Stépha came back from Lourdes; she had brought a big box of caramels for the children. ‘It’s very kind of you, Mademoiselle,’ said Madame Mabille in frosty tones, ‘but you might have saved yourself the expense: the children do not need presents from you.’ Stépha and I pulled Zaza’s family and friends to pieces, and that consoled me a little. Moreover, that year, too, the end of my stay was happier than the beginning. I don’t know whether or not Zaza had spoken about it to her mother, or whether she just handled things rather cleverly, but I was able to see her alone; again we went for long walks and we talked. She talked about Proust, whom she understood much better than I did; she told me that when she read him a great desire to write came over her. She assured me that next year she would not allow herself to be bullied into a dull routine: she would read a lot, and we would talk. I had an idea which appealed to her: on Sunday mornings we would all meet to play tennis – Zaza, my sister, and I, Jean Pradelle, Pierre Clairaut, and one of their friends.
Zaza and I agreed on almost everything. She believed that, provided one is not doing harm to others, there is nothing reprehensible in the conduct of unbelievers: she did not reject Gide’s immoralism; vice did not shock her. On the other hand, she failed to imagine how one could worship God and yet knowingly break His commandments. I found this attitude, which was practically in line with my own, to be quite logical, for I felt others should be allowed every freedom; but in my own case and in that of those near and dear to me – Jacques in particular – I continued to apply the standards of Christian morality. It was not without some misgiving that I heard Stépha roar with laughter one day as she said: ‘Good Lord! How naïve Zaza is!’ Stépha had declared that even in strictly Catholic circles no young man is a virgin when he marries. Zaza had protested that if one believes, one lives according to one’s belief. ‘Just look at your du Moulin cousins,’ Stépha had said. ‘But they take Holy Communion every Sunday!’ Zaza had replied. ‘I can assure you that they would not allow themselves to live in a state of mortal sin.’ Stépha had not tried to take the matter any further; but she told me that she had many a time met Henri and Edgar in Montparnasse – which she visited frequently – and in no unmistakable company: ‘You’ve just got to look at their faces!’ she told me. Indeed they didn’t look like angelic little choirboys. I thought of Jacques: he had quite another kind of face, he was altogether different; it was impossible to think of him popping in and out of bed with women all the time. All the same, by revealing some of Zaza’s naïveté, Stépha was challenging my own experience. It was something very ordinary for her to frequent bars and cafés in which I used to go hunting secretly for extraordinary experiences: she certainly saw them from a different angle to me. I realized that I took people as they were; I didn’t suspect them of having any other self than the official one; Stépha had opened my eyes to the fact that this rigid society had its darker corners. The conversation upset me.
That year, Zaza did not accompany me to Mont-de-Marsan; I walked round the town thinking about her as I waited for my train. I had decided to fight with all my strength to prevent her life becoming a living death.
BOOK FOUR
THE beginning of this academic year was unlike any other. By deciding to enter for the competition, I had at last escaped from the labyrinth in which I had been going round in circles for the last three years: I was now on my way to the future. From now on, every day had its meaning: it was taking me further on my road to final liberation. I was spurred on by the difficulty of the enterprise: there was no longer any question of straying from the straight and narrow path, or of becoming bored. Now that I had something definite to work for, I found that the earth could give me all I wanted; I was released from disquiet, despair, and from all my regrets. ‘In this diary, I shall no longer make note of tragic self-communings, but only of the events of every day.’ I had the feeling that after a painful apprenticeship my real life was just beginning, and I threw myself into it gladly.
In October, while the Sorbonne was closed, I spent my days in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I had obtained permission to have my lunch out: I would buy bread and rillette and eat them in the gardens of the Palais Royal while watching the petals of the late roses fall; sitting on the benches, navvies would be munching thick sandwiches and drinking cheap red wine. If it was raining, I would take shelter in the Café Biard with bricklayers eating out of messtins; I was delighted to escape from the ritual of family meals; by reducing food to its essential elements I felt I was taking another step in the direction of freedom. I would go back to the library; I was studying the theory of relativity, and was passionately interested in it. From time to time I would look up at the other readers and lean back proudly in my armchair: among these specialists, scholars, researchers, and thinkers I felt at home. I no longer felt myself to be rejected by my environment; it was I who had rejected it in order to enter that society – of which I saw here a cross-section – in which all those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know, to understand, to express itself: I was engaged in a great collective enterprise which would release me for ever from the bonds of loneliness. What a victory! I would settle down to work again. At a quarter to six, the superintendent’s voice would solemnly announce: ‘Gentlemen – we shall – very soon – be – closing.’ It was always a surprise, after leaving my stuthes, to come back to the shops outside, the lights, the passers-by, and the dwarf who sold bunches of violets near the Théâtre Français. I would walk slowly, giving myself up to the melancholy of evening and of my return home.
