Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

  I had long ago decided to devote my life to intellectual labours. Zaza shocked me when she declared, in a provocative tone of voice: ‘Bringing nine children into the world as Mama has done is just as good as writing books.’ I couldn’t see any common denominator between these two modes of existence. To have children, who in their turn would have more children, was simply to go on playing the same old tune ad infinitum; the scholar, the artist, the writer, and the thinker created other worlds, all sweetness and light, in which everything had purpose. That was where I wished to spend my life; I was quite determined to carve out a place for myself in those rarefied spheres. As soon as I had given up all hopes of heaven, my worldly ambitions increased; I had to get on in life. Stretched out in a meadow, I could see at eye-level the endless waves of grass, each blade identical, each submerged in a miniature jungle that concealed it from all the rest. That unending repetition of ignorance and indifference was a living death. I raised my eyes and looked at the oak tree: it dominated the landscape and there was not another like it. That, I decided, is what I would be like.

  Why did I decide to be a writer? As a child, I had never taken my scribblings very seriously; my real aim had been to acquire knowledge. I enjoyed doing French compositions, but my teachers objected to my stilted style; I did not feel I was a ‘born’ writer. Yet at the age of fifteen when I wrote in a friend’s album the plans and preferences which were supposed to give a picture of my personality, I answered without hesitation the question ‘What do you want to do later in life? ‘with ‘To be a famous author.’ As far as my favourite composer and my favourite flower were concerned I had invented more or less fictitious preferences. But on that one point I had no doubts at all; I had set my heart on that profession, to the exclusion of everything else.

  The main reason for this was the admiration I felt for writers: my father rated them far higher than scholars, philosophers, and professors. I, too, was convinced of their supremacy; even if his name was well-known, a specialist’s monograph would be accessible to only a small number of people; but everyone read novels: they touched the imagination and the heart; they brought their authors universal and intimate fame. As a woman, these dizzy summits seemed to me much more accessible than the lowlier slopes; the most celebrated women had distinguished themselves in literature.

  I had always had a longing to communicate with others. In my friend’s album I cited as my favourite hobbies reading and conversation. I was a great talker. I would recount, or try to, everything that had struck me in the course of the day. I dreaded night and oblivion; it was agony to condemn to silence all that I had seen, felt, and liked. Moved by the moonlight, I longed for pen and paper and the ability to describe my feelings. When I was fifteen I loved volumes of letters, intimate journals – for example the diary of Eugénie de Guérin – that attempted to make time come to a stop. I had also realized that novels, short stories, and tales are not divorced from life but that they are, in their own way, expressions of it.

  If at one time I had dreamed of being a teacher it was because I wanted to be a law unto myself; I now thought that literature would allow me to realize this dream. It would guarantee me an immortality which would compensate for the loss of heaven and eternity; there was no longer any God to love me, but I should have the undying love of millions of hearts. By writing a work based on my own experience I would re-create myself and justify my existence. At the same time I would be serving humanity: what more beautiful gift could I make it than the books I would write? I was interested at the same time in myself and in others; I accepted my ‘incarnation’ but I did not wish to renounce my universal prerogative. My plan to be a writer reconciled everything; it gratified all the aspirations which had been unfolding in me during the past fifteen years.

  *

  I had always thought very highly of love. When I was about thirteen, in the weekly magazine Le Noël which I was given instead of L’Étoile Noëliste, I read an edifying little tale entitled Ninon-Rose. Pious little Ninon loved André, who loved her too; but her cousin Thérèse, in tears, her lovely long hair spread out over her nightdress, confided to her that she was consumed with a violent passion for André; after an inner conflict and a few well-chosen prayers, Ninon decided on self-sacrifice; she refused to accept André who, on the rebound, married Thérèse. But Ninon had her reward: she married another very worthy young man called Bernard. This story disgusted me. The hero of a novel had the right to be mistaken in the object of his devotion or about his own feelings; true love might well be born from a love that was false or incomplete – like that of David Copperfield for his girl-wife. But true love, from the moment it burst into passionate life, was irreplaceable; no self-sacrifice, however generous, should be allowed to come between it and its object. Zaza and I were bowled over by one of Foggezzaro’s novels, Daniel Corthis. Daniel was an important Catholic politician; the woman he loved and who loved him in return was already married; there was a most exceptional degree of understanding between them; their hearts beat as one, and they had the same opinions about everything: they were made for one another. Yet even a platonic friendship would have given rise to unsavoury gossip, ruined Daniel’s career and compromised the cause he served. Swearing to be faithful to one another ‘until death and beyond’, they parted for ever. The story harrowed me, and made me furious too. Daniel’s career, the cause, and so on were all abstract things. I found it absurd and criminal that they should put them before love, happiness, life. Doubtless it was my friendship with Zaza which made me attach so much weight to the perfect union of two human beings; discovering the world together and as it were making a gift of their discoveries to one another, they would, I felt, take possession of it in a specially privileged way; at the same time, each would find a definite meaning in existence in the other’s need. To give up love seemed to me to be as senseless as to neglect one’s health because one believes in eternal life.

