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my education and my appearance. In particular he took great pains with my handwriting and spelling: whenever I wrote him a letter, he would send it back to me, with corrections. During the holidays he used to dictate tricky passages to me, chosen usually from Victor Hugo. As I was a great reader, I made few mistakes, and he told me with great satisfaction that I was a natural speller. In order to help form my taste in literature, he had assembled a little anthology for me in an exercise book covered with shiny black imitation leather: Un Évangile, by Coppée, Le Pantin de la petite Jeanne by Banville, Hélas! si j’avais su! by Hégésippe Moreau, and several other poems. He taught me to read them aloud, ‘putting in the expression’. He read the classics aloud to me: Ruy-Blas, Hernani , the plays of Rostand, Lanson’s Histoire de la littérature française, and Labiche’s comedies. I asked him many questions, which he answered willingly. He never intimidated me, in the sense that I never felt the slightest uneasiness in his presence; but I did not attempt to bridge the distance that lay between us; there were many subjects that I could not imagine myself discussing with him; to him I was neither body nor soul, but simply a mind. Our relationship was situated in a pure and limpid atmosphere whereunpleasantness could not exist. He did not condescend to me, but raised me up to his level, and then I was proud to feel myself a grown-up person. When I fell back to my ordinary level, I was dependent upon Mama; Papa had allowed her to take complete charge of my bodily and moral welfare.
    My mother had been born at Verdun, in a rich and devout bourgeois family; her father, a banker, had studied with the Jesuits; her mother had been brought up in a convent. Françoise had a brother and sister younger than herself. Grandmama, entirely devoted to her husband, showed her children only a distant affection, and it was Lili, the youngest, who was her father’s favourite. Mama suffered from their coldness towards her. A day-boarder at the Couvent des Oiseaux, she found some consolation in the warm regard of her teachers; under the guidance of the nuns, she eagerly threw herself into her school work and her religious duties, and, after she had passed her lower certificate of education, the Mother Superior supervised her studies. She suffered many sad disappointments in her adolescence. Her childhood and youth filled her heart with a resentment which she never completely forgot. At the age of twenty, her neck squeezed into whalebone collars, accustomed to suppressing all her natural spontaneity, resorting to silence and brooding over bitter secrets, she felt herself alone and misunderstood; despite her great beauty, she lacked assurance and gaiety. She went without enthusiasm to meet a strange young man at Houlgate. They liked one another. Won over by my father’s exuberant vitality, and made confident by the proofs of tenderness he gave her, my mother began to blossom. My earliest memories of her are of a laughing, lively young woman. She also had about her something wilful and imperious which was given a free rein after her marriage. My father enjoyed the greatest prestige in her eyes, and she believed that the wife should obey the husband in everything. But with Louise, my sister, and myself she showed herself to be dictatorial and overbearing, sometimes passionately so. If one of her intimate friends or relations happened to cross her or offend her, she often reacted with anger and outbursts of violent frankness. But in society she was always timid. Brusquely transported into a social group that was very different from her provincial circle, she found difficulty in adapting herself. Her youth, her inexperience, her love for my father all made her vulnerable: she dreaded criticism, and, in order to avoid it, took pains to be ‘like everybodyelse’. In her new environment, her convent