The death of a journalist

We were a little group of geniuses thrown together by chance.

Simenon, Le pendu de St Pholien (1931)

To his family and employers Simenon, in 1920, was a young newspaper columnist who had begun to publish fiction. But there was another side to his life which he was less anxious to publicise. The man who introduced him to it was one of those he met at the morning meetings at the Commissariat, Henri Moers, a reporter on La Meuse. Simenon recalled the event in an article written in 1953,

That Sunday [in June 1919] was probably one of the most important days of my adolescence ... I still see myself, with my hands in the pockets of my overcoat, crossing the footbridge over the Meuse then turning left at the corner of the rue de la Regence and the rue de la Cathedrale . . . If Moers had not been waiting for me at the corner of the rue Louvreux I doubt whether I would have had the courage to ring the bell at the door of the enormous mansion where Luc Lafnet lived with his parents . . . Lafnet was the centre of attraction for every aesthete, writer and dilettante in Liege . . . From that day on I became part of his group which called itself‘La Caque’.

‘La Caque’, originally ‘Le Cenacle’, later ‘L’Aspic’ - and there is an accurate picture of the development of the group in its changing names - was originally formed by two smaller groups who

met in the bar called ‘L’Ane-Rouge’ in the rue sur-la-Fontaine. It was not far from the Beaux-Arts, not far from the newspaper quarter and not far from the university. ‘L’Ane-Rouge’ was the , nearest thing to Montmartre for the bohemians and students and young artists of the city, and Luc Lafnet became their leader by force of achievement and personality. When others were still beginning their work Lafnet had a large house full of canvases. He was already giving shows that were sell-outs and he talked as impressively as he painted, being unusually well read. Following Lafnet’s influence the two groups known as ‘Les Rapins’ (the daubers) and ‘the Bohemians’ began to meet regularly. At first they went to a loft in the rue Basse-Sauveniere, which was directly between ‘L’Ane-Rouge’ and the Academie de BeauxArts. This was in 1917. Their proceedings were informal but followed a pattern. According to Leon Koenig in L’histoire de la peinture au pays de Liege:

In about 1917 among young people a sort of romantic despair towards events seemed to take hold and become the fashion. That was when this brotherhood of painters and writers sprang up, distinguishable by its uniform of floppy hats and long cravats. They attempted to treat their ‘overwhelming stupor’ with endless debates about aesthetics or walks through the woods on the heights of Sart-Tilmann (to the south of the city) and psychic experiments. They were trapped in the atmosphere of dread and rejection which characterised that unhappy period.

In Au-dela de ma porte-fenetre Simenon wrote in 1978:

What did we talk about, all through the night, so passionately, as though the fate of the world depended on it? Philosophy. We devoured the philosophers. I remember one whole night was spent discussing the most famous phrase from Socrates, ‘Know thyself . . . On other occasions everyone would bring a text or sketch and pass them round. We would compare our work to Villon, Baudelaire or Verlaine, or Goya or Delacroix.

As ‘Le Cenacle’ degenerated into ‘La Caque’, so-called after the herring barrel into which the herrings were stuffed so tightly that there was no room left to move, the proceedings also degener

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ated. Their meetings moved over the river to Outremeuse, to another loft, over a carpenter’s shop which was reached via a passageway and a dark sinister staircase:

There was no electricity, an oil-lamp lit the scene, the only furniture was an old mattress, one or two broken-down chairs and a rickety table. Everyone brought a bottle, either of wine or spirits, and someone would bring some dry cake. For hours on end we would discuss the essential questions, God, philosophy, art . . . life and death and Michelangelo, heaven and hell. Our views were necessarily either gloomy or desperate . . .

Later still:

We turned to chiaroscuro, motley and deaths-heads, to make the atmosphere more menacing, and we would drink more to make it wilder. We addressed God and Satan in familiar terms while repressing a shudder, and we made love to ‘Charlotte’ to convince ourselves that making love was a repugnant act.

Lafnet, the young genius with a head drawn by Goya, was capable in this atmosphere of producing the following lines:

For you, these verses, Satan . . .

Now show me your rump.

Your sorcerer’s haunches,

The sorcerer’s haunches which lie with Beelzebub.

I want my erotic blasphemy To be sucked into the gluey swamp Of their aroused sex

And I want to drink the blue-green sperm To their slippery rhythm.

