Part 2

Simone Weil
by Francine du Plessix Gray

(Page 2 of 2)

A few months after the war's end, as her family was settling back into their apartment on Boulevard Saint-Michel, Mme Weil noticed that Simone was nowhere to be seen. She rushed downstairs with her housekeeper to see what Simone was up to. The ten-year-old was found in the thick of the labor union demonstrations being staged a few blocks down the avenue, marching alongside the workers as they sang the Internationale and shouted their demands for better wages and hours.

The year 1919, when her political consciousness began to flower, offered Simone yet other epiphanies. According to Andrè Weil, it was then that the Weil children first learned that they were Jewish, a discovery that needs some elaboration. Both Dr. Weil, a professed atheist, and his wife exemplified the pattern of extreme assimilation that distinguished the progressive Jewish intelligentsia in France. This integration had to do, in part, with the Revolution of 1789, through which France became the first country in Europe to grant Jews rights of full citizenship, and which enabled them, in the following centuries, to rise to higher positions of eminence in the academic and political sphere than in any other European nation (philosopher Henri Bergson, sociologist Emile Durkheim, composer Jacques Halévy, Socialist premiers Léon Blum and Pierre Mendès-France, among them). Notwithstanding the acutely anti-Semitic currents later made manifest by the Dreyfus affair and the right-wing group Action Française, France's early pattern of tolerance inspired its Jewish community to display its patriotic fidelity by blending totally into the national melting pot. "No Jew prays harder for his country than a French Jew ... ," in the words of the contemporary French Jewish scholar Alexandre Alder. "This nation is the emancipator of Jews, and will provoke among them torrents of eternal devotion."

The intensity of Simone Weil's patriotism-a critical but savagely committed patriotism that may have shaped her destiny more deeply than that of any twentieth-century writer-might be seen in the light of this uniquely French pattern of assimilation. The same need for assimilation led Dr. and Mme Weil to decide that their children should not be told the difference between Jews and Gentiles until they had reached a fairly mature age. Mme Weil had suffered considerably from anti-Semitism during her youth in Central Europe and often stated her "profound desire to integrate herself into French society." As an Alsatian Jew, Dr. Weil had had to deal with a double level of alienation: Neither Jews nor Alsatians were ever seen as genuine "Fran¸ais de France." Simone's extremely tortured emotions about Judaism and her acute sense of deracination-her fundamental inability to experience a sense of "belonging" to any organization or milieu-are more understandable when seen in the light of these very complex family attitudes.

There was yet another way in which the year 1919-20 was an emotional turning point for Simone: It was the time when she had to confront, and accept, the genius of her brother, Andrè, who was to become one of the two or three most prominent mathematicians of the postwar era.

As is the case with most mathematicians, Andrè's gifts had flowered very early. He had come to his vocation at the age of eight, when he found a geometry book at an aunt's house and studied it as an entertainment. Seeing him working for days on end on mathematical problems, his parents took away papers and pencils so that he could get back to occupations more "normal" to his age; but they dropped this taboo when they noticed that he continued to write out equations on cement sidewalks. At the age of twelve he was solving mathematical problems beyond the doctoral level and was reading Plato and The Iliad in the original Greek. At the age of fourteen, three years below the minimum age required by the government, he obtained a special dispensation to take his bachot-the state-sponsored baccalaureate exam-and passed it with the highest scores in the nation. He then started preparing for the examinations that would allow him entrance to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the prestigious graduate school that has trained much of France's intellectual elite-Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Georges Pompidou, among scores of others. Such preparations are traditionally made through a few years of cramming school called cagne (ironic student argot for "laziness," also spelled "kha-gne")-intermediate institutions attached to the best lycèes-but Andrè whizzed through cagne in one year instead of the usual two, passing the exams that allowed him access to the scientific division of Normale with, again, the highest scores in France.

