I recognized the faint odor of sick patients mixed in with the smell of floor wax in the freshly polished hallways the supervisors hugged me.
Finally, I got to school, climbing up the stairs and happily swinging my schoolbag full of new books. My little sisters did not walk quickly the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens seemed to go on forever. I didn’t try to ask Mama: she always gave the same answers as Papa. You don’t believe what you believe on purpose: could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind? The spies who gave poisoned candy to children, or the ones who stabbed French women with poisoned needles, obviously deserved to die, but the defeatists left me perplexed. “We should shoot them all.” I didn’t understand. “They are the people who believe in the defeat of France,” Papa explained.
We sadly passed the Café de la Rotonde that had noisily opened below our apartment and which was, said Papa, a hideout for defeatists the word intrigued me. As we left the building, Mama held hands with the two little ones. “Look, there’s even a little belt!” said Mama to her admiring or amazed friends. All three of us had on sky blue coats made of the same fabric that the officers wore and tailored exactly like military greatcoats. I quickly wolfed down the soup and tasteless bread that had replaced the hot chocolate and brioche we’d had before the war, and waited impatiently as Mama finished dressing my sisters. Beneath their white veils stained here and there with blood, they looked like saints, and I was moved when they pressed me to their hearts. They wore long skirts and high-necked blouses, and since a part of the building had been transformed into a hospital, they often dressed as nurses. I was eager to get back: the classes (as solemn as a church Mass), the silence of the corridors, the sweet smiles of the young ladies. On that particular morning, however, I was very excited it was the first day of school. My prayers were answered when my father was transferred to the War Ministry due to a heart condition. Wearing a tulle dress and a bonnet made of Irish lace, I took my First Communion: from that day onward, I was held up as an example to my younger sisters. Father Dominique, who was the chaplain at Adélaïde, my school, encouraged my devotion. I started praying a very great deal and grew to like it. I walked through the Basilica of Sacré Coeur with the other little girls, waving banners and singing. I was taught that my good behavior and piousness would determine whether God saved France: I couldn’t escape. I immediately proved my exemplary patriotism by stomping on a plastic doll that was “made in Germany” I didn’t like it anyway. In my early childhood, the tyranny of adults threw me into such raging fits that one day, one of my aunts seriously declared: “Sylvie is possessed by demons.” War and religion had defeated me. When I was nine, I was a very good girl I hadn’t always been. Smith’s 30 published translations include, amongst others, Suite Française (Irène Némirovsky), which won the French-American-Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Independent British Booksellers Book of the Year Prize. Translated from the French by Sandra Smith, it explores the friendship of two young girls, as they come together and come apart. The following is excerpted from Simone de Beauvoir's newly-discovered novel, Inseparable.