We dreaded the next day’s ceremony. We took tranquillizers, slept until seven, drank some tea, ate, and took more tranquillizers. A little before eight a black motor-hearse stopped in the deserted street: before dawn it had gone to fetch the corpse, which had been taken out of the nursing-home by a side-door. We walked through the cold morning fog; we took our seats, Poupette between the driver and one of the Messieurs Durand, I at the back, next to a kind of metal locker. ‘Is she there?’ asked my sister. ‘Yes.’ She gave a short sob: ‘The only comfort I have,’ she said, ‘is that it will happen to me too. Otherwise it would be too unfair.’ Yes. We were taking part in the dress rehearsal for our own burial. The misfortune is that although everyone must come to this, each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days which she confused with convalescence and yet we were profoundly separated from her.
As we drove across Paris I looked at the streets and the people, carefully thinking of nothing. There were cars waiting at the gates of the cemetery: the family. They followed us as far as the chapel. Everybody got out. While the undertaker’s men were bringing out the coffin I drew Poupette over towards Maman’s sister, whose face was red and swollen with grief. We went in, making a procession: the chapel was full of people. No flowers on the catafalque: the undertakers had left them in the hearse – it did not matter.
A young priest, wearing trousers under his chasuble, celebrated the mass and gave a short, strangely sad sermon. ‘God is very far away,’ he said. ‘Even for those among you whose faith is the strongest there are days when God is so far that He seems not to be there. One might almost say careless. But He has sent us His son.’ Two kneeling-chairs had been placed for communion. Almost everybody communicated. The priest spoke again, briefly. And emotion seized both of us by the throat when he said, ‘Françoise de Beauvoir’; the words brought her to life; they summed up her history, from birth to marriage, to widowhood, to the grave; Françoise de Beauvoir – that retiring woman, so rarely named – became an important person.
People went by in a line; some of the women were crying. We were still shaking hands when the undertaker’s men took the coffin out of the chapel; this time Poupette saw it and she collapsed on my shoulder. ‘I had promised her that she shouldn’t be put into that box!’ I congratulated myself that she did not have that other prayer to remember – ‘Don’t let me fall into the hole!’ One of the Messieurs Durand explained to the people there that now they might go away – it was over. The hearse moved off all by itself; I do not even know where it went.
In a blotting-pad that I had brought back from the clinic I found two lines on a narrow piece of paper, written by Maman in a hand as stiff and firm as when she was twenty: ‘I should like a very simple funeral. No flowers or wreaths. But a great many prayers.’ Well, we had carried out her last wishes, and all the more faithfully since the flowers had been forgotten.
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WHY did my mother’s death shake me so deeply? Since the time I left home I had felt little in the way of emotional impulse towards her. When she lost my father the intensity and the simplicity of her sorrow moved me, and so did her care for others – ‘Think of yourself,’ she said to me, supposing that I was holding back my tears so as not to make her suffering worse. A year later her mother’s dying was a painful reminder of her husband’s: on the day of the funeral a nervous breakdown compelled her to stay in bed. I spent the night beside her: forgetting my disgust for this marriage-bed in which I had been born and in which my father had died, I watched her sleeping; at fifty-five, with her eyes closed and her face calm, she was still beautiful; I wondered that the strength of her feelings should have overcome her will. Generally speaking I thought of her with no particular feeling. Yet in my sleep (although my father only made very rare and then insignificant appearances) she often played a most important part: she blended with Sartre, and we were happy together. And then the dream would turn into a nightmare: why was I living with her once more? How had I come to be in her power again? So our former relationship lived on in me in its double aspect – a subjection that I loved and hated. It revived with all its strength when Maman’s accident, her illness and her death shattered the routine that then governed our contacts. Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together. The ‘Maman darling’ of the days when I was ten can no longer be told from the inimical woman who oppressed my adolescence; I wept for them both when I wept for my old mother. I thought I had made up my mind about our failure and accepted it; but its sadness comes back to my heart. There are photographs of both of us, taken at about the same time: I am eighteen, she is nearly forty. Today I could almost be her mother and the grandmother of that sad-eyed girl. I am so sorry for them – for me because I am so young and I understand nothing; for her because her future is closed and she has never understood anything. But I would not know how to advise them. It was not in my power to wipe out the unhappinesses in her childhood that condemned Maman to make me unhappy and to suffer in her turn from having done so. For if she embittered several years of my life, I certainly paid her back though I did not set out to do so. She was intensely anxious about my soul. As far as this world was concerned, she was pleased at my successes, but she was hurt by the scandal that I aroused among the people she knew. It was not pleasant for her to hear a cousin state, ‘Simone is the family’s disgrace.’
The changes in Maman during her illness made my sorrow all the greater. As I have already said, she was a woman of a strong and eager temperament, and because of her renunciations she had grown confused and difficult. Confined to her bed, she decided to live for herself; and yet at the same time she retained an unvarying care for others – from her conflicts there arose a harmony. My father and his social character coincided exactly: his class and he spoke through his mouth with one identical voice. His last words, ‘You began to earn your living very young, Simone: your sister cost me a great deal of money’, were not of a kind to encourage tears. My mother was awkwardly laced into a spiritualistic ideology; but she had an animal passion for life which was the source of her courage and which, once she was conscious of the weight of her body, brought her towards truth. She got rid of the ready-made notions that hid her sincere and lovable side. It was then that I felt the warmth of an affection that had often been distorted by jealousy and that she expressed so badly. In her papers I have found touching evidence of it. She had put aside two letters, the one written by a Jesuit and the other by a friend; they both assured her that one day I should come back to God. She had copied out a passage from Chamson in which he says in effect ‘If, when I was twenty, I had met an older, highly-regarded man who had talked to me about Nietszche and Gide and freedom, I should have broken with home.’ The file was completed by an article cut out of a paper – Jean-Paul Sartre has saved a soul. In this Rémy Roure said – quite untruthfully, by the way – that after Bariona had been acted at Stalag XII D an atheistical doctor was converted. I know very well what she wanted from these pieces – it was to be reassured about me; but she would never have felt the need if she had not been intensely anxious as to my salvation. ‘Of course I should like to go to Heaven: but not all alone, not without my daughters,’ she wrote to a young nun.