When she was with my father she came into flower. She loved him, she admired him, and there is not the slightest doubt that for ten years he made her entirely happy physically. He loved women; he had had many affairs; and like Marcel Prévost, whom he read with delight, he thought that a young wife ought not to be treated with less ardour than a mistress. Maman’s face, with that faint down on her upper lip, betrayed a warm voluptuousness. The understanding between them was perfectly apparent: he stroked her arm, petted her, whispered affectionate nonsense. I see her again as I saw her one morning – I was six or seven – barefoot on the red carpet of the corridor in her long white linen nightgown; her hair fell in a twist on the back of her neck and I was struck by the radiance of her smile, which, for me, was associated in some mysterious way with that bedroom she had just left; I scarcely recognized this brilliant vision as the respectable grown-up who was my mother.
But nothing, ever, wipes out childhood. And Maman’s happiness was not unalloyed. My father’s selfishness burst out as early as their honeymoon: she wanted to see the Italian Lakes; they went no further than Nice, where the racing season had just begun. She often recalled this disappointment, not with any grudge, but not without regret. She loved travelling. ‘I should have liked to be an explorer,’ she used to say. The happiest times of her young days were those excursions on bicycle or on foot, through the Vosges or Luxembourg, which my grandfather organized. She had to give up many of the things she had dreamt of: my father’s wishes always came before hers. She stopped seeing her own friends, whose husbands he found boring. He only enjoyed himself in drawing-rooms or on the stage. She cheerfully followed him there: she liked social events. But her beauty did not protect her from spitefulness: she was provincial and not very quick-witted; people smiled at her awkwardness in that very Parisian society. Some of the women she met there had had affairs with my father: I can imagine whisperings, betrayals. In his desk my father kept the photograph of his last mistress, a pretty, brilliant woman who sometimes came to the house with her husband. Thirty years later he said to Maman, laughing, ‘You did away with her photo.’ She denied it, but he was not convinced. One thing is sure, and that is that even at the time of her honeymoon she suffered both in her love and her pride. She was passionate and headstrong: her wounds healed slowly.
And then my grandfather went bankrupt. She thought herself dishonoured, so much so that she broke with all her connexions at Verdun. The dowry promised to my father was not paid. She thought it extremely noble in him not to blame her, and she felt guilty towards him all her life.
But for all that, a successful marriage, two daughters who loved her dearly, some degree of affluence – until the end of the war Maman did not complain of her fate. She was affectionate, she was gay, and her smile ravished my heart.
When my father’s circumstances changed and we experienced semi-poverty, Maman decided to look after the house without a servant. Unfortunately, housework bored her terribly, and she thought she was lowering herself by doing it. She was capable of selfless devotion for my father and for us. But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness. One of Maman’s contradictions was that she thoroughly believed in the nobility of devotion, while at the same time she had tastes, aversions and desires that were too masterful for her not to loathe whatever went against them. She was continually rebelling against the restraints and the privations that she inflicted upon herself.
It is a pity that out-of-date ideas should have prevented her from adopting the solution that she came round to, twenty years later – that of working away from home. She had a good memory, she was persevering and conscientious; she might have become a secretary or have worked in a book-shop: she would have risen in her own esteem instead of feeling that she was losing caste. She would have had connexions of her own. She would have escaped from a state of dependence that tradition made her think natural but that did not in the least agree with her nature. And no doubt she would then have been better equipped to bear the frustration that she had to put up with.
I do not blame my father. It is tolerably well known that in men habit kills desire. Maman had lost her first freshness and he his ardour. In order to arouse it he turned to the professionals of the café de Versailles, or the young ladies of the Sphinx. More than once, between the age of fifteen and twenty, I saw him coming home at eight in the morning, smelling of drink, and telling confused tales of bridge or poker. Maman made no scenes: perhaps she believed him, so trained was she at running away from awkward truths. But she could not happily adapt herself to his indifference. Her case alone would be enough to convince me that bourgeois marriage is an unnatural institution. The wedding-ring on her finger had authorized her to become acquainted with pleasure; her senses had grown demanding; at thirty-five, in the prime of her life, she was no longer allowed to satisfy them. She went on sleeping beside the man whom she loved, and who almost never made love to her any more: she hoped, she waited and she pined, in vain. Complete abstinence would have been less of a trial for her pride than this promiscuity. I am not surprised that her temper should have deteriorated: slaps, nagging, scenes, not only in privacy, but even when guests were there. ‘Françoise has a disgusting character,’ my father used to say. She admitted that she ‘flew off the handle’ easily. But she was bitterly hurt when she heard that people said ‘Françoise is so pessimistic!’ or ‘Françoise is becoming neurotic.’
When she was a young woman she loved clothes. Her face would light up when people told her that she looked like my elder sister. One of my father’s cousins, who played the ’cello and whom she accompanied on the piano, paid her respectful attentions: when he married she loathed his wife. When her sexual and her social life dwindled away Maman stopped taking care of her appearance, except on grand occasions when ‘dressing up’ was essential. I remember coming back from the holidays once: she met us at the station, and she was wearing a pretty velvet hat with a little veil, and she had put on some powder. My sister was delighted and she cried, ‘Maman, you look just like a fashionable lady!’ She laughed unreservedly, for she no longer prided herself on elegance. Both for her daughters and for herself, she pushed the contempt for the body that she had been taught at the convent to the point of uncleanliness. Yet – and this was another of her contradictions – she still retained the desire to please; flatteries flattered her; she replied to them coquettishly. She was filled with pride when one of my father’s friends dedicated a book (published at the author’s expense) to her – To Françoise de Beauvoir, whose life I so admire. An ambiguous tribute: she earned admiration by a self-effacement that deprived her of admirers.
Cut off from the pleasures of the body, deprived of the satisfactions of vanity, tied down to wearisome tasks that bored and humiliated her, this proud and obstinate woman did not possess the gift of resignation. Between her fits of anger she was perpetually singing, gossiping, making jokes, drowning her heart’s complaints with noise. When, after my father’s death, Aunt Germaine hinted that he had not been an ideal husband, Maman snubbed her fiercely. ‘He always made me very happy.’ And certainly that was what she always told herself. Still, this forced optimism was not enough to satisfy her hunger. She flung herself into the only other course that was available to her – that of feeding upon the young lives that were in her care. ‘At least I have never been self-centred; I have lived for others,’ she said to me later. Yes, but also by means of others. She was possessive; she was overbearing; she would have liked to have us completely in her power. But it was just at the time when this compensation became necessary to her that we began to long for freedom and solitude. Conflicts worked themselves up and broke out; and they were no help to Maman in recovering her balance.