So, Satan, show me your rump.

That was in 1919.

To add to the excitement and debauchery it was only necessary for drugs to be included in the programme, and this became possible through the assistance of a man known to his acquaintances in ‘L’Ane-Rouge’ as the Fakir. ‘One day,’ Simenon wrote in his Dictees, ‘one of us met up with a sort of guru whom we

Grandfather Chretien Simenon (extreme left) outside his hatter’s shop at 58 rue Puits-en-Sock, Outremeuse, Liege.

The Simenons of Outremeuse on 4 September 1900, just before the solemn profession of‘Aunt Louise’ (Sister Marie-Madeleine) as an Ursuline nun. (Back row 1 . to r.) Jean Charles Coomans (sacristan), his wife Aunt Franfoise Simenon, Uncle Lucien Simenon (cabinet maker), Desire Simenon (accountant and father of Georges), Uncle Arthur Simenon (cap maker), Uncle Guillaume Simenon (umbrella maker, later barred from the house by his mother after his divorce and remarriage), Aunt Celine Simenon (aged 14^). Grandfather and Grandmother Simenon are seated on either side of Aunt Louise. At this stage Lucien, Desire, Arthur and Celine were still living at home with their parents.

The Flemish side of the family. Grandfather Wilhelm (Guillaume) Briill born in Prussia, and Grandmother Maria Briill, born in the Dutch Limburg. ‘The Simenons took life as a straight line . . . the Briills came from a tormented race.’

Desire and Henriette Simenon, with Christian and Georges in 1910. Simenon worshipped his father. ‘No one ever understood what passed between father and son.’

A pageant at the Institut St Andre in April 1914. Georges Simenon, aged 11, stands centre-front holding the staff.

Street scene in Liege at the turn of the century. A food and flower market in the place Cockerill. Henriette and Georges crossed the River Meuse by a footbridge to shop here every week.

Three altar boys from the chapel of the Baviere Hospital. Georges (centre) would run through the streets on dark winter mornings to serve the 6 a.m. Mass.

At home in the rue de la Loi the house filled with student lodgers. Lola Resnick (left), ‘the fat Caucasian . . . pulpy as an exotic fruit’, and Frida Stavitskai'a from Odessa (right) a medical student specialising in morbid anatomy, later a Soviet commissar.

The house (left) in the rue de la Loi that stood directly opposite the school gates. Georges Simenon (below left), out of work in occupied Liege, November 1918, a 15-yearold black marketeer. And the man who gave him his chance, Joseph Demarteau III, barrister and editor of the Gazette de Liege.

‘We were a little group of geniuses, thrown together by chance.’ Members of‘La Caque’ in 1919. ‘Le petit Kleine’, who died in March 1922 hanging from the latch of a church door, is ringed.

The shabby district in which the bohemians of ‘La Caque’ held the sessions attended by Simenon at which Josef Kleine was drugged and hypnotised. Simenon wrote a newspaper report of Kleine’s death, identifying it as suicide and not mentioning that he had spent the previous evening in Kleine’s company.

In December 1922, wearing his poet’s uniform of long hair and a loosely knotted cravat, Georges Simenon, aged 18, resigned from his newspaper, left Liege and took the night train for Paris. His first job was as an office boy.

1928. Within five years of his arrival ‘Georges Sim’ (left) had become one of the most prolific and popular writers in France, producing up to forty-four pulp novels a year. (Below) An evening at ‘La Coupole)’ ( 1 . to r.) ‘Mrs Georges Sim’ (Tigy), ‘Georges Sim’, the cabaret star Josephine Baker, Pepito Abatino (Miss Baker’s manager), a fan. Simenon conducted a passionate affair with Josephine Baker, possessor of ‘the only bottom that laughs’.

Henriette Liberge, known as ‘Boule’, the 18-year-old fisherman’s daughter from Benouville, Normandy, who became Tigy’s maid and Simenon’s mistress, here dressed as a cabin boy.

Portrait of her husband by Tigy, made in the summer of 1927 on the lie d’Aix where he had gone to get away from Josephine Baker.

Simenon aboard the Ostrogoth before leaving Paris in March 1929 on the voyage north through the canals of Belgium and Holland during which he would develop the character of Commissaire Maigret.

