He was neither worried nor excited to see me lead such a strange, surreal existence. He had come to terms with the fact that I was still sitting in a classroom at the age of twenty or more. ‘She’s studying to become a teacher,’ he would tell customers. They never asked which subject, it was the title that mattered and anyway he could never remember. ‘French language and literature’ didn’t ring a bell for him like maths or Spanish might have done. He was afraid that people would think me privileged and that they would be seen as rich parents who had pushed me towards university. On the other hand, he never admitted that I had been given a scholarship, fearing that people might say they were darned lucky 63to have the State pay me to twiddle my thumbs. He was constantly beset by the envy and jealousy of others, this perhaps the most distinctive sign of his social condition. Sometimes I came in on a Sunday morning, having been out all night, and slept until the following evening. They never said a word. They even seemed to approve of my behaviour as it implied that I was normal after all – every girl’s entitled to a bit of good, clean fun. It is possible too that they had romanticized notions of the intellectual, middle-class world I was frequenting, a world unknown to them. If a factory girl was pregnant when she got married, the whole neighbourhood knew.

During the summer holidays I would invite a couple of friends from university to come and stay in Y—. Unprejudiced girls, who claimed that the main thing was to ‘have one’s heart in the right place’. To avoid any condescending remarks about my family, I had warned them: ‘I must tell you, it’s very basic back at my place.’ My father was glad to welcome such well-educated young ladies. He took a keen interest in everything they did and spoke to them at great length, keeping the conversation going out of politeness. Planning meals was always a problem. ‘Does mademoiselle Geneviève eat tomatoes?’ He went out of his way to make them comfortable. When I was a guest in their house, they didn’t let my visit upset their routine. I was allowed to share their lifestyle and step into their world which, unlike mine, had nothing to hide, and which was open to me because I had forgotten the ways, the ideas and the tastes of my own background. In middle-class circles, having one’s daughter’s friends to stay is commonplace. My father treated these visits 64as a special occasion because he wanted to honour my friends and show them that he had manners. Instead he only managed to reveal an inferiority, a fact which they instinctively acknowledged by saying, for instance, ‘Bonjour monsieur, how’s you?’

One day, proudly: ‘I have never given you cause for shame.’

One year, at the end of summer, I brought home a political science student to whom I was committed. This solemn ritual, which sanctions the right to enter a new family, was no longer observed in modern, middle-class households, where boyfriends came and went freely. To receive the young man, he put on a tie and changed his overalls for a pair of Sunday flannels. He was overjoyed, certain that he would be able to treat my future husband as his own son, that the two of them would establish a male bond that would transcend their social differences. He showed him the garden and the garage that he had built with his own hands. He made this offering in the hope that his merits would be acknowledged by the man who loved his daughter. All they asked from the boy was that he had good manners. It was the quality they admired most because they saw it as a tremendous achievement. They didn’t try to find out whether he was hard-working or whether he drank, as they would have in the case of a factory hand. They were convinced that being well-read and well-mannered were marks of an inner excellence that was innate.