This pious collusion bound me even more closely to my mother: she definitely took the first place in my life. Her brothers had been mobilized; Louise had returned to her parents to help them on the land. For Raymonde, the new maid, frizzy-haired, affected and pretentious, I had nothing but disdain. Mama hardly ever went out now, and had few visitors; she devoted nearly all her time to my sister and me; she made more of me than she did of my sister; she, too, was an elder sister, and everyone said how much I resembled her: I had the feeling that she belonged to me in a peculiarly privileged way.
Papa left for the front in October; I can see again the corridors of the Métro, and Mama walking beside me, her eyes brimming . . . she had beautiful brown eyes and two tears were slowly rolling down her cheeks. I was very touched by the sight. But I never realized that my father was in danger. I had seen wounded men; I knew there was a connexion between war and death. But I could not conceive that this great collective adventure could possibly concern me. And besides I was convinced that God would protect my father very specially for me: I was incapable of imagining any misfortune happening to him.
Events confirmed my optimism; after suffering a heart attack, my father was evacuated to the military hospital at Coulommiers, then transferred to the Ministry of War. He put on a different uniform and shaved off his moustache. About the same time, Louise returned to us. Life got back to normal.
I had made a definite metamorphosis into a good little girl. Right from the start, I had composed the personality I wished to present to the world; it had brought me so much praise and so many great satisfactions that I had finished by identifying myself with the character I had built up: it was my one reality. I was not quite so lively as before: I was growing rapidly, and an attack of measles had made my face look pale and interesting; I took sulphur baths and nourishing patent foods; I no longer upset the grown-ups with turbulent outbursts of rage; besides, my tastes fitted in well with the sort of life we were leading, so that there was not much occasion to reprimand or thwart me. If there was disagreement, I was now able to ask why, and to discuss the matter. Often all they had to say to me was: ‘It’s not done. When I say no I mean no!’ Even when that happened, I no longer thought of myself as a down-trodden child. I was sure that my parents were only trying to do their best for me. And besides, it was the will of God their lips gave utterance to: He had created me; He had died for me; He was entitled to my total submission. I felt I bore upon my shoulders the reassuring yoke of necessity.
And so I said good-bye to the independence which I had tried so hard to preserve in my earliest years. For some time, I was to be the docile reflection of my parents’ will. Now it is time to put down what I know about them.
*
I know very little about my father’s childhood. My great-grandfather, who was Inspector of Taxes at Argenton, must have left his sons a fairly substantial fortune, because even the youngest was able to live on his private income; the eldest son, my grandfather, inherited among other properties an estate of about five hundred acres: he married a middle-class girl from a large, rich family in the north. However, either from inclination or because he had three children, he took up a post in Paris, in the Town Hall; he had a long career; when he retired he was head of a department and had been decorated. His mode of life was more brilliant than his situation. My father spent his childhood in a fine apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and was brought up, if not in opulent then at least in moderately luxurious surroundings. He had an elder sister and an elder brother, a complete duffer, noisy and often violent, who used to bully him. Papa, who was not very strong, detested violence of any kind. He found means of compensating for his physical weakness: he sought to please: he was his mother’s favourite, and his teachers’ star pupil. His tastes were completely opposite to those of his elder brother; disliking sports and gymnastics, he loved reading and studying. My grandmother encouraged him: he lived in her shadow and his only wish was to please her in every way. She came from an austere bourgeois family of unshakeable Catholic faith in God, in work, in duty, and in strict personal values; she insisted that he should be a model pupil as well as a model son. Every year Georges won the first prize at the Collège Stanislas. During the holidays, he would round up the farmers’ children and give them lessons: an old photograph shows him in the courtyard at Meyrignac, surrounded by about a dozen pupils, boys and girls. A maidservant, in a white cap and apron, is holding a tray full of glasses of orangeade. His mother died when he was thirteen years old; not only did he feel violent grief at her death, he was suddenly left to his own devices. To him my grandmother had been the incarnation of law and order; my grandfather was quite unable to take her place. He meant well, of course, and had all the right ideas: he hated the communards and spouted Déroulède. But he was more conscious of his rights than he was aware of his duties. Half-way between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, between the landed gentry and the office worker, respecting but not practising the Catholic religion, he felt himself neither completely integrated with society nor burdened with any serious responsibilities: he represented an epicurean good taste. He took up a sport only less distinguished than fencing – single-sticks – and attained the rank of assistant master in the art, a rank of which he was very proud. He didn’t like arguments or worries and let his children have a free rein. My father continued to distinguish himself in the subjects that interested him – in Latin and literature: but he no longer won first prizes. He had stopped trying.