La Richardiere (above), near La Rochelle, the house which Simenon and Tigy lived in but could not buy. Christian Simenon (left) in the Belgian Congo in 1932 with his newborn son, ‘Georget’, named after Georges. Simenon later complained that this made it impossible for him to name any of his own children Georges.

Tigy and her Great Dane on a beach in the Vendee. ‘In the region of La Rochelle I found exactly the light of Holland, the radiance you find in the skies of Vermeer.’

By 1935 Simenon had placed Maigret in retirement and was wealthy enough to set off with Tigy on a world tour. They went to Tahiti where he met ‘Mamata’, here seen relaxing on the beach with a friend’s foot. The photographer, Simenon, was wearing a sunhat. Simenon enjoyed Tahiti.

called the Fakir and who came from I don’t know which Asian country, and who was always up to his eyeballs in morphine.’ According to Henri Moers this meeting took place in 1921. And according to Simenon in Les trois crimes de mes amis he himself had been introduced to the Fakir and to his young familiar, Joseph Kleine, by Ferdinand Deblauwe:

The Fakir was capable of hypnotising most of us and he put one of the youngest and weakest of the painters in a state of catalepsy. There was no trickery involved. We laid out our friend Kleine with his head resting on the edge of one chair and his heels resting on the edge of another. His body stretched over the intervening gap was so stiff that one could sit on it.

The Fakir supplied Kleine with cocaine, and the little painter, forced by poverty to earn a living as a house decorator, became addicted to it.

Apart from poetry, drink and drugs ‘La Caque’ had two other amusements at its disposal. One was evidently sex. Apart from Charlotte there was a girl called Henriette who slept with most of the group. (Simenon later complained that he missed his chance with her because he was obliged to work late one evening at the Gazette.) There were also other girls associated with the group, but they were ‘jilles serieuses', and often of good family to boot, and there was no question for them of dalliance with more than one young man at once, however much they were committed to anarchism, the revolution and the death of the bourgeoisie. After Simenon’s death one of them, Andree Pieteur, who later married another member of ‘La Caque’, the painter Joseph Bonvoisin, remembered the writer as he had been at that time:

We were both 17 [that is in 1920]. He was a big boy with blue eyes and wavy hair. He had a lot of charm ... I was going out with Bonvoisin but serious girls did not interest Sim. He was looking for something else. He actually preferred whores. There was a district near ‘La Caque’ where they worked and he would come and tell us about his adventures with them. In the evenings we used to read aloud a lot, Anatole France and Nietzsche. We would talk about all that. Some of us were

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broke. With their big hats, and their long pipes and their ideas, they were the last romantics.

Or as Simenon himself put it: ‘We were an elite. A little group of geniuses thrown together by chance. ’

‘La Caque’ had a symbol, the scorpion biting its own tail, which is sometimes taken as a symbol of eternity but could also be seen as a symbol of suicide. And the painters in the group had a theme which almost became an obsession: the hanged man, normally dangling not from a gallows but from the gargoyle of a church. The earliest surviving trace of this symbol is in an erotic and satanic painting by Luc Lafnet of 1918, called ‘The Haunted Castle’. It is a watercolour done in the style of an illustration to a medieval fairy story - but not the sort of fairy story which Henriette Simenon would have read to her children. The central figure is of Innocence, a beautiful young girl, being led by a prince across a moat towards the gateway of a walled city. Ahead of this couple walks Death, attended by devils. A black cat stalks Innocence past the outstretched bones of what appears to be a living skeleton, who is surrounded by skulls. The Prince, against whom the girl is leaning so trustingly, has, protruding from the hem of his robe, a reptile’s tail. Over the whole scene, suspended from a stone gargoyle, hangs the body of a young man.

The image of the hanged man remained sufficiently powerful for another painter associated with ‘La Caque’, Robert Crommelynck, to include it in a collection that was published in 1930. In this case only the feet of the body are visible, framed, with the end of a rope, in a gothic window which looks out over a river landscape. The picture is entitled ‘Water’s Edge’. In the following year the image appeared again, this time on the cover of the second Maigret novel, Le pendu de St Pholien (Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets). Again the body is suspended from a gargoyle. In a self-portrait made in 1919, Lafnet varied the theme by showing a cat swinging from a staff by a rope attached to its neck. A human skull, perhaps his own, is peering over the artist’s shoulder. Simenon referred to the power of the image in Le pendu de St Pholien:

[Maigret] was haunted by the pictures ... by the hanged men dangling everywhere, from the church cross, from trees in a

wood, from a nail in a garret, they were grotesque or sinister,

crimson or pale, decked out in clothes of every age.

