Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir Page A

were too real, and at the same time not real enough. The most sumptuous finery had not an iota of the brilliance of a carbuncle in a fairy-tale. I used to clap my hands and gasp with wonder, but in my heart of hearts I preferred a quiet afternoon alone with my books.
    As for the cinema, my parents looked upon it only as a vulgar entertainment. They thought Charlie Chaplin was very childish, even for children. However, a friend of my father’s having procured for us an invitation to see a private showing of a film, we went one morning to see L’Ami Fritz : everyone agreed that the film was charming. A few weeks later we saw, under the same privileged conditions, Le Roi de Camargue. The hero, engaged to a sweet blonde heroine, a simple peasant girl, was riding along the edge of the sea; he met a naked gipsy with smouldering eyes who slapped his horse’s neck; for a long while they stared at one another inamazement; later he went into a little house with her in the middle of the marshes. At this point I noticed my mother and grandmother exchanging looks of alarm; in the end I gathered from their distraught mien that this story was not suitable for my tender years: but I couldn’t quite understand why. While the blonde heroine was running desperately over the marshes, to be swallowed up by them in the end, I did not realize that the most frightful of all sins was being committed between the hero and the lovely dark gipsy. But her proud self-abandon had made no impression on me at all. In The Golden Legend and in the tales of Canon Schmid I had come across even more voluptuously naked scenes. But from then on, we did not go to the cinema.
    I didn’t mind; I had my books, my games, and, all around me, subjects more worthy of my interest and contemplation than a lot of flat pictures: men and women, in flesh and blood. Contrary to inanimate objects, human beings, endowed with minds, did not worry me at all: they were just like myself. At that hour of the evening when the fronts of houses become transparent, I would watch the lighted windows. I never saw anything out of the ordinary; but if I caught sight of a child sitting reading at a table, I would be deeply moved to see my own life displayed as it were on a lighted stage. A woman would be setting the table, a couple would be talking: played at a distance, illuminated by chandeliers or hanging lamps, these familiar scenes, to my mind, rivalled the brilliance of the spectacles at the Châtelet. I didn’t feel shut out; I had the feeling that a single theme was being interpreted by a great diversity of actors in a great diversity of settings. Repeated to infinity from building to building, from city to city, my existence had a part in all its innumerable representations; it comprised the entire universe.
    In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by. I knew too little of the habits of adults to be able to guess where they were going in such a hurry, or what the hopes and fears were that drove them along. But their faces, their appearance, and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to a fifth-floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: ‘But I won’t be able to see thepeople in the street any more! ‘I was being cut off from life, condemned to exile. When we were in the country, I didn’t mind being relegated to a rustic hermitage: I was overwhelmed by the wonders of Nature. But in Paris I was hungry for human company; the essence of a city is in its inhabitants: cut off from any more intimate contact, I had to be able to see them at least. Already I was beginning to want to escape from the narrow circle in which I was confined. A way of walking, a gesture, a smile