“By yourself?” asked Mademoiselle Dubois; Andrée shrugged. “Well, if your mother told the school . . .”
Mademoiselle Dubois kissed me on the forehead when it was my turn, and I followed Andrée into the coatroom. She slipped on her coat: it was not as unique as mine, but it was very pretty, made of thick wool, red with gold buttons. She wasn’t a street urchin, so why was she allowed to go out alone? Wasn’t her mother aware of the danger of deadly candy and poisoned needles?
“Where do you live, Andrée dear?” asked Mama as we were going down the stairs with my little sisters.
“Rue de Grenelle.”
“Oh, well, then! We’ll walk with you to the Boulevard Saint-Germain,” said Mama. “It’s on our way.”
“With pleasure,” said Andrée, “but please don’t go out of your way for me.” She looked at Mama. “You see, Madame,” she said quite seriously, “there are seven of us children; Mama says that we have to learn how to manage by ourselves.”
Mama nodded, but it was obvious she didn’t approve.
As soon as we were out on the street, I questioned Andrée: “How did you get burned?”
“I was cooking some potatoes over a campfire; my dress caught fire, and my right thigh was burned right down to the bone.” Andrée made a small gesture of impatience; this old story bored her. “When can I see your notebooks? I need to know what you studied last year. Tell me where you live, and I’ll come by this afternoon or tomorrow.”
I looked at Mama for approval; I wasn’t allowed to play with children I didn’t know in the Luxembourg Gardens.
“This week isn’t possible,” said Mama, sounding embarrassed. “Maybe on Saturday; we’ll see.”
“All right; I’ll wait until Saturday,” said Andrée.
I watched her cross the wide boulevard in her red woolen coat; she was really very small, but she walked with the confidence of an adult.
“Your uncle Jacques knew the Gallards, who were related to the Lavergnes, the Blanchards’ cousins,” Mama said in a dreamy voice. “I wonder if it’s the same family. But it seems to me that respectable people would not allow a little child of nine to run around the streets alone.”
My parents discussed the various branches of the Gallard families for a long time, what they’d heard from people close to them or from third parties. Mama got information from the teachers. Andrée’s parents were only distantly related to Uncle Jacques’s Gallards, but they were very highly regarded. Monsieur Gallard had attended the Polytechnique,* held an excellent post at Citroën, and was the chairman of the League of Fathers of Large Families. His wife, née Rivière de Bonneuil, belonged to a large dynasty of militant Catholics and was well respected by the parishioners of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Informed, most likely, of my mother’s concerns, Madame Gallard came to pick up Andrée the following Saturday at the end of the school day. She was a beautiful woman with dark eyes who wore a black velvet ribbon around her neck; it was held in place by an antique pin. She won Mama over by telling her that she looked young enough to be my older sister and by calling her “young lady.” But I didn’t like her velvet necklace.
Madame Gallard had indulgently told Mama the story of Andrée’s martyrdom: the cracked skin, enormous blisters, paraffin-coated dressings, Andrée’s delirium, her courage, how one of her little friends had kicked her while they were playing a game and had reopened her wounds. She’d made such an effort not to scream that she’d fainted. When she came to my house to see my notebooks, I looked at her with respect; she took notes in beautiful handwriting, and I thought about her swollen thigh under her pleated skirt. Never had anything as interesting happened to me. I suddenly had the impression that nothing had ever happened to me at all.
All the children I knew bored me, but Andrée made me laugh when we walked together on the playground between classes. She was marvelous at imitating the brusque gestures of Mademoiselle Dubois, the unctuous voice of Mademoiselle Vendroux, the principal. She knew loads of secrets about the place from her older sister: these young women were affiliated with the Jesuits; they wore their hair parted on the side when they were still novices, in the middle once they’d taken their vows. Mademoiselle Dubois, who was only thirty, was the youngest. She’d taken her baccalaureate the year before; the older students had seen her at the Sorbonne, blushing and all awkward in her long skirt. I was a little scandalized by Andrée’s irreverence, but I found her funny, and played opposite her when she improvised a dialogue between two of our teachers. Her caricatures were so accurate that we often poked each other with our elbows during lessons when we saw Mademoiselle Dubois open the attendance register or close a book. Once I was so overcome with laughter that I surely would have been thrown out of the class if my behavior hadn’t normally been so exemplary.
