by Annie Ernaux
—I must not repeat the things I know about them, I must not speak ill of them or other storekeepers
—I must never divulge the takings of the day
—I must never give myself airs or show off
The penalty for the non-observance of these rules, however slight, was well known to me—we’ll lose customers because of you, with the inevitable consequence, we’ll go bankrupt.
Revealing the moral precepts of the world I knew as a twelve-year-old conjures up, albeit briefly, the indescribable oppressiveness and sense of confinement which I experience in my dreams. The words that come to me are opaque, stones too heavy to move. Empty of imagery. Empty of formal meaning such as a dictionary might provide. There is no fantasy, no perspective surrounding these words: they are only matter. Familiar words inextricably linked to people and things from my childhood, brittle words that leave me no leeway. Tables of the Law.
(The words that made me dream in 1952—The Queen of Golconde, Sunset Boulevard, ice cream, pampa will never carry any weight; they still have that exotic, airy quality they had in my childhood, when they were shrouded in mystery. And all those adjectives one found in women’s romances—a haughty bearing, to speak in sullen, contemptuous, supercilious, sarcastic or bitter tones—which in my mind could never apply to a real person or to anyone I knew. I believe that my writing is still confined to that material language of the past; the words and syntax which did not come to me at the time have never come to me. I shall never experience the pleasure of juggling with metaphors or indulging in stylistic play.)
There were hardly any words for describing emotion—I was put straight (disenchantment), I was black as thunder (discontent). It grieved me could mean being sorry to leave food on one’s plate or being sad at losing one’s sweetheart. And of course to breathe disaster. The language of feeling was to be found in the songs of Luis Mariano and Tino Rossi, in novels by Delly and in the serials published by Le Petit Écho de la mode and La Vie en fleurs.
I shall now describe the atmosphere of the private boarding school where I
spent most of my time and which played a decisive role in my life, bringing together and equating two necessities, two ideals—knowledge and religion.
I was the only one in the family to have a private education; my cousins in Y went to a public school, so did all the girls from my neighborhood, except maybe for two or three of the older ones.
A large building in dark red brick, the convent school took up the whole side of a quiet, somber street in the center of Y. Opposite lay the blank façades of warehouses that probably belonged to the post office. No windows at street level, only a few circular openings high up to let in the daylight and two doors, always closed. One was the porch through which pupils entered and left, giving on to a closed-in, heated playground that provided access to the chapel. The other door, at the far end of the building, was forbidden territory for pupils; you had to ring before being admitted by a Sister, who would take you to a small lobby facing the principal’s office and the parlor. On the second story—a row of windows opening on to the classrooms and a corridor. The windows on the third floor and the skylights above were cloaked in white curtains. That’s where the dormitories were located. It was forbidden to look out of any of the windows down into the street.
Unlike the state-run establishments located outside the town center, where children could be seen playing in huge courtyards behind closed gates, nothing that went on in the private school was visible from outside. There were two playgrounds. One, a cobbled area with no sun, made even darker by the foliage of a tall tree, was used by the few pupils enrolled in the “free school” curriculum: children coming from the orphanage next to the Town Hall and girls whose parents could not afford the school fees. There was only one schoolmistress in charge of this section, which went from second grade to sixth grade; very few girls actually made it to sixth grade as the large majority would go straight into “domestic science.” The other playground, a large, sunny area reserved for the girls privately enrolled at the Catholic boarding-school (daughters of storekeepers, artisans and farmers) ran the whole length of the refectory and the covered play area that one crossed to reach the classrooms on the second floor. At one end it was sealed off by the chapel and its windows covered with wire mesh and, at the other, by a wall separating it from the free school, flanked by filthy toilets on either side. At the back of the courtyard, parallel to the main building, was a row of bushy lime trees; underneath these the little ones would play hopscotch and the older girls would study for their exams. Beyond the path lay a garden planted with fruit trees and vegetables, ending in a high wall which one could never see except in winter. The two playgrounds communicated through a crude opening in the wall that supported the toilets. The twenty or so pupils from the free school and the one hundred and fifty to two hundred from the private school never met except on special occasions and for solemn Communion; otherwise they had no contact whatsoever. The girls attending private school would immediately identify the other ones because of their clothes; sometimes they recognized items that had belonged to them, worn-out, relinquished garments that their parents had handed down to these needy girls.
The only men ordinarily allowed inside the Catholic school were the priests and the gardener, who was confined to the cellars and the grounds. Repairs requiring the presence of workers were carried out during the summer vacation. The principal and more than half the teaching staff were nuns; they wore dark non-religious clothes, black, brown or navy blue, and were addressed as “Mademoiselle.” The other teachers, unmarried women with a touch of class in some cases, came from bourgeois families, notables or storekeepers living in the town center.
