If It Die - André Gide E-Book

André Gide

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 563

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

 If It Die...  by André Gide is a profound exploration of personal identity, moral ambiguity, and the human experience. Through this autobiographical work, Gide reflects on his formative years, offering an intimate portrayal of his journey from adolescence to adulthood. The narrative delves into his struggles with religion, sexuality, and societal expectations, portraying his inner conflict with refreshing honesty.   In If It Die..., Gide confronts the rigid moral structures of his upbringing, particularly the influence of his Protestant faith. He presents a nuanced depiction of his search for authenticity, as he grapples with questions of desire and identity in a society that demanded conformity. Gide's writing is both introspective and candid, offering readers an unvarnished look into the complexities of his emotional and spiritual development.   The book is not merely a personal reflection, but a critique of the social and moral constraints of late 19th and early 20th-century France. Through his narrative, Gide explores themes such as the tension between personal freedom and societal norms, as well as the hypocrisy inherent in conventional morality. His experiences, particularly his travels and encounters with different cultures, broaden his perspective and deepen his understanding of human diversity. 

Leseprobe

André Gide

IF IT DIE...

Original Title:

“i le grain ne meurt”

First Edition

Contents

INTRODUCTION

IF IT DIE

ONE

TWO

INTRODUCTION

André Gide

1869-1951

André Gide was a French writer, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, recognized as one of the most influential figures in 20th-century literature. Born in Paris, Gide explored themes such as individual freedom, morality, and social hypocrisy. Throughout his career, his writings challenged social and religious conventions, earning him both admirers and critics. His works, often autobiographical, offer a deep reflection on the struggle between personal desire and societal norms.

Early Life and Education

Gide was born into a bourgeois Protestant family, an environment that shaped his relationship with morality and religion, recurring themes in his work. He studied at the École Alsacienne in Paris, and from a young age, he showed an interest in writing. However, his personal life was marked by internal conflicts, especially regarding his homosexuality, which had a profound influence on his literary output.

Career and Contributions

André Gide’s work boldly explores the human pursuit of authenticity. Among his most notable works is The Counterfeiters (1925), a novel that questions traditional literary conventions, featuring a complex narrative structure and characters struggling for authenticity in a world full of deceit. The Immoralist (1902) is another of his influential works, telling the story of Michel, a man who, after overcoming illness, decides to live according to his deepest desires, disregarding societal norms.

Gide was also an advocate for individual freedom and a critic of social and religious hypocrisy. In his autobiographical work If It Die... (1920), he reflects on his rejection of bourgeois values and his search for a more authentic life. Throughout his career, Gide remained firm in his conviction that individuals must be true to themselves, even if it meant challenging established norms.

Impact and Legacy

André Gide’s influence extends beyond literature. He was a key figure in European modernism, and his work inspired later writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The honesty with which he addressed topics like sexuality, morality, and individual freedom marked a radical shift in 20th-century narrative.

Gide was also a strong advocate for social justice. During his visit to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, he became disillusioned with the Stalinist regime, leading him to write Return from the USSR (1936), a work in which he openly criticized the social and political conditions of the country, reflecting his constant commitment to truth and authenticity.

Death and Legacy

André Gide passed away in 1951 at the age of 81. Throughout his life, his work was often controversial, but it was also recognized for its literary boldness and deep exploration of the human condition. The Nobel Prize in Literature he received in 1947 acknowledged his legacy as one of the most influential authors of his time. Today, his work continues to be studied and admired, highlighting his contribution to contemporary literature and his fight for individual freedom in a society that often imposes restrictions.

About the work

If It Die... by André Gide is a profound exploration of personal identity, moral ambiguity, and the human experience. Through this autobiographical work, Gide reflects on his formative years, offering an intimate portrayal of his journey from adolescence to adulthood. The narrative delves into his struggles with religion, sexuality, and societal expectations, portraying his inner conflict with refreshing honesty.

In If It Die..., Gide confronts the rigid moral structures of his upbringing, particularly the influence of his Protestant faith. He presents a nuanced depiction of his search for authenticity, as he grapples with questions of desire and identity in a society that demanded conformity. Gide's writing is both introspective and candid, offering readers an unvarnished look into the complexities of his emotional and spiritual development.

The book is not merely a personal reflection, but a critique of the social and moral constraints of late 19th and early 20th-century France. Through his narrative, Gide explores themes such as the tension between personal freedom and societal norms, as well as the hypocrisy inherent in conventional morality. His experiences, particularly his travels and encounters with different cultures, broaden his perspective and deepen his understanding of human diversity.

Since its publication, If It Die... has been recognized for its brave exploration of taboo subjects, particularly in its treatment of sexuality. Gide's forthrightness in discussing his own homosexuality was groundbreaking, and the book continues to be a pivotal work in the study of LGBTQ+ literature. Its reflection on the universal human struggle for self-acceptance makes it a timeless piece, resonating with readers long after its initial release.

The book remains relevant today as it speaks to issues of identity, repression, and the pursuit of authenticity—concepts that continue to have significance in contemporary discussions around personal freedom and societal expectations.

IF ITDIE

ONE

1

I was born on November 22nd, 1869. My parents at that time lived in the Rue de Medicis in an apartment on the fourth floor which they left a few years later and of which I have kept no recollection. Stay though, I do remember the balcony, or rather what could be seen from the balcony — the bird’s-eye view of the Place with its ornamental piece of water and fountain; or rather, to be still more exact, I remember the paper dragons which my father used to cut out for me and which we launched into the air from the balcony; I remember their floating away in the wind over the fountain in the Place below and being carried away as far as the Luxembourg Gardens, where they used sometimes to catch in the top branches of the horse-chestnut trees.

I remember too a biggish table — the dining-room table no doubt — with its table-cloth that reached nearly to the ground; I used to crawl underneath it with the concierge’s little boy, who sometimes came to play with me.

‘What are you up to under there?’ my nurse would call out.

