I DO NOT think my mother can have been a happy child. I only remember her speaking of one pleasant memory—her grandmother’s garden in a village in Lorraine, and the little plums and greengages they ate, warm from the tree. She never told me anything about her childhood at Verdun. There is a photograph of her, aged eight and dressed as a daisy. ‘You had a pretty costume,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘but the dye came out of my green stockings and worked deep into my skin. It took three days to get rid of it.’ Her voice was sullen: a past full of bitterness was running through her mind. She complained to me more than once of her mother’s coldness. When my grandmother was fifty she was detached and even haughty, a woman who laughed little, gossiped much, and showed no more than a conventional affection for Maman: she was fanatically devoted to her husband, and her children had only a secondary place in her life. Speaking to me of my grandfather, Maman often said resentfully, ‘He never had time for anyone but your Aunt Lili.’ Lili, five years younger, pink and fair, aroused a fervent, ineradicable jealousy in her sister. Until I began to reach adolescence Maman ascribed to me the loftiest intellectual and moral qualities: she identified herself with me and she humiliated and slighted my sister – Poupette was the younger sister, pink and fair, and without realizing it, Maman was taking her revenge upon her.
She told me proudly about Les Oiseaux and the Mother Superior, whose good opinion had consoled her self-esteem. She showed me a photograph of her class: six girls sitting in a park between two nuns. There are four boarders, dressed in black, and two day-girls, in white frocks – Maman and one of her friends. They are all wearing high tuckers, long skirts, severe buns. There is no expression whatever in their eyes. Maman started life corseted in the most rigid of principles – provincial propriety and the morals of a convent-girl.
When she was twenty she suffered another emotional set-back: the cousin she had fallen in love with preferred another girl, also a cousin, my Aunt Germaine. All her life long she retained an underlying sensitivity and rancour arising from these disappointments.
When she was with my father she came into flower. She loved him, she admired him, and there is not the slightest doubt that for ten years he made her entirely happy physically. He loved women; he had had many affairs; and like Marcel Prévost, whom he read with delight, he thought that a young wife ought not to be treated with less ardour than a mistress. Maman’s face, with that faint down on her upper lip, betrayed a warm voluptuousness. The understanding between them was perfectly apparent: he stroked her arm, petted her, whispered affectionate nonsense. I see her again as I saw her one morning – I was six or seven – barefoot on the red carpet of the corridor in her long white linen nightgown; her hair fell in a twist on the back of her neck and I was struck by the radiance of her smile, which, for me, was associated in some mysterious way with that bedroom she had just left; I scarcely recognized this brilliant vision as the respectable grown-up who was my mother.
But nothing, ever, wipes out childhood. And Maman’s happiness was not unalloyed. My father’s selfishness burst out as early as their honeymoon: she wanted to see the Italian Lakes; they went no further than Nice, where the racing season had just begun. She often recalled this disappointment, not with any grudge, but not without regret. She loved travelling. ‘I should have liked to be an explorer,’ she used to say. The happiest times of her young days were those excursions on bicycle or on foot, through the Vosges or Luxembourg, which my grandfather organized. She had to give up many of the things she had dreamt of: my father’s wishes always came before hers. She stopped seeing her own friends, whose husbands he found boring. He only enjoyed himself in drawing-rooms or on the stage. She cheerfully followed him there: she liked social events. But her beauty did not protect her from spitefulness: she was provincial and not very quick-witted; people smiled at her awkwardness in that very Parisian society. Some of the women she met there had had affairs with my father: I can imagine whisperings, betrayals. In his desk my father kept the photograph of his last mistress, a pretty, brilliant woman who sometimes came to the house with her husband. Thirty years later he said to Maman, laughing, ‘You did away with her photo.’ She denied it, but he was not convinced. One thing is sure, and that is that even at the time of her honeymoon she suffered both in her love and her pride. She was passionate and headstrong: her wounds healed slowly.
And then my grandfather went bankrupt. She thought herself dishonoured, so much so that she broke with all her connexions at Verdun. The dowry promised to my father was not paid. She thought it extremely noble in him not to blame her, and she felt guilty towards him all her life.
But for all that, a successful marriage, two daughters who loved her dearly, some degree of affluence – until the end of the war Maman did not complain of her fate. She was affectionate, she was gay, and her smile ravished my heart.
When my father’s circumstances changed and we experienced semi-poverty, Maman decided to look after the house without a servant. Unfortunately, housework bored her terribly, and she thought she was lowering herself by doing it. She was capable of selfless devotion for my father and for us. But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness. One of Maman’s contradictions was that she thoroughly believed in the nobility of devotion, while at the same time she had tastes, aversions and desires that were too masterful for her not to loathe whatever went against them. She was continually rebelling against the restraints and the privations that she inflicted upon herself.