The following rules demand unquestioning obedience:
—we must line up in front of the playground when we hear the first bell, which our schoolmistresses take turns to ring, and troupe upstairs in silence when we hear the second bell five minutes later
—we must make sure we never touch the handrail
—we must rise to our feet whenever a teacher, a priest or the principal enters the classroom and remain in this position until they leave, except when they motion us to sit down; we must rush to open the door when they come in and close it behind them
—we must look down and incline our head and shoulders every time we address our schoolmistresses or walk past them, in the same way we bow before the holy sacrament in church
—none of the day girls and, during the day, none of the boarders is allowed upstairs into the dormitory. It is the most secret place in the whole building. During all the years I spent at school, I never set foot there once
—except for those who have a written dispensation from the doctor, it is forbidden to go and relieve oneself during class. (On the first day of term following the Easter break in 1952, I felt like going just after class had resumed in the afternoon. I somehow managed to hold back until recess, sweating heavily, on the verge of fainting, terrified of shitting in my pants.)
Instruction and religion are inseparably linked, both in time and in space. Except for the playground and the toilets, all areas of the school premises are conducive to prayer. The chapel, naturally enough, the classroom, with its crucifix hanging on the wall above the teacher’s desk, the refectory and the garden, where, every year in May, the rosary is recited before a statue of the Virgin set up on a raised pedestal, nestling before a leafy trellis made to resemble the grotto in Lourdes. Prayers open and close all school activities. We recite them standing behind our desks, heads bent, fingers crossed, making the sign of the cross* at the beginning and end of each prayer. The longer prayers introduce morning and afternoon class. At half-past eight in the morning—The Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, I believe in God, Confiteor, Acts of Faith, Hope, Charity and Contrition, and occasionally Remember O most gracious Mary. At half-past one in the afternoon—The Lord’s Prayer and ten times Hail Mary. Shorter prayers,
frequently replaced by canticles after recess, announce the end of morning and afternoon class. Boarders are allowed twice as many prayers, from the time they get up to the time they go to bed.
Prayer is the supreme act of life—the remedy for both individual and universal ills. We must pray to better ourselves, to overcome temptation, to get good grades in arithmetic, to heal the sick and to convert those who have sinned. Every morning since nursery school we have pursued our commentary of the same book—the Roman Catholic catechism. Religious instruction is the first subject listed on our report card. In the morning, the day is offered as a gift to God and all our activities are directed toward Him. Our aim in life is to achieve a permanent “state of grace.”
On Saturday mornings one of the older girls goes round all the schoolrooms to collect our confession notes (a piece of paper on which we have written our name and classroom). The afternoon unfolds according to a set routine: the girl who has been granted absolution by the chaplain in the sacristy is given a note with the name of the pupil whom the chaplain wishes to receive and hear in confession. She goes straight to the classroom mentioned on the piece of paper and reads the name out loud; the girl stands up and goes to chapel and so on. The observance of religious practices (confession, Holy Communion) appears to take precedence over the acquisition of knowledge: “One can have top grades in all subjects and still displease God.” At the end of term the archpriest, accompanied by the principal, reads out the school results and the honor roll; he gives the good pupils a big picture of a saint; the others get a small one. He signs the picture and inscribes the date on the back.
The chronology of our school activities is dictated by the chronology of the missal and the gospel, fixing the subject of the day’s religious instruction class, before French dictation: the period around Advent and Christmas (a crib with figurines is set up by the window until Candlemas); the period around Lent, divided into Sundays (Septuagesima, Sexagesima); the period around Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. Day after day, year after year, the private school tells us the same story over and over again, cultivating familiarity with invisible yet omnipresent characters who are neither dead nor alive—the Virgin Mary, the Infant Jesus, the angels—whose lives are closer to us than those of our own grandparents.
(I feel compelled to use the present tense to list and describe these rules, as if they have remained as immutable as they were for me at the time. The more I explore this world of the past, the more dismayed I am by its coherence and its strength. Yet I am sure I was perfectly happy there and could aspire to nothing better. For its laws were lost in the sweet, pervasive smells of food and wax polish floating upstairs, the distant shouts coming from the playground and the morning silence shattered by the tinkling of a piano—a girl practicing scales with her music teacher.
Also, I must admit the following: up to my adolescence, nothing in the world could have changed the fact that for me faith in God was the norm and Roman Catholic religion the only truth. Although today I can read Being and Nothingness and be amused by Charlie Hebdo’s portrayal of Jean-Paul II as “the Polish transvestite,” I can never forget that in 1952 I believed I had been living in a state of mortal sin since my First Communion because the host flaked on the roof of my mouth before I had time to swallow it. I was certain of having destroyed and desecrated what I thought was the body of God. Religion was my whole life. Believing and having to believe were the same thing.)
We live in a world of truth, a world of light and perfection. In the other world, people don’t go to church or say their prayers: it’s the world of those who have sinned. Its name, mentioned only on very rare occasions, rings out like a blasphemy: secular education. (For me the word “secular” had no definite meaning, it was vaguely synonymous with “bad.”) We do everything to distinguish our world from the other one. We are supposed to say “refectory” instead of “canteen” and “sacristy” instead of “cloakroom.” “Comrades” and “Miss” smack of secular education; we must say “our classmates” and “Mademoiselle,” and address the principal as “dear Sister.” None of the teachers say tu to their pupils and even the five-year-olds at kindergarten are addressed formally as vous.
