262
FILIPPA ROLF
classics.
I
read Grimmelshausen's
Simplicius Simplicissimus.
And after
Callot's dancing pantaloons
I
took out a folio of Commedia dell'
arte
figures, drawn and colored by George Sand's son, Maurice de Guerin.
I
read Merimee and liked his bear-man, with its many languages.
I
read Senancour, because
I
soon found that my history of literature
disliked all the styles which
I
liked and so could be trusted inversely.
I
read
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy,
because at
home we had only
Sermons by Yorick.
I
read some Gautier, but there
I
got stuck, because my history of literature hated him so much (as
it did Diderot and Wordsworth) that it felt like dropping in on a
family quarrel
(I
never witnessed one). Thus, during my first tenn,
I
had all that
I
needed, if you add to this Chenier, Agrippa D'Au–
bigne and Ronsard, or would need, in life.
The war was
"J'ai vu Ie Reitre noir"
with
"der schwarze Tschako
mit dem Totenkopf"
and nevertheless
I
knew enough for my legs to
give under me when
I
was confronted, in the student's club, with a
large grey front page photograph in our liberal daily, of many
massed-together, flattened field coats in an opened ditch. The floor,
the window, the table ... They are doing it to other people than
me! The moment of cruelty. The ambiguity of its attribution was not
lost on me and
I
was not surprised at what later happened. "Later"
because the evidence comes so late. Bullfights, of which
I
saw an ex–
cellent one after the war, are brothers teasing a sister. One is hardly
unaware of these things.
Something exciting and interesting happened
in
June: my friend
would spend a month with us in the country. Suddenly, in front of
the hothouse, overlooking new apple trees, zinnias and red beets, on
a scythed, high grass border around the gooseberry bushes,
I
sit
laughing: "But they are
The Cherry Orchard!"
The bees buzz in the
hawthorn hedge separating the garden proper from the hotbeds, a
flashing square, which obscurely prolong the whitewashed quiet hot–
house. With jealousy, as she went on to another friend after my
month, a trite, goodlooking straightbacked girl, the delight of moth–
ers-in-Iaw, and went sailing on a sea, how blue, with sails, how white,
with laughter how young and light compared to mine and that of my
family; with waiting for her letter, with creeping behind the sofa to
savor her "Love" instead of her usual Ankarean (Grandmother had
called her only "Miss" with her last name. My friend had waved a
letter at me: "Tell them not to write to me like this" - somebody