‘Nothing; we’re playing.’ And then, we would make a great noise with our playthings, which we had taken with us for the sake of appearances. In reality, we amused ourselves otherwise, beside each other but not with each other; we had what I afterwards learnt are called ‘bad habits.

Which of us two taught them first to the other? I have no idea. Surely, a child may sometimes invent them for himself. Personally, I cannot say whether anyone instructed me in the knowledge of pleasure or in what manner I discovered it — I only know that as far back as my recollection goes, I cannot remember a time without it.

I perfectly realize, for that matter, that I am doing myself harm by relating this and other things that follow; I foresee what use will be made of them against me. But the whole object of my story is to be truthful. Put the case that I am writing it for a penance.

One would like to believe that in that age of innocence the soul is all sweetness, light, and purity, but I can remember nothing in mine that was not ugly, dark, and deceitful.

I used to be taken for my outings to the Luxembourg; but I would not play with the other children; I kept sulkily apart with my nurse and watched their games. I remember once they were making mud-pies with their pails ... All of a sudden, when my nurse was looking another way, I dashed up and trampled all the pies underfoot.

The only explanation I can think of for tins behavior is that I must have gone up to one of the children and asked to be allowed to play with them. It was their refusal that enraged me so and made me want to destroy their game.

The other incident I must relate is still odder, for which reason, no doubt, I am less ashamed of it. I often heard my mother tell the story later on, so that it kept fresh in my memory.

It happened at Uzes, where we used to go once a year to visit my father’s mother and other relations — amongst them my de Flaux cousins, who owned an old house and garden in the heart of the town. It was in the de Flaux’ house that it happened. My cousin was a very beautiful person and she knew it. Her black hair, which she wore parted in the middle and smoothed down on either side of her face, set off the perfection of her cameo-like profile (I have seen a photograph of her since then) and the dazzling whiteness of her skin. I remember the dazzling whiteness of her skin very well — and I remember it especially well because the day I was taken to see her she was wearing a low-necked dress.

‘Go and give your cousin a kiss,’ said my mother, as I came into the drawing-room. (I couldn’t have been much more than four years old — five, perhaps.) I went obediently up and she drew me towards her; but at the sight of her bare shoulder and its dazzling whiteness, some sort of craziness possessed me; instead of putting my lips to the cheek she offered me, fascinated by her dazzling shoulder, I gave it a great bite with my teeth. My cousin screamed with pain and I with horror. She began to bleed and I to spit with disgust. I was speedily carried off and I really believe they were all so astounded that they forgot to punish me.

I have found a photograph of myself taken at that time; it represents me half hidden in my mother’s skirts, frightfully dressed in a ridiculous little check frock, with a sickly ill-tempered face and a crooked look in my eyes.

I was six years old when we left the Rue de Medicis. Our new apartment, the second floor of No. 2 Rue de Tournon, was at the corner of the Rue Saint-Sulpice, on to which the windows of my father’s library looked; my own room gave on to a large courtyard. I particularly remember the anteroom of this flat, because that was where I spent most of my time when I was not at school or in my bedroom; when mamma was tired of me, she would tell me to go and play with ‘my little friend Pierre’, which meant in other words -by myself. There was a gaudy colored carpet in this anteroom, covered with large geometrical patterns, and it was great fun playing at marbles on it with ‘my little friend Pierre’.

I had a special little string bag for my best and finest marbles. They had been given me one by one and I kept them apart from the ordinary ones. Some were so lovely I could never touch them without being enraptured afresh by their beauty — in particular, a little one of black agate with a white equator and two tropics; and I had another of translucent cornelian, the color of light tortoise-shell, which I used as a taw. Then there was the common herd of grey marbles which I kept in a coarse linen bag and which were sometimes won and sometimes lost and served as stakes when later on I had real playmates.

Another plaything I adored was that worker of marvels called a kaleidoscope — a kind of toy telescope, looking through which one sees at the other end a constantly chang'n? rose pattern, made of loose bits of colored glass imprisoned between two transparent plaques. The inside of the telescope is lined with looking-glass, so that the phantasmagoria of the colored pieces, altering with every little movement of the hand, is multiplied into a symmetrical design. The shifting of the rose patterns filled me with unspeakable delight. I can still recollect accurately the color and shape of the bits of glass: the largest was a light ruby, triangular in shape; owing to its weight, it was always the first to move, jostling and tumbling over the rest of them. There was a very dark garnet, almost round; an emerald, shaped like a scythe; a topaz, whose color is the only thing I can remember about it; a sapphire and three little gold-brown fragments. They were never all on the stage together; some of them kept completely out of sight; others were partially hidden in the wings on the other side of the looking-glasses; the ruby alone was so large that it never disappeared entirely.

My girl cousins shared my liking for this toy, but they were less patient than I; they used to give it a shake each time so as to get a complete change. My method was different; without taking my eyes off the pattern for a moment, I turned the kaleidoscope very, very gently and watched the rose as it slowly altered. Sometimes the hardly perceptible displacing of one piece brought about the most startling consequences. I was still as curious as I was wonder-struck and soon resolved to make my toy give up its secret by force. I took out the bottom, counted up the bits of colored glass and removed the three looking-glasses from their cardboard sheath; then I put them back, but only three or four bits of colored glass with them. The color scheme was poor; the changes had ceased to be surprising; but how easy now to follow the action of the different parts! how clearly one understood the reason of one’s pleasure!

Then it occurred to me to replace the little bits of glass by all sorts of different objects — a nib, the wing of a fly, a match end, a blade of grass. The effect was dull, no longer the least transparent or fairy-like, but the reflections in the looking-glasses gave it a kind of geometrical interest ... In short, I passed hours and days over this amusement, I think it is unknown to the children of the present day, which is why I have said so much about it.

The other amusements of my early childhood — games of patience, transfers, bricks, were all solitary. I had no playfellows ... Yes, though; I can recall one small friend, but alas, he was not a playfellow. When Marie took me to the Luxembourg Gardens, I used to meet a child there of about my own age, a delicate, gentle, quiet creature, whose pallid face was half hidden by a pair of big spectacles, the glasses of which were so dark that one could see nothing behind them. I cannot remember his name, perhaps I never knew it. We used to call him Mouton because of his little white woolly coat.

