Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

  I tried to snap out of my depression. But Stépha was preparing her trousseau and getting her flat ready, and I hardly ever saw her now. My sister was far from cheerful, Lisa was in despair, Clairaut distant, Pradelle always the same; Mallet had been ploughed in his diploma. I tried to take an interest in Mademoiselle Roulin and other friends. I did not succeed. During one long afternoon I went on a great Journey from Assyria to Egypt, from Egypt to Greece in the galleries of the Louvre; when I came out I found a dark, wet Paris evening. I wandered about, thoughtless, loveless. I despised myself. I thought of Jacques, but from a long way off, as if he had been something I was proud of and had lost. Suzanne Boigue, who had come back from Morocco, received me in a brightly lit, discreetly exotic flat; she was beloved and happy, and I envied her. The thing that oppressed me most was to feel myself in some way diminished: ‘I feel as if I’d lost absolutely everything and the worst part of it is that I cannot bring myself to feel sorrow about it. . . . I am inert, driven hither and thither by the occupations and the day-dreams of the moment. No part of me is engaged; I no longer cling either to an idea or to an affection by that tight, cruel, and inspiring rein which for so long attached me to so many things; I’m interested in everything in moderation; oh! I’m so reasonable now, I no longer even feel that dreadful anguish about my own nothingness.’ I clung on to the hope that this state would only be a passing one; in four months’ time, when the selective examination was over, I could once more begin to take an interest in my life; I would begin to write my book. But I should have appreciated some outside help: ‘Longing for a new affection, an adventure, anything, so long as it’s something different!’

  The poetry of the bars had been dissipated. But after a day spent at the Nationale or in the Sorbonne, I didn’t feel at all like being cooped up in the house. Where could I go? Again I started roaming round Montparnasse, one evening with Lisa, another with Fernando and Stépha. My sister had struck up a friendship with one of her fellow-students, a bold, pretty, athletic seventeen-year-old whose mother kept a sweet-shop; she was called Gégé, and she went out as much as she liked in the evenings. I often found them together in the Dôme. One evening we decided to go to the Jungle, which had just opened up opposite the Jockey; but we were short of funds. ‘Not to worry,’ said Gégé. ‘Wait for us over there: we’ll fix things.’ I went into the night-club on my own and took my place at the bar. Poupette and Gégé, sitting on a bench in the street, kept moaning dramatically: ‘If only we had that extra twenty francs!’ A passer-by took pity on them. I have no idea what sort of yarn they spun, but soon they were perched beside me mopping up gin fizzes. Gégé knew how to lead men on. Drinks were bought for us, and we were invited to dance. A female dwarf called Chiffon whom I had already heard at the Jockey sang songs and kept up a flow of obscenities, lifting up her skirts and exhibiting thighs all marbled over with bites and bruises, inflicted on her, so she told us, by her lover. In one sense, it was very refreshing. We picked up our old habits. One evening at the bar in the Jockey I met some old acquaintances with whom I reminisced over the gay times we had had in the past; a young Swiss student, one of the regulars at the Nationale, paid me a great deal of attention; I drank and felt amused. Later that night, a young doctor who had been observing our trio with a critical eye asked me if I came there to study human nature; when my sister left at midnight, he congratulated me on her good behaviour, but he told me reproachfully that Gégé was too young to go to night-clubs. About one o’clock, he offered to take us home in a taxi; first we dropped Gégé, and my discomfiture at finding myself alone with him in the taxi during the rest of the ride obviously amused him. I was flattered by his interest in me. A meeting with a stranger or an unexpected incident was enough to put me in a good temper again. But the pleasure I took in these brief encounters does not explain why I should have succumbed again to the fascination of these haunts of vice. I expressed my surprise in my diary: ‘Jazz, loose women, sexy dancing, bad words, drink, physical intimacies: how is it I’m not shocked, but willingly accept things that in any other situation I could never accept, and bandy lewd expressions with strange men? How does it come about that I like these things, have such an incongruous passion for them; and why does this passion have such a strong hold over me? What am I looking for in these places with their curious, dubious charm?’

