Accustomed to grope and flounder in the mazes of the intellect, I found
her intelligence well-nigh terrifying. I would sit almost helplessly
and listen to her sparkle of talk. Her freedom knocked into pieces all
my little imagined world of French conventionalities and inhibitions.
How could this pale, dignified mother, to whom I was presented as she
passed hurriedly through the room one day, allow her to wander so
freely about Paris parks and museums with a foreign young man? Her
answer came superbly, with a flare of decision which showed me that
at least in one spot the eternal conflict of the generations had been
settled: “_Je me permets!_”--I allow myself. She gave me to understand
that for a while her mother had been difficult, but that there was no
longer any question of her “living her life”--_vivre sa vie_. And she
really thought that her mother, in releasing her from the useless
trammels, had become herself much more of an independent personality.
As for my friend, she dared, she took risks, she played with the
adventure of life. But she knew what was there.
The motherly Anglo-Saxon frame of mind would come upon me, to see
her in the light of a poor ignorant child, filled with fantastic
ideals, all so pitifully untested by experience. How ignorant she was
of life, and to what pitfalls her daring freedom must expose her in
this unregenerate France! I tried and gave it up. As she talked,--her
glowing eyes, in which ideas seemed to well up brimming with feeling
and purpose, saying almost more than her words,--she seemed too
palpably a symbol of luminous youth, a flaming militant of the younger
generation, who by her courage would shrivel up the dangers that so
beset the timorous. She was French, and that fact by itself meant
that whole layers of equivocation had been cut through, whole sets of
intricacies avoided.
In order to get the full shock of her individuality, I took her one
afternoon to a model little English tea-room on the rue de Rivoli,
where normal Britishers were reading _Punch_ and the _Spectator_
over their jam and cake. The little flurry of disapprobation and the
hostile stare which our appearance elicited from the well-bred families
and discreet young men at the tables, the flaring incongruity of her
dark, lithe, inscrutable personality in this bland, vacuous British
atmosphere, showed me as could nothing else how hard was the gem-like
flame with which she burned.
As we walked in the Luxembourg and along the quays, or sat on the
iron chairs in the gardens of the Parc Monceau or the Trocadéro, our
friendship became a sort of intellectual orgy. The difficulty of
following the pace of her flying tongue and of hammering and beating
my own thoughts into the unaccustomed French was fatiguing, but it was
the fascinating weariness of exploration. My first idle remarks about
God touched off a whole battery of modern ideas. None of the social
currents of the day seemed to have passed her by, though she had been
immured so long in her sleepy convent at Bourges. She had that same
interest and curiosity about other classes and conditions of life
which animates us here in America, and the same desire to do something
effective against the misery of poverty.
I had teased her a little about her academic, untried ideas, and
in grave reproof she told me, one afternoon, as we stood--of all
places!--on the porch of the Little Trianon at Versailles, a touching
story of a family of the poorest of the Parisian poor, whom she and
her mother visited and helped to get work. She did not think charity
accomplished very much, and flamed at the word “Socialism,” although
she had not yet had its program made very clear to her.
But mostly she was feminist,--an ardent disciple in that singularly
uncomplicated and happy march of the Frenchwomen, already so
practically emancipated, toward a definite social recognition of that
liberation. The normal Frenchwoman, in all but the richer classes,
is an economic asset to her country. And economic independence was
a cardinal dogma in my friend’s faith. She was already taking a
secretarial course, in order to ensure her ability to make her living;
and she looked forward quite eagerly to a career.
Marriage was in considerable disfavor; it had still the taint of the
Church upon it, while the civil marriage seemed, with the only recently
surrendered necessary parental consent, to mark the subjection of the
younger to the older generation. These barriers were now removed, but
the evil savor of the institution lingered on. My friend, like all the
French intellectuals, was all for the “union libre,” but it would have
to be loyal unto death. It was all the more inspiring as an ideal,
because it would be perhaps hard to obtain. Men, she was inclined to
think, were usually _malhonnête_, but she might find some day a man of
complete sympathy and complete loyalty. But she did not care. Life was
life, freedom was freedom, and the glory of being a woman in the modern
world was enough for her.
The French situation was perhaps quite as bad as it was pictured.
Friendship between a girl and a young man was almost impossible.
It was that they usually wished to love her. She did not mind them
on the streets. The students--oh, the students!--were frightfully
annoying; but perhaps one gave a _gifle_ and passed rapidly on. Her
parents, before she had become genuinely the captain of her soul, had
tried to marry her off in the orthodox French way. She had had four
proposals. Risking the clean candor of the French soul, I became
curious and audacious. So she dramatized for me, without a trace of
self-consciousness, a wonderful little scene of provincial manners.
The stiff young Frenchman making his stilted offer, her self-possessed
reluctance, her final refusal, were given in inimitable style. These
incidents, which in the life of a little American _bourgeoise_ would
have been crises or triumphs, and, at any rate, unutterably hoarded
secrets, were given with a cold frankness which showed refreshingly to
what insignificance marriage was relegated in her life. She wished, she
said, to _vivre sa vie_--to live her life. If marriage fitted in with
her living of her life, it might take her. It should never submerge
or deflect her. Countless Frenchwomen, in defiance of the strident
Anglo-Saxon belief, were able both to keep a household and to earn
their own living; and why not she also? She would always be free; and
her black eyes burned as they looked out so fearlessly into a world
that was to be all hers, because she expected nothing from it.
About this world, she had few illusions. To its worldlinesses and
glitter she showed really a superb indifference. I brutally tried to
trap her into a confession that she spurned it only because it might
be closed to her through lack of money or prestige. Her eloquent eyes
almost slew me with vivacious denial. She despised these “dolls” whose
only business in life was to wear clothes. Her own sober black was
not affectation, but only her way of showing that she was more than a
_poupée_. She did not say it, but I quite appreciated, and I knew well
that she knew, how charming a _poupée_ she might have made.
Several of her friends were gay and worldly. She spoke of them with
charming frankness, touching off, with a tone quite clean of malice,
all their little worthlessnesses and futilities. Some of this world,
indeed, shaded off into unimaginable _nuances_, but she was wholly
aware of its significance. In the inimitable French way, she disdained
to use its errors as a lever to elevate her own virtues.