After certain monetary compensations had been paid to my father and his sister, Meyrignac was to revert to my Uncle Gaston, and he, with his future assured, devoted himself to complete inactivity. His situation as younger brother, his attachment to his mother and his scholastic successes had led my father – whose future was not at all assured – to renounce his individuality: but he saw that he had certain gifts, and determined to make the best of them. The legal profession attracted him on account of its dramatic possibilities, because he was already a fine public speaker. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law. But he often told me that if the attitude of the family had not made it impossible, he would have entered the Conservatoire and trained as an actor. This was no idle whim: nothing was more genuine than his love for the theatre. While he was studying law, he discovered, to his great delight, the works of the best authors of his time; he spent his nights reading Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant, Bourget, Marcel Prévost, and Jules Lemaître. But he found even greater enjoyment in the pit at the Comédie Française or the music hall. He went to all the new plays; he was in love with all the actresses and idolized the great actors of his time: he shaved his face so that he might look like an actor. In those days, there was much amateur play-acting in private houses: he took elocution lessons, studied the art of make-up and joined a group of amateurs.
My father’s unusual vocation can be explained, I think, by his social standing. His name, certain family connexions, childhood friends, and those he associated with as a young man convinced him that he belonged to the aristocracy, so he adopted their manner of living. He appreciated elegant gestures, charming compliments, social graces, style, frivolity, irony, all the free-and-easy self-assurance of the rich and well-born. The more serious virtues esteemed by the bourgeoisie he found frankly boring. Thanks to a very good memory, he passed his examinations, but his student years were devoted mainly to pleasure: theatres, races, cafés, and parties. He cared so little for the common run of success that once he had passed his, qualifying examinations he didn’t bother to present a thesis but registered himself in the Court of Appeal and took a post as secretary to a well-established lawyer. He was contemptuous of successes which are obtained at the expense of hard work and effort: according to him, if you were ‘born’ to be someone, you automatically possessed all the essential qualities – wit, talent, charm, and good breeding. The trouble was that in the ranks of that high society to which he laid claim for admittance, he found he was a nobody; the ‘de’ in de Beauvoir showed he had a
handle to his name, but the name was an obscure one, and did not automatically open for him the doors of the best clubs and the most aristocratic salons; and he hadn’t the means to live like a lord. He attached little importance to the positions that were open to him in the bourgeois world – the distinguished lawyer, the father of a family, the respected citizen. He set out in life with empty hands, and despised the advantages he acquired. There was only one solution left to him: to become an actor.
But an actor needs an audience: my father did not care for country life or solitude; he was only happy when he was in society. He found his profession amusing only in so far as it gave him opportunities as an actor. When he was a young man he took great care with his appearance and became quite a dandy. Having practised since childhood the art of pleasing others, he soon gained a reputation for being a brilliant talker and a great charmer. But these successes did not satisfy him; they raised him only to the lower ranks in those fashionable drawing-rooms where wealth and noble ancestry counted above all else. In order to challenge the fixed hierarchies of aristocratic society, he would have to make himself a place that was outside the accepted categories. Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction; but though my father was an avid reader he knew that writing requires those tedious virtues, patience and application, that it is a solitary occupation with a public that exists only in the writer’s imagination. On the other hand the theatre brought a ready-made solution to his problems. The actor is spared the horrors of creation: he is offered on a plate an imaginary universe in which a special place has been created for him; he occupies that place in the flesh, before an audience of flesh and blood. Reduced to the role of a mirror, the audience faithfully reflects his image; on the stage he is king and he really exists, he really feels himself to be a king. My father took a special delight in making-up; he could escape from himself by putting on a wig and a false moustache. In this way he could avoid identification; he was neither a nobleman nor a commoner: this indeterminacy lent itself to every kind of impersonation; having fundamentally ceased to be himself, he could become anyone he liked, and could outshine them all.
