrated by sufferings that were only abstractions.
When I left for Lyon with Louise and my sister, I cherished the fond hope that I should meet the Evil One face to face. We had been invited to stay by distant cousins who lived in a house set in a large park on the outskirts of the town. Mama had warned me that the Sirmione children had lost their mother, that they were not always very well-behaved, and that they didn’t always say their prayers: I was not to be put out if they laughed at me when I said mine. I was given to understand that their father, an elderly professor of medicine, didn’t believe in God. I saw myself draped in the white robes of Saint Blandine before she was thrown to the lions: I was sadly disappointed, for no one tried to martyr me. Whenever Uncle Sirmione left the house, he would mumble in his beard: ‘Au revoir. God bless you,’ so he couldn’t be a heathen. My cousins – aged from ten to twenty – certainly behaved in a strange way: they used to throw pebbles through the railings of the park at the boys and girls in the street outside; they were always fighting; they used to torment a poor little feeble-minded orphan girl who lived in the house; at night, to frighten her, they would drag out of their father’s study a skeleton draped in a sheet. Though I found them disconcerting, I saw no real harm in these anomalies; I couldn’t discover in them the pitchy depths of real evil. I played quietly by myself among the clumps of hydrangeas and the seamy side of life still remained beyond my ken.
But one evening I thought the end of the world had come. My parents had come to join us. One afternoon Louise took me with my sister to a fair where we enjoyed ourselves immensely. When we left for home dusk was falling. We were chattering and laughing and I was chewing one of those imitation objects I liked so much – a liquorice braid – when Mama suddenly appeared at a turning in the road. She was wearing on her head a green muslin scarf and her upper lip was swollen: what sort of time was this to be coming home? she wanted to know. She was the oldest, and she was ‘Madame’, so she had the right to scold Louise; but I didn’t like the look of her mouth or the tone of her voice; I didn’t like to see something that wasn’t friendliness in Louise’s patient eyes. That evening – or it might have been some other evening, but in my memory the two incidents are intimately connected – I was in the garden with Louise and another person I can’t remember; it was dark; in the black façade of the house, a window was open on a lighted room; we could see two moving figures and hear raised voices: ‘There’s Monsieur and Madame fighting again,’ said Louise. That was when my universe began to totter. It was impossible that papa and mama should be enemies, that Louise should be their enemy; when the impossible happened, heaven was confused with hell, darkness was conjoined with light. I began to drown in the chaos which preceded creation.
This nightmare didn’t last for ever: the next morning, my parents were talking and smiling as they always did. Louise’s snicker still lay heavy on my heart, but I put that behind me as soon as possible: there were many small things which I was able to banish thus into the limbo of forgetfulness.
This ability to pass over in silence events which I felt so keenly is one of the things which strike me most when I remember my childhood. The world around me was harmoniously based on fixed coordinates and divided into clear-cut compartments. No neutral tints were allowed: everything was in black and white; there was no intermediate position between the traitor and the hero, the renegade and the martyr: all inedible fruits were poisonous; I was told that I ‘loved’ every member of my family, including my most ill-favoured great-aunts. All my experience belied this essentialism. White was only rarely totally white, and the blackness of evil was relieved by lighter touches; I saw greys and half-tones everywhere. Only as soon as I tried to define their muted shades, I had to use words, and I found myself in a world of bony-structured concepts. Whatever I beheld with my own eyes and every real experience had to be fitted somehow or other into a rigid category: the myths and the stereotyped ideas prevailed over the truth: unable to pin it down, I allowed truth to dwindle into insignificance.
As I had failed in my efforts to think without recourse to language, I assumed that this was an exact equivalent of reality; I was encouraged in this misconception by the grown-ups, whom I took to be the sole depositaries of absolute truth: when they defined a thing, they expressed its substance, in the sense in which one expresses the juice from a fruit. So that I could conceive of no gap into which error might fall between the word and its object; that is why I submitted myself uncritically to the Word, without examining its meaning, even when circumstances inclined me to doubt its truth. Two of my Sirmione cousins were sucking sticks of candy-sugar: ‘It’s a purgative’, they told me in a bantering tone: their sniggers warned me that they were making fun of me; nevertheless the word they had used incorporated itself in my mind with the sticks of candy-sugar; I no longer liked them because they now seemed to me a dubious compromise between sweets and medicine.