  A few days later, I had tea with Mademoiselle Roulin, and was bored stiff. When I left her, I went straight to the Européen; I paid four francs for a seat in the balcony among the loose women and even looser men; there were couples locked in each other’s arms; others were kissing; heavily scented tarts swooned with ecstasy as they listened to the crooner with the slick black hair, and their riotous laughter made the comic’s dirty jokes seem even dirtier. I was too excited; I laughed and felt happy. Why? I wandered a long time on the boulevard Barbes, watching the whores and pimps – no longer with horror, but with a sort of envy. Again I was surprised at myself: ‘There is within me I know not what yearning – maybe a monstrous lust – ever-present, for noise, fighting, savage violence, and above all for the gutter. . . . What is there to prevent me today from becoming a morphinomaniac, and alcoholic, and heaven knows what else? Perhaps all that’s lacking is the opportunity, a little greater hankering for everything I shall never know. . . .’ At times I was shocked by this ‘perversion’, by these ‘baser instincts’ which I discovered in myself. What would Pradelle have thought – he who used to accuse me of putting life on a pedestal? I reproached myself with being two-faced, hypocritical. But I never once thought of denying my nature: ‘I want life, the whole of life. I feel an avid curiosity; I desperately want to burn myself away, more brightly than any other person, and no matter with what kind of a flame.’

  I was on the verge of admitting the truth to myself: I was fed up with being a disembothed spirit. Not that I was tormented by lust, as I was at the onset of puberty. But I guessed that the violence of the flesh and its crudity would have saved me from this ethereal insipidity that was atrophying my life. There was no question of my indulging in sexual experiments; my own prejudices, as well as my feelings towards Jacques, forbade me to do so. I frankly detested the Roman Catholic religion; watching Lisa and Zaza fighting for their lives against ‘this self-martyring religion’, I was more and more thankful that I had escaped from its clutches; in fact, I was still contaminated by it; the sexual taboos still haunted me to such an extent that I longed to become a drug-addict or an alcoholic, but never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence. Reading Goethe, and the book about him by Emil Ludwig, I protested against his moral code. ‘That place, so calmly intended for the gratification of the senses – without heartbreak, without any discomposure – shocks me,’ I wrote. ‘The worst kind of debauchery, provided it be a defence, a provocation, provided it be the means used by a Gide to find spiritual nourishment, moves me deeply; Goethe’s amours irritate me.’ Either physical love was identified with love itself, in which case it becomes self-explanatory, or it was a tragic fall from grace, and I hadn’t the courage to attempt it.

  *

  Decidedly, I was a creature of the seasons. That year again, at the first whisper of spring, I blossomed forth, I sniffed up with greedy gaiety the smell of warm tarmac. I did not relax; the examination was drawing near and there were many gaps in my knowledge that had to be filled in; but sheer fatigue forced me to take rests, and I made the most of them. I walked with my sister on the banks of the Marne, I took renewed pleasure in talking to Pradelle under the chestnut trees in the Luxembourg Gardens; I bought myself a little red hat which made Stépha and Fernando smile. I took my parents to the Européen and my father treated us to ices on the terrace of the Café Wepler. My mother went fairly frequently with me to the cinema; I saw Barbette with her at the Moulin Rouge, and found him – or her – not nearly as extraordinary as Cocteau made out. Zaza returned from Bayonne. We visited the newly opened galleries of French painting in the Louvre; I didn’t like Monet, Renoir I appreciated with
some reserve, I admired Manet very much, and Cézanne I worshipped because I thought I saw in his paintings ‘the descent of the spirit to the heart of the senses’. Zaza more or less shared all my tastes. I attended her sister’s wedding and wasn’t too bored.