Only one picture of Kleine’s is known to have survived, and it does not show a hanged man but the face of a Bacchante who could well have found himself at home in Lafnet’s haunted castle. The presence of ‘M. le Coq’ at these meeting shows that the chirpy columnist had begun to develop a second, less conventional, personality.

Among those who occasionally joined ‘La Caque’ was Ferdinand Deblauwe, the journalist on La Meuse who had urged Simenon to follow a dancing girl on to the stage and who had been wounded during the hotel riot. One day in October 1920 Deblauwe told Simenon that he had a proposition to make that would be worth a bit more than spending the evening locked up in a garret talking nonsense and drinking bad wine by candlelight. Deblauwe was going to start a satirical magazine. It would be backed by a wealthy Romanian and its motto would be, ‘A newspaper written by journalists, not by politicians or bankers’. ‘Sim’ could write what he wanted to write - in fact he could write the whole paper if he liked, because Deblauwe intended to write nothing. Simenon would be paid at twice the rate paid by the Gazette and his name did not have to appear on the masthead.

Simenon was delighted with the new arrangement and immediately took the opportunity to use the paper, which they called Nanesse, to settle scores which he was unable to settle in the Gazette. Among his first targets was the majority shareholder of the Gazette, the man he had done so much to assist in the elections to the Chambre des Representants, Jules de Geradon. ‘Until the elections,’ the anonymous contributor to Nanesse wrote, ‘M. de Geradon monopolised the pleasure to be had from his particle, his rents and his paunch. Then he decided to place two of these pleasures, the first and the last, at the disposition of his fellow citizens. As for the second he intended merely to increase it.’ The article went on to mock M. de Geradon for his stance as the anglers’ friend and concluded on a note of great friendliness: ‘To sum it up, he is not at all a bad chap, and certainly has no more brains than a pickled herring.’

When Henriette was shown the first number of Nanesse she is supposed to have said, ‘You should be ashamed to be writing in

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such a rag.’ But the paper had an immediate success in a city which had forgotten what it was like to enjoy the benefits of a muck-raking newspaper. Nanesse was not above making friends as well as enemies. There were further signs of Sim’s collaboration in a friendly profile of his first patron, the librarian and poet Joseph Vriendts, and in a defence — for once — of the Gazette de Liege against accusations that at the beginning of the occupation the paper’s management had allowed the German authorities to use its presses to print a collaborationist newspaper. (In fact when the Gazette ceased publication for the duration its plant was commandeered by the Germans.) In defending the Gazette against this charge Sim was of course defending his friend Demarteau rather than the new chairman of the board, de Geradon. When he was asked in later life about his contributions to Nanesse Simenon twice professed to have ‘vague memories’ of the period. While he was writing for it and living in Liege this discretion was understandable; any later discretion was doubtless connected with the fact that Nanesse quite quickly deteriorated into a ‘blackmail sheet’. And it had the unusual distinction among newspapers in Europe or North America or anywhere else of being edited by two men who were later to be convicted of murder.

Simenon’s collaboration with Nanesse did not last very long. Once again it was Joseph Demarteau III who intervened. Concerned by the attacks on M. de Geradon and by the fact that his star columnist’s association with Nanesse was becoming general knowledge, he instructed Simenon to sever his connections with the magazine in November 1921. By this time the Romanian had disappeared and his money had dried up. He had funded the paper to settle a couple of scores of his own. Having inserted some unsigned items about the private affairs of a rich Liegeois, and having been paid off, recouping his investment and making a handsome profit, the Romanian had left the country. With his departure, Deblauwe resigned as editor in favour of Hyacinthe Danse, the ‘ vicieux ’ so well-known to the child prostitutes of the occupation. Danse then tried to pull the same trick as the Romanian. And the paper which had set out ‘to clean the Augean stables’ quickly gained a reputation for refilling them. Both editors were quite quickly forced to leave the country. Deblauwe abandoned journalism and turned to pimping. He left Belgium for Paris and then for Spain. In July 1931, when his girl turned to a