The first few times I went to play at Andrée’s house on the Rue de Grenelle, I was dumbfounded. Apart from her brothers and sisters, there were always masses of cousins and friends; they ran, shouted, sang, dressed up, jumped on the tables, overturned the furniture. Sometimes Malou, who was fifteen and bossy, intervened, but then you’d immediately hear Madame Gallard’s voice saying, “Let the children have fun.” I was astounded by her indifference to the injuries, bumps, stains, broken dishes. “Mama never gets angry,” Andrée said to me with a triumphant smile. At the end of the afternoon, Madame Gallard came into the room we’d wrecked, smiling; she picked up a chair and dried Andrée’s forehead, saying, “You’re drenched in sweat again!” Andrée hugged her tightly, and for an instant, her face was transformed. I looked away, feeling uneasy, probably because I was a little jealous, perhaps envious, and I felt the kind of fear aroused by the unknown.
I had been taught that I had to love Mama and Papa equally: Andrée didn’t hide the fact that she loved her mother more than her father. “Papa is too serious,” she calmly said to me one day. Monsieur Gallard puzzled me because he wasn’t like Papa. My father never went to Mass, and he smiled whenever someone talked about the miracles of Lourdes in front of him; I’d heard him say that he had only one religion: the love of France. I was not troubled by his irreverence. Mama, who was very pious, seemed to find it normal; a man as superior as Papa necessarily had a more complicated relationship with God than women or little girls did. Monsieur Gallard, on the other hand, took Communion every Sunday with his family; he had a long beard, wore a pince-nez, and volunteered to do good works in his spare time. His silky hair, his Christian virtues, made him seem feminine and belittled him in my eyes. Anyway, he was seen only under unusual circumstances. It was Madame Gallard who ruled the house. I envied the freedom she gave to Andrée, but even though she always spoke to me most kindly, I felt uncomfortable with her.
Sometimes Andrée would say: “I’m tired of playing.” We’d go and sit down in Monsieur Gallard’s office and not turn on the lights so we wouldn’t be discovered, and then we’d chat: it was a new pleasure. My parents talked to me and I talked to them, but we never chatted together; with Andrée, I had real conversations, like Papa did in the evening with Mama. She’d read a lot of books during her long convalescence, and she surprised me because she seemed to believe that the stories the books told had actually happened: she detested Corneille’s Horace and Polyeucte, admired Don Quixote and Cyrano de Bergerac as if they had existed in flesh and blood. Where earlier centuries were concerned, she also had her favorites. She liked the Greeks, but the Romans bored her; though unmoved by the misfortunes of Louis XVII and his family, she was devastated by the death of Napoleon.
Many of these opinions were subversive, but given her young age, the novices forgave her. “That child has personality,” they said at school. Andrée quickly caught up; I only barely beat her in composition, and she had the honor of copying two of her essays into the special book used to display excellent work. She played the piano so well that she was immediately placed in the intermediate group; she also started taking violin lessons. She didn’t like to sew, but she was good at it; she competently made caramels, shortbread cookies,
chocolate truffles. Even though she was frail, she knew how to turn cartwheels, could do the splits and all sorts of somersaults. But what gave her the greatest prestige in my eyes were certain unique characteristics whose meanings I have never understood: when she looked at a peach or an orchid, or if anyone simply said either word in front of her, Andrée would shudder, and her arms would break out in goose bumps; those were the times when the heavenly gift she’d received—and which I marveled at so much—would manifest itself in the most disconcerting way: it was character. I secretly told myself that Andrée was one of those child prodigies whose lives would later be recounted in books.
MOST OF THE PUPILS from the school left Paris in the middle of June because of the bombs and Big Bertha.*
The Gallards left for Lourdes; they took part in a large pilgrimage every year. Their son was a stretcher bearer, and the older girls washed dishes in the kitchens of a hospice; I admired the fact that they entrusted Andrée with these grown-up tasks and respected her more for it. Nevertheless, I was proud of the heroic stubbornness of my parents: by remaining in Paris, we were demonstrating to our valiant soldiers that the civilians were “holding out.” I was the only one left in my class along with a big idiot who was twelve, and I felt important. One morning when I got to school, the teachers and pupils were all taking refuge in the basement: we joked about that at home for a long time. When the sirens went off, we didn’t go down to the basement; the people who lived upstairs came and took shelter at our place, they slept on the couches in the next room. I liked all that hustle and bustle.