He never dreamed of flouting the conventions of his social group and becoming a professional actor. He devoted himself to the stage because he could not resign himself to an inferior position in society; he never contemplated the possibility of losing caste. He was doubly successful. Seeking a means of admittance to a society which was very reticent in opening its arms to him, he decided to force his way in through the front door. Thanks to his talents as an amateur, he did in fact gain access to more elegant and less austere circles than the ones he had been brought up in; witty men, pretty women, and every kind of pleasure were the things they appreciated there. As an actor and man of the world, my father had found his true vocation. He devoted all his leisure to comedy and mime. On the very eve of his marriage, he acted in a play. As soon as he had returned from the honeymoon he put Mama on the stage, where her beauty made up for her lack of experience. I have already mentioned that every year, at Divonne-les-Bains, they took part in theatrical performances given by a company of amateurs. They often went to the theatre. My father subscribed to Comédia, the theatrical magazine, and kept up to date with all the back-stage gossip. Among his intimate friends was an actor from the Odéon. During his convalescence in the hospital at Coulommiers, he wrote and played in a revue in collaboration with another patient, the young singer Gabriello, who was often invited to our house. Later on, when he no longer had the means to keep up a gay social life, he still found opportunities to tread the boards, even if it was only an affair in a church hall.
His singular individuality came out to the full in this insatiable passion for the theatre. In other respects, my father was a true representative of his period and his class. He considered the re-establishment of the monarchy a Utopian dream; but the Republic only filled him with disgust. Without actually subscribing to L’Action Française, he had many friends among the Camelots du Roi* and he admired Maurras and Léon Daudet. He would not hear any criticism of the nationalist movement in politics; if someone were sufficiently ill-advised to discuss it, he would laugh uproariously and refuse to take part: his love for his native land was above and beyond all arguments and all words: ‘It’s my only religion,’ he used to say. He detested foreigners, and was indignant that Jews should be allowed to take part in the government of the country; he was as convinced of Dreyfus’ guilt as my mother was of the existence of God. He read Le Matin and flew into a temper one day because one of our Sirmione cousins had brought a copy of L’Œuvre into the house: ‘That rag!’ he called it. He considered Renan to be a great thinker, but he respected the Church and was horrified by the bills passed by Émile Combes. His private morality was based upon the cult of the family; woman, in her role as mother, was sacred to him; he demanded the utmost fidelity from married women and all young girls had to be innocent virgins, but he was prepared to allow great liberties to men, which led him to cast an indulgent eye upon women known as ‘fast’. As is nearly always the case with idealists, he was sceptical almost to the point of cynicism. He responded to Cyrano with quivering emotion, enjoyed Clément Vautel, delighted in Capus, Donnay, Sacha Guitry, Flers, and Callavet. Both nationalist and man about town, he knew the value both of grandeur and of frivolity.
While I was still very small, he had won me over by his gaiety and gift of the gab; as I grew older, I came to admire him for more serious reasons: I was amazed at his culture, his intelligence, and his infallible good sense. At home, his pre-eminence was undisputed, and my mother, younger than he by eight years, willingly took second place. It was he who had introduced her to life and the world of books. ‘The wife is what the husband makes of her: it’s up to him to make her someone,’ he often said. He used to read aloud to her Taine’s Les Origines de la France contemporaine and Gobineau’s L’Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. He had no overweening pretensions: on the contrary, he prided himself on knowing his limitations. He brought back from the front subjects for short stories which my mother found delightful but which he didn’t develop any further for fear of writing something banal. This modesty gave proof of a lucidity of mind which authorized him to pass final judgements on any case in question.