rival pimp, Deblauwe murdered this rival in Paris, then fled back to Liege. Deblauwe had been a friend, not just a colleague, of Simenon’s, and the two of them, both coming from Outremeuse, had often walked to work together, since Simenon’s route lay past the ironmonger’s shop belonging to Deblauwe’s parents. The friendship was apparently broken when Simenon left Liege, but when Deblauwe was eventually arrested and tried in Paris in 1933, Simenon followed the story closely. Ferdinand Paul Joseph Deblauwe was found guilty of the murder of the gigolo and pimp Carlos de Tejada y Galban by the Seine Assizes on 10 October 1933 and condemned to twenty years’ hard labour; ‘extenuating circumstances’, that is, jealousy, saved him from the guillotine.

Nanesse eventually crashed in 1925 and in 1926 Danse was sentenced to two years for blackmail and criminal libel. He was on the run at the time of his trial, so avoided prison. By 1932 he was living in Boullay-les-Trous, a little village to the south of Paris, with his mistress and his mother, and styling himself the ‘Sage of Boullay’, an expert in black magic. Here on 10 May 1933 he murdered both his mother and his mistress. Then, realising that this time he would certainly be caught and guillotined, he took the train to Liege where on 12 May he tracked down his childhood confessor at the College St Servais, the Jesuit Father Hault, and murdered him as well. He hoped that this meant that he would be tried in Belgium for murder, where there was no death penalty. And so it happened. In due course he was condemned to death in Liege in December 1934 for murder and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, which meant that he could not be extradited to France until he was dead.

These two men, Deblauwe and Danse, very nearly played a decisive role in Simenon’s life. It had been Deblauwe who had introduced Simenon to the brothel where the girl Deblauwe was later to murder worked, and Deblauwe who had presided over the disastrous evening when ‘le petit Sim ’ had pursued a chorus girl across the stage. He had walked to work with Deblauwe and enjoyed the company of girls in the same brothels. Deblauwe also had a daily newspaper column and had once worked as a journalist in Paris. He was 30 years old, ‘un beau gargon , handsome, ‘with delicate features, and a curled-up moustache and slightly precious mannerisms’. If Simenon had fallen in love with a prostitute he could easily have gone the same way as Deblauwe and

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Danse, both of whom came from ‘respectable’ families as he did; Deblauwe’s family were also ‘petites gens’ from Outremeuse; Danse had gone to the College St Servais. But what really bound them together, what gave them their fascination with crime, was the shared experience of occupation. They had lived through it and it had marked them. In Les trois crimes de mes amis Simenon recalled the shape of that scar. It had been a time when an entire school class had been arrested after the death of a little girl, a little girl who had been brought to school by her brother ‘to be used as a test bench’ by each of the boys in turn. It had been a time when fathers were ruined within a few days, when suicide was common, when boys whose fathers were away at the war watched their mothers taking a German lover in order to eat. Each family weighed out the bread allowance and each parent and child watched the others to make sure they did not cheat. ‘We used to count out the potatoes on to each plate, and I forged a pass key to my parents’ loft so that I could steal sugar lumps.’ And after the liberation the whole city had seen that none of the real profiteers was arrested but that, on the contrary, they had consolidated their success and established themselves and their families comfortably for life:

When I was 11 years old I was rushed down into the cellar because they were shelling the city, and suddenly we all heard cries and a hundred yards away they were rounding up 200 civilians, chosen at random, and shooting them up against the walls of our houses . . . We were taught to cheat and defraud and lie . . . we were taught how to live in the shadows and how to whisper . . . and they told us, the children, to carry letters around the town which had come from the other side of the front line, and which a grown-up would have been shot for carrying.

Simenon, on M. Demarteau’s insistence, left Nanesse just before things got serious, while the other two stayed on and ‘put their heads down and pushed on towards a life of crime’. But all his life he continued to enjoy one pleasure he had learnt in the company of Deblauwe, and that was a preference for the company of prostitutes.