I left for Sadernac at the end of July with Mama and my sisters. Grandfather, who remembered the siege of ’71, imagined that we were eating rats in Paris: for two months, he stuffed us with chicken and clafoutis cake. I had many happy days. In the living room, there was a library full of old books whose pages were dotted with rust stains; the forbidden works were relegated to the highest shelf, but I was allowed to freely leaf through anything on the lower ones. I read, played with my sisters, and went for long walks. I walked a lot that summer. I walked through the chestnut groves, stinging my fingers; I picked bunches of honeysuckle and spindle, tasted the blackberries, arbutus berries, dogwood leaves, the tart berries of the barberry shrubs; I breathed in the heavy scent of the buckwheat in flower, lay on the ground to catch a whiff of the strange scent of the heather. Then I would sit in the wide meadow, at the foot of the silver poplar trees, and open a novel by James Fenimore Cooper. When the wind blew, the poplars would whisper. The wind enthralled me. I felt that from one end of the earth to the other, the trees spoke to each other and spoke to God; it sounded like both music and a prayer were piercing my heart before rising to the heavens.
The pleasures I experienced were innumerable but difficult to describe. All I sent to Andrée were brief notes on postcards; she hardly wrote to me either. They were in the Landes region, at her maternal grandmother’s house; she went horseback riding, she was having a good time; she wouldn’t come back to Paris before mid-October. I didn’t think of her very often. During the summer vacation, I almost never thought about my life in Paris.
I shed a few tears when saying goodbye to the poplar trees: I was getting older, becoming sentimental. But on the train, I remembered how much I liked the beginning of the school year. Papa was waiting for us on the platform in his pale-blue uniform; he said the war would soon be over. The schoolbooks seemed even newer than in past years: they were bigger, more beautiful, they cracked open beneath your fingers, they smelled good. In the Luxembourg Gardens, there was the stirring scent of dead leaves and dried-out grass. The teachers hugged me effusively, and the homework I’d done over the summer earned me the greatest praise. So why did I feel so miserable? In the evening, after supper, I sat in the adjoining room, reading or writing stories in a notebook; my sisters were asleep; at the end of the hallway, Papa was reading to Mama: it was one of the best moments of the day. I would lie on the red carpet, doing nothing, in a daze. I would look at the enormous wardrobe and the hand-carved wooden clock that held within it two copper pinecones and the obscurity of time. The slats of the heater were set in the wall; through their bronze bars flowed the nauseating smell of warm gusts of air rising from the abyss. All that darkness and the silent things around me suddenly made me feel afraid. I could hear Papa’s voice; I knew the title of the book: Essay on the Inequality of Human Races by Count de Gobineau. Last year it was The Origins of Contemporary France by Taine. Next year, he’ll start a new book, and I’ll still be here, between the wardrobe and the clock. How many years? How many evenings? Is living nothing more than that: killing one day after the other? Would I be this bored until I died? I thought that I missed Sadernac; before going to bed, I shed a few more tears over the poplar trees.
Two days later, the truth struck me like a lightning bolt. I went into the Sainte Catherine classroom and Andrée smiled at me; I smiled back and we shook hands.
“When did you get back?”
“Last night.”
Andrée looked at me somewhat playfully. “You were here the first day of school, of course?”
“Yes,” I said. “Did you have a good vacation?” I added.
“Very good, and you?”
“Very good.”
We made small talk, like adults do; but I suddenly understood, with astonishment and joy, that the emptiness in my heart, my gloomy feeling of recent days, had only one cause: the absence of Andrée. Living without her was no longer living. Mademoiselle de Villeneuve sat down on her high-backed chair and I thought once more: “Without Andrée, my life is over.” My joy transformed into anguish: what would become of me if she died? I wondered. I would be sitting on my little seat, the principal would come in and say in a serious voice: “Let us pray, dear children, your little friend Andrée Gallard was called to God last night.” Well! It’s simple, I decided, I’d slip under my chair and fall down dead as well. The idea didn’t frighten me because we would soon be reunited at the gates of heaven.
On November 11, we celebrated Armistice Day; people hugged and kissed in the street. For four years, I had prayed for this great day to come, and I expected astonishing changes; dark memories returned to my heart. Papa put his civilian clothes back on, but nothing else happened; he talked endlessly about how the Bolsheviks had stolen some of his savings. Those men in some faraway place, whose names dangerously resembled the Boche seemed to possess terrible powers; and then General Foch truly had let himself be manipulated: he might have had to go all the way to Berlin. Papa imagined such a bad future that he didn’t dare reopen his office; he found a job at an insurance company and announced it was necessary to tighten our belts. Mama let Elisa go, she didn’t behave very well anyway—she went out with firemen every night—and Mama took charge of all the housework; in the evening, she was in a bad mood, Papa too. My sisters often cried. But I didn’t care because I had Andrée.
Andrée grew taller and stronger; I stopped thinking she might die, but there was another dangerous threat: the school did not approve of our friendship. Andrée was a brilliant pupil, I came first in the class only because she couldn’t be bothered; I admired her nonchalance without being able to imitate it. Nevertheless, she had lost favor with the teachers. They found her contradictory, ironic, prideful; they reproached her for making snide remarks. They never succeeded in catching her being downright insolent because Andrée carefully kept her distance, and that was perhaps what irritated them the most. But they scored a point the day of the piano recital. The great hall was full: in the first rows were the pupils wearing their most beautiful dresses, their hair in ringlets or curls, with bows; behind them, the teachers and supervisors, in silk blouses and white gloves; at the back, the parents and guests. Andrée, dressed in a fancy blue taffeta dress, played a piece that her mother found too difficult for her and in which she normally massacred several bars. I was upset because I could feel all those malevolent eyes fixed on her as she started the tricky passage. She played it without a single
mistake, then gave her mother a triumphant look and stuck her tongue out at her. The other mothers coughed, scandalized, the teachers glanced at each other, and the principal turned all red. When Andrée came down from the stage, she ran to her mother, who kissed her. Andrée was laughing in such a happy way that Mademoiselle Vendroux didn’t dare scold her. But a few days later, she complained to Mama about Andrée’s bad influence on me: we chatted in class, I sniggered, was distracted. She talked about putting us in different classes, and I spent a week in anguish. Madame Gallard, who appreciated my studious enthusiasm, easily convinced Mama to leave us in peace, and as both mothers were excellent patrons with a lot of influence, Mama having three daughters and Madame Gallard six, we continued sitting next to each other as in the past.
Would Andrée have been sad if we’d been prevented from seeing each other? Less than me, most definitely. We were called the inseparable friends, and she liked me more than our other classmates. But it seemed to me that her adoration of her mother made all other feelings fade by comparison. Her family counted a tremendous amount on her; she spent a long time playing with her little twin sisters, bathing and dressing those masses of jumbled flesh. She found meaning in their babbling, their vague gestures, showered them with love. And then there was music, which held an important place in her life. When she sat down at the piano, when she placed her violin in the crook of her neck and listened dreamily to the song born beneath her fingers, I thought I could hear her talking to herself: compared to the long dialogue that continued secretly in her heart, our conversations seemed quite childish. Sometimes Madame Gallard, who played the piano very well, accompanied the piece Andrée was playing on the violin, and then I felt completely excluded. No, our friendship did not have the same importance to Andrée as it did to me, but I admired her far too much to suffer because of it.
The following year, my parents left the apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse and moved into cramped lodgings on the Rue Cassette, where I didn’t have even a corner to myself. Andrée invited me to go and work at her house as often as I wanted. Every time I went into her bedroom, I was so moved that I wanted to make the sign of the Cross. Above her bed was a crucifix with a little branch from a box tree that had been blessed by the priest on Palm Sunday, and opposite, a copy of Saint Anne by da Vinci; on the mantelpiece, a portrait of Madame Gallard and a photograph of the château de Béthary. On her bookshelves, Andrée’s personal library: Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Eugénie Grandet, Tristan and Isolde (she knew passages from the novel by heart); she usually liked realist or satirical books: her preference for that romantic epic confused me. I anxiously examined the walls and objects that surrounded Andrée. I wanted to understand what she was thinking when her bow glided over the strings of her violin. I wanted to know why, with so much emotion in her heart, so many things to do, so many gifts, she often looked distant and seemed sad to me. She was very pious. When I went to pray in the chapel, I sometimes found her kneeling at the foot of the altar, head in her hands, or her arms outstretched in front of one of the stations of the Cross. Was she considering becoming a nun later in life? Yet her freedom and the joys of the world were so important to her. Her eyes shone when she told me about her vacation: she spent hours galloping on horseback through the pine forests where the low branches scratched her face, she swam in the stagnant waters of the ponds, in the brisk waters of the Adour River. Was that the paradise she was dreaming of when she sat motionless in front of her notebooks, staring into space? One day, she noticed I was watching her and laughed, embarrassed: “You think I’m wasting my time?”
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