She repudiated her faith with indescribable vivacity. A hardened Anglo-Saxon agnostic would have shown more diffidence in denying his belief in dogma or the Bible. As for the latter, she said, it might do for children of five years. And the cutting sweep of that “enfants de cinq ans” afforded me a revealing glimpse of that lucid intelligence with which the French mind cuts through layers and strata of equivocation and compromise.
Most Frenchmen, if they lose their faith, go the swift and logical road to atheism. Her loss was no childish dream or frenzy; she still believed in God. But as for the Church and its priesthood,—she told me, with malicious irony, and with the intelligence that erases squeamishness, of a friend of hers who was the daughter of the priest in charge of one of the largest Parisian churches. Would she confess to a member of a priestly caste which thus broke faith? Confession was odious anyway. She had been kept busy in school inventing sins. She would go to church on Easter, but she would not take the Eucharist, though I noticed a charming lapse when she crossed herself with holy water as we entered Notre Dame one day.
Where had she ever got such ideas, shut up in a convent?—Oh, they were all perfectly obvious, were they not? Where would one not get them? This amazing soul of modern France!—which pervades even the walls of convents with its spirit of free criticism and its terrible play of the intelligence; which will examine and ruthlessly cast aside, just as my vibrant, dark-haired, fragile friend was casting aside, without hypocrisy or scruple, whatever ideas do not seem to enhance the clear life to be lived.
II
Accustomed to grope and flounder in the mazes of the intellect, I found her intelligence well-nigh terrifying. I would sit almost helplessly and listen to her sparkle of talk. Her freedom knocked into pieces all my little imagined world of French conventionalities and inhibitions. How could this pale, dignified mother, to whom I was presented as she passed hurriedly through the room one day, allow her to wander so freely about Paris parks and museums with a foreign young man? Her answer came superbly, with a flare of decision which showed me that at least in one spot the eternal conflict of the generations had been settled: “Je me permets!”—I allow myself. She gave me to understand that for a while her mother had been difficult, but that there was no longer any question of her “living her life”—vivre sa vie. And she really thought that her mother, in releasing her from the useless trammels, had become herself much more of an independent personality. As for my friend, she dared, she took risks, she played with the adventure of life. But she knew what was there.
The motherly Anglo-Saxon frame of mind would come upon me, to see her in the light of a poor ignorant child, filled with fantastic ideals, all so pitifully untested by experience. How ignorant she was of life, and to what pitfalls her daring freedom must expose her in this unregenerate France! I tried and gave it up. As she talked,—her glowing eyes, in which ideas seemed to well up brimming with feeling and purpose, saying almost more than her words,—she seemed too palpably a symbol of luminous youth, a flaming militant of the younger generation, who by her courage would shrivel up the dangers that so beset the timorous. She was French, and that fact by itself meant that whole layers of equivocation had been cut through, whole sets of intricacies avoided.
In order to get the full shock of her individuality, I took her one afternoon to a model little English tea-room on the rue de Rivoli, where normal Britishers were reading Punch and the Spectator over their jam and cake. The little flurry of disapprobation and the hostile stare which our appearance elicited from the well-bred families and discreet young men at the tables, the flaring incongruity of her dark, lithe, inscrutable personality in this bland, vacuous British atmosphere, showed me as could nothing else how hard was the gem-like flame with which she burned.
As we walked in the Luxembourg and along the quays, or sat on the iron chairs in the gardens of the Parc Monceau or the Trocadéro, our friendship became a sort of intellectual orgy. The difficulty of following the pace of her flying tongue and of hammering and beating my own thoughts into the unaccustomed French was fatiguing, but it was the fascinating weariness of exploration. My first idle remarks about God touched off a whole battery of modern ideas. None of the social currents of the day seemed to have passed her by, though she had been immured so long in her sleepy convent at Bourges. She had that same interest and curiosity about other classes and conditions of life which animates us here in America, and the same desire to do something effective against the misery of poverty.
I had teased her a little about her academic, untried ideas, and in grave reproof she told me, one afternoon, as we stood—of all places!—on the porch of the Little Trianon at Versailles, a touching story of a family of the poorest of the Parisian poor, whom she and her mother visited and helped to get work. She did not think charity accomplished very much, and flamed at the word “Socialism,” although she had not yet had its program made very clear to her.
But mostly she was feminist,—an ardent disciple in that singularly uncomplicated and happy march of the Frenchwomen, already so practically emancipated, toward a definite social recognition of that liberation. The normal Frenchwoman, in all but the richer classes, is an economic asset to her country. And economic independence was a cardinal dogma in my friend’s faith. She was already taking a secretarial course, in order to ensure her ability to make her living; and she looked forward quite eagerly to a career.