[In the following essay, Houlding examines feminine and gender issues occupying French intellectuals during the war years based on an examination of Violette Leduc's La Bâtarde.]

At night I dreamed that the war was over, that the people with real ability had returned, that I was scurrying like a mangy dog to the refuge of an unemployment bureau. I would wake up soaked with sweat, convince myself with a stammering voice that it was a nightmare, then fall asleep again.¹

Nightmarish images of the liberation of France from Nazi occupation recur frequently in Violette Leduc's autobiographical work, La Bâtarde (1964). At no point in this work does Leduc take part in her country's euphoric anticipation of Allied victory over the German occupying forces. Rather, for Violette Leduc, the liberation of France portends a dysphoric return to unemployment, despair, shame, and submission to those more able than herself. Who, we might ask, or what kind of woman would dread the end of Nazi domination and of history's most horrific international conflict? And, perhaps more scandalously, who would admit to such a thing in writing?

One might initially speculate that Leduc's fear of freedom is not entirely unusual, that it might, in fact, simply mirror the “articulation of female dread” identified by Susan Gubar in her important study of British women's literary responses to World War II.² Gubar defines this fear on the part of British women as an apprehension that “male vulnerability in wartime would result in violence against women” (230). Violette Leduc is of course French and not British; however, national differences matter little here since Leduc's specific and entirely personal fear is not fear of a backlash by men against women for taking their place during wartime, but is more like terror at the prospect of the community as a whole reverting to “normal” after a time of “gender disorder.”

This fear of the consequences of a social backlash in which the masculine attempts to reassert itself would seem at least partly, however, to fit Leduc's near-despairing anxiety at the thought of a return a to prewar social order. According to Joan W. Scott, the return of peace does have the effect of spinning hard-won, often tenuous gains back in on themselves: “War is the ultimate disorder; peace thus implies a return to ‘traditional’ gender relationships, the familiar and natural order of families, men in public roles, women at home, and so on.”³ In Leduc's case, the gains at stake are her hard-won profits in the worlds of publishing and black-marketeering during the Occupation. Her fear of losing these becomes tangible in La Bâtarde, where her identification with other women and with socially defined gender roles is shot through with ambivalence. Whereas Gubar argues that “the literature women wrote about World War II needs to be understood as a documentation of women's sense that the war was a blitz on them,” one can, in Leduc's case, offer a parallel but distinct revision of this interpretation by arguing that Leduc's autobiographical representation of the Occupation depicts the war as a blitz on herself alone. It remains uncomfortably but undeniably clear throughout La Bâtarde that Leduc prospered materially and socially under the conditions of “gender disorder” provoked by five years of war, national anxiety, and foreign occupation. As an example of French women's lives during wartime, Leduc resembles less the model wives of prisoners-of-war, the “women who wait” recently studied by Sarah Fishman, than the “outlaw” women into whose experience Miranda Pollard has called for further investigation, women whose tales offer marginal and “less respectable” narratives of Occupied France.⁴

La Bâtarde's representation of the war years is structured by a series of personal and intellectual moments, mostly concerning femininity, gender roles (especially the role of gender as manifested by Occupation discourse and activity), and discontent, which together elaborate a view of the effects of the Occupation on an “outlaw” French woman and her text. To be sure, Leduc provides an extreme example of the crisis in the social “place” and the self-definition of women during the Occupation. Her illegitimacy, psychological instability, class affiliations, and above all her bisexuality all come into play in her search for a stance that will most effectively distance her from the postwar desire for quiescence. But the fact that Leduc is unrepresentative, an “outlaw” to a prescribed concept of femininity as well as to social legitimacy, is conversely what makes La Bâtarde so important to a fuller understanding of the textual memory of the Occupation. Just as Leduc felt drawn to what she termed the “underside of the war”—“l'envers de la guerre,” her text tells the story of the underside of gender relations of the time.⁵

In an argument related to that of Joan W. Scott, Denise Riley has claimed that “war throws gender into sharp relief.”⁶ Although the war between France and Germany officially ended in June 1940, certainly such a highlighting of gender systems obtained in occupied France. Vichy discourse surrounding the defeat is fraught with an anxious harking back to a distant past in which France had not yet fallen prey to the feminizing influences of the Third Republic. The National Revolution was described by Pétain as “a strongly human and virile reaction to a feminized republic, a republic of women and homosexuals.”⁷ Yet dedicated women were precisely what Pétain needed to launch this conservative social vision, since only they could bear the many French children desired by the grandfatherly leader. In the case of Violette Leduc, it is worth noting that there is no room in the discourse of Pétain's new nation for the woman who is also a homosexual (“une république de femmes ou d'invertis”). Vichy's aim was to shape the potentially troublesome “femme” into the warmer “épouse” and “mère.”⁸

In her study of social policy concerning women in wartime and postwar Britain, Riley makes the following crucial observation: “Women when named as a sex by the formulations of social policy cannot escape being the incarnation of gender as strange or temporary workers; nor can they escape being seen as hovering on the edge of maternity” (260). If we apply Riley's remarks to the equally appropriate context of occupied France, we can argue that it would be virtually impossible not to recognize oneself as a woman under such extreme conditions, impossible to avoid what Riley terms “gendered self-consciousness.”⁹ If women are “the incarnation of gender,” they are not subjects but signifiers within the social project. For Violette Leduc, bastard, bisexual, black-marketeer, the imposition of gendered self-consciousness represented both the greatest release of power and the most oppressive, nightmarish ambiguity.

Born in 1907, Violette Leduc arrived at the war years as an unmarried woman of mediocre health, with an unfinished high-school education, several badly ended love affairs (mostly, but not exclusively, with women), unresolved conflicts with her mother, and massive insecurities: in short, having successfully completed and passed through none of the traditional stages of a French woman's life of her generation. Leduc's particular brand of marginality was accompanied by a heightened awareness of the “norm,” of the appropriate way of living a woman's life, of the ways of being and becoming a jeune fille rangée—Simone de Beauvoir's phrase for her own bourgeois Catholic upbringing. Leduc was constantly aware of her failure to follow the appropriate life plot. This pain of the jeune fille dérangée¹⁰ acts as the ongoing leitmotif of her work: the pain of forever being the unacknowledged offspring of an illegitimate union, of bearing what she describes as an unforgivably ugly face from day to day, of her inability to establish satisfying relationships with others.