Stépha came back to Paris a few days after me and often came to the library to read Goethe and Nietzsche. With her roving eye and ready smile, she was too attractive to men and they were too much interested in her for her to be able to get much work done. She would have barely taken her place beside me when she would put her coat over her shoulders and go outside to have a chat with one of her boy friends: the teacher studying German, the Prussian student, the Romanian doctor. We used to lunch together and although she was not well-off she would treat me to cakes at a pâtisserie or a good cup of coffee at the Bar Poccardi. At six o’clock we would stroll along the boulevards, or most often have tea in her room. She had a bright blue room in a hotel in the rue Saint-Sulpice; she had hung reproductions of Cézanne, Renoir, and El Greco on the walls, together with some drawings by a Spanish friend who wanted to be a painter. I liked being with her. I loved the soft feel of her fur collar, her little toques, her dresses, her scent, her warbling voice, her loving gestures. My relationships with my other friends – Zaza, Jacques, Pradelle – had always been extremely formal. But Stépha would take my arm in the street; in the cinema she would hold hands with me; she would kiss me on the slightest provocation. She used to tell me all kinds of stories about herself, was enthusiastic about Nietzsche, indignant about Madame Mabille and made fun of the men who were in love with her: she could do imitations very well and would intersperse her stories with bits of acting which amused me vastly.
She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover. At Lourdes, she had gone to confession and taken Holy Communion; back in Paris she had bought a small missal at the Bon Marché and had gone to pray in one of the chapels in Saint-Sulpice: but it hadn’t worked. For a whole hour she had paced up and down in front of the church without being able to make up her mind whether to go back inside or to walk away. With her hands behind her back, her forehead deeply furrowed and stamping backwards and forwards in her room, she mimed this spiritual crisis so exuberantly for me that I didn’t know whether to take her seriously or not. In fact, the divinities she really worshipped were Thought, Art, and Genius; at a pinch, intelligence and talent would do instead. Every time she tracked down an ‘interesting’ man, she would arrange to have herself introduced to him and then would do her utmost to ‘get him under my thumb’. It was, she explained to me, the ‘eterna
lfeminine’ in her. She preferred intellectual conversations and comradeship to these flirtations; once a week she would argue for hours at the Closerie des Lilas with a group of Ukrainians who were journalists or engaged on vague studies in Paris. She saw her Spanish friend every day; she had known him for years, and he had asked her to marry him. I often met him in her room; he lived in the same hotel. He was called Fernando. He was a descendant of one of those Jewish families that had been driven out of Spain by the Inquisition four centuries ago; he had been born in Constantinople and had studied in Berlin. Prematurely bald, with a rounded face and skull, he would talk with romantic intensity about his daimón, but he was capable of irony, and I liked him very much. Stépha admired him because, though he hadn’t a penny, he managed somehow to go on painting, and she shared all his ideas: these were unshakeably internationalist, pacifist, and even, in a Utopian sense, revolutionary. The only reason she hesitated to marry him was that she wanted to keep her freedom.