As I grew up, he paid more and more attention to my education and my appearance. In particular he took great pains with my handwriting and spelling: whenever I wrote him a letter, he would send it back to me, with corrections. During the holidays he used to dictate tricky passages to me, chosen usually from Victor Hugo. As I was a great reader, I made few mistakes, and he told me with great satisfaction that I was a natural speller. In order to help form my taste in literature, he had assembled a little anthology for me in an exercise book covered with shiny black imitation leather: Un Évangile, by Coppée, Le Pantin de la petite Jeanne by Banville, Hélas! si j’avais su! by Hégésippe Moreau, and several other poems. He taught me to read them aloud, ‘putting in the expression’. He read the classics aloud to me: Ruy-Blas, Hernani, the plays of Rostand, Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française, and Labiche’s comedies. I asked him many questions, which he answered willingly. He never intimidated me, in the sense that I never felt the slightest uneasiness in his presence; but I did not attempt to bridge the distance that lay between us; there were many subjects that I could not imagine myself discussing with him; to him I was neither body nor soul, but simply a mind. Our relationship was situated in a pure and limpid atmosphere where unpleasantness could not exist. He did not condescend to me, but raised me up to his level, and then I was proud to feel myself a grown-up person. When I fell back to my ordinary level, I was dependent upon Mama; Papa had allowed her to take complete charge of my bodily and moral welfare.
My mother had been born at Verdun, in a rich and devout bourgeois family; her father, a banker, had studied with the Jesuits; her mother had been brought up in a convent. Françoise had a brother and sister younger than herself. Grandma
ma, entirely devoted to her husband, showed her children only a distant affection, and it was Lili, the youngest, who was her father’s favourite. Mama suffered from their coldness towards her. A day-boarder at the Couvent des Oiseaux, she found some consolation in the warm regard of her teachers; under the guidance of the nuns, she eagerly threw herself into her school work and her religious duties, and, after she had passed her lower certificate of education, the Mother Superior supervised her studies. She suffered many sad disappointments in her adolescence. Her childhood and youth filled her heart with a resentment which she never completely forgot. At the age of twenty, her neck squeezed into whalebone collars, accustomed to suppressing all her natural spontaneity, resorting to silence and brooding over bitter secrets, she felt herself alone and misunderstood; despite her great beauty, she lacked assurance and gaiety. She went without enthusiasm to meet a strange young man at Houlgate. They liked one another. Won over by my father’s exuberant vitality, and made confident by the proofs of tenderness he gave her, my mother began to blossom. My earliest memories of her are of a laughing, lively young woman. She also had about her something wilful and imperious which was given a free rein after her marriage. My father enjoyed the greatest prestige in her eyes, and she believed that the wife should obey the husband in everything. But with Louise, my sister, and myself she showed herself to be dictatorial and overbearing, sometimes passionately so. If one of her intimate friends or relations happened to cross her or offend her, she often reacted with anger and outbursts of violent frankness. But in society she was always timid. Brusquely transported into a social group that was very different from her provincial circle, she found difficulty in adapting herself. Her youth, her inexperience, her love for my father all made her vulnerable: she dreaded criticism, and, in order to avoid it, took pains to be ‘like everybody else’. In her new environment, her convent morality was only half-respected. She didn’t want to be taken for a prude, and so she renounced her own standards of judgement: instead she decided that she would take the rules of etiquette as her guide. Papa’s best friend was living with a woman, and that meant he was living in sin; that didn’t prevent him from paying frequent visits to our house; but his mistress could not be received. My mother never dreamed of protesting in any way against an illogicality sanctioned by social conventions. She consented to many other compromises; they did not do violence to her principles; it was even perhaps in order to compensate for these concessions that she preserved, in her heart of hearts, a rigorously inflexible personal morality. Although she had been without doubt happy in her marriage, she was apt to confuse sexuality with vice: she always associated fleshly desires with sin. Convention obliged her to excuse certain indiscretions in men; she concentrated her disapproval on women; she divided women into those who were ‘respectable’ and those who were ‘loose’. There could be no intermediate grades. ‘Physical’ questions sickened her so much that she never attempted to discuss them with me; she did not even warn me about the surprises awaiting me on the threshold of puberty. In all other matters, she accepted my father’s ideas without ever appearing to find any difficulty in reconciling them with her religion. My father was constantly astonished by the paradoxes of the human heart, by the playful tricks of heredity, and by the strangeness of dreams; I never saw my mother astonished by anything.