Yet she was the strongest: it was her will that won. At home we had to leave all the doors open, and I had to work under her eye, in the room where she was sitting. When, at night, my sister and I chattered from one bed to the other, she pressed her ear against the wall, eaten up with curiosity, and called out, ‘Be quiet!’ She would not let us learn to swim, and she prevented my father from buying us bicycles: we would have escaped from her through these pleasures that she could not have shared. She insisted upon taking part in all our amusements, and this was not only because she had few of her own: for reasons that no doubt went back to her childhood, she could not bear to feel left out. She did not scruple to force herself upon us, even when she knew she was not wanted. One night at La Grillère, we were in the kitchen with a whole band of friends of our cousins, boys and girls: we were cooking the crayfish that we had just caught by the light of lanterns. Maman burst in, the only grown-up: ‘I certainly have the right to have supper with you.’ She cast a great damp on everything, but she stayed. Later, my cousin Jacques and my sister and I had agreed to meet at the door of the Salon d’Automne; Maman went with us; he did not appear. ‘I saw your mother, so I went away,’ he said the next day. She always made her presence felt. When we invited friends to the house – ‘I certainly have the right to have tea with you’ – she monopolized the conversation. At Vienna and Milan my sister was often dismayed by the confidence with which Maman thrust herself forward during more or less official dinners.
These heavy-handed intrusions, these outbursts of self-consequence, were opportunities for getting her own back: she did not often have the chance of asserting herself. She had few social contacts, and when my father was there it was he who held the stage. The expression that we found so vexing, ‘I certainly have the right’, in fact proves her want of self-assurance; her desires did not carry their own justification with them. She had no self-control and at times she was a shrew; but ordinarily she pushed discretion to the point of humility. She quarrelled with my father over trifles, but she never ventured to ask him for money; she spent none on herself and as little as possible on us; meekly she let him spend all his evenings away from home and go out by himself on Sundays. After his death, when she was dependent on Poupette and me, she had the same scruple with regard to us, the same desire not to be a nuisance. She was under an obligation to us and she no longer had any other way of showing us her feelings; whereas formerly in her eyes the trouble she took over us justified her tyranny.
Her love for us was deep as well as exclusive, and the pain it caused us as we submitted to it was a reflection of her own conflicts. She was very open to wounds – she was capable of chewing over a reproof or a criticism for thirty or forty years – and her diffused indwelling resentment made itself apparent in aggressive forms of behaviour – brutal frankness, heavily ironic remarks. With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself. When I was spending my holidays with Zaza, my sister wrote to me: an adolescent girl, she told me about her heart, her soul, her problems; I replied. Maman opened my letter and read it aloud in front of Poupette, shrieking with laughter at its confidences. Poupette, stiff with fury, overwhelmed her with her scorn and swore that she would never forgive her. Maman burst into tears and begged me, in a letter, to bring them together again: which I did.
She wanted to make sure of her power over my sister above all, and she grew jealous of our friendship. When she knew that I had lost my faith she said very loudly and angrily to Poupette, ‘I shall defend you against her influence. I shall protect you!’ During the holidays she forbade us to see one another alone: we met secretly in the chestnut woods. This jealousy tormented her all her life, and until the end we still kept the habit of hiding most of our meetings from her.
But it also often happened that we were moved by the warmth of her affection. When Poupette was about seventeen she was the involuntary cause of a quarrel between Papa and ‘Uncle’ Adrien, whom he considered his best friend: Maman defended her fiercely against my father, who would not speak to his daughter for months. Later on he held it against my sister that she would not sacrifice her vocation as a painter in order to earn her bread and butter, and that she went on living at home: he would not give her a penny and he barely fed her. Maman stood up for her and used all her ingenuity to help her. For my part, I have not forgotten how sweetly, after my father’s death, she urged me to go off on a journey with a friend, when a single sigh from her would have kept me back.
She spoilt her relationships with other people by clumsiness: nothing could have been more pitiful than her attempts at separating my sister and me. When our cousin Jacques – she transferred to him a little of the love she had had for his father – took to coming to the rue de Rennes less frequently she received him every time with little scenes that she thought amusing and that he found irritating: he came less and less often. There were tears in her eyes when I settled in Grandmama’s house, and I was grateful to her for not making even the first hint of an emotional display – that was something she always avoided. Yet every time I had dinner at home that year she grumbled that I was neglecting my family, although in fact I came very often. She would not ask for anything, out of pride and upon principle; and then she complained of not being given enough.
She could not discuss her difficulties with anyone at all, not even herself. She had not been taught to see her own motives plainly nor to use her own judgment. She had to take shelter behind authority: but the authorities she respected were not in agreement; there was hardly a single point in common between the Mother Superior of Les Oiseaux and my father. I had experienced this setting of one idea against another while my mind was being formed and not after it was set: thanks to my early childhood I had a confidence in myself that my mother did not possess in the least: the road of argument, disputation – my road – was closed to her. On the contrary, she had made up her mind to share the general opinion: the last person who spoke to her was right. She read a great deal; but although she had an excellent memory she forgot almost everything. Exact knowledge, a decided view, would have made the sudden reversals that circumstances might force upon her impossible. Even after my father’s death she retained this prudent attitude. The people she then mixed with were more of her way of thinking. She sided with the ‘enlightened’ Catholics against the integrists. Yet the people she knew differed on many points. And on the other hand, although I was living in sin, my opinion counted in many things, and so did those of my sister and Lionel. She dreaded ‘looking a fool’ in our eyes. So she remained woolly-minded and she went on saying yes to everything and being surprised by nothing. In her last years she did attain some kind of coherence in her ideas, but at the time when her emotional life was at its most tormented she possessed no doctrine, no concepts, no words with which to rationalize her situation. That was the source of her bewildered uneasiness.
Thinking against oneself often bears fruit; but with my mother it was another question again – she lived against herself. She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger. In her childhood her body, her heart and her mind had been squeezed into an armour of principles and prohibitions. She had been taught to pull the laces hard and tight herself. A full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated.