My situation in the family resembled that of my father in his childhood and youth: he had found himself suspended between the airy scepticism of my grandfather and the bourgeois earnestness of my grandmother. In my own case, too, my father’s individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother’s teaching. This imbalance, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.

At home, nothing was ever wasted: not a crust, not a wafer of soap, not a twist of string; free tickets and opportunities for free meals were always seized with avidity. My sister and I wore our clothes until they were threadbare, and even after that. My mother never wasted a second; she would knit while she was reading; when she talked to my father or to friends she would be sewing, patching, or embroidering; when she travelled by tram or by the Métro she would crochet miles of ‘tatting’ with which she ornamented our petticoats. In the evenings, she did her accounts; for years, every penny that passed through her hands had been noted down in a big black ledger. I used to think that not only in my own family but everywhere time and money were so exactly measured that they had to be distributed with the greatest economy and strictness: this idea appealed to me, because I wanted to see a world free from all irregularities. Poupette and I often used to play at being explorers lost in a desert or castaways on a desert island; or, in a besieged town, we would be gallant defenders dying of starvation: we used to perform miracles of ingenuity in order to draw the maximum of profit from our most infinitesimal resources; it was one of our favourite themes in our play. Everything must be put to use: I felt I must carry out this command to the letter. In the little notebooks in which I used to write down each week a résumé of my lessons, I began to cover every page with minute script, taking care not to leave the smallest blank space anywhere. My teachers were puzzled: they asked my mother if I had a mean streak. I got over that mania fairly quickly: gratuitous economy is a contradiction in terms, and it isn’t interesting or amusing. But I remained convinced that one must make use of everything, and of one’s self, to the utmost. At La Grillière there were often unoccupied moments before and after meals or at the end of Mass; I would fret and fidget: ‘Can’t that child sit still for just one minute?’ my Uncle Maurice would mutter impatiently. My parents and I used to laugh at him when he talked that way: my father and mother condemned idleness. I found it all the more reprehensible because it bored me so. Duty therefore was mixed with pleasure. That is why, at this period, my existence was such a happy one: I simply had to do just as I liked, and everyone was delighted with me.

[...] in Little Women Jo was superior to her sisters, who were either more virtuous or more beautiful than herself, because of her passion for knowledge and the vigour of her thought; her superiority was as outstanding as that of certain adults, and guaranteed that she would have an unusual life: she was marked by fate. I, too, felt I was entitled to consider my taste for reading and my scholastic successes as tokens of a personal superiority which would be borne out by the future. I became in my own eyes a character out of a novel. I invented all kinds of romantic intrigues that were full of obstacles and setbacks for the heroine. One afternoon I was playing croquet with Poupette, Jeanne, and Madeleine. We were wearing beige pinafores with red scallops and embroidered with cherries. The clumps of laurel were shining in the sun, and the earth smelt good. Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up. I decided that my sister and my cousins, who were prettier, more graceful, and altogether nicer than myself would be more popular than I; they would find husbands, but not I. I should feel no bitterness about it; people would be right to prefer them to me; but something would happen which would exalt me beyond all personal preference; I did not know under what form, or by whom I should be recognized for what I was. I imagined that already there was someone watching the croquet lawn and the four little girls in their beige pinafores: the gaze rested on me and a voice murmured: ‘She is not as other girls.’ It was utterly ridiculous to compare me with a sister and cousins so lacking in all pretensions. But I aspired, through them, to those higher modes of being where I should be with my equals. I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million.

I had always been sorry for the grown-ups’ monotonous existence: when I realized that, within a short space of time, it would be my fate too, I was filled with panic. One afternoon I was helping Mama to wash up; she was washing the plates, and I was drying; through the window I could see the wall of the barracks, and other kitchens in which women were scrubbing out saucepans or peeling vegetables. Every day lunch and dinner; every day washing-up; all those hours, those endlessly recurring hours, all leading nowhere: could I live like that? An image was formed in my mind, an image of such desolate clarity that I can still remember it today: a row of grey squares, diminishing according to the laws of perspective, but all flat, all identical, extending away to the horizon; they were the days and weeks and years. Since the day I was born I had gone to bed richer in the evening than I had been the day before; I was steadily improving myself, step by step; but if, when I got up there, I found only a barren plateau, with no landmark to make for, what was the point in it all?