The product of a brief liaison between a young housemaid and the ne'er-do-well son in whose parents' household her mother, Berthe, worked, Leducnever received her legitimate name of the father or the kind affection of her mother. As the daughter of an abandoned, impoverished, and resentful woman, Leduc soon grew aware of the illegitimacy she eventually declared in the title of the work in question, a title that also bears the mark of gender in the English edition, La Bâtarde.¹¹ When La Bâtarde was published by Gallimard in 1964, it was accompanied by an important preface written by Simone de Beauvoir, literary protector, advisor, and friend of the less well-known Leduc. (Beauvoir was one of Gallimard's most distinguished authors by this point and was of course engaged in the writing of her own extremely successful autobiographical project.¹²) In introducing Leduc's first specifically autobiographical work to the reader, Beauvoir focused on Leduc's obsessive style and personality, and on what she termed her “scrupulous honesty” (xxiii) in telling the story of an unusual life.

Beauvoir also pointed out that Leduc did not hesitate to discuss in her work those topics that continually engaged her, regardless of their appropriateness as literary material for a woman of her generation. For example, Leduc in no way limited herself to a typically prescribed feminine pudeur (or modesty) when it came to revealing her obsessions with money, sexuality, psychological stability, and her physical appearance. On the other hand, this intensely personal writer remained, perhaps necessarily, disengaged from more public or ethical concerns, such as, for instance, the global historical significance of the war. I quote Beauvoir's preface here:

[A]nything that does not touch her personally leaves her indifferent. She calls the Germans “the enemy” in order to make it clear that this borrowed notion has remained quite foreign to her. She does not owe allegiance to any camp. She has no sense of the universal, no sense of simultaneity; she is there where she is, with the weight of her past upon her shoulders.

(xxiii)

In regard to the Occupation, then, we might well ask what it means to read the work of a writer who has, according to Beauvoir, “no sense of the universal.” For Leduc is surely more than an existential author. Dealing with the political crisis of a country to which her own affiliations were inherently ambiguous, and feeling that she had been assigned at birth the role of “public enemy” within a society that now no longer knew who exactly the enemy was, Leduc filters this literal crisis of the nation through her own inescapable self.

That self, however, was hardly the most stable or trustworthy medium. Critics in general agree that Leduc never succeeded in creating a literary persona other than her troubled biographical self, a point with which Leduc concurred during an interview: “I told the story of my life as it happened, my books, my mistakes, my despair, in short, my life as a failed writer.”¹³ Although Leduc is not alone among women writers in suffering this critical fate, in her work the problem is perhaps more acute. Leduc's case, with its particular mix of ego and anomie, poses an interesting question in the problematics of autobiography and literary self-representation, namely, how does a flagrantly self-centered woman write about the outside world in her autobiographical work?¹⁴ And more specifically, how does the historical event that was the Occupation enter Leduc's life and her text? It is her status as a witness, and the value of her testimony, that are at stake in these questions of Leduc's relationship to the universal.

In fact, the years of the Occupation are crucial to the development of both Leduc and La Bâtarde. The fact that Leduc chose to end her book with the closing moments of the Occupation of France in 1944 should not be overlooked; it is perhaps the most simple but also the most telling example of an important historical and textual coincidence. The co-termineity of the book and the Occupation may at first seem surprising in a writer as obsessed by self and closed to the greater field of international politics and affairs, but La Bâtarde weaves life story and history together in ways that have previously been disregarded, but that are very telling in the larger context of the literary representation of the war years.

Like Beauvoir, Isabelle de Courtivron interprets Leduc's insistence upon italicizing the term “the enemy” to refer to the Germans within her work as symptomatic of Leduc's inability to identify with the social crisis around her. De Courtivron summarizes her view of Leduc's representation of the war in this way:

Violette's reactions to the war are devoid of value judgment. The Germans, whom she feels obliged to label “the enemy,” are invisible in her account. The tragedies she witnesses are told in a detached manner, exhibiting the same lack of concern with which Violette will later allude to the deportation of her Jewish neighbors. The world's catastrophes do not seem to affect her except insofar as they interfere with the course of her private world. An occasional allusion to the progression of the war, gleaned from dialogues of people who surround her, is the only marker of real time and events.¹⁵

Leduc's detachment from what is generally termed the “political” cannot be denied. There is no attempt made in the narrative of La Bâtarde to look back at the war years and analyze the politico-historical significance of events.

Yet I would argue that Leduc does indeed represent the Occupation. Indeed, to embrace the opposite point of view and focus on Leduc's subjectivity tends to deny the historical context and political content of Leduc's wartime text (and of women's texts in general). It is to do a disservice to all works of this period. To view Leduc's writing as apolitical in nature is to overlook precisely that which is historical and political about this work; it is to support the interpretation of women's writing as limited to the realm of the personal. To write that “the Germans are invisible” in Leduc's account, as though this were an unfortunate oversight on her part but one that bears confessing, is simply not to see where the Germans are in the text.

Leduc's refusal to comment directly upon the Germans or upon Nazi ideology does not mean they have no bearing in and on her text. The Germans are not invisible; like all aspects of the war and the Occupation, their presence is a fact, one with which Leduc copes in life and in language. But the war itself and the German “enemy” enter the text through an extremely partial, discontinuous discourse, through the men in Leduc's own life, and through the details of her daily life, as is the case with many other women of the time. The fragmented manner in which Leduc represents wartime and the intersections of the war and the Germans with her own life calls not for dismissal but rather for what I have termed a reading “between the lines.”¹⁶ To call for such internal reconstruction does not set us free to proffer our own version of what Leduc leaves unsaid by glossing her infelicities or supplementing her lack of political commentary. It is rather a reading that takes into account the indirectness of many women's experience of history, exemplified here by the oft-noted “fragmentary” nature of Leduc's narrative. In this way, we can account not only for the larger moments of international combat, the declarations of war, and the signing of peace treaties but also for the details of daily life, the private negotiation of food rationing, and the sexual politics of military occupation.