But it was not only Joseph Demarteau III who saved Simenon. One evening in December 1920 he was drinking with some friends from ‘La Caque’ when they met a young architect who invited them to a New Year’s Eve party at his parents’ house. By the time Simenon reached the tall house in the rue Louvrex, the same long, bourgeois street in which Lafnet lived, he was so drunk that he could no longer stand. ‘I entered matrimony on my hands and knees,’ he wrote in Un homme comme un autre. That evening he had started celebrating the New Year early. By 9 o’clock he was drunk. He scaled the first two flights of the architect’s staircase, but could only manage the last flight on all fours. At the top of the house he found the architect’s sister, a young girl whose hair was drawn back under a headband and who, as he sobered up, talked to him about art and literature. She was still a student at the Beaux-Arts where she was studying painting and drawing. Her name was Regine, she was three years older than him, and this is how she remembered their meeting:

We were both Liegeois and our meeting was pure chance. I remember it was at a party for friends in our house one New Year’s Eve. I was twenty, he was seventeen and a half. He was a journalist on the Gazette de Liege and I was in the last year of my studies. I had nonetheless already had a first exhibition and people had talked about it a little. I was certainly his first love, judging by the ardour he showed at the time!

In their directness, simplicity and conviction these sentences are typical of Regine Renchon, a strong personality who was fundamentally honest and uncomplicated in a way that her husband was not. Contrast them with Simenon’s memories of the occasion, written many years later:

Was it first love? I don’t think so. I don’t think I was really in love with her. I am almost certain I wasn’t. There was no sensation of falling in love, but I sought out her company. I was dreaming of two shadows silhouetted on a dimly lit blind and I thought it would be good to find myself with her in the evening behind such a blind, to be one of those two shadows.

But in another passage from Memoires intimes Simenon appeared

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to confirm Regine’s version of events. During the winter of 1921-2, when he was doing his first period of military service in the German border town of Aix-la-Chapelle, he remembered that every morning, with his fingers frozen by the cold, he would write a long letter to Regine: ‘They were a sort of hymn to love, because my heart overflowed with it. ’

Quite soon after meeting Regine, Simenon decided that he did not like her name and it would have to be changed. He rebaptised her ‘Tigy’. The name caught on and became the one Regine was generally known by. Tigy was the first 'file serieuse to whom Simenon had been attracted, his experience of women being at that time limited to either prostitutes or ‘ filles legeres ’, girls of more or less his own age and sometimes of his own family who found sex as amusing a way of passing the time as he did. Tigy was altogether a different proposition. It was not long, two or three weeks he claimed later, before they were lovers, but he wanted more than that from her, and from early days they were making plans to share their lives.

In February 1921 Simenon celebrated his 18th birthday and started one of the happiest years of his life. He had fallen in love and was already making plans to leave Liege. Simenon, Tigy said later, ‘did not want to get married before he had done his military service. So he brought that forward by one year and afterwards we planned to go to Paris. You know, when you are young and from the provinces or Belgium . . . Paris is a great draw . . . Paris consacre.’ Tigy had far clearer ideas than Simenon; she was older, and she became the dominant member in their early partnership. He looked up to her. In their move to Paris it is clear that Simenon was going along with a plan of his wife’s. Indeed in their plans to get married the escape to Paris played a determining role. Simenon once claimed that Tigy even made it a condition of their marriage that they should live there. But on another occasion he admitted that he too was happy with the plan. ‘I would have flown in the face of all traditions if I had not shown a sovereign contempt for my little native town and if I had not decided that only Paris was fit to welcome me,’ he wrote in Le Romancier. ‘Manger de la vache enragee’ (to suffer hard times) in Paris, and preferably in Montmartre, was as indispensable to a future writer as the work on the school magazine and the first novel on his childhood and youth.

Simenon met Tigy on New Year’s Eve and when soon afterwards they became lovers they regarded themselves as unofficially engaged. This engagement became less unofficial when Tigy’s father, a prominent interior decorator called Jules Renchon, read some explicit letters Georges had written to Tigy and asked the young man what his intentions were towards his daughter. Simenon did not appreciate this hint. He wanted to marry Tigy anyway. She had to some extent replaced Desire as a figure of gentle authority and a steadying influence, someone to save him from the bottle or worse; he had met her just in time. They both wanted to have their chance but they agreed that Tigy should have hers first. It was impossible for two geniuses to starve in a garret together, one had to buy the camembert. Tigy was older, and she was ready. It was agreed between them that when they went she would be able to concentrate on her painting while Simenon found some means of keeping them alive.