‘Mouton, why do you wear spectacles?’

I have bad eyes.’

‘Let me see them.’

Then he had lifted the frightful glasses and the sight of his poor blinking, weak eyes had made my heart ache.

Not that we played together; I cannot remember that we did anything but walk about hand in hand without saying a word.

This first friendship of mine lasted only a short time. Mouton soon stopped coming. Oh, how lonely the Luxembourg seemed then! ... But my real despair began when I realized that Mouton was going blind. Marie had met the little boy’s nurse in the street and she told my mother what she had learnt; she spoke in a whisper so that I should not hear; but I caught these words: ‘He can’t find the way to his mouth I’ An absurd remark, assuredly, for of course there is no need to see in order to find the way to one’s mouth, as I immediately reflected, but nevertheless it filled me with dismay. I ran away to cry in my room and for several days I practiced keeping my eyes shut and going about without opening them, so as to try and realize what Mouton must be feeling.

My father was taken up preparing his lectures at the Faculty of Law and gave very little of his time to me. He spent most of the day shut up in a vast and rather dark study, into which I was only allowed when he expressly invited me. I have a photograph which keeps me in mind of my father with his square-cut beard and rather long curly black hair; without this picture I should only have had the recollection of his extreme gentleness. My mother told me later that his colleagues had surnamed him Vir probus and I learnt from one of them that they often had recourse to his advice.

I had a veneration for my father which was slightly mixed with fear and which was enhanced by the solemnity of this abode. I went into it as into a temple; the bookcase rose out of the gloom like a tabernacle; a thick carpet of a dark rich color stifled the sound of my footsteps. There was a reading desk near one of the two windows; in the middle of the room stood an enormous table covered with books and papers. My father would go and fetch some big volume, a Coutume of Burgundy or Normandy, and open the heavy folio on the arm of an easy chair, so that we might follow from page to page the persevering labors of a gnawing bookworm. While he was consulting some ancient text, the learned jurist had admired these little clandestine galleries and had said to himself, ‘Ah! This will amuse my small boy. ’And it did amuse me very much, and the amusement he seemed to take in it as well, increased my own.

But my recollection of the study is especially bound up with his reading aloud. My father had very special ideas as to what should be read to me — ideas that were not shared by my mother; and I used often to hear them discuss what was the proper nourishment for a child’s mind. Similar discussions sometimes arose on the subject of obedience, my mother holding that a child should obey without trying to understand, my father always inclining to explain me everything. I remember very well that then my mother would compare the child I was to the people of Israel and declare that before living in grace it was good to have lived under the law. I think to-day that my mother was right; nevertheless, my attitude to her at that time was constantly marked by discussions and frequently by insubordination, while a single word from my father would have obtained anything he pleased from me. I think it was inclination rather than principle that kept him from holding up for my admiration or amusement anything he did not himself like and admire. French literature for children at that date was almost wholly inept, and I think he would have been pained to see some of the books that were put into my hands later on-Madame de Segur’s for instance, though I must confess that, like nearly all the children of my generation, I took a good deal of pleasure in them — foolish pleasure but fortunately not greater than the pleasure I had before taken in hearing my father read aloud to me certain scenes from Moliere, certain passages of the Odyssey,Pathelin’s Farce, the adventures of Sindbad or Ali Baba and some of the harlequinades of the Italian Comedy that are to be found in Maurice Sand’s Masques; in this book there were pictures for me to admire too of Harlequin, Columbine, Punchinello, and Pierrot, after I had listened to them discoursing in my father's voice.

The success of these readings was such and my father’s confidence in me so great, that one day he ventured on the first part of the Book of Job. This was an experiment at which my mother wished to be present; and so, it took place not in the library, like the other readings, but in a small drawing-room which was more particularly in my mother’s domain. I would not swear of course that I at once understood the full beauty of the sacred text! But the reading certainly made the deepest impression on me, not only because of the solemnity of the story, but because of the gravity of my father’s voice and my mother’s expression, as she sat with her eyes closed, in order alternatively to signify or to shield her pious absorption, and opened them only to cast a questioning glance on me, full of love and hope.

Sometimes on fine summer evenings, when we had not supped too late, and when my father was not too busy, he used to say:

‘Would my little friend like to come for a walk?’

He never called me anything but his ‘little friend’.

‘You’ll be sensible, won’t you?’ said my mother. ‘Don’t come in too late.’

I liked going out with my father; and as he rarely gave me any of his tune, the few things we did together had an unfamiliar, solemn, and rather mysterious air about them which delighted me.

Playing as we went at some game of rhymes or riddles, we would walk up the Rue de Tournon and then either cross the Luxembourg Gardens or follow tire part of the Boulevard St Germain that skirts them, until we reached the second garden near the Observatory. In those days the land that faces the School of Pharmacy had not yet been built over; the school itself in fact did not exist. Instead of the six-storied houses that stand there now, there were nothing but temporary wooden booths, stalls for the selling of old clothes, and sellers or hirers of second-hand velocipedes. The asphalt — or perhaps macadam — space which borders the second Luxembourg was used as a track by the devotees of this sport; they sat perched up aloft on those weird, paradoxical machines which were the ancestors of the bicycle, circled swiftly past us and disappeared into the darkness. We admired their boldness and their elegance. The framework and the minute back wheel on which the equilibrium of this aerial apparatus depended were scarcely visible. The slender front wheel swayed to and fro; the rider seemed some fantastic creature of a dream world.

As the night fell, it intensified the lights of a café-concert a little further on, whose music attracted us. We could not see the gas globes themselves, only the strangely illuminated horse-chestnut trees above the palisade. We drew near. The planks were not so well joined as to prevent one from getting a peep here and there between two of them, if one put ones eye close enough: I could just make out over the dark swarming mass of the audience, the wonderment of the stage, on which some music-hall star was warbling her absurdities.