If Leduc does purposefully distance herself from the war through such tactics as the italicization of charged elements of public discourse or her refusal to include “value judgments” in her narrative of the time, these strategies tell us something important about the degree of Leduc's social alienation, and also about our expectations as readers of these wartime texts. Could it be that, unless War is represented monolithically, we tend to think that it is not present at all? Leduc's overriding concern with herself complicates, but certainly does not erase, her relationship to “real time and events.” Given the critical commentary we have seen remarking upon Leduc's idiosyncrasies and limitations as an observer of her time, one might even be tempted to retitle her work La Bâtarde or How Not To Write An Occupation Memoir.¹⁷

We have already reached the midpoint of Leduc's six-hundred-page narrative when the possibility of war with Germany enters the text. Half of the book (or three hundred pages) is then devoted to the five years of World War II, a telling proportion in a story recounting the first thirty-seven years of Leduc's life. (The first half of La Bâtarde is an account of Leduc's unhappy childhood, adolescence, failed studies, and lesbian initiation, up to the age of thirty-two.) Immediately before the war, Leduc worked as a Girl Friday for Denise Batcheff, a film impresario. Leduc was constantly delighted by the contact with the bright lights of the Parisian artistic world this job afforded her. In addition to Maurice Sachs, by whose sophisticated banter and flirtatious attention she is attracted, Leduc mentions the office visits of Jean Gabin, Michèle Morgan, Jacques Prévert, and Robert Bresson, among others.

These were the early months of Leduc's friendship and fascination with Maurice Sachs, a writer and notorious member of the Parisian artistic world. Her frustrated love for Sachs was the first in a series of Leduc's attachments to homosexual men, Jean Genet among them. Although little known to today's readers, Maurice Sachs was a highly visible figure in Parisian literary circles between the two World Wars.¹⁸ Through his association with Cocteau's “Boeuf sur le Toit” group in the 1920s, Sachs became known for his scandalous behavior, debauchery, and extravagance. Despite his sexual adventures and shady financial affairs, Sachs (who had been raised by his nonpracticing Jewish mother) underwent a very public conversion to Catholicism under the guidance of the Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïsa, with Jean Cocteau as his “godfather.” His newfound piety and desire to become a priest ended in failure, however, when Sachs returned to his old ways and fell in love with a young man while on vacation at Juan-les-Pins. (Like Leduc, Sachs was also married for a brief time.) While Sachs adored celebrated writers such as Cocteau and Gide, Leduc was equally flattered by his attention and came to adore this profoundly dishonest and misogynistic character.

Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939, Gabriel Mercier, an old friend of Leduc's and a potential lover, resurfaced after an absence of many years. At this point, Leduc's life seemed just about “complete.” It was this precarious “almost” that the possibility of war threatened to destroy:

I don't want the war to interrupt a new love affair and a new friendship. I had been a failure in everything: studies, piano, examinations, relationships, sleep, health, holidays, tranquillity of mind, gaiety, happiness, security, application at work. Now I was winning; I almost had a job, almost a lover, almost a friend with a position in Parisian society. They couldn't declare war, they couldn't take all that away from me. I shall never cease to insist on the terror of insecurity instilled into me as a child. One must always have a few sous in one's purse. The war would push me into the gutter.

(289)

A failure at each and every duty of the daughters of her generation, Leduc feared that just as she was getting her feet on the ground, the war would sweep away all stability by removing both men, the friend (Sachs) and the lover (Gabriel), from her side. Like many of her counterparts, including Simone de Beauvoir, Leduc's reaction when faced with the invasion of her private life by such things as history and war was to echo those common questions of selfish impatience: Why now, and why me?

As predicted, Leduc's job did indeed disappear with the declaration of war in September 1939. The men in her life received their postings (Sachs was sent to Caen as an interpreter, and Gabriel was assigned work as an office clerk), while Leduc found herself in Paris without a job, worried about money and her financial future. With both men away in the military, Leduc was concerned about their well-being and dutifully wrote both of them letters. Sachs did not remain in the military long, however, as he was discharged for “unacceptable sexual behavior” and soon returned to Paris.¹⁹ Due to his complicated medical history, Gabriel was soon judged too weak to be sent to the front and was returned to Paris to take a job in the records department of the War Office.

As literary or indeed as memoir material, Leduc's relationships with Sachs and Gabriel are problematic. Clearly, neither of these men can serve as a traditional war hero. Indeed, in a conventional war narrative, the soldier's story should provide the plot. However, for a brief time at least, Gabriel's status as a soldier does propel Leduc's life story along a more conservative path. For, within weeks of the declaration of war between France and Germany, the lack of social stability drives Leduc to a previously unconsidered extreme: she announces a desire for the security of marriage to Gabriel, no matter how unorthodox their relationship has been up to this point. Therefore, what becomes important during the war and the Occupation is Leduc's surprising turn, after the two most serious lesbian relationships of her life, toward a visible heterosexual relationship and toward public acceptability.

.....

When war invades women's private lives, even a life as unorthodox as Leduc's, the pressures brought to bear immediately center upon “a woman's place” in society. Leduc knew that as the legitimate bride of a French soldier she would be entitled to financial support from the state. And this woman wanted to be a bride as soon as possible: “Why weren't we both Americans? I longed for a runaway marriage like the heroine of a Western” (293). For the unmarried daughter of an unmarried mother, it was marriage above all that would place Leduc, for the first time in her life, in a legitimate position in society:

My husband would be a soldier, I would be able to draw the allowance made to soldier's wives, I would have someone to love, and I would be saved … I had been in exile, and now I had come home again … My fourth finger feels uneasy, the poor thing needs a ring around it. You shall have your wedding ring, I promise you. It will shine, and when my marriage is glowing on my hand I shall know how to make the most of it.

(293)

Exiled as a woman, repatriated as a wife, Leduc's legitimation proved, however, just as alienating as her original bastard state. Leduc does not make it entirely clear to her reader whether in fact she did benefit financially from becoming a war bride. Shortly after the wedding, Gabriel writes to tell her that she will not be able to draw an allowance from the army, but no reasons are given for this in the text, nor do we know if this was perhaps only a temporary delay due to French bureaucracy. From this point on, though, Leduc complains that her husband is an unsatisfactory provider: “The cards were down: Gabriel was not going to give me anything” (297). Within the convention of marriage, Leduc quickly finds herself in a familiar state of sexual frustration and financial uneasiness.

Simply stated, Leduc's feelings about sexual involvement with Gabriel were extremely conflicted. Gabriel's interest in Leduc appears to have been grounded more in friendship than in physical passion, with Leduc often dressing in masculine attire and adopting the role of Gabriel's “bonhomme.” On their wedding night, when Gabriel declared, “Nothing is changed, you will be free, I shall be free” (296), Leduc was wounded by his indifference: “I admit it: I wanted to be attractive to Gabriel” (167). The chapter immediately following the euphoric wedding band passage opens with this evocative description: “It was an old marriage that smelt of napthalene” (294). Leduc's disappointment in marriage is perhaps predictable. Because of her marginality and lack of physical beauty, Leduc never felt that she could play the parts available to women of her time. Certainly she knew that her relationship with Gabriel did not conform to current heterosexual norms. Nonetheless, Leduc was no sooner in the marriage than she grew nostalgic for the life of the single woman, alone and independent. Pulled in both directions, Leduc wanted to have her wedding cake and eat it too.

