Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (20 page)

Stupidity: at one time my sister and I used to accuse other children of stupidity when we found them dull and boring; now there were many grown-ups, and in particular our school-teachers, who came in for the charge. Unctuous sermons, all kinds of solemn twaddle, grand words, inflated turns of phrase, and any pompous affectation was ‘stupidity'. It was stupid to attach importance to trifles, to persist in observing conventions and customs, to prefer commonplaces and prejudices to facts. The very height of stupidity was when people fatuously believed that we swallowed all the righteous fibs that were dished out to us. Stupidity made us laugh; it was one of our never-failing sources of amusement; but there was also something rather frightening about it. If this dunce-like dullness had won the day we would no longer have had the right to think, to make fun of people, to experience real emotions and enjoy real pleasures. We had to fight against it, or else give up living.

In the end my teachers got fed up with my insubordination and they let me know their displeasure. The Institut Adeline Désir took great care to distinguish itself from secular establishments where the mind is cultivated at the expense of the soul. At the end of the year, instead of awarding prizes for scholastic success – which would have run the risk of encouraging worldly rivalry among the pupils – we were presented at the end of March, in the presence of a bishop, with certificates and medals which were mainly rewards for industriousness and good behaviour and also for long attendance at the school. The ceremonies took place, with tremendous pomp, at
the Salle Wagram. The highest distinction was called ‘the certificate of honour' awarded to only a few pupils from each class who had excelled in everything. The rest only had a right to ‘special mentions'. That year, after my name had reverberated in the solemn silence of the hall, I was startled to hear Madame Lejeune announce: ‘Special mentions in mathematics, history, and geography.' From my assembled schoolmates came a murmur of consternation, and also of satisfaction, because not all of them were my friends. I took this affront without turning a hair. At the end of the ceremony, my history teacher came up to my mother: Zaza had a bad influence upon me; we would no longer be allowed to sit next to one another at school. I tried hard to keep a stiff upper lip, but in vain: my eyes filled with tears, to the great delight of Mademoiselle Gontran who thought I was weeping because I had only got a special mention; I was popping with rage because they were going to take me away from Zaza. But my distress had a more profound significance. In that sad corridor I realized vaguely that my childhood was coming to an end. The grown-ups still had me under their thumb, but peace had gone for ever from my heart. I was now separated from them by this freedom that was no source of pride to me, but that I suffered in solitary silence.

*

I no longer held sway over the world: the façades of buildings and the indifferent glances of the passers-by exiled me from life. That is why about this time my love of the countryside took on an almost mystical fervour. As soon as I arrived at Meyrignac all barriers seemed to be swept away and my horizon broadened. I lost myself in the infinite and at the same time remained myself. I felt on my eyelids the
heat of the sun that shines for everyone but that here and now was lavishing its caresses on me alone. The wind went whirling round the poplars; it came from elsewhere, from everywhere; it went hustling through space, and I, too, was whirled away with it, without stirring from where I stood, right to the ends of the earth. When the moon arose in the heavens, I would be in touch with far-off cities, deserts, oceans, and villages which at that moment were bathed, as I was, in its radiance. I was no longer a vacant mind, an abstracted gaze, but the turbulent fragrance of the waving grain, the intimate smell of the heather moors, the dense heat of noon or the shiver of twilight; I was heavy; yet I was as vapour in the blue airs of summer and knew no bounds.

My experience of humanity was small; lacking insight and the appropriate words, I could not comprehend it all. But nature revealed to me a host of visible, tangible modes of existence which my own had never remotely resembled. I admired the proud isolation of the oak that dominated the landscape garden; I felt sorry for the communal solitude of blades of grass. I knew the innocence of morning and the melancholy of twilight, the triumphs and the defeats, the renewals and the expirations of life. One day, something inside me would find itself in harmony with the scent of the honeysuckle. Every evening I would go and lie among the same heather, and gaze at the shadowy blue undulations of the Monédières; every evening the sun would set behind the same hill: yet the pinks, the reds, the carmines, the purples, and the violets were never the same. From dawn to dusk there hummed over the unchanging plains a life that was everlastingly renewed. In the face of the changing sky, constancy was seen to be something more than routine habit, and growing-up did not necessarily mean denying one's true self.