Sometimes we still had time to walk back through the big Luxembourg Gardens. But a rub-a-dub of drums soon gave notice it was closing time. The last visitors reluctantly turned towards the exits, with the park-keepers close at their heels, and behind them, the broad garden walks, now left deserted, filled slowly up with mystery. On those evenings, I went to bed intoxicated with darkness, sleep, and strangeness.

When I was five years old, my parents sent me to some children’s classes held by Mademoiselle Fleur and Madame Lackerbauer.

Mademoiselle Fleur lived in the Rue de Seine. While the little ones, of whom I was one, were poring over their alphabets or copy-books, the elders — or rather the elder girls (for Mademoiselle Fleur’s classes were attended by a good many girls but only by little boys) — were in great excitement over some theatricals to which the children’s parents were to be invited. An act of Les Plaideurs was being rehearsed; I saw the girls trying on their false beards and envied them for being allowed to dress up; nothing, I thought, could be more delightful.

I can remember nothing at Madame Lackerbauer's but an old electric apparatus (a Ramsden machine) which made me desperately curious, with its glass disk, on to which were stuck little metal plaques, and a handle to make the disk go round; it was expressly forbidden to touch it ‘on pain of death’, as the notices on high-power transmission posts say. One day the mistress tried to make the machine work; we children stood round in a big circle very far off, because it was highly alarming; we expected to see the mistress struck dead; and she certainly trembled a little as she put the knuckle of her forefinger to the brass knob at the end of the apparatus. But not the smallest spark flashed from it... Oh I how relieved we were!

I was seven years old when my mother thought it necessary to supplement Mademoiselle Fleur’s and Madame Lackerbauer’s classes by Mademoiselle de Goecklin’s piano lessons. One could not help suspecting this innocent lady to be less devoted to the arts than in extreme need of earning her living. She was a slight, pale little creature and always looked on the point of fainting. I think she can never have had enough to eat.

When I was well-behaved, Mademoiselle de Goecklin used to present me with a picture which she drew out of a small muff. The picture in itself might have seemed ordinary enough and I might almost have turned up my nose at it; but it was scented — extraordinarily scented — in remembrance, no doubt, of the muff; I used hardly to give it a glance; I just sniffed it; then I stuck it into an album with other pictures, which the big shops used to give their customers’ children — but which were not scented. A little while ago, I opened the album to amuse a small nephew: Mademoiselle de Goecklin’s pictures are still perfumed; they have perfumed the whole album.

After I had done my scales, my arpeggios and a little solfege and drummed over again and again some piece out of The Young Pianist, I gave up my place to my mother, who sat herself down beside Mademoiselle de Goecklin. I think it was from modesty that mamma never played alone; but in duets she was magnificent! As a rule, it was a part of some Haydn symphony they played, preferably the finale which, so she thought, needed less expression because the time was so quick — and she hurried it more and more the nearer she came to the end. She counted aloud from one end of the piece to the other.

When I was a little older, Mademoiselle de Goecklin stopped coming to us; I used to go to her for my lessons, she lived in a tiny apartment with an elder sister, who was either an invalid or a little feeble-minded and had to be looked after. In the first room, which probably served as the dining room, there was a cage full of Bengali finches; in the second room stood the piano; some of the notes in the upper register were horribly out of tune, which considerably damped any preference I might have had for taking the treble in our duets. Mademoiselle de Goecklin had no difficulty in understanding my repugnance and she would say in a plaintive voice and a kind of abstracted manner, as if she were giving a discreet order to a spirit: ‘We must really send for the piano-tuner.’ But the spirit never did the errand.

My parents had taken to passing the summer holidays in Calvados at La Roque Baignard, a country place which had come into my mother’s possession at my grandmother Rondeaux’ death. The Christmas holidays we spent at Rouen with my mother’s relations, and the Easter ones at Uzes with my paternal grandmother.

Nothing could be more different than these two families, nothing more different than the two provinces of France which combine their contradictory influences in me. I have often thought that I was driven into the held of art by my consciousness that only in this way should I find it possible to reconcile these discordant elements which would otherwise have led to a state of perpetual warfare or at any rate antagonism. No doubt, the only natures capable of asserting themselves powerfully are those having behind them one undeviating urge of heredity. On the other hand, arbiters and artists are, I imagine, produced when crossbreeding encourages the simultaneous growth and consequent neutralization of opposing elements. I am very much mistaken if examples could not be found to bear me out.

But the law which I here adumbrate has hitherto, it would seem, occupied historians so little that not a single one of the biographies I have consulted at Cuverville, where I am writing this, not a single dictionary, not even the enormous Biographie Universelle in fifty-two volumes, not one of them, I say, look where I may, so much as mentions the maternal origins of a single great man or single hero. Someday, I shall return to this subject.

My great-grandfather, Rondeaux de Montbray, counsellor, like his father before him, at the Cour des Comptes (his fine town house still stood in the Place Notre-Dame opposite the cathedral), was Mayor of Rouen in 1789. In ’93, he was thrown into prison at Saint-Yon with Monsieur d’Herbouville, and Monsieur de Fontenay, who was considered more advanced, succeeded him in his post. On leaving prison, he retired to Louviers. It was there, I think, that he married for the second time.1 He had had two children by a previous marriage; and up until that, time the Rondeaux family had been wholly Catholic; but Rondeaux de Mont-bray´s second wife was a Protestant, Mademoiselle Dufour, who bore him three more children, of whom Edouard, my grandfather, was one. These children were baptized and brought up in the Catholic faith. But my grandfather, too, married a Protestant — Julie Pouchet, and this time the five children, of whom my mother was the youngest, were brought up as Protestants.

At the time of my story, nevertheless, that is to say at the extreme limit of my memories, my grandparents’ house had reverted to Catholicism and had become indeed more Catholic and bien pensant than it had ever been before. My uncle Henri Rondeaux who, after my grandmother’s death, lived in it with his wife and two children, had been converted when he was still very young and long before he had thought of marrying the very Catholic Mademoiselle Lucile K.