.....

In writing of this first winter of war and marriage, Leduc's representations of wartime experience center in great part on moments of gendered activity, moments that are grounded in Frenchwomen's experience of the time: waiting in line with other Parisian housewives for rationed food; waiting for letters from absent men; worrying about food and supplies. Leduc offers the following passage as an example of feminine conversation carried on to pass the time while waiting in line for vegetables. For both Leduc and the other women present, these exchanges constitute a veritable “orgy of platitudes” in which everyone participates. “All is not lost,” one of the strong-minded ones whispered in my ear. ‘All is not lost,’ I would say to one weaker than myself. The enemy, our troops” (321). Leduc finds her place within the circularity of this exchange; she talks to the other women, commiserates, and for once she speaks the right language: “I chatted. I put myself in the others' shoes … I wanted to please them” (321). Leduc realizes that this sharing of common experience is largely a matter of manipulating the right vocabulary:

So I talked: parcels to be packed for prisoners, letters received, letters sent, the advances, the defeats of our enemies, a ray of hope, relatives in the country, relatives going short themselves in order to send a piece of bacon. Repetitions, twice-told tales, lamentations, threats. I imitated the other housewives.

(321)

Leduc takes satisfaction in her role as one of this group of women. She is eager to please and to identify with others, to get outside of herself by placing herself “in their shoes,” or “in their skin,” as expressed by the original French. Here at last is her link to Frenchness and to femininity, for as a newlywed she too has an enlisted husband and household worries. The identification with each other and with the nation comes through the domestic elements of their lives, literally through the home(front) which is their “lieu commun.”

While these clichés place the speaker in a circuit of conversation, with the oppositional phrase “the enemy, our troops” functioning as a crucial password, it is not clear from Leduc's written account that information is actually exchanged. These words may prove to be merely skin deep, just another “formule de politesse” so beloved by the French, that is, a superficial means of establishing verbal contact that allows speakers to steer well clear of the unwelcome awkwardness of the private. What does appear to be essential here is the exclusionary rhetoric of “us” versus “them.” While able to enter into this network of public exchange, Leduc is, however, unable to forget the conditions under which she personally enters the war: “This new vocabulary did nothing to help me in my war against Gabriel, nothing to prevent us from humiliating each other all the time. My defeat had merely coincided with the outbreak of war” (321). Leduc's private battles with her husband, Gabriel, with marriage, and with desire are not forgotten in the midst of war with Germany. But neither is the private seen to eclipse the public. The imagery here is one of mirroring and coincidence rather than exclusion. The war provides new ways for Leduc to visualize and articulate her domestic conflicts, by shifting her temporarily “outside” of herself, even by means of a seemingly trivial chat with other women about letters, packing string, and parcels.

While participating in these feminine exchanges in what she terms “good faith,” Leduc admits in writing that she is “neutral” at best and, moreover, that she secretly desires the dramatic upheaval of the war for the personal opportunities an unstable environment may afford her:

But in fact I was sincerely neutral. And what is more, I was hoping for world-wide disaster, I was hoping that when everyone in Paris had fled I would be promoted in their absence. I wanted bombs and mortar shells to shatter my past failures. The war would get me out of the rut I was in. (…) I was living in one squalid room; but all those luxury apartments with their signs “To Let”—they also belonged to me now. I breathed more freely in a Paris without people.

(321-22)

Although the “world-wide disaster” of war means exodus for many, it augurs liberation for Leduc, from her past, from social conventions and restraints, and, finally, from herself.

The structure of the confessional relationship with the reader that Leduc constructs in her text recalls very strongly a “window scene” in which de Courtivron locates the apotheosis of Leduc's obsessive relationship with her mentor Simone de Beauvoir. As de Courtivron notes in an analysis of L'Affamée (1948), a surrealistic account of Leduc's obsessive attachment to Beauvoir, Leduc's problem with “others,” namely, her “failure to establish enduring relationships with other human beings,” is one of miscalculated distance and skewed perception.²⁰ Conscious of this problem, Leduc herself creates a metaphor of binoculars, a device de Courtivron finds especially appropriate for describing Leduc's project of looking: “Binoculars cut you off from people by bringing you close to them. You close in on what's happening far from you but without participating in it.”²¹ Indeed, de Courtivron argues that the sole moment in L'Affamée during which Leduc manages to achieve the perfect distance from “Madame” (the Beauvoir figure), her constant object of observation, occurs when Leduc stands outside a café window and gazes in to watch Beauvoir as she reads peacefully on her own: “Separated by a glass pane, they are apart yet near.”²² Leduc's binocular gaze brings her relentlessly close to her objects of study, only to disappoint and disorient her when removed. Leduc's texts serve, then, as a window between herself and others. Through her texts, she manages to put herself into circulation, while guarding a self-protective distance.

In the moves between proximity and distance, Leduc establishes a cautious relationship with an imaginary “nous.” Within the context of the Occupation, however, the stakes of proximity and distance are particularly meaningful. As a marginal member of French bourgeois society, Leduc often identifies in writing with victims of persecution under the Occupation, only to undermine this closeness through her acknowledged failure to make the slightest gesture of support to aid her Jewish neighbors, and through her profiteering on the black-market.

A telling example of Leduc's simultaneous identification with and distance from her “subjects” is found in her references to a young Jewish neighbor, Esther. This young girl, with whom Leduc does not appear to have a personal relationship, is referred to as her “friend on the other side of a windowpane” (320). Esther's second-floor room is directly across the courtyard from that of Violette and Gabriel. From their windows, Esther and Leduc serve as silent spectators of the other's life: “The visits we paid each other through our windowpanes were more real than any spoken greeting. I would appear, she would rush to see me; or she would be there, and I would hurtle to watch her” (321). Leduc observes Esther and comments upon her grace and beauty. In Leduc's terms, they know each other well: “Ours was a public idyll. We had nothing to say to one another, nothing to confide, nothing to offer” (321). Both women are trapped within the lives they lead inside their respective rooms, Esther by the war, Leduc by her marriage. The actual terms of this relationship remain, however, undefined and entirely one-sided. Do the women truly have “nothing to say to one another” because their profound similarity and intimacy transcend speech? Or is it that Leduc is most comfortable with a relationship that remains unconsummated, seen through a window, or italicized, as it were?