  During the Easter holidays I spent every day at the Nationale; there I used to meet Clairaut whom I still found rather pedantic but who continued to intrigue me; had this dry, dark little man really suffered from the ‘tyranny of the flesh’? Whatever the answer, it was quite certain that he was much preoccupied by this question. Several times he brought the conversation round to Mauriac’s article. How much sexual pleasure is permissible between a Christian husband and wife? And between fiancés? He asked Zaza this question one day, and she flew into a temper: ‘It’s only priests and old maids who ask that kind of thing!’ she retorted. A few days later, he told me he had gone through a harrowing personal experience. At the beginning of the academic year, he had become engaged to a friend’s sister; she admired him enormously, and she was of a passionate nature: if he hadn’t kept a firm rein on her, heaven knows what her impetuosity might not have involved them in! He had explained to her that they should save themselves for their wedding-night, and that in the meantime only the chastest of kisses were permissible. She had persisted in offering him her open mouth, and he had kept on turning his away; at the end she had got fed-up with him and had broken off the engagement. He was obviously obsessed by this set-back. He argued about marriage, love, and women with a maniacal intensity. I thought his story was rather ridiculous, for it reminded me of Suzanne Boigue’s first affair. But I felt flattered that he had confided in me.

  The Easter holidays came to an end; in the gardens of the École Normale, aflower with lilacs, laburnums, and pink hawthorn, I was delighted to meet my fellow-students again. I knew almost all of them. Only Sartre’s little band, which included Nizan and Herbaud, remained closed to me; they had no truck with anybody else; they only attended certain lectures, and always sat apart from the rest of us. They had a bad reputation. It was said of them that they were unsympathetic. Violently opposed to the ‘Holy Willies’ among their fellow-students, they belonged to a clique composed mainly of Alain’s ex-pupils and well known for its brutality: its members threw water-bombs on distinguished students at the Normale returning home at night in evening dress. Nizan was married and had travelled; he sported plus-fours and I found the eyes behind his heavy hom-rimmed glasses very intimidating. Sartre wasn’t bad to look at, but it was rumoured that he was the worst of the lot, and he was even accused of drinking. Only one of them I thought seemed fairly accessible: Herbaud. He too was married. When he was with Sartre and Nizan, he ignored me. When I met him on his own, he would exchange a few words with me.

  He had given a talk in January in one of Brunschvig’s lectures, and during the discussion that had followed everyone had found him very amusing. I was very conscious of the charm of his mocking voice, and of the ironical twist he gave to his mouth. Weary of gazing upon the grey mass of students, I found his pink face with its baby-blue eyes very refreshing; his blond hair seemed as tough and springy as grass. One morning he had come to work in the Nationale, and despite the elegance of his blue overcoat, his light-coloured scarf, and his well-cut suit, I had found something of the country boy about him. I had a sudden inspiration: contrary to my usual habits, I went to lunch in the restaurant in the library; he cleared a place for me at his table as naturally as if we’d arranged to meet there. We talked about Hume and Kant. I passed him in the ante-room outside Laporte’s study; the professor said in ceremonious tones: ‘Well, au revoir, Monsieur Herbaud’; and I thought to myself regretfully that he was a married man, inaccessible, and totally unaware of my existence. One afternoon I had noticed him in the rue Soufflot in the company of Sartre and Nizan; a woman in a grey coat was on his arm: I felt shut out. He was the only one of the three to attend Brunschvig’s lectures; just before the Easter holidays, he sat down beside me in the lecture-room. He had drawn Eugène figures inspired by those which Cocteau created in Le Potomak, and composed acidulous little poems. I found him very amusing, and I was overjoyed to find someone at the Sorbonne who liked Cocteau. In a way, Herbaud reminded me of Jacques; he, like Jacques, often used a smile instead of a word and seemed to live elsewhere than in books. Every time he had come to the Nationale he had greeted me in a friendly manner, and I had racked my brains to find something intelligent to say to him: unfortunately I had been quite unable to do so.

