Read Online Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir - Free Book Online

esteemed by the bourgeoisie he found frankly boring. Thanks to a very good memory, he passed his examinations, but his student years were devoted mainly to pleasure: theatres, races, cafés, and parties. He cared so little for the common run of success that once he had passed his, qualifying examinations he didn’t bother to present a thesis but registered himself in the Court of Appeal and took a post as secretary to a well-established lawyer. He was contemptuous of successes which are obtained at the expense of hard work and effort: according to him, if you were ‘born’ to be someone, you automatically possessed all the essential qualities – wit, talent, charm, and good breeding. The trouble was that in the ranks of that high society to which he laid claim for admittance, he found he was a nobody; the ‘de’ in de Beauvoir showed he had a handle to his name, but the name was an obscure one, and did not automatically open for him the doors of the best clubs and the most aristocratic salons; and he hadn’t the means to live like a lord. He attached little importance to the positions that were open to him in the bourgeois world – the distinguished lawyer, the father of a family, the respected citizen. He set out in life with empty hands, and despised the advantages he acquired. There was only one solution left to him: to become an actor.
    But an actor needs an audience: my father did not care for country life or solitude; he was only happy when he was in society. He found his profession amusing only in so far as it gave him opportunities as an actor. When he was a young man he took great care with his appearance and became quite a dandy. Havingpractised since childhood the art of pleasing others, he soon gained a reputation for being a brilliant talker and a great charmer. But these successes did not satisfy him; they raised him only to the lower ranks in those fashionable drawing-rooms where wealth and noble ancestry counted above all else. In order to challenge the fixed hierarchies of aristocratic society, he would have to make himself a place that was outside the accepted categories. Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction; but though my father was an avid reader he knew that writing requires those tedious virtues, patience and application, that it is a solitary occupation with a public that exists only in the writer’s imagination. On the other hand the theatre brought a ready-made solution to his problems. The actor is spared the horrors of creation: he is offered on a plate an imaginary universe in which a special place has been created for him; he occupies that place in the flesh, before an audience of flesh and blood. Reduced to the role of a mirror, the audience faithfully reflects his image; on the stage he is king and he really exists, he really feels himself to be a king. My father took a special delight in making-up; he could escape from himself by putting on a wig and a false moustache. In this way he could avoid identification; he was neither a nobleman nor a commoner: this indeterminacy lent itself to every kind of impersonation; having fundamentally ceased to be himself, he could become anyone he liked, and could outshine them all.
    He never dreamed of flouting the conventions of his social group and becoming a professional actor. He devoted himself to the stage because he could not resign himself to an inferior position in society; he never contemplated the possibility of losing caste. He was doubly successful. Seeking a means of admittance to a society which was very reticent in opening its arms to him, he decided to force his way in through the front door. Thanks to his talents as an amateur, he did in fact gain access to more elegant and less austere circles than the ones he had been brought up in; witty men, pretty women, and every kind of pleasure were the things they appreciated there. As an actor and man of the world, my father