When Gabriel announces that the Nazis have arrested Esther's father, Leduc admits that, at this point in her life, she cannot be seen as unlucky. Illegitimate daughters with failed professional and emotional lives remain insignificant and relatively secure citizens of occupied Paris:

I didn't dare cry out that we were two monsters of indifference safe by our fireside. On my Aryan maiden's helmet there perched a parrot that would keep croaking: how lucky that we're not Jews, how lucky that we're not Jewish at this moment.

(339)

Leduc takes a measure of pleasure in exposing her own indifference, cowardice, and anti-Semitism at this time: “Having been suppressed, reduced to zero at birth by members of the wealthy classes, I was by no means unhappy, now we were at war, to see the rich being forced to escape into the Unoccupied Zone” (339).

Leduc calls Esther into her narrative at different moments, much as the unnamed Jewish girl punctuates segments of Marguerite Duras's La Douleur.²³ As the Occupation progresses, Esther's family members are arrested; Esther herself is taken away in the middle of the night by the Germans:

Next morning I was told that the enemy had come at five in the morning and taken Esther away. The neighbours had to tear the gas-pipe out of her mother's hands by brute force. Mme Lita and Mme Keller went out shopping as usual, with their yellow stars sewn on their bodices. They didn't dare mention Esther's disappearance.

(352)

In this instance, the reader finds no ironic quotation marks around the words “the enemy,” a choice we might attribute to Leduc's professed affection for Esther, and to her tendency to identify with victims rather than oppressors. However, each of these Jewish women, Esther, Mme Lita, and Mme Keller, remains forever silent in Leduc's text. The reader is left to wonder whether Mme Lita and Mme Keller did not dare mention the disappearance of Esther to Leduc in particular, or whether they chose, for their own reasons, not to communicate with their neighbor. And Leduc further clouds her identification with Esther by confessing that on the night of Esther's arrest she had been awakened by shouts and screams and had selfishly gone back to sleep “so as to escape the nightmare of a woman who was suffering” (352). Leduc had done nothing to intervene. In a disturbing admission, Leduc reveals to the reader that her nightmares of the period are conditioned not by fears of the present but by that future time at which the war and her good fortune will end: “At night I dreamed that the war was over, that the people with real ability had returned, that I was scurrying like a mangy dog to the refuge of an unemployment bureau. I would wake up soaked with sweat, convince myself with a stammering voice that it was a nightmare, then fall asleep again” (339).²⁴ Although one would in no way wish to defend Leduc—in fact, one could argue that she literally begs to be condemned by the reader for her cowardice and complicity with the Nazis and Vichy—it seems important to point out that here again, as in the representation of the Parisian housewives doing their marketing, the relationship with Esther is initially idealized (however offensively) as one of mirroring, harmony, and intimacy. Leduc's attraction to Esther and subsequent break with her suggest something quite different than the total “detachment” mentioned by de Courtivron. It is in no way the case that Jews or Germans are missing from Leduc's narrative; it is, rather, that Leduc refuses to describe her responses to Nazism and Vichy policy in more heroic, and thus, more readable, or more palatable terms of resistance.

The most striking examples of Leduc's simultaneous distance from and investment in femininity and the lifestyle of the good French housewife occur during her marriage to Gabriel and her active work life—a life that encompassed both licit and illicit forms of labor. Although worried about money, Leduc was never better employed than during the war years and the Occupation. Because of the exodus from Paris in the early months of the Occupation, there was a great shortage in the publishing business, and with the help of Maurice Sachs, Leduc was asked to write several short pieces for a women's magazine (311).²⁵ All the while she hid her marriage, her married name, and her much coveted wedding band from Sachs and her employers so that she would appear to be a “self-sufficient woman”: “Invincible celibacy, I had hidden my wedding ring in my handbag before going into the magazine office … A self-sufficient woman must be single …” (312). The tension between the illegitimate daughter and the disappointed wife is now complicated by an additional, less conventional role, that of the outwardly single woman, the woman who writes.

For her second assignment, rather than “fiction,” Leduc is asked to write several editorial articles, a kind of self-help column and morale booster for women separated by the war from the men they love. In her attempts to reproduce kernels of “common sense” about women's daily lives, Leduc's distance from the categories of “woman” and “wife” becomes painfully, and hilariously, clear. Blocked in the writing of these self-help columns, Leduc remarks of her female audience: “I had to inspire them with good humour, strength of mind, energy and health. Using the materials of their day-to-day existence I was supposed to provide a firm foundation for the women on the home front … My double life began” (323-24). In her narrative of this tension, Leduc brilliantly stages the contrast between the model life of the cheery French housewife and her own inability to live up to the apparently simple advice she is dispensing. As Judith Butler has observed, “[t]he injunction to be a given gender takes place through discursive routes: to be a good mother, to be a heterosexually desirable object, to be a fit worker, in sum, to signify a multiplicity of guarantees in response to a variety of different demands all at once.”²⁶ The following cropped passage will serve as an example of Leduc's cutting analysis of the multiple binds of gender and identity during a time of war:

I wrote several editorials.

Get up early, I told my readers. I used to get up at eleven, screaming for Gabriel's sex inside me … I like begging, I like asking for things, being given things, getting something for nothing. Oh God, yes, oh God how magnificent it was, my mendicancy as I lay weeping on Gabriel's bare feet in front of the sink …

And, above all, get out on the right side of the bed, I told my readers.

I didn't give a damn about the right side of the bed. Exhausted by my privations, I collapsed limply on our divan. My tear-spattered hair rained down on my cheeks … Gabriel gave way because he couldn't kill me. Then he tore himself away from the room …

Don't waste time: see that you're in a good temper when you get up. Put on your boxing gloves and face your everyday routine, Mesdames, Mesdemoiselles. Your difficulties will fly away, I told my readers.

If I got up at the same time as Gabriel it was to argue about the two francs for the electricity, the three francs for the gas, the one franc for the coal, the hundred francs for the rent … Bizarre rivals in rapacity. We both lied about our earnings …

Strength of mind above all else. Tend your nerves as though they were a precious garden. A sound mind in a sound body, the Greeks used to say. Not a moment to lose, breathe in breathe out, window wide open as soon as you get up, I told my readers.