Unlike public education, private education is characterized by a wealth of celebrations. Throughout the year, a large part of school time is taken up with the preparation for various events: at Christmas, a stage presentation in the indoor playground for pupils, with repeats for parents on the two following Sundays; in April, an alumni reunion including a trip to the local movie theater, with several evening performances for parents later on in the week; in June, a fete organized in Rouen by the Christian Youth Movement.
The most popular celebration is the parish fair in early July, heralded by a procession through the city streets, with all the girls dressed up in costumes around a chosen theme. With its flower-decked figures, circus riders and old-fashioned dames, singing and leaping, private education unveils its charms to the crowds lining the sidewalks, displaying imagination and unquestionable supremacy over public education—the latter had held its celebrations the week before, with pupils marching to the Champ-des-Courses neighborhood in their gym outfits. The parish fair seals the victory of private education.
During preparations for the fair, everything that is normally forbidden is permissible: going into town to buy material or to slip invitations into people’s mailboxes; leaving the classroom before the end of the lesson to go and rehearse one’s part. Although we are not allowed to come to school in trousers without wearing a skirt on top, on stage the little girls in tutus expose their naked thighs and panties, the older ones, the top of their breasts and the hair under their arms. The male gender is suggested by the disturbing figures of girls dressed up as men who kiss hands and declare their love. At the Christmas show in 1951, I am one of the “La Rochelle girls” named after a traditional French song. Standing next to two or three other students, I sing facing the audience, motionless, holding a ship in my arms. Originally, I was to be one of the “three little drummer boys returning from war” but the Sister in charge of rehearsals sent me back because I couldn’t march in time with the music. In April 1952, at the alumni reunion, I am featured in a Greek painting—a maiden making an offering to a dead girl. My body is bent forward, resting on one outstretched leg, the palms of my hands facing upward. I remember it as sheer torture; I dreaded that I would collapse on stage. Both roles were static and both involved minor characters, probably because I lacked grace, a fact evidenced by many photographs.
Everything that cements this world is encouraged, everything that threatens it is denounced and vilified. It is good form:
—to attend chapel during recess
—to make Communion privately at the age of seven instead of waiting for solemn Communion, like the girls who attend school without God
—to join the “Croisées,” an organization whose mission is to convert people throughout the world, seen as the ultimate expression of religious fervor
—to carry around a rosary in one’s pocket
—to buy a copy of mes vaillantes
—to own a copy of Dom Lefebvre’s evening prayer book
—to say that “the whole family joins in the evening prayers” and that one wants to take the veil.
It is bad form:
—to come to school with books and magazines other than religious works such as mes vaillantes. Because of the existence of “bad books,” reading in itself breeds suspicion; we are warned about these books and made to fear them, and they are even mentioned in the examination of conscience before confession. Consequently, we imagine them to be awesome and far more numerous than the good ones. The books handed out on prize-giving day, provided by the town’s Catholic bookstore, are intended to be shown, not read. They edify those who merely glance at them. The Bible for Children, Général de Lattre de Tassigny and Hélène Boucher are the titles I remember.
—to mix
with girls who attend public school
—to see movies other than those scheduled by the school (Joan of Arc, Monsieur Vincent, The Bishop of Ars). On the church door hangs the Index published by the Roman Catholic Church, classifying films in terms of dangerousness. Any girl seen coming out of a movie that had been “banned” was likely to be expelled then and there.
It is unthinkable to read photo romances or to go to the public dance held in the Poteaux hall on Sunday afternoons.
Yet these rules are never perceived as being coercive. Authority is exerted in a gentle, convivial manner, as through the encouraging smile of the “Mademoiselle” whom we meet in the street and greet with deference.
The pupils’ parents exercise extreme vigilance in the streets of the town center in order to preserve the reputation of the private school and its key role in the selection process—details of what the girls wear and whom they meet will ultimately be talked about. Saying “my daughter goes to a private school” instead of simply “my daughter goes to school” emphasizes the difference between those who are thrown together indiscriminately and those who belong to a special world, between those merely attending compulsory education and those who early on have opted for a better life.
Naturally, it was understood that within the boundaries of the private school there were neither rich girls nor poor girls but one big Catholic family.
(For me the word private will always suggest deprivation, fear and lack of openness. Including in the expression private life. Writing is something public.)
In this world of excellence, I am acknowledged as an excellent student and I enjoy the freedom and privileges conferred upon me by my top rank in the school’s hierarchy. Replying before the other girls and being asked to explain a math problem or to read certain passages out loud because I have perfect intonation ensures that I feel quite at home in class. I am not particularly studious or hardworking, handing in hastily-written homework which I rush through in no time. Being naturally talkative and noisy, I delight in playing the part of the bad, unruly pupil, as this will save me from being ostracized by the other girls on account of my good grades.