The Rouen house was at the corner of the Rue-de Crosne and the Rue de Fontenelle. Its carriage entrance gave on to the latter street and most of its windows on to the’ former. I thought it enormous — and so indeed it was. Downstairs, as well as the porter's lodge, die kitchen, the stables, and the coach-house, there was a warehouse for the Rouen cries or printed linens, which my uncle manufactured in his factory at Le Houlme, a few kilometers outside Rouen. Next to the warehouse, there was also a little office into which we children were forbidden to go, and which, for that matter, was forbidding enough of itself, with its smell of stale tobacco and gloomy, cheerless aspect. But, on the other hand, how delightful the house was! Even as one stepped over the threshold, the deep-soft-toned bell seemed to be giving one a welcome. To the left, under the arched entrance way and three steps up, was the porter’s lodge, from which the porter’s wife smiled down at one through her glass door. Opposite lay the courtyard, where all sorts of decorative green plants, ranged in pots against the further wall, were enjoying the air for a little before going back to the greenhouse at Le Houlme, out of which they had been taken and to which they would shortly be sent back for their health’s sake — meanwhile taking it in turns to have a little rest here, after their service indoors. And indoors! Oh, how warm, how soothing, how discreet it all felt! A little severe perhaps, but so comfortable, so dignified and pleasant! The well of the staircase was lighted below by the arched entrance way, and at the top of the house by a glass roof. On every landing, there were long benches, covered with green velvet, where it was delightful to lie on one’s stomach and read. But one was still more comfortable between the second and last floors, sitting on the steps themselves, which were laid with a black and white speckled carpet, bordered with wide strips of red. The light that fell from the glass roof was soft and peaceful. I sat on one step and leant my elbow on the one above, which also served as a reading desk, as it slowly dug into my ribs.

I mean to write down my recollections just as they come, without trying to arrange them in any order. The most I can do is to group them round places and persons; my memory seldom goes wrong about places but often confuses dates. I am lost if I attempt to take count of chronology. When I think over the past, I am like a person whose eyes cannot properly measure distances and is liable to think things extremely remote which on examination prove to be quite nearby. This is how for a long time I was convinced I remembered the entry of the Prussians into Rouen.

It was night time. A military brass band was playing; one could see it from the Rue de Crosne balcony as it marched past; and the walls of the houses were whipped into astonished life by the flickering lights of resinous torches.

My mother to whom I spoke of this in later years convinced me that, first of all, I was much too young to have any recollection whatever of that time, and secondly, that no inhabitant of Rouen, or at any rate no member of my family, would ever have gone on to the balcony to look out, even if Bismarck or the King of Prussia himself had ridden by, so that if the Germans had got up a procession, it would have passed through streets of closed shutters. What I remembered must certainly have been the military torchlight processions which used to go up and down the Rue de Crosne every Saturday evening, long after the Germans had left the town.

‘That was what we used to show you. And, do you remember, we used to sing:

Hey diddle day! Hey diddle day!

See the fine soldiers marching away!’

And suddenly the song came back to me as well. Everything returned to its proper place and proportions. But I felt as if I had been a little defrauded; it seemed to me I had been nearer the truth in the first instance and that what my youthful senses had invested with such importance deserved to be a historical event. Hence, the unconscious necessity I had felt of making it unduly remote, so that it might be magnified by distance.

It was the same with the ball at the Rue de Crosne, which my memory obstinately placed in my grandmother’s lifetime; but as she died in 1873, when I was not yet four years old, I must have been thinking of the party which my uncle and aunt Henri gave three years later, on the occasion of their daughter’s coming of age.

I had gone to bed, but was prevented from sleeping by strange rumors — a thrill of agitation that ran through the house from top to bottom, accompanied by waves of harmonious sound. No doubt, I had noticed some preparations during the day. No doubt, I had been told there was to be a ball that evening. But, could I have any idea what a ball was? I had not given the matter a thought and had gone to bed as usual. But, now came these strange rumors ... I listened, trying to catch some sound that would be more distinct, trying to understand what was happening. I strained my ears with all my might and main. Finally, unable to resist any longer, I got up and groped my way out of the room along the dark passage, till I reached the lighted staircase. My room was on the third floor. The waves of sound rose from the first; I felt I must go and see; and as I got nearer, creeping downstairs step by step, I began to distinguish the sounds of voices, the rustling of dresses, whispering and laughter. Nothing wore its usual look; I felt as if I was going to be suddenly initiated into another life — a mysterious, differently real, more brilliant, more exciting life, which began only after little boys had gone to bed. The passages on the second floor were deserted; the party was downstairs. Should I go on? I should be caught if I did. I should certainly be punished for not going to sleep, for having ventured to look. I slipped my head between the iron bars of the banisters to take a peep.

At that very moment some of the guests were arriving — an officer in uniform, a lady all in ribbons and silk; she was holding a fan in her hand; the man-servant — my friend Victor — whom I did not recognize at first because of his knee-breeches and white stockings, was standing by the open door of the drawing-room and announcing the guests. All of a sudden, someone pounced down on me — it was my nurse Marie, who was trying to peep like me and had ensconced herself a little lower down, at the first turn of the stairs. She seized me in her arms and I thought at first, she was going to carry me back to my room and shut me up; but no, on the contrary, she took me down to the place where she had been watching and from which it was just possible to catch a tiny whiff of the festivities below. I heard the music perfectly now. I saw the gentlemen whirling round to the sound of invisible instruments, with beautifully dressed ladies, who were all far more lovely than in the daytime. Then the music ceased; the dancers stopped; and there was a noise of voices instead of the sound of instruments. My nurse was on the point of taking me back to bed, when just at that moment one of the lovely ladies who was standing leaning by the door and fanning herself caught sight of me. She came up to where I was and kissed me, laughing because I did not recognize her. She was evidently the friend I had seen that morning calling on my mother; but all the same, I was not really and truly sure of it. When I got back to my bed, my brain was in a turmoil, and before sinking into sleep, I thought in a confused way — there is reality and there are dreams; and there is another reality as well.