(326-27)

Not surprisingly, Leduc goes on to explain that she wrote only a few editorial articles for women and that they were not accepted for publication because she lacked the appropriate point of view: “What I did was meaningless, abortive, rejected. I couldn't see things through the readers' eyes” (331). In spite of this disclaimer concerning her unacceptable “way of seeing,” Leduc indeed knew the appropriate clichés for the occasion. In this reader's eyes, this extended and willfully graphic passage represents a virtuoso redeployment on Leduc's part of the insipid discourses of femininity so prevalent in women's publications during the war. By obsessively dwelling on her failures, Leduc discloses the performative nature of gender and places herself and her readers soundly inside the gap between publicly constructed discourses of femininity and our private struggles with these received models. Indeed, Leduc makes clear to her reader that wherever she is located, the act of being a “woman” (a good mother, a good wife, a fit worker) lies, necessarily, somewhere else.

As a writer for fashion magazines and “la page féminine” of newspapers, Leduc was working in a woman's world. At the same time, she found that she was perceived as a woman more than ever before in her movements through occupied Paris. This was an extremely new and charged situation for Leduc, as she had not previously experienced such attention paid to the fact of her sex. Under the gaze of police enforcing the curfew, Leduc tries to make her way home one night after covering a cabaret act for a magazine. Desperate to get home to Gabriel, Leduc is allowed to pass without the required “ausweis,” simply by virtue of being (dressed like) a woman. The French police officers on patrol warn her, nonetheless, that the clicking of her high-heeled shoes will make it more difficult for her to pass through the streets unnoticed:

“You can try your luck if you want,” he said, “but it's dangerous. All that way in those heels …”

“They make a noise,” I said miserably.

“I'll bet they do,” he replied. “Ah, women, women …”

(346)

Interestingly, many women of the Resistance linked their ability to outsmart the Occupation forces to their manipulation of the prevailing stereotypes of femininity. In order to conceal illicit documents or material, women often hid them in one of the many feminine accessories typical of the time—shopping bags, hand bags, sewing bags, cosmetic bags, baby carriages, even in tubes of lipstick.²⁷ Leduc drew heavily and eagerly on these stereotypes during her black-market days in order to avoid arrest. After making it past the street patrol on this occasion, Leduc repeats the phrase “les femmes, les femmes” to herself like a mantric password to ward off danger as she runs through the unlit streets in her high heels toward her husband and home.

It was, however, in order to escape from the utterly real disappointments of domestic life with Gabriel that Leduc turned to the other principal male figure in her life at the time, Maurice Sachs. When Leduc first met Sachs, he moved within a world of writers, artists, and intellectuals but was not yet known as a writer himself. During the 1930s, Sachs worked for a time as a reader for the Gallimard publishing house. Yet, throughout his life, Sachs was drawn to illicit financial deals, and during the war this criminal activity escalated with his involvement in the trading of black-market jewelry and the trafficking of Jewish refugees into the Unoccupied Zone. For a time, Sachs also served as an informer for the Gestapo, but he was soon compromised on both sides of the law and opted to flee Paris in the fall of 1942. Leduc had separated from Gabriel by this time, and she chose to accompany Sachs in his flight to Normandy.

During their stay in the small town of Anceins, Sachs completed his autobiography Le Sabbat (1946) and brought about Leduc's “coming to writing”²⁸ by encouraging her to record her childhood memories. In Leduc's version of this pivotal episode, Sachs, exasperated by her incessant talk and complaints, turned to her and said: “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me” (403-404). And in fact, vexed but obedient, Leduc began to write the childhood memories that became her first book, L'Asphyxie (1946).²⁹ By subsequently abandoning Leduc in Normandy—to the world of fabulation and self-recreation, if you will—Sachs also set the conditions for Leduc's finally taking herself in hand, although not in the predictable way she had encouraged other women to do in her editorials. Only after Sachs's departure did Leduc wholeheartedly undertake the black-market dealing at which she proved to be extremely successful.

.....

After mysteriously volunteering for work in a German factory in November 1942, Sachs disappeared while there and was presumed dead in 1945.³⁰ From Germany, Sachs made a desperate and perverse request of Leduc that clearly “named her as a sex” and, more precisely, as the mother of his (nonexistent) child. Here, too, we have only Leduc's version of his note to interpret:

My love,

You tell me that you are pregnant and that things are going badly for you.

Would you like me to come and see you, would you feel better if I were by your side? Please answer. I kiss you my darling.

Maurice

(437)

Leduc's initial reaction was euphoric: “The miracle had taken place. I had a homosexual at my feet” (437). Although she immediately recognized the letter's urgent undertones and Sachs's wish to return to France, Leduc was tempted by the thought that there may be some truth to Sachs's vows of tenderness, and easily procured from her doctor a medical certificate verifying a (false) pregnancy. She never sent it.

Leduc explains to the reader her anger at Sachs's knowing manipulation of wartime policies and of her affections in this way: “‘My love,’ a mockery. ‘My darling,’ a mockery … There was no doubt that to Maurice my heart and his sperm were mere commodities of trade. I threw the certificate into the fire” (438). In later letters, Sachs claimed to have “found a way around his difficulties” and to bear Leduc no grudge. In the postwar years, Leduc remained haunted by her decision, by her refusal to indulge Sachs's physical and psychological requests, and by her failure, quite possibly, to save his life. It was, of course, not Leduc's heart that Sachs desired.³¹

Significantly, an earlier rejection of Vichy's powerful maternal model had also marked the end of Leduc's marriage to Gabriel. Having become pregnant, Leduc did not want to carry the pregnancy to term, and she informed Gabriel of her “visits to the so-called midwives” (356). Although Gabriel was by now living separately from Leduc, he offered to help her raise the child. After weeks of waiting for the mysterious procedures of the “so-called midwives” to take effect, Leduc finally aborted in the fifth month of pregnancy. As those who have seen Claude Chabrol's affecting film Une Affaire de femmes (1989) are aware, abortion was considered an illegal procedure under Vichy law, punishable by death as a form of treason against the French State.³² After this final abortion attempt, an infection caused Leduc to fall gravely ill; she entered a clinic for treatment, and upon her release, spent several months convalescing at her mother's home (357).

La Bâtarde closes in 1944 with the depiction of Leduc's euphoria during a long walk from Paris back to the village in Normandy, in which she feels at home with her black-market colleagues:

I reflect: my wealth and beauty in the paths of Normandy lay in the efforts I made. I kept going until I had what I wanted: I was existing at last. I was succeeding, and my courage led me astray. I toiled and I forgot myself.