No, I told myself, arranging a pile of plates in the cupboard; my life is going to lead somewhere. Fortunately I was not dedicated to a life of toil at the kitchen sink. My father was no feminist; he admired the wisdom of the novels of Colette Yver in which the woman lawyer, or the woman doctor in the end sacrifice their careers in order to provide their children and husband with a happy home. But after all, necessity knows no law: ‘You girls will never marry,’ he often declared, ‘you have no dowries; you’ll have to work for a living.’ I infinitely preferred the prospect of working for a living to that of marriage: at least it offered some hope. There had been people who had done things: I, too, would do things. I didn’t quite know what; astronomy, archaeology, and palaeontology had in their turn appealed to me, and I was still toying vaguely with the idea of writing. But these projects were all in the air; I didn’t believe enough in any of them to be able to face the future with confidence. Already I was in mourning for my past.

On the other hand I would think of myself as it were from within, as someone who was in the process of being created, and my ambition was to progress to the infinite of perfection; I saw the chosen one from outside, like a complete person; in order that he might always be at my own lofty level, I would provide him from the start with perfections that for me were still unrealized hopes; from the very start he would be the model of all I wished to become; he would, therefore, be superior to me. Yet I was careful not to set too great a distance between us. I could not have accepted a man whose thoughts and work were an enigma to me; love would be a justification, not a limitation. The picture I conjured up in my mind was of a steep climb in which my partner, a little more agile and stronger than myself, would help me up from one stage to the next. I was grasping rather than generous; if I had had to drag someone along behind me, I should have been consumed with impatience. In that case, celibacy was preferable to marriage. A life in common would have to favour and not stand in the way of my fundamental aim, which was to conquer the world. The man destined to be mine would be neither inferior nor different, nor outrageously superior; someone who would guarantee my existence without taking away my powers of self-determination.

[...\ In our family, only my cousin Madeleine defied this ban on cosmetics. When she reached the age of sixteen she began to tart herself up discreetly. Papa, Mama, and Aunt Marguerite would point scandalized fingers at her: ‘Madeleine! You’ve been putting powder on!’ ‘No, Aunt, I swear I haven’t!’ she would protest coquettishly, in an affected, babyish tone of voice. Along with the grown-ups, I laughed at her: any kind of artifice was always ‘ridiculous’. Every morning they would harp on the same theme: ‘It’s no use trying to deny it, Madeleine, you’ve been putting powder on again; you can see it a mile off.’ One day – she was then eighteen or nineteen – she got fed-up and retorted: ‘Well, why shouldn’t I?’ She had finally admitted it: triumph for the grown-ups! But her reply gave me something to think about. In any case, we were far from living in a state of nature. In our family, the grown-ups claimed that ‘make-up spoils the complexion’. But my sister and I often remarked to one another when we saw our aunts’ raddled features that their prudence had not brought them any great reward. But I didn’t attempt to argue them into letting me use cosmetics. So I used to arrive at the dancing academy in a dowdy old frock, with badly brushed hair, well scrubbed cheeks, and a shiny nose. I couldn’t do anything with my body; I couldn’t even swim or ride a bicycle: I felt as awkward and self-conscious as the day I had tried to show off my charms in the role of a Spanish dancer. [...]

Grandpapa died at the end of the autumn, after lingering on interminably; my mother shrouded herself in black crêpe and had all my clothes dyed black. This funereal get-up did not improve my appearance; it set me apart, and I felt it condemned me to an austere way of life that was beginning to weigh heavily upon my spirits. The students, both boys and girls, used to parade up and down the boulevard Saint-Michel in laughing gangs; they went to cafés, theatres, cinemas. As for me, after reading learned tomes and translating Catullus all day, I would spend the evenings doing mathematical problems. My parents, by helping to push me, not into marriage, but into a career, were breaking with tradition; nevertheless they still made me conform to it; there was never any question of letting me go anywhere without them, nor of releasing me from family duties.