The vague, ill-defined belief that something else exists alongside the acknowledged, above-board reality of everyday life, inhabited me for many years; and I am not sure that even to-day I have not still some remnants of it left. It had nothing in common with tales of fairies, ghouls, or witches, nor even with Hoffman’s or Hans Andersen’s stories. No, I think it was more a kind of unskillful desire to give life more thickness — a desire that later on religion was better able to satisfy; and also, a sort of propensity to imagine a clandestine side to things. After my father’s death, for instance, big boy as I was, I took it into my head that he was not really dead, or at any rate — how can I put this kind of apprehension? -that he was only dead to our visible, diurnal life, but that at night he used to come secretly while I was asleep and visit my mother. In the daytime, my suspicions wavered, but at night, just before going to sleep, I felt them grow more vivid and more certain. I did not try to unravel the mystery; I felt I should put an abrupt stop to anything I might try to discover; no doubt, I was still too young, thought I, and then my mother was too much in the habit of saying about too many things, ‘You will understand it when you are older’ — but on certain nights, as I dropped off to sleep, I really had the feeling that I was making way — giving up my place.

I must return to the Rue de Crosne. I can see the schoolroom on the second floor at the end of a passage into which the bedrooms open; it is more comfortable, cozier than the big drawing-rooms downstairs, so that my mother prefers sitting here and keeping me with her. A big cupboard, which serves as a bookcase, takes up the end wall. The two windows look on to the courtyard; one of them is double and in between the two frames are pots and saucers in which there are flowering bulbs — crocuses, hyacinths, 'Duke of Tholl’ tulips. On either side of the fireplace are two large tapestry armchairs, worked by my mother and aunts. My mother is seated in one of them. Miss Shackleton, on a mahogany chair covered with crimson rep, is sitting at the table, busied with her filet embroidery. The little square of filet she is adorning — a spider’s web over which her needle runs industriously to and fro — is stretched on a metal frame; Miss Shackleton sometimes consults a pattern, on which the design is traced in white on a blue ground. My mother looks at the window and says:

‘The crocuses are out; we shall soon be having fine weather.’

Miss Shackleton corrects her gently:

‘Oh, Juliette, how like you I It is because the weather is fine already that the crocuses have come out. Surely you know they don’t start it.’

Anna Shackleton! I recall your calm face and pure brow, the slight severity of your mouth, your smiling eyes that showered such loving-kindness on my childhood. I wish I could invent fresh words in which to speak of you — more moving, more respectful, tenderer words. Shall I someday tell the story of your modest life? I should like your humility to shine as resplendently in my story as it will shine before God on the day the mighty are cast down and the lowly magnified. It is not the great and glorious of this world that I have ever felt inclined to portray — no, but those whose truer glory is hidden from sight.

I cannot say what reverses of fortune had brought the Shackleton children out of the depths of Scotland and cast them on the Continent. Pastor Roberty, who himself married a Scotswoman, was, I believe, acquainted with the family and it was no doubt he who recommended the eldest daughter to my grandmother. Needless to say, I only learnt all that follows much later, either from my mother herself or from my elder cousins.

It was really as my mother’s governess that Miss Shackleton entered our family. My mother was then nearly old enough to be married and many a one thought that the presence of Anna Shackleton — young herself and moreover extremely pretty — might not be very advantageous for her pupil. Young Juliette Rondeaux, it must be confessed, was not a very easy person to manage. Not only did she constantly retire into the background and efface herself when she ought to have been cutting a figure, but she never lost an opportunity of pushing forward Anna, to whom she had almost immediately become devotedly attached. Juliette could not endure to be better dressed than her friend; she considered everything that drew attention to her position or her fortune shocking, and a continual battle was waged between her on one side, and her mother and elder sister Claire, on the other, about questions of precedence.

My grandmother was assuredly not a hard-hearted woman; but though not exactly over-proud of her position, she had a very lively sense of social hierarchies. Her daughter Claire had this same sense (she had indeed very little other) but not her mother’s kindness of heart. She was irritated to find her sister was without it, and to be met instead by a temper, which, if not actually rebellious, was at any rate far from submissive — a temper which was probably not natural to Juliette, but which had apparently been fostered by her friendship for Anna. Claire found it difficult to forgive Anna her sister’s friendship; she considered that friendship comports degrees and shades and that it was not proper Miss Shackleton should forget she was a governess.

‘What!’ thought my mother ‘am I handsomer? or more intelligent, or better? Is my fortune or my name any reason I should be preferred?’

‘Juliette,’ Anna would say, ‘you must give me a tea-colored silk gown for your wedding-day, and I shall be t completely happy.’

For a long time, Juliette Rondeaux had disdained the most brilliant matches in Rouen, when one day people were surprised to hear she had accepted a penniless young professor of law, from the depths of Provence, who would never have dared to ask her hand if good Pastor Roberty, by whom he had been introduced into my mother’s family, and who knew her views, had not encouraged him to do so. When, six years later, I made my appearance, Anna Shackleton adopted me as she had adopted one after the other, my big cousins. As neither beauty, nor grace, nor kindness, nor cleverness, nor virtue can compensate for lack of money, it was never Anna’s lot to know anything of earthly love but a pale reflection, nor to have any other family but the one my relations provided her with.

My memory of her recalls a face with features already a little hardened by age and a slightly severe mouth; her eyes alone had kept their smiles — a smile that at any trifle was ready to break out into laughter so fresh and pure that it seemed as though neither sorrows nor disappointments had been able to lessen the extreme amusement it is natural for a human being to take in life. My father too had the same laugh and sometimes Miss Shackleton and he went off into fits of childish merriment, in which I cannot remember my mother’s ever joining.