I introduced them to my sister, whom they at once took to their hearts, and to my friends. Pradelle had broken his leg; he was limping when I met him at the beginning of October on the terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens. Stépha thought he was too quiet, and her volubility bewildered him. She got on better with Lisa, who was now living in a students’ hostel, the windows of which overlooked the Petit Luxembourg. She made a scanty livelihood by giving lessons; she was studying for a science certificate and preparing a thesis on Maine de Biran; but she had no intention of entering for the competitive examination; her health was too weak. ‘My poor brain!’ she used to say, holding her little cropped head in her hands. ‘When I think it’s all I have to rely on, and that I have to get everything from it! It’s not natural! One of these days it’s going to give way!’ She wasn’t interested in Main de Biran, in philosophy, or in herself: ‘I often wonder,’ she told me with a frosty smile, ‘what pleasure you can get in seeing me!’ I was always pleased to see her, because she never let herself be taken in, and her mistrustful turn of mind often made her very perspicacious:
I often talked to Stépha about Zaza, who was having an extended holiday at Laubardon. I had sent her a few books from Paris, including The Constant Nymph; Stépha told me that Madame Mabille had flown into a temper and had declared: ‘I hate intellectuals!’ Zaza was beginning to cause her serious concern: it would not be easy to make her accept a marriage of convenience. Madame Mabille regretted ever having let her attend the Sorbonne; she felt it was now urgently necessary to get her daughter in hand, and she would have very much liked to have her somewhere where she would not be under my influence. Zaza wrote to me that she had mentioned our plan for playing tennis to her mother, and that she was up in arms against it: ‘She declared that she didn’t hold with that sort of student behaviour and that I was not to go to a game of tennis organized by a girl of twenty where I would come into contact with young men whose families she had never met. I’m not mincing my words; I prefer that you should realize the state of mind that I have to contend with all the time but which my concept of Christian duty obliges me to respect. But today I’m so upset about it I could weep; the things I love do not love each other; and taking refuge in moral principles I have been listening to opinions that I cannot stomach . . . I made an ironical offer to sign a statement saying I would undertake never to marry Pradelle, Clairaut, or any of their friends, but that didn’t make matters any better.’ In her next letter, she told me that in order to make her break completely with the Sorbonne her mother had decided to send her to Berlin for the winter, just as in former times the local gentry used to pack their sons off to South America in order to put an end to some scandalous or embarrassing affair.
Never had I written Zaza such expansive letters as in those last weeks; never had she confided so frankly in me. Yet when she came back to Paris in the middle of October our friendship got off to a bad start. When she was not with me, she could write to me about her difficulties and her dislikes and I felt I was her ally; but in fact her attitude was an equivocal one: she still retained all her love and respect for her mother, and remained loyal to her background. I could no longer accept such a division of personality. I had got the measure of Madame Mabille’s hostility, and had understood that there could be no possible compromise between the two camps to which we belonged: the ‘orthodox’ Catholics wanted to annihilate the ‘intellectuals’ and vice versa. By not coming over to my side, Zaza was throwing in her lot with enemies who were set on destroying me, and that made me feel resentful towards her. She dreaded the journey she was being compelled to make, and was worrying herself sick; I showed my resentment by refusing to share her worries; I let myself go in a great burst of high spirits which disconcerted her. I professed a great intimacy with Stépha, and began to imitate her by laughing and chattering in her own over-exuberant way; Zaza was often shocked by our conversations; she frowned when Stépha declared that the more intelligent people were, the more internationally-minded they became. In reaction against our ‘Polish student’ manners, she set out deliberately to play the part of the ‘well-bred young French girl’, and my apprehensions increased: perhaps in the end she would go over entirely to the enemy; I no longer dared speak freely to her, and so I preferred to meet her when I was in the company of Pradelle, Lisa, my sister, and Stépha rather than alone. She certainly sensed this distance between us; she was absorbed in the preparations for her departure. We said good-bye to one another, without regrets, at the end of November.