  I was determined not to let any of the good things of this world slip through my fingers. When I gave up the idea of becoming a nun, I began to dream of love on my own account; I found I could envisage without repugnance being married to a man. Maternity was something I couldn’t entertain, and I was astounded whenever Zaza started cooing over new-born infants with crumpled red faces: but I no longer thought it would be out of the question to spend the rest of my days with the man of my choice. My parents’ house was no prison, and if I’d had to leave it without warning I should have been panic-stricken; but I had now ceased to look upon my eventual departure as an agonizing separation. I was feeling rather stifled in the family circle. That is why I was so vividly impressed by a film based on Bataille’s Le Berçail which a chance invitation enabled me to see. The heroine was bored with her children and a husband as rebarbative as Monsieur Mabille; a heavy chain round her wrists symbolized her servitude. A lively, handsome young man came along and released her from the cares of house and home. The young woman, in a sleeveless linen dress, her hair blowing in the wind, was seen capering about the countryside hand in hand with her lover; they threw handfuls of hay in each other’s faces - I felt I could almost smell it – and their eyes were always brimming with laughter: never had I felt, witnessed, or imagined such transports of gaiety. I don’t know what twists and turns of the plot brought back the young woman, sadder and wiser, to the family fold, where her husband welcomed her with open arms; having repented of her outburst, she saw the heavy iron chain turn into a garland of roses. I was very sceptical about this miraculous transformation. But I had been dazzled by the revelation of unknown, unnamed delights which would one day be mine; they were liberty and physical pleasure. The grown-ups’ mournful bondage frightened me; nothing unexpected ever happened to them; sighing, they put up with an existence in which everything was decided beforehand, and in which no one ever decided anything. Bataille’s heroine had dared to make a decision, and the sun had smiled upon her. For a long time after that, whenever I turned my inward eye towards the uncertain years when I should
be grown-up, the memory of a couple skipping about in a field made me quiver with hope.

  In the summer of my fifteenth year, I went boating once or twice in the Bois de Boulogne with Zaza and some other school-friends. In one of the avenues I noticed a young couple walking ahead of me; the boy was resting his hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder. Suddenly moved by the sight, I said to myself that it must be sweet to go through life with someone’s hand on one’s shoulder, a hand so well-known that one barely felt its weight, and so ever-present that loneliness would be banished for good. ‘A well-matched pair’; I used to muse over those words. Neither my sister, who was too close to me, nor Zaza, who was too distant, had ever let me sense the true meaning of the phrase. After that, reading in the study, I would often look up from my book and wonder silently: ‘Will I ever meet the one who is made for me?’ My reading hadn’t provided me with my ideal. I had felt very close to Hellé, Marcelle Tinayre’s heroine. ‘Girls like you, Hellé,’ her father had told her, ‘are fit to be the companions of heroes.’ This prophecy had aroused my interest; but I found the bearded, ginger-haired missionary she finally married rather revolting. I had no particular type in mind for my future husband. On the other hand, I had a very precise idea of what our relationship would be; I would feel for him a passionate admiration. In this respect, as in all others, necessity must govern the choice. My chosen one must, like Zaza, impose himself upon me, prove he was the right one; otherwise I should always be wondering: why he and not another? Such a doubt was incompatible with true love. I should be in love the day a man came along whose intelligence, culture, and authority could bring me into subjection.

  Zaza did not agree with me on this point; for her, too, love implied mutual esteem and understanding; but if a man was sensitive and imaginative, whether he was an artist or a poet, she said it didn’t matter to her if he had had very little education or was even not very intelligent. ‘But then you would not be able to discuss everything,’ I objected. A painter, a musician would not have understood me completely, and a part of him would always be beyond my grasp. I wanted husband and wife to have everything in common; each was to fulfil for the other the role of exact observer which I had formerly attributed to God. That ruled out the possibility of loving anyone different; I should not marry unless I met someone more accomplished than myself, yet my equal, my double.

  Why did I insist that he should be superior to me? I don’t for one moment think I was looking for a father-image in him; I valued my independence; I would have a profession, I would write and have a life of my own; I never thought of myself as a man’s female companion; we would be two comrades. Nevertheless the concept I had of our relationship was influenced indirectly by the feelings I had had for my father. My education, my culture, and the present state of society all conspired to convince me that women belong to an inferior caste; Zaza was doubtful about this because she much preferred her mother to Monsieur Mabille; but in my own case my father’s prestige had strengthened that opinion: my whole existence was in part founded upon it. If in the absolute sense a man, who was a member of the privileged species and already had a flying start over me, did not count more than I did, I was forced to the conclusion that in a relative sense he counted less: in order to be able to acknowledge him as my equal, he would have to prove himself my superior in every way.

