Memoirs

Introduction

A very dear and very reliable friend, Cardinal Heenan,¹ Archbishop of Westminster, whose premature loss is one of my greatest regrets, entitled his memoirs Not the Whole Truth. With those very first words, he seems to me to have denounced the claim of so many memorialists, starting with Rousseau, to have said everything: as if that were possible, even if one sincerely wished to do so . . . which is probably never the case! But, as his example shows, undoubtedly the best a memorialist can do is offer a selection from among his memories of what, on reflection, seems capable of revealing something meaningful, for himself, first of all, and perhaps then for a few others.

The closer I come to the end, the more in fact I sense that there is a meaning in our life. The hand of God leads us to it, using all things for his purposes: failures, disillusionments, as well as and even more than successes, moments of happiness, or what seems to us to be such, and, what is most astounding, even our glaring faults!

So in the pages that follow, what I would like to recall is what, on final, or undoubtedly very nearly final, reflection, seems to me to have the most meaning. I hope that those who read them, and especially my friends, both known and unknown (for a writer, are not many of these latter often among the closest?), will also draw some profit from them, perhaps more than I do myself. I hasten to add that the entertainment that these pages could, at least I hope, provide them is an integral part in my eyes of that potential profit. For it is a too-little-known but to me unquestionable fact that Providence has a great and, of course, the best sense of humor! The terrible lack in this regard on the part of modern Christians in general (and of ecclesiastics in particular) is in my opinion what most prevents them from being taken seriously no matter what they say. I do not want to try to provoke them, but I will do nothing special to spare them.

May those of good faith, Christian or not, who read these pages sense that they are addressed to them by someone who had no other ambition in writing them but to merit being counted among them.

CHAPTER ONE

The Narrator’s Childhood

I was born the third child of parents already rather advanced in age, although my two older siblings were already dead, the first nearly at birth, the other at scarcely two years of age. And, what is more, I was born on the eve of that 1914 war which, by common opinion, marked the end of a civilization. After these introductory declarations, one might believe that my childhood was miserable, or at the very least unhappy. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Undoubtedly under the influence of that unconscious selection which governs the retention of memories, but also, very obviously, because good memories were plentiful in it, my first years leave me with a singularly sunny impression. I can best express it by recalling one of those early childhood memories that remain to me with a distinctness that has rescued them from any such oblivion. The window of our dining room is open in the apartment where I was born on 5 rue Juliette Lamber, a short distance from the place de Wagram and the boulevard Pereire.¹ It must be a spring morning or at the beginning of summer. I may be around a year old, for I am taking my first steps. On the other side of the street, a lowered orange and white striped awning glistens in the sun. I am starting toward a chair placed in the same direction, where an orange, which is itself brilliantly colored, has been placed in order to entice me.

. . . According to what I have been told, it seems that my rapid progress was interrupted by a memorable fall, after which for a long time I no longer wished to make use of my legs, to the great distress of my family and of Irma, my little nurse. But it is quite revealing that I, for my part, have retained no memory of this misadventure at all, while the luminous awning and the attractive fruit have left an indelible memory of an entrance into a world of happy brightness in which shadows only enhance the light. I can say that all the trials of my life, and I have not been spared them, have never managed to erase that vision of awakening.

My mother’s solicitous concern (reflected in an absolutely firm belief, which even a fair degree of annoyance was never to shake), Irma’s kindness toward me (which, I am ashamed to say, I rewarded at least once by hurling a bowl of creamy milk at her face—I have always detested that, but she had been instructed to make me swallow it as is), my father’s goodness and dreamy idealism (which, in my judgment, was not in the least affected by the sound thrashing he felt obliged in conscience to administer to me that day): all that would have been enough to make those early years a paradise.

Obviously adding to that impression were the charm of that part of Paris, the proximity of my young aunt and godmother Jeanne, my mother’s younger sister, of her husband, Uncle Francis (an expert in Far Eastern art who was, unconsciously I think, to leave an indelible mark on me), and of my cousin, their daughter Jacqueline, who was a little older than I. So much so that those early years seem to me to have passed like a single beautiful day like the one I have recalled.

I was thus scarcely more than a year old when we entered the war: the great war, as it would be called . . . before another one made it seem small-scale. A second one of my oldest memories must relate to its very beginning, for I see myself there on our balcony in the arms of my nurse. She, my mother, and I are watching my father get out of a taxi (still a rare thing) and shout to us: We are not leaving: no more trains! This could only have been one of the early days of August 1914.

In fact, we would leave all the same for the summer holidays a little later, to the beach at Fouras,² summoned back by the La Rochelle origins of my father’s family to the place where the mayor was a cousin of my father. That war, I must admit, did not long affect my childhood or, undoubtedly, that of many others who were spared any separation by the weak constitution of their fathers. The only lasting impression was made by what might seem comical or incongruous: such as a Zeppelin or the taubes, as they were called (the first German military airplanes), flying over Paris. The most unusual thing I recall was an interminable procession of ambulances that were to bring back the victims of the Marne.³ But, apart from that, it seems to me that as long as we lived in that part of Paris (which, if I am not mistaken, was until 1916 or 1917), it remained a tranquil little world where life passed peacefully, and for us happily, in a beautiful setting shaded by tall trees, where the only excitement was serene and gay.

Nothing has remained more definite for me than the various sounds that followed one another there; but they stood out against a background of silence that it would be difficult today to reconcile with the idea of a large city. It is true that we were just on the edge of the city: quite close to the desert of fortifications where I often went to play when there was not enough time to spend a whole morning or afternoon with my mother or my nurse at the Parc Monceau.⁴ Beyond that, it was almost a completely country suburb, where a semi-rural disorder of mismatched buildings and little garden patches suffered from only a few noisy and smoky industrial blocks.

But along where we lived and my aunt lived, the place de Wagram, or along the boulevard Pereire, the two most urban noises made by the traffic of that time did no more than pleasantly punctuate the silence. One, I would say, filled it without dispelling it: it was that of horses trotting on the wooden pavement. A sound of which people have no idea today: a familiar and quiet music, with a bit of gaiety to it, which harmonized delightfully with the swaying coziness of the old carriages, where you were so well placed, on large grey or blue cushions, to watch from on high the swinging spectacle of houses, trees, and passersby. The other sound was a sign of a civilization that was barely on the way: the deafening racket, entertaining as long as it remained rare, of electric tramways creaking, whirling, and vibrating on their rails, with the joyful chimes of their bells, operated by the foot of the driver.

Apart from that, I recall only the noise of the little street trades: noise whose poetry I will always miss, like that of the diverse but equally pleasant characters whose call was enough to bring us to the windows. There was, above all, as I remember, the glassworker, whose modulated cry had an incomparable fullness and originality. The clothes merchants, for their part, gave out those languid chants that still seem to me to have been the height of romanticism. Nothing was more optimistic, on the other hand, than the vigorous call of the grinders, which was regularly punctuated (I have no idea why) with the ringing of energetically struck bells. But the virtuosos in the most unexpected vocal exercises remained without a doubt the menders of crockery and porcelain, as they were called, who, for their part, took a rest from broadcasting their invocations, which were in turn ironic or nonsensical, by making a terrible racket sounding shrill little trumpets, which had the most comical effect.

I wonder what those good people could really have earned. But I must believe they enjoyed their work, even if it did not pay well, for they were all of an inexhaustible good humor and gaiety. The chair menders were generally, but not always, more silent. They would set up in a nice, quiet, sunny place in order to restore our worn seats with beautiful golden straw, a bundle of which they always held between their lips and which they wove with a fascinating sureness of hand.

I have spoken of the fortifs⁵ and the Parc Monceau. They were the areas reserved for the wafer merchants: true magicians who had us turn a kind of sparkling arrow on the cover of a colored cylinder that they carried on their backs. The arrow would stop dead on the variable number of those light delicacies to which we were entitled by the little sou we had paid in order to be allowed to launch this fanciful contraption, which sometimes filled us and sometimes left us hungry.

And, too, what about the variety, the picturesque quality, even the mystery of the innumerable little shops, which were rare on our more or less well-to-do streets but which were crowded next to each other when you moved on in the direction of the Batignolles,⁶ where you went up toward the Ternes⁷ on the avenue de Wagram. On that side, though, there was the first of the large department stores, Les Trois Quartiers, where I would soon be grumbling to see my mother and my aunts spend endless hours going from counter to counter in what seemed to me to be a mob and which was only a pleasant throng of idle Parisian women.

But the shops of the dairymen with their milk and cream, of the grocers and fruit sellers, where everything was so fresh or, on the other hand, filled with elaborate scents that were strangely mixed together—of cinnamon, pepper, dried fruits, and particularly coffee, roasted regularly two or three times a week, filling the air of a whole district with its fragrance. Less appealing to one’s sense of smell but even more exciting to the eyes were the dealers in small notions, with their spools of infinite shades, their ribbons, their trims of a variety unimaginable today. And then there were the pharmacies of that time, whose windows were decorated with crystal amphoras of flamboyant colors, made luminous at nightfall by gas lamps placed behind them.

But, in fact, the shop I knew best for its chaotic profusion was unquestionably that of my godfather, the husband of one of my maternal aunts. It took two streetcars to get there, one after the other: first, from the place Pereire, a double-decker, whose tall brown body would take you, if I remember correctly, to the École Militaire.⁸ You got off there to take the much more imposing but less entertaining vehicle of the Compagnie des Omnibus, which succeeded the old coaches drawn by four horses and was to pass on its dark green uniform, edged in yellow, to the present-day buses. It let us off at the Vaugirard town hall, and then we had no more than a few steps in order to reach the rue de la Procession, where the store of my uncle and godfather faced Saint-Lambert Square.

Even after years of visiting this pleasant shambles, I would not be able to recount everything to be found there, and still less what might not be unearthed. Dry goods, knick-knacks, stationery goods, perfume, hardware, newspapers (especially the most popular illustrated ones), all in an inextricable jumble, even for my aunt. But, in an emergency, all my uncle had to do in order to go straight to the desired object to satisfy the request of an imaginative client was to adjust his pince-nez with its black cord.

Yet, in his eyes, the only value of all that was that it earned him a living, which is not to say he did not take some pride in it. But my uncle, before being an unbeatable tradesman, had the justifiable pride of being an artist. The repair—or, better said, the resurrection and transfiguration—of the most pitiful dolls, either because of their accidental misfortunes or because of the very mediocrity of their construction, was his gift, if not his genius. He was so widely and so well known by the feminine hordes that very well-bred little girls sometimes burst into that neighborhood, which was quite working class at the time. Chaperoned by respectable nannies, they came in tears and not without some apprehension to entrust their treasures, almost in shreds, to the miraculous surgeon whose reputation must have spread to the fashionable neighborhoods bordering the Champ de Mars. A few days later, all these mothers in distress would retrieve their beloved babies with a mixture of exultation and astonishment, so creative could the restoration of these pitiful wrecks be.

I appreciated the true merit of these heroic deeds of my godfather, but I must say I took a particularly equivocal interest in the odor of the warm glue that accompanied his work, unable to tell if its strong pungency pleased me because of its strangeness or sickened me because of its stench of spoiled fish. My uncle and godfather (whose name was Louis Dauphin) excelled, however, not only in the plastic arts. He had a splendid voice, of which he was innocently proud, and would sing grand opera for you as well as light-hearted songs with scarcely less spirit than emotion. Where and how he had developed this gift, I could not say, for he was a foundling, as was discreetly said at that time. A very handsome man on top of that, he must have had something aristocratic in his obscure pedigree. When he was in evening dress, he made a magnificent impression, with his prematurely white hair. That impression was unfortunately upset the moment he opened his mouth other than to sing. Not that he was in the least foolish (although pleasantly boastful), but because his language was that of a pure Parisian titi⁹ and because his education, picked up here and there, allowed him only just barely to read and scarcely to write.

I think his artistic tastes are what made him fall in with my mother’s family. He and his wife, Aunt Mélie (short for Amélie), also had my grandfather staying with them, a magnificent and intractable old Spaniard to whom his son-in-law was bound by a delightful mixture of exasperation and congeniality. For this old man, as cordial as he was irascible, was an exceptional musician. The son of a dignified bourgeois family from Gerona, in Catalonia, he had had a fatal falling out with his family when he was barely twenty years old. Having arrived in France with only his father’s curse as luggage, he had joined the army in order to earn his bread and change his nationality. But his abilities had caused him to climb the rungs of the military musical hierarchy with a surprising swiftness, so that, despite various incidents due to his congenital insubordination, he was, scarcely in his forties, the command master chief of music of the fleet. Having settled in Toulon¹⁰ with a sweet young Italian woman—also an artist although the daughter of a mere house painter—whom he had met in Languedoc, where his career began, this flattering arrival at the summit of his profession barely allowed him to feed the four sons and four daughters who had blessed their union. A new, conveniently timed, more or less Oedipal conflict, this time with the admiral of the Levant Fleet,¹¹ made him decide to offer himself to the Republican Guard Band¹² at the time of its formation.

Having gone up to Paris with his whole family, he had managed to raise it by adding to his meager pay what he could get as both first violinist and first clarinettist at the Opéra, not without having also been the conductor of the orchestra at the Hippodrome, the famous circus of the 1889 exposition. My kind, poor little grandmother died prematurely from the work, but the whole family nevertheless became a nest of songbirds in which everyone tried his hand at nearly all the instruments. The boys, unfortunately, were each carried off in turn when they were barely adults by what was then called consumption—in particular, a certain Louis, whose name and romantic library I inherited and whom his sisters, apparently more robust when it came to withstanding privations, were agreed in describing as a prodigy of kindness, intelligence, and musicality all at once.

It was clear that my grandfather, despite his anarchism, thought his two eldest daughters had lowered themselves socially by their marriages, while having a strong if grumbling affection for at least the one of his two first sons-in-law of whom I have spoken (I never knew the other or saw much of his wife, who seems to have returned early in life to the ancestral type of the Piedmontese Mama). On the other hand, this temperamental, difficult old man, though basically a good fellow, burst with pride over his two younger daughters, and, in the first place, my mother, whom brilliant studies had cast into a profession as a private teacher among the grand families of the P.H.S. (Protestant High Society), including a famous British doctor whose name I have forgotten. She had at the same time served as second mother to my godmother Jeanne, of whom I have already said a few words: a marvel of youth, charm, and beauty, although she had undeniably inherited some of her father’s quick temper. That had not prevented her from seducing my uncle Francis, heir of a wealthy Geneva family and, as I have said, an expert in Far Eastern art.

They have left me the memory of a delightful couple who died too young, one after the other having been taken away toward the end of the war by the same tuberculosis that had prematurely decimated my four young uncles.

My mother, shortly after her young sister, had in her turn married, less grandly but also very happily. My father, the only son of a postal official of Charente origins, had in fact had to interrupt his studies after finishing high school because his own father had also died very young. But he had had no difficulty in finding a rather good position in one of the first electric companies in Paris, which had brought him some delectable experiences, since his duties included supervising (as they say today) telephone installations, still an utter novelty, among the cream of high society. His tastes, too, however, were completely intellectual and artistic. He read voraciously, drew and painted very well, and, until his marriage in 1908, seems to have used his free time and savings in visiting the art centers of Italy, Spain, and Central Europe.

I have already mentioned the British episode in my mother’s own youth, which was to leave her with an Anglomania that she passed on to me. For his part, my father was rather a Germanist, and it is not his fault if his influence succeeded in giving me nothing but a wholly academic introduction to German, but one that did include various Teutonic friends whom I was to host, Prussian squires or Rhenish intellectuals distinguished by an equal Francomania, which ruled out any chance of speaking their own idiom with them.

But I am already anticipating the future! These early years of my existence, as one can foresee, as Parisian as it was, was divided between aristocratic holidays on the Monceau plain and somewhat plebian excursions on the Vaugirard side. In these latter, I enjoyed, in addition to the avuncular shop, endless walks in the neighborhood and far beyond it, in particular along the wharfs, lagging behind either my godfather or my grandfather.

I will say this in their favor: that they both had the rare merit of treating me, at five or six years of age, as if I had been their contemporary and, even more, an old friend trustworthy enough to be made a party to their shared grumbling about the fairer sex, whom they affected to scorn but of whom they were the slaves, as I well saw. They would have been greatly surprised, more even than flattered, if they had been told that they proved to be much more effective teachers than their daughters, wives, or sister-in-laws thought themselves to be. They passed on to me, along with a solid independence of judgment, a love for and untiring curiosity about old Paris and all that it implies of charm, common as well as elegant, with a definite taste for direct and well-bred speech, an amused liking for original characters, figures a bit outside the usual frame of reference.

Neither my aunts nor my mother looked very favorably on these rambles together, but the inquiries to which my aunt Mélie, in particular, attempted to subject me on my return from our harmless escapades were promptly discouraged by my apparently faulty memory, which was attributed to the perpetual daydream in which I was lost, as it was soon generally acknowledged, and which became an invaluable alibi for me.

The boulevard Pereire and the place de Wagram side was of course spiced with less colorful pleasures, to which I was, however, no less sensible and without any particular snobbery. The regular company of my very pretty cousin was most pleasant. With both of us dressed very elegantly by our respective mothers, we sent the old ladies into raptures who took us for brother and sister, which I have trouble understanding, for I cannot believe I could ever have been what is called a charming child. My cousin Jacqueline was supremely so, which did not prevent her from being much more mischievous and forward than I. She had won over my father on the eve of his marriage by telling him, at the risk of making my future godmother faint: You know! Maman thinks you’re not bad, although it’s a shame you have the nose of a drum! Of course my aunt had said trumpet,¹³ but the children of the family had been raised among such a multitude of instruments that they could easily mistake them.

Among other misdeeds in which she involved me: one morning when we had both been dressed in adorable outfits of dark green velvet with large lace collars in order to play the most touching parts in the marriage of a mutual cousin, while we were waiting to be led in, Jacqueline persuaded me to finish off, by the handful, what remained of a plate of macaroni with tomatoes and cheese . . . We were taken by surprise in the midst of this operation, with our frills and flounces in a state that can well be imagined, which led to another fit of hysterics for my poor little aunt. My uncle Francis, who did not know whether to laugh or cry, tried in vain, as usual, to calm her, blowing on his pince-nez and saying sweetly: My dear, they are children! Never mind about their clothes as long as they don’t cripple or blind themselves . . . To which my aunt proclaimed: Ah! That is what you men find to console us! Is it possible to be unhappier than I am? in tragic tones and with a wringing of her hands. My father appeared unexpectedly at that point and, not daring to look at his brother-in-law and close friend, diverted this Italian-Spanish fury to himself by saying, My dear Jeanne, with a husband like yours, who could be happier than you?

I must admit on this occasion that the southern Latin element that governed our family gave everything a tragi-comic form that somewhat disconcerted me but entertained me even more. For me as for my exquisite cousin, it was to contribute not a little to the ingenious perversity that our unhappy (though actually very happy) mothers vied with each other in lamenting.

But since I am on the subject of the theatre, it is time to say a word about a pleasant relationship my godmother brought to my childhood. Living at 5 place