It is a pity that out-of-date ideas should have prevented her from adopting the solution that she came round to, twenty years later – that of working away from home. She had a good memory, she was persevering and conscientious; she might have become a secretary or have worked in a book-shop: she would have risen in her own esteem instead of feeling that she was losing caste. She would have had connexions of her own. She would have escaped from a state of dependence that tradition made her think natural but that did not in the least agree with her nature. And no doubt she would then have been better equipped to bear the frustration that she had to put up with.
I do not blame my father. It is tolerably well known that in men habit kills desire. Maman had lost her first freshness and he his ardour. In order to arouse it he turned to the professionals of the café de Versailles, or the young ladies of the Sphinx. More than once, between the age of fifteen and twenty, I saw him coming home at eight in the morning, smelling of drink, and telling confused tales of bridge or poker. Maman made no scenes: perhaps she believed him, so trained was she at running away from awkward truths. But she could not happily adapt herself to his indifference. Her case alone would be enough to convince me that bourgeois marriage is an unnatural institution. The wedding-ring on her finger had authorized her to become acquainted with pleasure; her senses had grown demanding; at thirty-five, in the prime of her life, she was no longer allowed to satisfy them. She went on sleeping beside the man whom she loved, and who almost never made love to her any more: she hoped, she waited and she pined, in vain. Complete abstinence would have been less of a trial for her pride than this promiscuity. I am not surprised that her temper should have deteriorated: slaps, nagging, scenes, not only in privacy, but even when guests were there. ‘Françoise has a disgusting character,’ my father used to say. She admitted that she ‘flew off the handle’ easily. But she was bitterly hurt when she heard that people said ‘Françoise is so pessimistic!’ or ‘Françoise is becoming neurotic.’
When she was a young woman she loved clothes. Her face would light up when people told her that she looked like my elder sister. One of my father’s cousins, who played the ’cello and whom she accompanied on the piano, paid her respectful attentions: when he married she loathed his wife. When her sexual and her social life dwindled away Maman stopped taking care of her appearance, except on grand occasions when ‘dressing up’ was essential. I remember coming back from the holidays once: she met us at the station, and she was wearing a pretty velvet hat with a little veil, and she had put on some powder. My sister was delighted and she cried, ‘Maman, you look just like a fashionable lady!’ She laughed unreservedly, for she no longer prided herself on elegance. Both for her daughters and for herself, she pushed the contempt for the body that she had been taught at the convent to the point of uncleanliness. Yet – and this was another of her contradictions – she still retained the desire to please; flatteries flattered her; she replied to them coquettishly. She was filled with pride when one of my father’s friends dedicated a book (published at the author’s expense) to her – To Françoise de Beauvoir, whose life I so admire. An ambiguous tribute: she earned admiration by a self-effacement that deprived her of admirers.
Cut off from the pleasures of the body, deprived of the satisfactions of vanity, tied down to wearisome tasks that bored and humiliated her, this proud and obstinate woman did not possess the gift of resignation. Between her fits of anger she was perpetually singing, gossiping, making jokes, drowning her heart’s complaints with noise. When, after my father’s death, Aunt Germaine hinted that he had not been an ideal husband, Maman snubbed her fiercely. ‘He always made me very happy.’ And certainly that was what she always told herself. Still, this forced optimism was not enough to satisfy her hunger. She flung herself into the only other course that was available to her – that of feeding upon the young lives that were in her care. ‘At least I have never been self-centred; I have lived for others,’ she said to me later. Yes, but also by means of others. She was possessive; she was overbearing; she would have liked to have us completely in her power. But it was just at the time when this compensation became necessary to her that we began to long for freedom and solitude. Conflicts worked themselves up and broke out; and they were no help to Maman in recovering her balance.
Yet she was the strongest: it was her will that won. At home we had to leave all the doors open, and I had to work under her eye, in the room where she was sitting. When, at night, my sister and I chattered from one bed to the other, she pressed her ear against the wall, eaten up with curiosity, and called out, ‘Be quiet!’ She would not let us learn to swim, and she prevented my father from buying us bicycles: we would have escaped from her through these pleasures that she could not have shared. She insisted upon taking part in all our amusements, and this was not only because she had few of her own: for reasons that no doubt went back to her childhood, she could not bear to feel left out. She did not scruple to force herself upon us, even when she knew she was not wanted. One night at La Grillère, we were in the kitchen with a whole band of friends of our cousins, boys and girls: we were cooking the crayfish that we had just caught by the light of lanterns. Maman burst in, the only grown-up: ‘I certainly have the right to have supper with you.’ She cast a great damp on everything, but she stayed. Later, my cousin Jacques and my sister and I had agreed to meet at the door of the Salon d’Automne; Maman went with us; he did not appear. ‘I saw your mother, so I went away,’ he said the next day. She always made her presence felt. When we invited friends to the house – ‘I certainly have the right to have tea with you’ – she monopolized the conversation. At Vienna and Milan my sister was often dismayed by the confidence with which Maman thrust herself forward during more or less official dinners.