How would Simone-immensely competitive and ambitious by nature, always striving to attain first rank among her peers-accommodate herself to the fact of her brother's all-too-evident genius? Any sense of rivalry the siblings felt toward each other was bound to be made all the more complex by their great mutual devotion. Notwithstanding her distaste for physical contact, Simone was extremely receptive to other expressions of tenderness, and adulated her brother all the more because of the affection he lavished upon her. From their early childhood on, Andrè had done all he could to bring his brilliant but slightly less precocious sister into his own rarefied sphere. At the age of eight, for instance, he had decided that as a birthday present to his father he would teach his five-year-old sister to read. He made her work for long stretches, sometimes six hours in a row-even their walks were devoted to practicing spelling-and accomplished his goal in a matter of weeks. "Simone ... follows Andrè everywhere," their mother reported during a summer vacation when her daughter was five. "She's interested in his every move ... he protects her, he helps her clamber out of tight spots, he often gives way to her." As they were growing up, Andrè continued to share with Simone what he was learning in school and on his own, introducing her to Plato, explaining astronomy to her on the tram. The siblings communicated on such a level of intellectual virtuosity that on one occasion, a woman sitting behind them on the bus got off, angrily exclaiming, "How can anyone train children to be such parroting savants!"

Relations between the siblings were not perpetually harmonious, however. The scholarly silence of their quarters gave way on occasion to a muffled, thumping sound. Mme Weil came rushing into their rooms, and found Simone and locked in physical battle: "They fought in the deepest silence, so as not to attract our attention ... " Mme Weil recalled. "We heard only a shuffling; never a shout. When we came into the room, they'd be pale and shaking, each holding the other by the hair." But such squabbles-one particular spat began when Simone refused to lend her brother her copy of Racine because it contained passages about sex she felt he shouldn't see-were infrequent. Most times the Weil children maintained the tone of affectionate serenity and elevated intellectual pursuit established by their parents. Voices were seldom raised, divisive or sensitive issues (such as Jewishness) were avoided. Though "Biri" is rarely heard about in family accounts-he is not so much absent from family affairs as eclipsed by his wife's dominating presence-the Weils' mutual devotion continued to be exemplary. One of their idiosyncracies, at mealtimes, was to save the morsel of meat or fowl they each knew the other most fancied-he saved her the tidbit of lamb nearest the bone, she saved him morsels of the chicken's second joint-with the result, their children teased, that each of them might end up with the food they liked least. (Mme Weil, a hefty woman, was a gourmet who put a great importance on cuisine and fussed a lot about the freshness and healthiness of different foods; this, too, might have been a factor in the eating disorders Simone was to develop in her teens.)

Other preferred topics of conversation at the Weils' dinner table-music, literature, and Andrè's favorite hobby, the collecting of rare editions of Greek and Latin texts-were occasionally held in the family's second languages, German and English. It was a highly cosmopolitan family. Mme Weil, who had inherited a tidy income from her prosperous merchant father, loved to travel, and several times a year devised ingenious vacations for the family to enjoy together. In fact, one is bound to be struck by the variety of fashionable, luxurious vacations the commanding Mme Weil planned for her family. Spending substantial sums on their travel, the Weils took off, not only on summer vacations but on any other major holidays-Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, All Souls' Day-to a variety of glamorous destinations, such as biking trips in the Tyrol or hiking treks in the Black Forest. It might have indeed been difficult for Simone and Andrè to take that essential step of a healthy adolescence-a measured rebellion against parental authority-with a father and mother as eminently generous, progressive, loving, and enlightened as Dr. and Mme Weil. They even knew how to use that potent tool of emotional release, humor, to keep their kids in line; for along with a merciless outpouring of intellect there was a lot of affectionate teasing, at the Weils' dinner table, about everyone's foibles. Andrè had not studied long enough hours today to be content, so the ribbing might go. Papa had not sufficiently exhausted himself working at his office to be happy tonight. Maman had not organized the lives of others as much as she would have liked. Simone had not suffered enough to feel worthy. This last allusion was bound to be brought up frequently, for it was clear, by the time she was fourteen, that the most singular trait of Simone's character was her almost pathological receptiveness to the sufferings of others, and her strong tendency to cultivate her own.

From Simone Wiel (Penguin Lives) by Francis du Plessix Gray. © 2001, Viking, used by permission.

About the Author

Francine du Plessix Gray is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the author of numerous essays and books, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She lives with her husband, the painter Cleve Gray.