Anna (with the exception of my father, who always said Mademoiselle Anna, we all called her by her Christian name, and I used even to say ‘Nana’ — a childish habit I only gave up when a book by Zola came out with this name for title) -Anna Shackleton wore a kind of indoors cap, made of black lace, with two lappets that fell on each side of her face and framed it rather oddly. I do not know when she took to this headdress, but I cannot remember her without it, and she is wearing it in one or two photographs I have of her. Though the expression of her face, her bearing, and whole way of life were so tranquil and harmonious, Anna was never idle; she kept her interminable embroidery for the time she spent in company and devoted her long hours of solitude to translation; for she read English and German as well as French, and knew Italian very tolerably.

I have kept some of these translations, which were never printed; they are written in her fine regular handwriting and fill several stout copybooks to the last line. All the works she translated in this way have since appeared in other translations — better perhaps; and yet I cannot bring myself to throw away these copybooks, which tell such a tale of patience, love, and probity. The one among them I am especially fond of is Goethe’s Reineke Fuchs, of which Anna used often to read me passages. After she had finished this work my cousin, Maurice Demarest, gave her a present of a set of little plaster heads of all the animals mentioned in the old fabliau; Anna had hung them all round the frame of the glass over the mantelpiece in her room, and they were a constant delight to me.

Anna drew too and painted. She made some sketches of La Roque, conscientious, harmonious, modest sketches, which still hang in my wife’s room at Guverville; and another of La Mivoie, a place which belonged to my grandmother on the right bank of the Seine above Rouen. (It was sold shortly after her death and I should scarcely remember it except for the fact that every time I go to Normandy I can see it from the train near Saint-Adrien’s hill, and above the church of Bon-Secours, a few moments before one crosses the bridge.) In Anna’s watercolor, it still has the graceful balustrade and the Louis XVI facade, which its new owners promptly ruined by adding to it a massive pediment.

But Anna’s principal occupation, her dearest study, was botany. In Paris, she assiduously attended Monsieur Bureau s lectures at the Natural History Museum, and in the spring, she used to join the botanizing excursions organized by Monsieur Poisson, his assistant. I make a point of not forgetting these names which Anna referred to with such veneration, and which wore the halo of a great prestige in my eyes. My mother thought this would be an opportunity of getting me to take a little exercise, and allowed me to join these Sunday excursions, which gave me the romantic feeling of a scientific voyage of discovery. The band of botanists was composed almost entirely of old maids and harmless monomaniacs. We used to meet at some station and take the train together; we all wore, slung over our shoulders, a tin box painted green, in which to put the plants we proposed to study or dry. Some of us had pruning scissors as well, and some, butterfly nets. I was among the latter, for I was not interested in flowers at that time so much as in insects and especially in beetles, of which I was beginning a collection; and my pockets were stuffed with boxes and glass bottles in which I poisoned my victims by means of benzene fumes or potassium cyanide. At the same time, I hunted for plants as well: nimbler than the elderly explorers, I ran on ahead, left the beaten track to ransack the copses and fields, and trumpeted my discoveries, bursting with pride when I was the first to catch sight of a rare species; the other members of our little troop came up to admire it afterwards — rather vexed, some of them, when the specimen was unique, while I took my prize off in triumph to Anna.

In imitation of Anna and with her help, I made an herbarium; but I more especially helped her to complete hers, which was very large and remarkably well arranged. Not only had she succeeded by dint of patience in getting the nest examples of each variety, but they were marvelously Set up; thin strips of gummed paper were used to keep the most delicate little stalks in place; the build and carriage of the plant were carefully respected; the bud, the full-blown flower and the seed were all shown together, and the names underneath were written in copper-plate. Sometimes the designation of a doubtful variety necessitated the most careful and minute investigations. Anne bent over her microscope, armed herself with pincers and tiny scalpels, opened the flower delicately, spread its organs under the objective glass and showed me some peculiarity of the stamens or what not, which her Flora had not mentioned and which Monsieur Bureau had pointed out.

It was especially at La Roque, where Anna came with us every summer that her botanizing activities reached their height and the herbarium grew fat. She and I never went out without our green boxes (for I had mine too) and a kind of special trowel which enabled us to dig up the plant without injuring its root. Sometimes we watched one particular plant day after day; we waited for the flower to come to perfection and were in real despair when on the last day we found perhaps that it had been half eaten by caterpillars, or maybe a sudden storm kept us in.

At La Roque, the herbarium reigned supreme; everything connected with it was performed with the zeal and gravity pertaining to a rite. On fine days, the leaves of grey paper, between which the plants were to be dried, were spread out on all the window-sills and on the sunny parts of tables and floors. Some of them — those that were slender or fibrous -required only a few leaves of paper; but there were others -fleshy ones, juicy with sap — which had to be pressed between thick mattresses of very dry, spongy paper that had to be changed every day. All this took a considerable amount of time and needed much more room than Anna was able to find in Paris.

She lived in the Rue de Vaugirard, between the Rue Madame and the Rue d’Assas, in a little flat of four poky rooms that were so low you could almost touch the ceiling with your hand. The apartment, however, was not badly situated, opposite the garden or courtyard of some scientific institution, which gave us an opportunity of witnessing the first trials of those strange affairs — solar boilers. They were like enormous flowers, with a corolla made of mirrors; the pistil, at the point where the rays of light converged, contained the water which had to be brought to the boil. No doubt the attempt was successful, for one fine day, one of the boilers burst, terrifying the whole neighborhood, and breaking the window-panes in Anna’s drawing-room and bedroom, which both looked on to the street. The dining room and a study where Anna usually sat, looked on to a courtyard; it was here that she preferred to receive the few intimate friends who came to see her; and I should no doubt have forgotten the drawing-room, if it had not been that a little folding bed had been put up for me there, when once, to my great joy, my mother had entrusted me for a few days to her friend’s care, for some reason or other which I cannot remember.

