Sisters. Brigitte Lozerec'h

Alice with my eyes; she was a girl in my class who wore her hair in long braids wrapped around her head like a fairytale princess or a saint, and I always managed to sit beside her in chapel. In the silence and cold of the stones, nothing escaped my senses during the daily service. We were supposed to read the sacred texts with visible enthusiasm, but were still half-asleep. Still, I recited each word of love composing the hymns intended for God, the Holy Trinity, or the Virgin Mary with a heart so full of joy that I thought it might crack. I thought I’d die every time, and I imagined with delight how much attention I’d get as they tried to bring me back to life. Alice would be leaning over me then, and in the moment I opened my eyes, I’d be able to see how upset she was. That would be bliss. Without Alice I wouldn’t have been so ardent in chapel. Religion, garnished as it is, most plentifully, with words otherwise intended for secular love—so delicious to say or just to hold in your mouth—filled the vast emptiness into which I’d sunk when I’d arrived. It was my guilty pleasure to contemplate Alice’s profile, like some holy image. What was it she radiated that was able to inspire in me a sort of inexpressible hope? The line of her high forehead, her slender nose, her mouth, her well-formed chin, and her crown of braided hair made my pulse erratic. These surges felt both so good and yet so painful that I could sense that I was in a state of sin without knowing why.

      Now I wonder if having to get up at six o’clock in a building with no heat and being made immediately to wash ourselves quickly in cold water—by dampening our ardent desire to just let things go, be comfortable, not to mention all sorts of other lascivious temptations—didn’t have the opposite effect from the one intended, in the long run . . . In the end, convents often return girls to their families entirely depraved. All their frustrations during the years they were pent up have fed their desire for luxury, for wild extravagance, and those pleasures of the flesh. Some women try to realize these dreams when they’re returned to a worldly life, while others remain immured in themselves, as obsessed as the nuns who brought them up. The marriage of my mother to wild Frank Lewly stands as an example of the first scenario, and my life among bohemian artists as another instance of the same. I hope it doesn’t take an entire lifetime to expurgate one’s soul of the perversions with which it’s been impregnated during one’s youth. How many times, as an adult, in the midst of delirious ecstasy, have I had visions of Frédéric and myself locked in an embrace on the tiled floor between the font and the confessional of a chapel lit by stained-glass windows . . . I’ve tried and tried each time this happened to get rid of the image, because I still have the notion that some things are sacred, but back it comes, against my will, as if I still needed the place that had first inspired my secret passions in order to reach the heights of pleasure as an adult.

      When finally I ended up dissolving into the mentality of that establishment, it was the workings of the outside world that came to alarm me. I would have liked to stay shut up inside, hidden beneath the veil, and when I was twelve I thought I’d made the mother superior like me when I confided to her that I wanted to become a nun when I was older. “Continue to pray, my child, and we’ll talk about it later,” she said, looking me in the eye with her hand on my shoulder. It was almost pleasant. I was moved for a moment. I felt I really existed.

      Deep inside me, however, there was something else, welling up as though determined to humiliate me. I could feel it coming, and, with all my might, refused to accept it.

6

      If I’d known when I was young that it was because my father had died bankrupt that our house in Twickenham had been sold just before our return to France, I’d have been even more miserable among those wealthy heiresses being brought up with the sole purpose of making good marriages and prolonging a respectable lineage. I did indeed feel that the death of my father had caused a great disruption, but I certainly didn’t want to listen to my intuition, especially if I might discover that my fears were well-founded. I would then have lost him for a second time. Still, a little voice inside kept whispering that, despite the fine lifestyle I’d experienced, despite the loving atmosphere at Swann House, I was worth nothing. Occasionally, I’d have bad dreams in which I saw myself barefoot, begging for a living. Clearing my mind of those images took a long time; they felt like a premonition. Though I wouldn’t have known how to put it in words, my entire being was permeated with my mother’s shame. Ruined after paying off all the debts by selling our home in Twickenham, she was forced to move back to Grandmother’s—this time with a baby in her arms and two other children in tow. She had barely any income at all, as I found out later. Though she’d been affectionate and free at Twickenham, now at the house on rue Moncey she had to stifle all rebellious instincts and, too weary to argue, consent to her mother’s strict requirements; for one, she hadn’t been able to prevent William and I from being sent to boarding school. I sensed something broken deep inside her, something collapsing with each hour of distance between England and us, as if her life were ebbing away. The day must have come when she’d had to renounce some essential part of herself and I realized that we were losing her.

      She herself had been sent away to Sacré-Coeur after the death of her father, and she still had bad memories of being shut up inside the convent. There were always two or three less wealthy and less well-born little girls who were tolerated there “out of Christian charity”—as we were rather disdainfully reminded. Was it out of revenge that my mother, at the age of twenty, had married a very rich thirty-year-old man who loved parties, horses, and gambling?

      Luckily for William, he was blossoming at the Lycée Lakanal. Whereas I was moping, he was playing sports and bridge and chess and studying the arts and mathematics, all with equal verve and with fascinating teachers. He formed strong friendships in this brand new institution with its revolutionary methods of education built on furthering the boys’ development with lots of outdoor exercise. And, above all, something it took me years to understand, he had escaped the exclusively feminine milieu of our family. An unspeakable distance gradually grew up between us—a loss I suffered like a mutilation.

      Imprisoned as I was, I could feel memories floating back to me of the first weeks we’d spent in Paris before going out to Grandmother’s property along the Seine, near Meulan, for the summer. Every night when I was trying to go to sleep, these images would emerge one after another to fill my heart; day by day I was growing more aware that they marked the real end of our childhood. I didn’t know that, in consequence, I was cultivating an incurable nostalgia for the days when our house held only two children and two parents.

      Scarcely had we deposited our trunks at the rue Moncey in April 1895 than our mother had established a new ritual—one that lasted until June. The moment we’d swallowed our midday meal she would exclaim: “Get ready, children, we’re going to citify!” and then, in a fiacre she’d engaged, we’d take off—my mother, my brother, and I, leaving the baby with her nurse for the afternoon. It was as if we were prolonging the adventure we’d begun at the station in London, after which we discovered the docks of Southampton and the train station at le Havre. I liked that expression: citifying. I didn’t know she’d made the word up; I still and will always use it to describe aimlessly strolling around the city, whether on foot or in an automobile. Much later I understood that it was a form of escapism for Jeanne Lewly and her twins, all three of them concealing their mourning deep inside a horse-drawn carriage. Our mother kept us as long as possible in a world of illusion, prolonging the complicity that had bound us so tightly together up to that time. Was she hoping to impress upon our memories forever those hours stolen from the rules of our new existence? We drove around Paris a lot that spring.

      North, south, to the Champs-Elysées or the Faubourg Saint-Antoine we drove, staring open-eyed at the city. They were carefree hours when we would speak our father’s language and sing the songs we’d always sung; we also listened to our mother as she told us the names of monuments, streets, and parks, which, compared to the great gardens of London, seemed so meager. We weren’t old enough yet to appreciate the architecture and situate it in its proper period and culture. Notre-Dame didn’t seem as impressive to us as West-minster Abbey. It sat there on its island like a stone sphinx pricking up its ears and surrounded by the river flowing past in its narrow, fortified bed. What were we to make of the pathetic yet charming Seine with its elegant bridges when our eyes were accustomed to the