Here, once again, I became unique and I felt I was needed: my own eyes were needed in order that the copper-red of the beech could be set against the blue of the cedar and the silver of the poplars. When I went away, the landscape fell to pieces, and no longer existed for anyone; it no longer existed at all.

Yet, much more strongly than in Paris, I could feel all around me the presence of God; in Paris He was hidden from me by people and their top-heavy preoccupations; here I could see blades of grass and clouds that were still the same as when He had snatched them out of primal Chaos, and that still bore His mark. The harder I pressed myself against the earth, the closer I got to Him, and every country walk was an act of adoration. His sovereign power did not cancel out my own authority. He knew all things after His own fashion, that is to say, in an absolute sense: but it seemed to me that He needed my eyes in order that the trees might have their colours. How could a pure spirit have experienced the scorching of the sun, the freshness of the dew, if not through the medium of my own body? He had created this earth for men, and he had created men in order that they might bear witness to its beauty: it was He who had given me the mission with which I had always felt myself to be
somehow entrusted. Far from wishing to dethrone me, He assured me that I would go on reigning. Deprived of my presence, Creation sank into a shadowy slumber; by waking it to life again, I was accomplishing the most sacred of all my tasks, whereas grown-ups, the indifferent ones, took God's laws into their own hands. Every morning as I passed through the white gates and ran down to the underwoods, it was He Himself who was calling me. He was gazing upon me with high satisfaction as I gazed upon this world which He had created in order that I might gaze upon it.

Even when I was racked with hunger, even when I was weary with reading and meditating, I disliked resuming possession of my wretched carcase and returning to the enclosed spaces and the ossified timetables of grown-up life. One evening, however, I went too far. It was at La Grillière. I had read a long time by the edge of a small lake; when it grew too dark to read, I closed the book, which was about the life of St Francis of Assisi. Lying in the grass, I gazed up at the moon; it was shining down on an Umbrian landscape radiant with the first dews of night: I felt breathless with the soft beauty of the moment. I should have liked to snatch it as it fled and fix it for ever on paper with immortal words; there will be other hours like this, I told myself, and I shall learn how never to let it go. I lay flat on my back, unable to move, and with my eyes fixed on the sky. When eventually I opened the billiard room door, dinner was just coming to an end. There was a fine how-d'ye-do; even my father expressed himself very forcibly. Thinking to teach me a lesson, my mother ordered that next day I should not be allowed to go outside the boundaries of the estate. Frankly, I did not dare disobey. I spent the day sitting on the lawns or pacing up and down the avenues with a book in my hand and rage in my heart. Over there, outside, the waters of the lake were ruffling and smoothing, light was hardening and softening on the heath and the hills, but without me, without anyone to see: it was unbearable. ‘If it were raining; if there were
some
reason for this silly prohibition,' I told myself, ‘then I could resign myself to it.' Here, once more, boiling up inside me, was the rebelliousness that had expressed itself in furious convulsions during my early childhood; a word thrown out at random sufficed to disrupt my happiness or prevent the gratification of a desire; and this frustration of oneself and of the world didn't help anyone in any way. Fortunately, I didn't get another
telling-off like that one. On the whole, as long as I was in time for meals, I could do what I liked with my time.

My holidays prevented me from confusing the joys of contemplation with boredom. In Paris, in museums, I would sometimes cheat; at least I knew the difference between forced admiration and sincere emotion. I also learnt that in order to enter into the secrets of things you first of all have to give yourself to them. Usually my curiosity was insatiable; I believed I could possess something as soon as I knew about it, and that I could get this knowledge in a superficial glance. But in order to make a small part of the countryside my own I wandered day after day along the country lanes, and would stand motionless for hours at the foot of a tree: then the least vibration of the air and every fleeting autumnal tint would move me deeply.

