I

- 87

ZAZA’S WAY; SACRIFICIAL VICTIM OR ALTERNATE ROLE MODEL?

GUILLEMINE DE LACOSTE
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

W© all remember Zaza affectionately as Simone de Beauvoir’s closest friend with whose
death she ends Mémoires d'une Jeune Fille Rangée : ‘Together we fought against the miry
destiny which awaited us and I thought for a long time that I had paid for my freedom with her
death.” (1) (2) Beauvoir scholars interpret the “miry destiny” as the bourgeoisie, clearly identified
as the villain as the Mémoires progress. The words also apply, however, to the patriarchy to
which the French bourgeoisie was inextricably linked until approximately thirty years ago.
The newly published Zaza: Correspondance et Carnets d'Elisabeth Lacoin 1914-1929
gives us a chance to further document Zaza’s struggle against the bourgeoisie/patriarchy. These
letters, especially those to Simone de Beauvoir, to Geneviève de Neuville, to her mother, and to
Merleau-Ponty, as well as her journal, simultaneously show her to be a powerful, wise, very
sensitive and above all authentic young woman, completely unlike the neurotic, “rigid,” v
“repressive” victim painted by Deirdre Bair. (3) They also enable us to analyze the similarities
and the differences between her situation and her reactions and those of Beauvoir.
According to the Larousse, to be bourgeois is to be bound by conventionality,
traditionalism and orthodoxy or authoritarianism. Zaza s family was certainly very conventional
in a number of ways. First of all, they were strict followers of the bourgeois/patriarchal model of
complementarity and asymmetry in the roles assigned man and woman. Man’s role was to forge
for himself as interesting a life as possible in the world in order to support his family as amply as
possible, if not to change the world. Woman’s role was one of action and devotion as wife,
mother and homemaker. (4)
Moreover, in order to safeguard and if possible upgrade lineage and fortunes, arranged
marriages were quite customary in that milieu at that time. From the beginning Zaza resisted the
very idea of an arranged marriage, shocked by the possibility that a young woman could marry
for any other reason than pure love. And she frustrated her family by either falling in love or
being intimate with young men who were impossible candidates in their eyes: “a foreign cousin
whose family was hostile, a ‘Boche’, a philosophy student leaving behind him a trail of broken
hearts and who was in no hurry to get married”. (5)
* Although in the 1920's a girl’s education was on a par with a boy’s until the bachot there
was great ambivalence in Zaza’s milieu about further studies for a young woman. Might they not
chip away at the idea! of action/devotion of wife and mother which had been inculcated in her?
When Garric. who had become aware of Zaza's brilliance when he was her teacher in the
bachot program, convinced her family to let her do a licence in classics, Zaza’s comments in her
journal reflect her family’s attitude as well as her incipient divergence from it. She is elated, for
she loves the intellectual life and she knows that she will plunge into her studies with great
gusto. But she is also perturbed. For she intuits that unlike other intelligent young women of her
milieu, for whom further studies were either a way to enhance their qualities as marriage
candidates and/or a way to keep busy until their marriage, she might never be willing to let go of
the intellectual pursuits so vital to her.
“Is this an evil?” she asks. And her answer clearly reflects her family’s attitude and her
determination at that point not to let her ideal of action/devotion be stained by her intellectual
development, which as yet has barely begun. “And if after some studies I enter the life of action
and devotion, will there be need for regret? I plan to remain free to be able to serve better and if
the obstacles to this freedom, to this emancipation, only come from me, I will certainly have the
courage to overcome them. But I will have to go into the world and I will do that joyously and
without grumbling, keeping for more beautiful things my ardor and my love.” (Zaza 63) (6).
It seems that during the three years of her licence Zaza managed extremely well to
balance her intellectual/cultural/artistic/social life with action/devotion in training, for there are
neither letters nor entries in her journal about a conflict arising from the juxtaposition of the two.
 88