When I began going to the Ecole Alsacienne, my parents having, I suppose, come to the conclusion that the education I was getting with Mademoiselle Fleur and Madame Lackerbauer was no longer adequate, it was settled I should have lunch with Anna once a week. It was on Thursdays, I remember, after the gymnastic lesson. The Ecole Alsacienne was not then as flourishing as it afterwards became and had no special room for physical drill, so that its pupils used to be sent to Pascaud’s Gymnasium, a few doors from Anna’s, in the Rue de Vaugirard. I used to arrive at her rooms still dripping with perspiration, and all in disorder, my clothes full of sawdust and my hands sticky with rosin. What was there so charming about those luncheons? Chiefly, I think, Anna’s untiring attention to all my most foolish chatter, the feeling that I was important in her eyes, that I was awaited, considered, made much of. It was for my sake the room filled with welcome and smiles and the lunch was especially good. How I wish that in return I could remember one gracious act, one look or word of childish affection ... But no; the only thing I can recall is an absurd sentence, worthy of the dense boy I then was; I blush to repeat it — but this is no romance I am writing and I have determined not to flatter myself in these memoirs, either by adding anything agreeable or hiding anything painful.

As I was eating that morning with an excellent appetite and it was clear that Anna, with her small means, had done her best:

‘Oh, Nana!’ I cried, ‘I shall eat you out of house and home!’ (the words are still ringing in my ears) ... At any rate, I had no sooner pronounced them, than I felt that no one of any delicacy of heart could have said such a thing, that Anna was hurt by them, that I had a little wounded her. This was, I think, one of the first flashes of my conscience — a fugitive gleam, too fitful and too feeble as yet to pierce the thick darkness that still wrapped my tardy childhood.

2

I can imagine my mother’s bewilderment when for the first time she left her comfortable surroundings in the Rue de Crosne to accompany my father to Uzes. The progress of the age seemed to have passed by this little Provencal town, situated off the beaten track and unaware of the surrounding world. The railway went only as far as Nimes, or at most to Remoulins; and from there one had to finish the journey in a crazy shandrydan. It was considerably longer to go by Nimes, but the road was much more beautiful. It crossed the Gardon by Saint Nicholas’s bridge and then one entered Palestine and Judaea. The rough glen or garrigue smelt sweet of lavender and was bright with tufts of white and purple cistus. A dry, exhilarating air blew overhead, which cleared the road but covered everything round with dust. Our carriage often started numbers of enormous grasshoppers, which spread their blue, red, or grey membranes and shot up into the air, gay butterflies for a single moment, but falling down the next with their brightness dulled, and indistinguishable from the stones and scrub amongst which they lay.

Asphodels grew on the banks of the Gardon; and in the river-bed itself, which was almost everywhere dry the flora was quasi-tropical ... Here, I leave the shandrydan for a moment; there are memories I must snatch in passing or I shall not know where else to place them. As I have already said, I fit less easily into time than into space; for instance, I cannot say what year it was that Anna came to visit us at Uzes, which my mother no doubt was anxious to show her; but what I do remember very clearly is the excursion we made with her one day from Saint Nicholas’s bridge to some village not far from the Gardon, where the carriage was to pick us up.

In the narrow parts of the valley, at the foot of the cliffs burning with the reverberated heat of the sun, the vegetation was so luxuriant it was difficult to make one's way through it. Anna was in ecstasies at the many plants that were unknown to her, and kept recognizing one or another she had never before seen growing wild — I was going to say ‘at liberty’ — as, for instance, those triumphant daturas, sometimes called ‘trumpets of Jericho', which, with the oleanders, have remained so deeply engraved on my memory for their splendor and strangeness. We advanced cautiously on account of snakes, and saw several, though mostly harmless ones, which glided out of our way. My father, who found something to amuse him at every turn, was inclined to loiter and linger. My mother, aware of the lateness of the hour, tried in vain to hurry us on. The evening was already closing in when we came out from between the high banks of the river. The village was still a long way off and the angelic sound of its bells reached us only faintly; the road that led to it was nothing but an ill-defined path, wavering uncertainly through the brushwood...

The reader will suspect perhaps that I am adding all this after the event; but no; the sound of the angelus is still in my ears; I can see the delightful path, the rosy sunset and the darkness marching up behind us from the bed of the Gardon. At first, I was amused by the long shadows we cast; then everything vanished in the grey of twilight and I felt my mother’s anxiety growing upon me too. But my father and Anna, intent on the beauty of the hour, still dawdled, regardless of time. I remember they were repeating poetry; my mother thought ‘it was not the moment’ and cried:

‘Paul, you can say that when we get in.’

In my grandmother’s apartment, all the rooms communicated, so that in order to get to their bedroom, my parents had to go through the dining-room, the drawing-room, and another smaller drawing-room, where a bed for me was put up. If you finished the round, you came to a little dressing room and then to my grandmother’s room, which could be reached from the other end as well, by passing through my uncle’s room. This latter opened again on to the landing, as also did the kitchen and the dining-room. The windows of the two drawing-rooms and my parents’ room looked on to the esplanade; the others opened on to a narrow courtyard, round which the apartment was built; my uncle’s room alone overlooked a dark alley, at the further end of which could be seen a comer of the market place. My uncle cultivated strange objects on his window-sill; he had a collection of mysterious glass jars and in these were stuck a number of rigid stems round which crystallized what he explained were salts of zinc, copper, and other metals: he told me that according to the name of the metal, these implacable growths were called trees of Saturn, Jupiter, etc.

My uncle had not then begun to take an interest in political economy; I heard later that his real hobby at that time was astronomy, to which study he was drawn by his taste for figures, a habit of taciturn contemplation, and that denial of individuality and psychology of any kind, which eventually turned him into a being with less knowledge of himself and other people than anyone I had ever known. He was then a tall young man, with long strands of black hair plastered back behind his ears, rather short-sighted, rather queer, chary of words, and incredibly alarming. He was greatly irritated by my mother’s constant attempts to thaw him; though full of good intentions, she was not very adroit, and my uncle, unable or unwilling to take the will for the deed, was even then beginning to be impervious to the blandishments of anyone who was not a humbug. It seemed as if my father had absorbed all the family stock of amiability and that none was left to moderate the crabbed humors of its other members.