Yet I can remember one case in which words did not override my reason. During our holidays in the country I was often taken to play with a little cousin; he lived in a beautiful house in vast grounds and I rather enjoyed playing with him. ‘The boy’s half-witted,’ my father remarked one evening. Cendri, who was much older than myself, seemed to me to be quite normal, because he
was someone I knew well. I don’t know if I had ever been shown what a half-wit was, or had an idiot described to me: I imagined idiots as having a slobbery mouth, a vacant smile, and a blank stare. The next time I saw Cendri, I tried in vain to apply this image to his own face, but the mask wouldn’t stick; perhaps without showing it on the outside his essential nature resembled that of an idiot, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Driven by a desire to clear the matter up, and also by an obscure resentment against my father for having insulted my playmate, I asked Cendri’s grandmother: ‘Is it true that Cendri is a half-wit?’ ‘Of course not!’ she retorted with some indignation. She knew her grandson well enough. Could it be that Papa had made a mistake? It was very puzzling.
I wasn’t terribly attached to Cendri, and the incident, though it astonished me, didn’t particularly upset me. I could perceive the sinister effect of words only when their black magic clutched at my heart.
Mama had just been wearing for the first time an orange-yellow dress – tango-coloured, we called it. Louise said to the housemaid from over the road: ‘Did you see the way Madame was got up today? Proper eccentric she looked!’ Another day, Louise was gossiping in the hall with the caretaker’s daughter: two storeys up Mama was accompanying herself at the piano: ‘Oh!’ said Louise. ‘There’s Madame at it again, screaming like a macaw!’ Eccentric. Macaw. These words sounded awful to me: what had they to do with Mama, who was beautiful, elegant, and sang and played so well? And yet it was Louise who had used them: how could I counter their sinister power? I knew how to defend myself against other people: but Louise! She was justice in person; she was truth itself, and my respect for her forbade me to pass judgement on anything she said. It would not have been sufficient to question her good taste; in order to neutralize her malevolence, I should have had to put it down to bad temper, and therefore to admit that she did not get on well with Mama; in which case, one of them must be in the wrong about something! No. I wanted to have them both perfect. I endeavoured to drain Louise’s words of their meaning: certain strange sounds had issued from her mouth, for reasons which were beyond my ken. I was not altogether successful. From then on, whenever Mama wore a new dress or sang at the top of her voice, I always felt a certain uneasiness. Moreover, knowing now that it wouldn’t do to attach too much importance to what Louise had to say, I no longer listened to her with quite the same docility as before.
I was always quick to turn a blind eye on anything that seemed to threaten my security, and so I preferred to dwell on ‘safe’ questions. The problem of birth did not bother me very much. At first I was told that parents bought their children in a shop; well, the world was so vast and so full of unknown wonders that there might well be stores selling babies somewhere. Gradually this idea was forgotten, and I contented myself with a vaguer solution: ‘It is God who makes children.’ He had created the earth out of chaos, and shaped Adam out of clay: so there was nothing unusual in the idea that He could produce a baby from an empty cradle. Submission to the divine will satisfied my curiosity: in the end, it could explain everything. As for the details of this divine operation, I was sure that I should gradually get to know them. What did intrigue me very much was the great care my parents sometimes took to prevent my overhearing certain conversations: as I drew near, they would lower their voices or stop talking altogether. So there were things that I could understand but that I was not intended to hear! Whatever could they be? Why were they kept from me? Mama forbade Louise to read me one of Madame de Ségur’s fairy-tales: she said it would give me nightmares. What eventually became of that boy clothed in the skins of wild animals – for that was how the pictures showed him? My inquiries were fruitless. Ourson – the bear-cub – appeared to me to be the very incarnation of secrecy.
The great mysteries of religion were much too remote and too difficult to cause me any surprise. But the familiar miracle of Christmas often set me wondering. I thought it was quite incongruous that the all-powerful Christ-child should prefer to come down the chimney like a common sweep. I pondered this problem for a long time and finally appealed to my parents for enlightenment; they confessed their deception. I was stupefied to think that I could have believed so firmly in something that wasn’t true, to realize that what one had accepted as the truth could be untrue. I didn’t learn from experience, either. I didn’t tell myself that my parents had deceived me, and that they might deceive me in other ways. Probably I could not have forgiven them for telling me a lie which was intended to frustrate my own desires or which pained me deeply; I should have revolted, and become suspicious. But in fact I was no more put out than someone to whom a conjurer explains how his tricks are performed. Indeed I was so delighted to find my doll Blondine sitting on her little trunk beside my Christmas stocking that I was rather grateful to my parents for such an amiable deception. Perhaps too I would have held it against them if I hadn’t learnt the truth from their own lips: by admitting that they had been playing a trick on me, they convinced me of their sincerity. They were treating me now, I thought, as a grown-up; proud of my new dignity, I happily accepted the fact that they had had to indulge their baby, because I was a baby no longer: it seemed to me perfectly natural that we should continue to hoax my little sister. I was now on the side of the adults, and I presumed that henceforward I should always be told the truth.