Lectures started again. I had skipped a year, and, except for Clairaut, knew none of my new fellow-students; there was not one amateur, not one dilettante among them: they were all, like me, grim professionals intent on getting through the competition. I thought they looked a forbidding lot, with their air of great self-importance. I decided to ignore them. I went on working hell for leather. I followed all the lectures in the competitive examination course at the Sorbonne at the École Normale, and, whenever my timetable allowed, I would go and study at Sainte-Geneviève, at the Victor Cousin, or the National libraries. In the evenings I would read novels or go out. I had grown up; I would soon be leaving: that year my parents gave me permission from time to time to go out to the theatre in the evenings, alone or with a friend. I saw Man Ray’s Star-fish, all the programmes at the Ursulines, Studio 28, and Ciné Latin, all the films with Brigitte Helm, Douglas Fairbanks, and Buster Keaton. I frequented the left-wing theatres. Under Stépha’s influence, I took more pride in my personal appearance. She had told me that her boy friend who was studying German thought I was wrong to spend all my time studying: twenty is too young for a blue-stocking, and if I went on like this I’d turn into an ugly little spinster. She had protested against his judgement, but had taken it to heart; she didn’t want her best friend to look like an old frump; she assured me that I could do something with a body like mine, and insisted that I should show it off to its best advantage. I began to pay regular visits to the hairdresser and to take an interest in buying a hat or making a dress. I made friends. Mademoiselle Lambert no longer interested me. Suzanne Boigue had followed her husband to Morocco; I was quite pleased to see Riesmann again and I took a fresh liking to Jean Mallet who was working as assistant master at the Lycée de Saint-Germain and was preparing a thesis under the guidance of Baruzi. Clairaut often used to come to the Nationale. Pradelle had great respect for him and had convinced me of his exceptional qualities. He was a Catholic, a Thomist, and a follower of Maurras; when he talked to me, with his eyes boring into mine, and using a categorical tone of voice that impressed me deeply, I would wonder if I hadn’t misjudged St Thomas and Maurras; I still disliked their doctrines; but I should have liked to know how one looked at life and how one felt within oneself when one adopted them: Clairaut intrigued me. He assured me that I was bound to succeed in the competition: ‘Apparently you succeed in everything you undertake,’ he told me, and I felt very flattered. Stépha, too, encouraged me: ‘You’ll have a wonderful life. You’ll always get just what you want
.’ So I sailed along, confident that I was under a lucky star and feeling very pleased with myself. It was a lovely autumn, and whenever I raised my head from my books I was grateful to the heavens for their smile.
All the time I was trying so hard not to be a little book-worm, I was thinking of Jacques; I devoted entire pages of my diary to him, and wrote him long letters that I never posted. When I met his mother at the beginning of November, she was very affectionate towards me; Jacques, she informed me, was always asking her for news of ‘the only person in Paris who interests me’; she smiled at me in a conspiratorial manner as she uttered these words.
I was working hard, and amusing myself too: I felt my balance had been restored, and it was with a certain wonder that I recalled the pranks I had got up to in the summer. Those bars and dance-halls where I had whiled away my evenings now only filled me with disgust, and even with a kind of horror. This virtuous revulsion had the same roots as my former dissipation: despite my rationalist mentality, the things of the flesh remained taboo to me.
‘How idealistic you are!’ Stépha often told me. She took great care not to shock me. One day, Fernando, pointing to a sketch of a naked woman on the walls of his room, told me mischievously ‘Stépha posed for that.’ I didn’t know where to look, and she cast an indignant glance at him: ‘Don’t say such stupid things!’ He hurriedly admitted that he only meant it as a joke. Not for one moment did I think that Stépha might be what Madame Mabille had called her – ‘not a lady’, which meant, of course, ‘not a virgin’. Nevertheless she made some gentle attempts to open my eyes a little: ‘But I’m telling you, dear, physical love is very important, for men especially. . . .’ One night, as we were coming out of the Atelier, we saw a crowd gathered in the place Clichy; a policeman had just arrested an elegant young man whose hat was lying in the gutter; he was white-faced and trying to struggle free; the crowd were booing him: ‘Dirty touting pimp. . . .’ I thought I was going to faint, and dragged Stépha away; the lights, the noises of the boulevard, the painted women, everything made me feel like screaming. ‘But Simone, that’s life!’ In her brisk, matter-of-fact voice, Stépha explained to me that men aren’t angels. Of course, ‘all that’ was rather ‘disgusting’, but after all it was a fact, and even a very important fact; she supported her claims with a host of examples. Her stories made me rigid with disapproval. All the same, from time to time I tried to be frank with myself: where did these resistances and prohibitions stem from? ‘Is it my Catholic upbringing which has left me with such a fixation on purity that the slightest allusion to fleshly things causes me this indescribable distress? I think of Alain Fournier’s Colombe, who drowned herself in a lake before she would sully her purity. But perhaps that is pride?’