However, her mother’s traditionalism or tear ot intellectuals became exacerbated during the
summer after Zaza’s licence , when she discovered Simone de Beauvoir’s loss of faith, and
when she realized Zaza’s growing friendship with some of Simone’s friends, especially Merleau-
Ponty and Gandillac. (7). She therefore forbade Zaza to pursue the next degree, the diplôme
d'études supérieures, which Zaza was eager to pursue, and made pians to send her daughter to
Berlin. Zaza writes to Simone at that time: “Maman now wants me to make this trip so that I may
make a clean break with the Sorbonne, studies and intellectuals. It is thus that in former days
the families of this region, when they wanted to marry their sons with dignity, sent them abroad
for a few months to make them break their possible liaisons with the neighboring innkeepers or
farmers. Sad comparison, but so true.’’ (Zaza 141 ).
For Zaza the conflict arose upon her return from Berlin. For, after three months of
autonomy and a full cultural/intellectual/social life free of family obligations, she found it very
difficult to resume almost full time the duties of an apprentice homemaker. As she complains in
her journal: “My time is crumbling into little pieces so that I have nothing left.” (Zaza 256). And
six weeks later she laments “the stupid existence of Miss Zaza Lacoin, young woman given over
to family affections, to worldly get-togethers and to the reading of the uninteresting novels which
are now being published. . . It is inadmissible to be thus given over to all and to anything.
Persons who are too good-natured, or more simply who have no character, allow their lives to
be stolen.” (Zaza 277).
On July 4, 1929, Zaza explodes, commenting sardonically in her journal on the social life
of her milieu in which she is afraid of becoming engulfed: “Reception this evening. This is
enough to occupy the whole day of an entire household. One must occupy one’s life with
something in order to have the illusion that it is full. We ‘got busy.’ The dinner was essentially
‘bourgeois’ and ‘well to do’. At a certain moment I watched the ladies seated close together,"
with the same quiet and resigned physiognomy, with an irrevocably honest and empty
expression. Will we all be like that one day? Can one be an honest Christian woman only at
the price of such smothering? Is that what education is, this slow going-to-sleep which makes
women and nice young girls into good, harmless beings but is so discouraging that I understand
why [Merleau-Ponty] told Simone that he didn’t have the courage to court the young woman who
was yawning so heartily in front of him. Mr. G. and Mr. C., very different from each other, exist,
catch your attention and hold it, but their wives! Is this an inescapable fate?” (Zaza 295).
The reception above was one of many occurrences of this kind in the Lacoin’s bourgeois
lives. In fact, such was the whirl of activities - picnics, lunches, teas, dances, excursions - at
Haubardin, the Landes family estate, during the summer that, as we remember from the
Mémoires, Zaza was one day in such need of a little solitude that she actually let a hatchet fall
on her foot in order to be allowed to rest for a few days. (Zaza 97).
The Lacoins were quite authoritarian with their children, so much so that Zaza did not
question the fact that, in theory at least, she owed obedience to her mother. In practice,
however, she fought hard to get her way in the things which mattered most to her. After writing to
Simone about her mother’s adamant refusal to let her participate during the coming year (during
which she would turn twenty-one) in a Sunday morning tennis game organized by Simone and
which would also include Poupette, Merleau-Ponty, Gandillac and a third young man, she
remarks: “I tell you all this quite brutally. I prefer that you be aware of the state of mind which I am
constantly running into and which nevertheless my Christian ideal of obedience obliges me to
respect” (Zaza 137).
But it was her mother’s Jansenistic attitude which riled Zaza the most. “Under the pretext
of moral principles, I have heard things which revolt me,” she writes Simone in the letter about
the tennis plans. (Zaza 137). And nine months later she writes in her journal: ‘To hear everything
which I have heard from Maman on the corruption of human nature, on Simone, on the
scandalous life which I am living . . . really hurts me.” (Zaza 298).
Even though Simone’s family was just as bourgeois/patriarchal as Zaza’s, her father's
bad fortune and consequent inability to provide her with a dowry forced him to orient her - much
to his chagrin and to her delight - towards a career instead of a bourgeois marriage. This and
the fact that towards her tenth year her happy home life with doting and loving parents