I returned to Paris with bad grace. I would go out on the balcony: there would be nothing but roofs; the heavens would be reduced to a geometrical pattern, the air was no longer a perfume and a caress, but a nothingness in a wilderness of space. The noises of the street did not speak to me. I would stand there with an empty heart, and with my eyes full of tears.

*

Back in Paris, I was again under grown-up supervision. I still accepted without criticism their version of the world. It would be impossible to imagine a more sectarian education than the one I received. School primers, text books, lessons, conversations: all converged upon the same point. I was never allowed to hear, even at a great distance, even very faintly, the other side of the question.

I learnt history as unquestioningly as I did geography, without ever dreaming that there might be more than one view of past events. When I was very small, we visited the Musée Grévin where I was very moved by the martyrs delivered up to the lions and by the noble countenance of Marie-Antoinette. The emperors who had persecuted the Christians, the stocking-knitters and the
sans-culottes
of the French Revolution seemed to me to be the most odious incarnations of Evil. Good was represented by the Church and by
‘la France'.
In my lessons I was taught about Popes and Lateran Councils, but I was much more interested in the destiny of
my country: her past, her present, and her future gave rise to numerous discussions at home; Papa enjoyed the works of Madelin, Lenôtre, and Funck-Brentano. I was made to read quantities of historical tales and romances, and the entire collection of
Memoirs
in Madame Carette's expurgated edition. About the age of nine, I had wept over the misfortunes of Louis XVII and admired the heroism of the insurgent Breton royalists. But I very soon dismissed the monarchy; I found it absurd that power should be given to hereditary rulers who were for the most part imbeciles. It would have seemed more natural to me if the Government had been entrusted to those who were most competent to govern. In our land, I knew, this was unfortunately not the case. We were fated to get scoundrels for our leaders, and so France, fundamentally superior to all other nations, did not occupy her rightful place in the world. Certain of Papa's friends maintained that England and not Germany was our hereditary enemy; but that was as far as their dissensions went. They agreed that the existence of any foreign country should be considered ludicrous as well as dangerous.
‘La France'
, a victim of Wilson's criminal idealism, her future threatened by the brutal realism of Boche and Bolshevik was heading for disaster because she lacked firm leadership. My father, who was steadily eating up his capital, saw ruin staring humanity in the face: Mama chorused her agreement. There was the red peril; there was the yellow peril: soon a new wave of barbarism was spreading from the four corners of the earth and from the lowest depths of society; revolution would precipitate the world into chaos. My father used to prophesy these calamities with a passionate vehemence that filled me with consternation; this future that he painted in such lurid colours was
my
future; I loved life: I couldn't accept that tomorrow it would be filled with hopeless lamentation. One day, instead of letting the flood of words and images of devastation roll over my head, I hit upon an answer: ‘Whatever happens,' I said, ‘it will be men who win the final victory.' One might have thought, to listen to my father, that there were deformed monsters waiting to tear humanity to pieces. But the two opposing sides would be composed of human beings! After all, I thought, it is the majority who will win the day; the dissatisfied will be in the minority; if happiness changes hands, that's no catastrophe. The Other Side had suddenly ceased to appear as Evil incarnate: I could not see why we should
a priori
prefer those interests which were said to be mine to
his
interests. I breathed again. The world was not, after all, in danger.

It was mental distress that had provoked my outburst: I had found a way out of my despair because I ardently desired it and sought for it. But my security and my comfortable illusions made me insensitive to social problems. I was very far from disputing the established order of things.

To say the very least, property, it seemed to me, was a sacred right; I assumed that there was a consubstantial unity between the proprietor and his possessions, just as formerly I had considered words and their meanings to be integral parts of one another. When I said:
my
money,
my
sister,
my
nose, I was in all three cases consolidating a bond which no will could destroy because it existed above and beyond all conventional ideas. I was told that in order to construct the railway to Uzerche the State had expropriated a certain number of small farmers and landed gentry: I could not have been more horrified if it had shed their blood. Meyrignac belonged to my grandfather as absolutely as his own life.