(468)

Finally a “self-sufficient woman,” she has found her place in this village and in this “profession,” just as she will find her place in the autobiographical text whose writing she has now begun. In transporting food into Paris to wealthy acquaintances of Sachs, Leduc experienced moments of personal danger and triumph. She is, paradoxically, most at peace when in motion, most successful and socially integrated when purposefully living in the margins and able to “forget herself.” In her determination to enter into public circulation, both as a black-market dealer and as a writer, Leduc did not choose the most common routes. During the Occupation, this marginal woman proves that she is a survivor, although in ways that are much less heroic than we might wish. Leduc is eventually at her best during these years, productive, successful, and momentarily content.

Leduc chose to delay representation of the end of the war and the Liberation until the second volume of her autobiography, La Folie en tête (1970). We read there that, just as she had feared, the Liberation was a dysphoric and disturbing experience. Obsessed by fears of bankruptcy, Leduc was arrested in Normandy during the last winter of the war and taken in for questioning concerning her black-market trafficking. During her interrogation, she discovered that her notoriety among the local police had earned her the criminal name of “Paris-Beurre.”³³ In turn, the police wanted Leduc to reveal the names of the farmers who acted as her suppliers during the Occupation. Rather than risk further punishment herself, Leduc chose to denounce the very individuals whom she had come to consider her allies. The end of the war signaled, then, the end of Leduc's positive associations with her friends in Normandy, and the end of her financial success and happiness. As France moved toward the postwar era, Leduc was thrown back into alienation and despair, caught between liberated Paris and a Normandy village whose inhabitants would no longer tolerate her presence: “Paris had been liberated, but I hadn't been liberated from my lust for profit … Paris had been liberated, and I was torn between a village in Normandy that no longer wanted anything to do with me and a city in which I had no wish to rot.”³⁴ Unable to imagine a persona for herself in a world seeking to restore gender and social relations to a semblance of prewar order, Leduc surrenders to the anomie that had governed her life before the Occupation.

Although La Bâtarde was itself the object of great scandal and critical attention at the time of its publication in 1964, in recent years it had fallen out of print altogether. It has now been reissued by Gallimard.³⁵ Recognized as a work of great literary merit by many, La Bâtarde was considered as a candidate for the Goncourt and Fémina prizes but was rejected by both juries. The reason given for this by the Goncourt jury was that since the book was not, after all, a novel, it was not a legitimate contender for the prize. (Questions of genre, however, did not prevent Marguerite Duras's “autobiographical novel” L'Amant from receiving the Goncourt Prize twenty years later, in 1984.)

Often dismissed as a sordid lesbian exposé, it is worth considering to what extent La Bâtarde's representation of the Occupation disclosed perhaps even more dangerous aspects of a woman's participation in social life. Although marginal, lesbianism holds its attractions as a literary subject. However, Leduc's blatant confession in La Bâtarde of complacency, hypocrisy, anti-Semitism, political inaction, greed, and black-market collaboration during the Occupation move the work into extremely volatile territory. What is more, La Bâtarde's euphoric ending can be seen as daring to recast the narrative of a failed life in the form of a collaborator's wartime success story. Clearly, there are deeply troubling aspects of this work that have remained closeted, although Leduc defiantly placed them in plain sight. Dealing with a moment that was and was not a war, produced by a writer who felt that she was and was not a woman, Leduc's La Bâtarde offers today's readers a strangely legitimate way of looking at the still controversial, unclassifiable war years in France.

Notes

1. Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde, trans. Derek Coltman (London: Virago Press, 1985), 339. The original French edition of La Bâtarde was published by Gallimard in 1964. Subsequent references to the Coltman translation appear within the text. I would like to thank the members of my Reno reading group, Kathleen Boardman, Stacy Burton, Martha Hildreth, and Gaye Simmons, for the careful and insightful attention they brought to this article in draft form.

2. Susan Gubar, “‘This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun’: World War II and the Blitz on Women,” Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 227-59.

3. Joan W Scott, “Rewriting History,” in Ibid., 27.

4. Sarah Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Like Fishman, Pollard is a feminist historian of Vichy France. Pollard's call for the study of “less respectable” narratives, those which allow us to imagine more marginal women's tales, appears in her review of Fishman's valuable book, “Forgotten Women,” The Women's Review of Books 10.2 (November 1992): 21-22.

5. This expression appears on page 304 of the original French text (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). It is inexplicably missing from the Coltman translation and I have thus used my own translation here. In the passage in question, Leduc follows a German soldier as he walks through the streets of Paris hand-in-hand with a young French girl: “Le boulevard des Capucines me montraient l'envers de la guerre. Un guerrier promenait une jeune fille” (304). This is Leduc's first sighting of “an enemy in the street,” and, significantly, this encounter introduces the Occupation to her reader as a conventional wartime drama with sexual connotations, conquests, and consequences for French women in which Leduc, a marginal figure, neither young nor beautiful, often adopts the role of voyeur.

6. Denise Riley, “Some Peculiarities of Social Policy concerning Women in Wartime and Postwar Britain,” Behind the Lines, 260.

7. Quoted in Michèle Bordeaux, “Femmes hors d'Etat français, 1940-1944,” Femmes et fascismes, ed. Rita Thalmann (Paris: Tierce, 1986), 138: “La Révolution nationale est une réaction très virilement humaine à une république féminisée, une république de femmes ou d'invertis.”

8. For further analysis of these terms as manipulated within Vichy discourse, see Michèle Bordeaux, 138-39.

9. Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 2.

10. I borrow this phrase from Jacqueline Piatier's review of La Bâtarde in Le Monde, 10 Oct. 1964: 13.

11. Leduc's first work, L'Asphyxie, chronicles her unhappy childhood and her troubled relationship with her mother (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).

12. Beauvoir began writing her autobiography in 1957. Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée dates from 1958, La Force de l'âge from 1960. She concluded La Force des choses, the third volume of her autobiography, in March 1963. This volume was followed by an account of her mother's death, Une Mort très douce (1964). The final volume of Beauvoir's autobiography, Tout compte fait, appeared in 1972. Beauvoir encouraged Leduc to write an autobiography after witnessing the relative lack of popular success of Leduc's earlier works. According to Isabelle de Courtivron, Leduc spent four years writing La Bâtarde, from 1958 to 1962. Violette Leduc (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 29.

13. J. Piatier, Le Monde, 30 May 1972: 28, as quoted by Pièr Girard in Œdipe masqué (Paris: des femmes, 1986), 18: “J'ai raconté ma vie comme elle est arrivée, mes livres, mes erreurs, mes désespoirs, en somme ma vie d'écrivain raté” (my translation).