  Nevertheless when Brunschvig started his lectures again after the holidays, Herbaud once more came and sat beside me. He dedicated a ‘Portrait of the Average Student’, a few other drawings and some poems to me. He made the abrupt announcement that he was an individualist. ‘I am too,’ I replied. ‘What? You!’ He stared at me mistrustfully. ‘But I thought you were a Catholic, a Thomist, and devoted to good works?’ I protested against this, and he was pleased that we had come to an understanding. He gave me a disjointed running commentary on our precursors, praising Sylla, Barrès, Stendhal, and other ‘individualists’ including Alcibiades, for whom he had a weakness; I no longer remember all he talked about, but I found him more and more amusing; he seemed to be absolutely sure of himself and didn’t take himself in the least bit seriously: it was this mixture of arrogance and irony which delighted me. When he said, as he left, that he hoped we would have many more talks, I was over the moon, and wrote in my journal that evening: ‘He has a kind of intelligence that goes straight to my heart.’ I was already prepared to throw over Clairaut, Pradelle, Mallet, and all the rest of them for Herbaud. It was obviously a case of a new broom sweeping clean; I knew that I was very soon won over by people, and sometimes this made me drop them all the more quickly. All the same, I was surprised by the violence of my new enthusiasm: ‘Meeting with André Herbaud; or with myself . . .? Who else has ever made such a strong impression on me? Why am I overwhelmed by this meeting, as if something had really happened to me at last?’

  Something had happened to me, something which indirectly was to shape the whole of my life to come: but I wasn’t to know that till later.

  From then on, Herbaud became one of the regulars at the Nationale; I used to keep the chair next to mine for him. We used to lunch in a sort of tea-room on the first floor of a cake-shop; I could only just afford the ‘special’, but he used to insist on stuffing me with strawberry tarts. Once, at the Fleur-de-Lys in the square Louvois, he treated me to what I thought was a sumptuous spread. We would stroll together in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and sit beside the fountain; the wind would ruffle the jet of water and sprinkle cold drops on our faces. I would suggest that we go back to work. ‘Let’s go and have a coffee first,’ Herbaud would say. ‘If you don’t have one, you’ll work badly, then you’ll fidget and prevent me from reading.’ He would take me to Poccardi’s, and when I used to stand up after draining my cup, he would say: ‘What a pity!’ He was the son of a schoolteacher from somewhere near Toulouse and he had come to Paris to study for the Normale. That is how he had met Sartre and Nizan; he often talked to me about them; he admired Nizan’s smooth, gay distinction, but he had more to do with Sartre, who he said was prodigiously interesting. He despised our other fellow-students, individually and en masse. He thought Clairaut was a stuffy pedant and never spoke to him. One afternoon Clairaut came over to me with a book in his hand: ‘Mademoiselle de Beauvoir,’ he began, in a quizzing, inquisitorial tone, ‘what do you make of Brochard who is of the opinion that Aristotle’s God would be able to experience sexual pleasure?’ Herbaud cast him a disdainful look: ‘I should hope so, for His sake,’ he haughtily replied. In our early days together, we used to talk chiefly about the little world we both belonged to: our friends, our professors, the competition. He told me about the subject that students would suggest – it was a traditional joke – for their theses: ‘The difference between the notion of concept and the concept of notion.’ He had invented others: ‘Of all the authors in your syllabus, which
one do you prefer, and why?’ And: ‘Body and soul: resemblances, differences; advantages and disadvantages of.’ In fact, he only had the most tenuous association with the Sorbonne and the Normale; his life was elsewhere. He talked to me a little about it. He spoke to me about his wife who in his view was every feminine paradox incarnate; about Rome, which they had visited on their honeymoon, and the Forum, which had moved him to tears; about his system of morality and the book he wanted to write. He used to bring me magazines like Detective and the Autocar; he would take a passionate interest in a cycle-race or in a crime novel; he made my head swim with his anecdotes, with unexpected juxtapositions. He could handle everything – bombast and dry wit, lyricism and cynicism, naïveté and insolence – with such happy ease that nothing he said ever seemed banal. But the most irresistible thing about him was his laugh: when he gave vent to his laughter, it was as if he had just unexpectedly dropped in on a strange planet and was making a rapturous discovery of its prodigious comicality; whenever he exploded in laughter, everything seemed to me to be novel, surprising, deliciously funny.