My parents were very willing to answer my questions; my ignorance was dissipated as soon as I gave voice to it. But there was, I realized, a gap which couldn’t be bridged: to the eyes of an adult, the black marks in books were words; I would look at them: I could see them too, but I couldn’t make them out at all. I had been taught to play with letters from an early age. When I was three I knew that ‘o’ is called ‘o’, and that ‘s’ is ‘s’, just as a table is a table; I knew the alphabet fairly well, but the printed page remained a closed book to me. One day, it all seemed to click into place. Mama had opened on the dining-room table the Regimbeau reading-book for infants; I was looking at the picture of a cow, and the letters C and H which are pronounced CH in the word VACHE. I suddenly understood that they didn’t have names, as objects do, but that they represented sounds: I understood now that they were symbols. After that, I soon learnt to read. Even afterwards, however, some blocks remained in my brain. I felt that the printed letter was the sound it corresponded to; they both proceeded from the thing they expressed, and were so closely linked that no arbitrary constants were possible in their fixed equation. The understanding of the symbol did not necessarily pre-suppose an understanding of its conventional application. This is why I put up such a strong resistance when grandmama wanted to teach me the notes of the scale. Using a knitting needle, she pointed to the notes on the stave; this line, she tried to explain, corresponded to that note on the pianoforte. But why? How could it possibly do that? I could see nothing in common between the ruled manuscript paper and the keys of the instrument. Whenever people tried to impose on me such unjustified compulsions and assumptions, I rebelled; in the same way, I refused to accept truths which did not have an absolute basis. I would yield only to necessity; I felt that human decisions were dictated more or less by caprice, and they did not carry enough weight to justify my compliance. For days I persisted in my refusal to accept such arbitrary regulations. But I finally gave in: I could finally play the scale; but I felt I was learning the rules of a game, not acquiring knowledge. On the other hand I felt no compunction about embracing the rules of arithmetic, because I believed in the absolute reality of numbers.
In October 1913 – I was five and a half years old – it was decided to send me to school, a private institution with the alluring name of Le Cours Désir. The head of the elementary classes, Mademoiselle Fayet, received me in an awe-inspiring study with padded doors. All the time she was talking to my mother, she kept stroking my hair. ‘We are not governesses,’ she explained, ‘but educators.’ She wore a high-necked dress with a long skirt and I found her manner revoltingly suave; I preferred something more severe. Nev
ertheless on the eve of my first day under her tutelage, I jumped for joy in the hall: ‘I’m going to school tomorrow!’ ‘You won’t always feel so happy about it,’ Louise assured me. I was quite sure that for once she was mistaken. The idea of entering upon a life of my own intoxicated me. Until now I had been growing up as it were on the fringe of adult life; from now on I should have my satchel, my books, my exercise books, and my homework: my days and weeks would be arranged according to my own timetable; I had glimpses of a future which, instead of keeping me away from myself would leave its cumulative deposits in my memory: every year I would become more and more myself, and at the same time remain faithful to the schoolgirl whose birth I was celebrating at this very moment.
I was not disappointed. Every Wednesday and Saturday I participated in an hour-long ceremony whose almost religious pomp transfigured the whole week. The pupils took their places round a large oval table; the gathering was presided over by Mademoiselle Fayet, enthroned in a sort of professorial chair; from the rarefied heights of her gilded frame, Adeline Désir, our foundress, a stony-faced lady with slightly hunched shoulders who was in the process of beatification, gazed down upon us. Our mothers, installed on black imitation leather settees, did their embroidery or their knitting. According to whether we had been more or less well-behaved they bestowed good-conduct notes upon us which we had to give out at the end of the lesson. Mademoiselle entered them in her register. Mama always gave me ten out of ten: to give me only nine would have brought, we felt, disgrace upon us both. Then Mademoiselle would distribute ‘Excellent’ or ‘Satisfactory’ tokens to the righteous; at the end of each term we exchanged these for gilt-edged prize books. Then Mademoiselle took up her position at the door: she placed a kiss upon our foreheads, and whispered a word or two of good advice. I could read and write already, and count a little: I was the star turn of the ‘O’ class. Towards Christmas, I was garbed in a white robe bordered with gold braid and represented the Infant Jesus: all the other little girls had to come and bend the knee before me.