would suddenly touch me deeply; I should have liked to run after the stranger turning the corner and whom I might never see again. One afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens a big girl in an apple-green coat and skirt was playing with some children; they were skipping; she had rosy cheeks and a gentle, radiant smile. That evening, I told my sister: âI know what love is!â I had had a glimpse of something new. My father, my mother, my sister, and all those I loved were mine already. I sensed for the first time that one can be touched to the very heart of oneâs being by a radiance from outside.
These brief impulses didnât prevent me from feeling firmly rooted in my own environment. Curious about others, I never dreamt that my fate might be different from what it was. Above all, I felt no disappointment at being a girl. As I have already said, I did not lose myself in vain desires but happily accepted whatever was given. Besides, I could see no positive reason for considering that Iâd been given a hard deal.
I had no brother; there were no comparisons to make which would have revealed to me that certain liberties were not permitted me on the grounds of my sex; I attributed the restraints that were put upon me to my age. Being a child filled me with passionate resentment; my feminine gender, never. The boys I knew were in no way remarkable. The brightest one was little René, who, as a special favour, had been allowed to start school among the girls at the Cours Désir, and I always got better marks than he did. In the sight of God, my soul was no less precious than that of His little boys: why, then, should I be envious of them?
With regard to the grown-ups, my experience was rather ambiguous. In certain respects Papa, grandpapa, and my uncles appeared to me to be superior to their wives. But in my everyday life, it was Louise, Mama, grandmama, and my aunts who played the leading roles. Madame de Ségur and Zénaïde Fleuriot took children as their heroes, with grown-ups in subordinate parts; mothers hadquite a prominent place in their books, while the fathers didnât have a look-in. As for myself, I thought of grown-ups essentially in their relationship to childhood: from this point of view, my sex assured my pre-eminence. In all my games, my day-dreams, and my plans for the future I never changed myself into a man; all my imagination was devoted to the fulfilment of my destiny as a woman.
I made this destiny suit my own wishes. I donât know why, but organic phenomena very soon ceased to interest me. When we were in the country, I helped Madeleine to feed her rabbits and her hens, but these tasks soon bored me and I cared very little for the softness of fur or feather. I have never liked animals. I found red-faced, wrinkled, milky-eyed babies a great nuisance. Whenever I dressed up as a nurse, it was to go and bring in the wounded from a battlefield; but I never nursed them. One day at Meyrignac I administered, with a rubber bulb, a simulated rectal injection to my cousin Jeanne, whose smiling passivity was an incitement to sadism: but I cannot remember any other similar event. When we played games, I accepted the role of mother only if I were allowed to disregard its nursing aspects. Despising other girls who played with their dolls in what seemed to us a silly way, my sister and I had own particular way of treating our dolls; they could speak and reason, they lived at the same rate, and in the same rhythm as ourselves, growing older by twenty-four hours every day: they were our doubles. In reality, I was more inquisitive than methodical, more impulsive than finicky; but I revelled in schizophrenic daydreams of strictness and economy: I made use of Blondine to satisfy this mania. As the perfect mother of an exemplary little girl, providing her with an ideal education from which she drew the maximum of profit, I made good the shortcomings of my daily existence under the guise of
These brief impulses didnât prevent me from feeling firmly rooted in my own environment. Curious about others, I never dreamt that my fate might be different from what it was. Above all, I felt no disappointment at being a girl. As I have already said, I did not lose myself in vain desires but happily accepted whatever was given. Besides, I could see no positive reason for considering that Iâd been given a hard deal.
I had no brother; there were no comparisons to make which would have revealed to me that certain liberties were not permitted me on the grounds of my sex; I attributed the restraints that were put upon me to my age. Being a child filled me with passionate resentment; my feminine gender, never. The boys I knew were in no way remarkable. The brightest one was little René, who, as a special favour, had been allowed to start school among the girls at the Cours Désir, and I always got better marks than he did. In the sight of God, my soul was no less precious than that of His little boys: why, then, should I be envious of them?
With regard to the grown-ups, my experience was rather ambiguous. In certain respects Papa, grandpapa, and my uncles appeared to me to be superior to their wives. But in my everyday life, it was Louise, Mama, grandmama, and my aunts who played the leading roles. Madame de Ségur and Zénaïde Fleuriot took children as their heroes, with grown-ups in subordinate parts; mothers hadquite a prominent place in their books, while the fathers didnât have a look-in. As for myself, I thought of grown-ups essentially in their relationship to childhood: from this point of view, my sex assured my pre-eminence. In all my games, my day-dreams, and my plans for the future I never changed myself into a man; all my imagination was devoted to the fulfilment of my destiny as a woman.
I made this destiny suit my own wishes. I donât know why, but organic phenomena very soon ceased to interest me. When we were in the country, I helped Madeleine to feed her rabbits and her hens, but these tasks soon bored me and I cared very little for the softness of fur or feather. I have never liked animals. I found red-faced, wrinkled, milky-eyed babies a great nuisance. Whenever I dressed up as a nurse, it was to go and bring in the wounded from a battlefield; but I never nursed them. One day at Meyrignac I administered, with a rubber bulb, a simulated rectal injection to my cousin Jeanne, whose smiling passivity was an incitement to sadism: but I cannot remember any other similar event. When we played games, I accepted the role of mother only if I were allowed to disregard its nursing aspects. Despising other girls who played with their dolls in what seemed to us a silly way, my sister and I had own particular way of treating our dolls; they could speak and reason, they lived at the same rate, and in the same rhythm as ourselves, growing older by twenty-four hours every day: they were our doubles. In reality, I was more inquisitive than methodical, more impulsive than finicky; but I revelled in schizophrenic daydreams of strictness and economy: I made use of Blondine to satisfy this mania. As the perfect mother of an exemplary little girl, providing her with an ideal education from which she drew the maximum of profit, I made good the shortcomings of my daily existence under the guise of
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