Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

question the values and the tenets of those around me.
    The two major categories into which my universe was divided were Good and Evil. I inhabited the region of the good, where happiness and virtue reigned in indissoluble unity. I experienced certain forms of pain, it is true, that seemed to me unmerited: I sometimes bumped my head or grazed my elbow; an outbreak of eczema disfigured my face: a doctor cauterized my pimples with silver nitrate and I yelled. But these accidents were quickly forgotten, and they did not upset my belief that man experiences joy or pain according to his merits.
    Living in such intimate contact with virtue, I knew that there were degrees and shades of goodness. I was a good little girl, and I had my faults; my Aunt Alice was always praying; she would surely go to heaven, and yet she had been very unjust to me. Among the people to whom I owed love and respect, there were some whom my parents censured for some reason or other. Evengrandpapa and grandmama did not escape their criticism: they had fallen out with some cousins whom Mama often visited and whom I found very nice. I disliked the very word ‘quarrel’: why did people quarrel? and how? The word ‘wrangle’, too, unpleasantly reminded me of tangled hanks of wool. Wrangling and quarrelling seemed to me most regrettable activities. I always took my mother’s side. ‘Whom did you go to see yesterday?’ my Aunt Lili would ask me. ‘I shan’t tell you: Mama told me not to.’ She would then exchange a significant look with her mother. They sometimes made disagreeable remarks like: ‘Your Mama’s always going somewhere, isn’t she?’ Their spiteful tone discredited them in my eyes, and in no way lowered Mama in my own estimation. But these remarks did not alter my affection for them. I found it natural, and in a sense satisfactory that these secondary characters should be less irreproachable than those supreme divinities – Louise and my parents – who alone could be infallible.
    A sword of fire separated good from evil: I had never seen them face to face. Sometimes my parents’ voices took on a rancorous note: judging by their indignation and anger, I realized that even in their own most intimate circle there were some really black sheep: I didn’t know who these were, or what their crimes might be. Evil kept a respectful distance. I could imagine its agents only as mythical figures like the Devil, the wicked fairy Carabosse and the Ugly Sisters: not having encountered them in the flesh, I reduced them to pure essences; Evil did wrong, just as fire bums, inexcusably and inevitably; hell was its natural habitat, and endless torment its proper fate; it would have seemed sacrilegious to feel pity for its pain. Indeed, the red-hot iron boots which the Seven Dwarfs made Snow-White’s stepmother wear and the flames burning Lucifer in hell never evoked in my mind the image of physical suffering. Ogres, witches, demons, stepmothers, and torturers – all these inhuman creatures symbolized an abstract power and their well-deserved defeat was illustrated by sufferings that were only abstractions.
    When I left for Lyon with Louise and my sister, I cherished the fond hope that I should meet the Evil One face to face. We had been invited to stay by distant cousins who lived in a house set in a large park on the outskirts of the town. Mama had warned me that the Sirmione children had lost their mother, that they were not always very well-behaved, and that they didn’t always say theirprayers: I was not to be put out if they laughed at me when I said mine. I was given to understand that their father, an elderly professor of medicine, didn’t believe in God. I saw myself draped in the white robes of Saint Blandine before she was thrown to the lions: I was sadly disappointed, for no one tried to martyr me. Whenever Uncle Sirmione left the house, he would mumble in his beard: ‘