During the past year, my principal amusement had been my meetings and my conversations with my friends; but now, apart from Zaza, they all bored me stiff. I went three or four times to the study-circle they attended under the supervision of the Abbé Trécourt, but the dreary inanity of the discussions drove me away. My old schoolmates hadn’t changed all that much; I hadn’t either; but before, we had been bound by a common endeavour: our studies; while now our lives were going separate ways; I was pushing forward and developing all the time, whereas they, in order to adapt themselves to their role of marriageable young girls, were beginning to grow dull and stupid. From the outset, I was being separated from them by the diverse paths our future was taking.

[...] I cut a poor figure in society. My friends, including Zaza, played their worldly roles with ease; they put in an appearance on their mothers’ at-home days, served tea, smiled and smiled, and talked amiably about nothing; I found smiling difficult, I couldn’t turn on the charm, make cute remarks, or any kind of concession to polite chit-chat. My parents would hold up to me as examples ‘remarkably intelligent’ girls who nevertheless were brilliant ornaments to their mothers’ drawing-rooms. This used to exasperate me because I knew that their way of life had nothing in common with mine: they were mere amateurs; I was a professional. That year I was preparing for examinations in literature, Latin, and general mathematics, and I was learning Greek; I had set this heavy programme myself, for I found difficulties amusing: but precisely in order that I might be able to embark light-heartedly on such an undertaking, it was essential that my studies should not just represent an off-shoot of my life, but should be my entire life itself: the things people talked about did not interest me, I had no subversive ideas; in fact, I hardly had any ideas on anything; but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

The best part of the week was Garric’s lecture. I was beginning to admire him more and more. It was rumoured at Sainte-Marie that he could have had a brilliant career at the University; but he had not a scrap of personal ambition; he never finished his thesis and devoted himself body and soul to his Social Welfare Groups; he lived the life of an ascetic in a working-class house in Belleville. He used to give fairly frequent propaganda lectures, and through Jacques’ good offices my mother and I were admitted to one of them. Jacques took us into a suite of drawing-rooms, richly furnished, in which rows and rows of red plush chairs with gilded woodwork were set out; he found us seats and went off to greet his acquaintances; he seemed to know everybody: how I envied him! It was hot, I was stifling in my mourning garments and I knew no one. Then Garric walked on to the platform; I forgot myself, and everything else; I was spellbound by the authority in his voice. He explained to us that at the age of twenty he had discovered in the trenches the joys of a comradeship which overcame all social barriers; when, after the armistice, he became a student again, he was determined not to be deprived of that comradeship; the segregation which in civilian life separates young middle-class men from working chaps was something he felt like a personal mutilation; besides, he believed that everybody has a right to culture. He believed firmly in the truth of what General Lyautey had said in one of his Moroccan speeches: that beyond all differences, there is a common denominator which links all men. On the basis of this concept, he decided to set up a system of exchanges between students and working-class youths which would release the former from the egotistical solitude and the latter from their ignorance. By learning to understand and love one another they would work side by side to bring the classes together. To loud applause, Garric stated that it is impossible for any kind of social progress to emerge from a conflict whose motive force was class hatred: progress would only come through friendship. He had roped in a few friends who helped him to organize the first cultural centre at Neuilly. They obtained support and subsidies and the movement began to grow: there were now ten thousand members in groups all over France, all young men and women, and two hundred teachers. Garric himself was a firm Roman Catholic, but he did not intend to turn the movement into a religious mission; there were unbelievers among his collaborators; he believed that men should help one another on the human level. At the end, in a voice charged with emotion, he claimed that if people are well-treated they will be good; by refusing to offer the hand of friendship to the lower classes the bourgeoisie were making a grave mistake whose consequences would fall upon their own heads.