  On the other hand I would think of myself as it were from within, as someone who was in the process of being created, and my ambition was to progress to the infinite of perfection; I saw the chosen one from outside, like a complete person; in order that he might always be at my own lofty level, I would provide him from the start with perfections that for me were still unrealized hopes; from the very start he would be the model of all I wished to become; he would, therefore, be superior to me. Yet I was careful not to set too great a distance between us. I could not have accepted a man whose thoughts and work were an enigma to me; love would be a justification, not a limitation. The picture I conjured up in my mind was of a steep climb in which my partner, a little more agile and stronger than myself, would help me up from one stage to the next. I was grasping rather than generous; if I had had to drag someone along behind me, I should have been consumed with impatience. In that case, celibacy was preferable to marriage. A life in common would have to favour and not stand in the way of my fundamental aim, which was to conquer the world. The man destined to be mine would be neither inferior nor different, nor outrageously superior; someone who would guarantee my existence without taking away my powers of self-determination.

  This scheme was the blueprint for my dreams during the next two or three years. I attached a certain importance to these dreams. One day I asked my sister, with a touch of anxiety: was I quite definitely ugly? Was there any chance of my growing up into a woman pretty enough to be loved? Accustomed to hearing my father declare that I was a man, Poupette did not understand my question; she loved me, Zaza loved me; what was I worrying about? To tell the truth, I was only very mildly concerned about my appearance. My studies, books, these things which were dependent upon my will remained the centre of my preoccupations. I was less interested in my grown-up destiny than in my immediate future.

  At the end of my penultimate year at school I was fifteen and a half, and I went with my parents to spend part of the holidays at Châteauvillain. Aunt Alice was dead; we stayed with Aunt Germaine, the mother of Titite and Jacques. The latter was in Paris taking the orals of his school-leaving certificate. I was very fond of Titite; she was radiantly fresh and dewy; she had beautiful sensuous lips and one could sense the blood pulsing beneath her skin. Engaged to a childhood friend, a ravishing young man with immensely long eye-lashes, she awaited marriage with an impatience which she made no attempt to hide; certain aunts hinted that when she was alone with her fiancé she sometimes behaved badly: very badly. On the evening of our arrival, we both went after dinner for a stroll in the avenue beyond the garden. We sat down on a stone bench; we were silent; we never had much to say to one another. She pondered a moment, then stared at me inquisitively: ‘Are your studies all you want out of life?’ she asked me. ‘Are you happy with things that way? You don’t want anything more?’ I shook my head. ‘It’s all I want,’ I said. It was true: at the close of that year at school, I couldn’t see much further than the next one with the school-leaving certificate that I had to pass at the end of it. Titite gave a sigh and returned to day-dreams about her fiancé which I was sure would be rather sloppy, despite my fondness for her. Jacques arrived next day; he had got through, and he was bursting with self-satisfaction. He took me off to the tennis court, suggested we should have a knock-up, trounced me, and then casually asked forgiveness for having used me as an Aunt Sally. I knew that I didn’t interest him very much. I had heard him talk admiringly of girls who were preparing for their degree and at the same time went on playing tennis, going to parties, dancing, and keeping up with the latest fashions. But his contempt left no impression on me; not for an instant did I deplore my poor game or the rudimentary styling of my pink pongee dress. I was worth much more than the regimented students whom Jacques preferred to me, and he would find it out himself one day.

  I was beginning to emerge from the difficult age; instead of regretting my childhood I turned towards the future; it was still far enough away not to alarm me and already I was dazzled by its brilliance. I was sitting on a block of grey granite beside the little lake I had discovered at La Grillière the year before. A mill was reflected in the water, across which broken cloud-reflections were drifting. I was reading Gaston Boissier’s Archaeological Walks and was telling myself that one day I too would go rambling on the Palatine Hill. The clouds in the lake were tinged with pink; I got up but could not bring myself to go; I leaned against the hazel hedge; the evening breeze was caressing the spindle-trees; it was touching me, too, brushing and buffeting me, and I gave myself up to its gentle violence. The hazel leaves were rustling and I understood their mysterious whispers; I was expected: by myself. Bat
hed in the sunset glow, with the world crouching at my feet like a big friendly animal, I smiled to myself at the adolescent who would die on the morrow only to rise again in all her glory: no other life, no moment in any other life could hold all the promises which were thrilling my credulous heart.