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.