14. For further discussion of the question of autobiography and self-representation in Leduc's work, see Michèle Respaut, “Femme/ange, femme/monstre: L'Affamée de Violette Leduc,” Stanford French Review 73 (Winter 1983): 365-74; Isabelle de Courtivron's ground-breaking critical overview, Violette Leduc, and her subsequent exploration of Leduc's relationship in life and writing with Simone de Beauvoir, “From Bastard to Pilgrim: Rites and Writing for Madame,” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 133-48; Pièr Girard's Œdipe masqué, a psychoanalytic reading of L'Affamée (Paris: des femmes, 1986); Martha Noel Evans's important chapter on Leduc in her book on twentieth-century French women writers, “Violette Leduc: The Bastard,” Masks of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Shirley Neuman's “‘An appearance walking in a forest the sexes burn’: Autobiography and the Construction of the Feminine Body,” Signature 2 (Winter 1989): 1-26; Eileen Boyd Sivert, “Permeable Boundaries and the Mother-Function in L'Asphyxie,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 11.2 (Fall 1992): 289-307. More recently, Nord', a journal devoted to the literature of Northern France, published a special issue on Leduc's life and writing: Nord' 23 (June 1994).

15. De Courtivron, Violette Leduc, 32.

16. In my work in progress, Between the Lines: Women, Witnessing, and the Occupation of France, a study of literary testimony to the war years by Colette, Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Charlotte Delbo, and Elsa Triolet.

17. The term “anti-memoir” is only appropriate to the extent that Leduc clearly does not say “the right things” about the Nazis, about her Jewish neighbors, or about the war in general. Her refusal to do so should not be interpreted as a bald-faced rejection of the genre of autobiography or memoir, but as a provocation to literary convention and to social and readerly expectations.

18. For information concerning Maurice Sachs, I am drawing on Leduc's portrayal of him in La Bâtarde; Henri Raczymow's biography, Maurice Sachs (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); and Isabelle de Courtivron, Violette Leduc, 2-4.

19. De Courtivron, Violette Leduc, 3.

20. Isabelle de Courtivron, “From Bastard to Pilgrim,” 136.

21. Violette Leduc, La Folie en tête, 231 (as translated and quoted by de Courtivron, “From Bastard to Pilgrim,” 136).

22. De Courtivron, “From Bastard to Pilgrim,” 138.

23. The final section of Duras's La Douleur focuses on a recurring Durassian figure, Aurélia Steiner, a young Jewish girl who, in this version, observes the world from her hiding-place window (Paris: P.O.L., 1985). Earlier in the work, however, within the diary “La Douleur,” the girl remains unnamed.

24. In the original French, this reads quite differently: “La nuit je rêvais que la guerre était finie, que les valeurs rentraient …” (349). Leduc's fear of a return of social and moral “values” that condemn her lesbianism and criminality is, of course, less offensive than her anti-Semitism and her related conflation of Jews, among the “people of ability” to whom she has previously referred, with wealth (339).

25. Although the magazine is not named in La Bâtarde, it is identified in a later work as Pour Elle (La Folie en tête, 107). Dominique Veillon notes, in La Mode sous l'Occupation, that Pour Elle was a weekly women's magazine founded in August 1940 (with the approval of the German authorities) that lasted until March 1942 (Paris: Payot, 1990), 48.

26. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 145.

27. Guylaine Guidez, Femmes dans la guerre (Paris: Perrin, 1989), 219.

28. My use of the phrase “coming to writing” relies on Nancy K. Miller's elaboration of the scenarios through which a woman “authorizes” herself, not only as a writer, but as a female/feminist subjectivity negotiating within the social. Whereas Leduc's previous journalistic writing had started her on the road to her vocation, I place her “coming to writing” at this later moment in which she begins writing for (her own) good. See Miller's Subject to Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 16, 158 n.3.

29. The circumstances of this “coming to writing” somewhat resemble those of Colette, who, famously, began to write her schoolgirl memoirs at the behest of her husband, Willy. Lest we be misled by Leduc's indirection, it should be noted that, once begun, her career as a writer was undertaken seriously over the next thirty years until her death in 1972, and certainly not simply to please Maurice Sachs (or later, Simone de Beauvoir). Leduc continued writing in spite of the lack of success of her books: L'Asphyxie (1946), L'Affamée (1948), Ravages (1955), La Vieille fille et le mort (1958), Trésors à prendre (1960). Beauvoir insists that Leduc was an extremely disciplined writer, in spite of her lack of acceptance and her recurrent bouts of mental illness. It was not until the publication of La Bâtarde in 1964, written under the sign of total failure, that Leduc was to gain true critical and popular success. None of her subsequent books came remotely close to matching the bestseller status of this first volume of her autobiography: Thérèse et Isabelle (1965), La Femme au petit renard (1966), La Folie en tête (1970, vol. 2), Le Taxi (1971), La Chasse à l'amour (1973, vol. 3; posthumous publication edited by Beauvoir).

30. See Raczymow for the details surrounding Sachs's decision to go to Germany and the circumstances of his death there.

31. This was not the first time that Sachs had proposed motherhood to Leduc He had, in fact, asked if she would like to have a baby with him earlier in the war, after the collapse of her marriage to Gabriel. Leduc was flattered, sickened, and tempted by his ambiguous proposition: “Did he want to make me a mother in order to save me? It's not impossible” (353-54). This offer was also rejected.

32. Chabrol's film is loosely based on the life of Marie-Louise Giraud, a black-market abortionist convicted of treason by Vichy and guillotined on 29 July 1943. Giraud was the last woman to be executed within the French penal system. For an important analysis of Chabrol's film, see Rosemarie Scullion, “Family Fictions and Reproductive Realities in Occupied France: Claude Chabrol's Une Affaire de femmes,” L'Esprit Créateur 33.1 (Spring 1993): 85-103. Concerning Vichy and abortion laws, see Miranda Pollard, “Femme, Famille, France: Vichy and the Politics of Gender,” Ph.D. diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 263-89. Before writing La Bâtarde, Leduc had described the life-threatening illness caused by the abortion in her novel Ravages (1955).

33. Leduc had published fashion articles during the war in Paris-Soir.

34. Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 14-15.

35. The Gallimard re-edition dates from 1988 It is currently available in the “Blanche” and “Folio” editions, thereby rendering it a more likely candidate for classroom use.