These heavy-handed intrusions, these outbursts of self-consequence, were opportunities for getting her own back: she did not often have the chance of asserting herself. She had few social contacts, and when my father was there it was he who held the stage. The expression that we found so vexing, ‘I certainly have the right’, in fact proves her want of self-assurance; her desires did not carry their own justification with them. She had no self-control and at times she was a shrew; but ordinarily she pushed discretion to the point of humility. She quarrelled with my father over trifles, but she never ventured to ask him for money; she spent none on herself and as little as possible on us; meekly she let him spend all his evenings away from home and go out by himself on Sundays. After his death, when she was dependent on Poupette and me, she had the same scruple with regard to us, the same desire not to be a nuisance. She was under an obligation to us and she no longer had any other way of showing us her feelings; whereas formerly in her eyes the trouble she took over us justified her tyranny.
Her love for us was deep as well as exclusive, and the pain it caused us as we submitted to it was a reflection of her own conflicts. She was very open to wounds – she was capable of chewing over a reproof or a criticism for thirty or forty years – and her diffused indwelling resentment made itself apparent in aggressive forms of behaviour – brutal frankness, heavily ironic remarks. With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself. When I was spending my holidays with Zaza, my sister wrote to me: an adolescent girl, she told me about her heart, her soul, her problems; I replied. Maman opened my letter and read it aloud in front of Poupette, shrieking with laughter at its confidences. Poupette, stiff with fury, overwhelmed her with her scorn and swore that she would never forgive her. Maman burst into tears and begged me, in a letter, to bring them together again: which I did.
She wanted to make sure of her power over my sister above all, and she grew jealous of our friendship. When she knew that I had lost my faith she said very loudly and angrily to Poupette, ‘I shall defend you against her influence. I shall protect you!’ During the holidays she forbade us to see one another alone: we met secretly in the chestnut woods. This jealousy tormented her all her life, and until the end we still kept the habit of hiding most of our meetings from her.
But it also often happened that we were moved by the warmth of her affection. When Poupette was about seventeen she was the involuntary cause of a quarrel between Papa and ‘Uncle’ Adrien, whom he considered his best friend: Maman defended her fiercely against my father, who would not speak to his daughter for months. Later on he held it against my sister that she would not sacrifice her vocation as a painter in order to earn her bread and butter, and that she went on living at home: he would not give her a penny and he barely fed her. Maman stood up for her and used all her ingenuity to help her. For my part, I have not forgotten how sweetly, after my father’s death, she urged me to go off on a journey with a friend, when a single sigh from her would have kept me back.
She spoilt her relationships with other people by clumsiness: nothing could have been more pitiful than her attempts at separating my sister and me. When our cousin Jacques – she transferred to him a little of the love she had had for his father – took to coming to the rue de Rennes less frequently she received him every time with little scenes that she thought amusing and that he found irritating: he came less and less often. There were tears in her eyes when I settled in Grandmama’s house, and I was grateful to her for not making even the first hint of an emotional display – that was something she always avoided. Yet every time I had dinner at home that year she grumbled that I was neglecting my family, although in fact I came very often. She would not ask for anything, out of pride and upon principle; and then she complained of not being given enough.
She could not discuss her difficulties with anyone at all, not even herself. She had not been taught to see her own motives plainly nor to use her own judgment. She had to take shelter behind authority: but the authorities she respected were not in agreement; there was hardly a single point in common between the Mother Superior of Les Oiseaux and my father. I had experienced this setting of one idea against another while my mind was being formed and not after it was set: thanks to my early childhood I had a confidence in myself that my mother did not possess in the least: the road of argument, disputation – my road – was closed to her. On the contrary, she had made up her mind to share the general opinion: the last person who spoke to her was right. She read a great deal; but although she had an excellent memory she forgot almost everything. Exact knowledge, a decided view, would have made the sudden reversals that circumstances might force upon her impossible. Even after my father’s death she retained this prudent attitude. The people she then mixed with were more of her way of thinking. She sided with the ‘enlightened’ Catholics against the integrists. Yet the people she knew differed on many points. And on the other hand, although I was living in sin, my opinion counted in many things, and so did those of my sister and Lionel. She dreaded ‘looking a fool’ in our eyes. So she remained woolly-minded and she went on saying yes to everything and being surprised by nothing. In her last years she did attain some kind of coherence in her ideas, but at the time when her emotional life was at its most tormented she possessed no doctrine, no concepts, no words with which to rationalize her situation. That was the source of her bewildered uneasiness.
Thinking against oneself often bears fruit; but with my mother it was another question again – she lived against herself. She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger. In her childhood her body, her heart and her mind had been squeezed into an armour of principles and prohibitions. She had been taught to pull the laces hard and tight herself. A full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated.