I
She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but
she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine.
She belonged to that France which Jean-Christophe found in his friend
Olivier, a world of flashing ideas and enthusiasms, a golden youth of
ideals.
She had picked me out for an exchange of conversation, as the custom
is, precisely because I had left my name at the Sorbonne as a person
who wrote a little. I had put this bait out, as it were, deliberately,
with the intention of hooking a mind that cared for a little more than
mere chatter, but I had hardly expected to find it in the form of a
young girl who, as she told me in her charmingly polished note, was
nineteen and had just completed her studies.
These studies formed a useful introduction when she received me in
the little old-fashioned apartment in the Batignolles quarter on my
first visit. She had made them ever since she was five years old in
a wonderful old convent at Bourges; and in the town had lived her
grandmother, a very old lady, whom she had gone lovingly to see, as
often as she could be away from the watchful care of the nuns. In
her she had found her real mother, for her parents had been far away
in Brittany. When the old lady died, my friend had to face an empty
world, and to become acquainted all over again with a mother whom
she confessed she found “little sympathetic.” But she was a girl of
_devoir_, and she would do nothing to wound her.
She told me one afternoon as we took our first walk through the dusky
richness of the Musée Cluny, that the shock of death had disclosed
to her how fleeting life was, how much she thought of death, and
how much she feared it. I used the lustiness of her grandmother’s
eighty-four years to convince her as to how long she might have to
postpone her dread, but her fragile youth seemed already to feel the
beating wings about her. As she talked, her expression had all that
wistful seriousness of the French face which has not been devitalized
by the city, that sense of the nearness of unutterable things which
runs, a golden thread, through their poetry. Though she had lived away
from Brittany, in her graver moments there was much in her of the
patient melancholy of the Breton. For her father’s people had been
sea-folk,--not fishermen, but pilots and navigators on those misty and
niggardly shores,--and the long defeat and ever-trustful suffering was
in her blood. She would interpret to me the homely pictures at the
Luxembourg which spoke of coast and peasant life; and her beautiful
articulateness brought the very soul of France out of the canvases of
Cottet and Breton and Carrière. She understood these people.
But she was very various, and, if at first we plumbed together the
profoundest depths of her, we soon got into shallower waters. The
fluency of her thought outran any foreign medium, and made anything but
her flying French impossible. Her meager English had been learned from
some curious foreigner with an accent more German than French, and we
abandoned it by mutual consent. Our conversation became an exchange of
ideas and not of languages. Or rather her mind became the field where I
explored at will.
I think I began by assuming a Catholic devotion in her, and implied
that her serious outlook on life might lead her into the church. She
scoffed unmitigatedly at this. The nuns were not unkindly, she said,
but they were hard and narrow and did not care for the theater and for
books, which she adored.
She believed in God. “Et le théâtre!” I said, which delighted her
hugely. But these Christian virtues made unlovely characters and
cut one off so painfully from the fascinating moving world of ideas
outside. But surely after fourteen years of religious training and
Christian care, did she not believe in the Church, its priesthood and
its dogmas?
She repudiated her faith with indescribable vivacity. A hardened
Anglo-Saxon agnostic would have shown more diffidence in denying
his belief in dogma or the Bible. As for the latter, she said, it
might do for children of five years. And the cutting sweep of that
“enfants de cinq ans” afforded me a revealing glimpse of that lucid
intelligence with which the French mind cuts through layers and strata
of equivocation and compromise.
Most Frenchmen, if they lose their faith, go the swift and logical
road to atheism. Her loss was no childish dream or frenzy; she still
believed in God. But as for the Church and its priesthood,--she told
me, with malicious irony, and with the intelligence that erases
squeamishness, of a friend of hers who was the daughter of the priest
in charge of one of the largest Parisian churches. Would she confess
to a member of a priestly caste which thus broke faith? Confession was
odious anyway. She had been kept busy in school inventing sins. She
would go to church on Easter, but she would not take the Eucharist,
though I noticed a charming lapse when she crossed herself with holy
water as we entered Notre Dame one day.
Where had she ever got such ideas, shut up in a convent?--Oh, they were
all perfectly obvious, were they not? Where would one not get them?
This amazing soul of modern France!--which pervades even the walls of
convents with its spirit of free criticism and its terrible play of
the intelligence; which will examine and ruthlessly cast aside, just
as my vibrant, dark-haired, fragile friend was casting aside, without
hypocrisy or scruple, whatever ideas do not seem to enhance the clear
life to be lived.