Simone de Beauvoir - A Very Easy Death

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It is a pity that out-of-date ideas should have prevented her from adopting the solution that she came round to, twenty years later – that of working away from home.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.

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.