He had already shown how he might do this by publishing Au Pont des Arches, also in February, and in June for Tigy’s 21st birthday he presented her with a pamphlet which he had written and had printed on expensive paper by the presses of the Gazette de Liege. It was called Les ridicules and was a satire on four of his closest friends, all known to Tigy, and all members of‘La Caque’. In July he finished Jehan Pinaguet and overcame his disappointment at having this banned by launching his impudent attack on M. de Geradon in Nanesse. In September he declared his independence from Noss’ Perron, then mocked the city’s examining magistrates in the Gazette and predicted, correctly, that burglars would shortly strike at the house of a policeman. In October he committed a theft on his own behalf and made himself the most talked-about figure in town in the process.

At that time the bourgmestre of Liege and the deputy mayor, the ‘echevin , were socialists. Simenon chose to make these political opponents a major target for ridicule in a conservative paper. The story started when Simenon, in the course of his frequent visits to the town hall, noticed that three heavy metal boxes had been lying in the corridor for some time. On enquiry he discovered that they contained a collection of all the French newspapers which had been published during the war, and which had been donated to the city by a Liegeois living in Paris. Simenon’s precocious talent for publicity was brought into play. Taking this essentially unin

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teresting fact he managed to construct a major scandal out of the event by personalising the story and laying the blame for this ‘scandalous neglect of valuable documents’ on the hapless echevin, Louis Fraigneux, a reasonably busy man who was doubtless occupied with a number of other duties of more immediate importance.

With the permission of M. Demarteau, but having been warned that if things went wrong he would be on his own, Simenon went back to the town hall accompanied by a muscular printer dressed in working clothes and pushing a trolley. Together they loaded one of the boxes on to the trolley and removed it. The act was all the more insolent because it was committed just outside the office of the city’s transport police, run at that time by a certain Commissaire Arnold Maigret. The next day the Gazette announced that as a result of administrative negligence valuable documents had been stolen from the town hall. The front-page headline was, ‘How to steal a strongbox from the town hall at midday’. ‘For two years,’ wrote Georges Sim, ‘these boxes had been left lying in a corridor’:

They were addressed personally to M. l’Echevin Fraigneux. No doubt the generous donor thought that the surest means of making a gift to the city of Liege was to confide it to one of our representatives . . . Documents such as these are in heavy demand in the University Library and are extremely difficult to obtain . . . Even today many issues of the most important reviews are still missing from the municipal collection. Are these missing numbers in the boxes entrusted to M. Fraigneux? We do not know. M. Fraigneux does not know. Nobody knows! The boxes have not even been opened, they have just been left in the corridor rusting away, gathering mildew, for two years. It is a case of the most flagrant negligence. Foreseeing the traditional objection that it is impossible to steal anything from our town hall we decided to carry out the theft of one of the boxes ourselves. Today the box is in a safe place, the premises of the Municipal Library.

M. Demarteau was so pleased with the success of the operation that he offered Sim a box of twenty-five cigars, but there was better to come. That afternoon Simenon was summoned to the

Commissariat to be questioned about a charge of theft which the echevin had brought against him. This was another mistake on the part of M. Fraigneux. The story grew and grew. First the stolen box was returned to the town hall by Simenon. Then M. Fraigneux wrote to a rival newspaper to defend himself, explaining that the collection had been donated to the city only because of his personal friendship with the donor. Then the donor wrote to the Gazette de Liege to express his disappointment with the neglect of his gift and to thank the paper for its role in exposing it. Then Simenon returned to the attack, this time anonymously, in (for the last time) Nanesse, mocking the echevin s attempts to defend himself. Then Simenon discovered that M. Fraigneux had been stimulated into opening one of the boxes and was now to be found in his private office reading its contents. ‘There is no need for him to monopolise the documents in this way, even if the sinecure promised him on his impending retirement is a job in the municipal library,’ he wrote.

The charge of theft had to be withdrawn on the bourgmestre’s instructions and for two weeks or so ‘Sim’s’ exploit was the talk of Liege. The future novelist had received an invaluable lesson in the art of self-publicity. And since the crime of the stolen documents was both committed and solved by Simenon, it provided him with the perfect means of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. It satisfied two of the young reporter’s deepest interests, breaking the law and upholding it. Perhaps it was, on a minor scale, Simenon’s perfect news story. And it made him famous for a fortnight.

Demarteau, keen to capitalise on ‘Sim’s’ fame, immediately asked him to cover another sensitive story, the post-war smuggling trade which had grown up between Belgium and Germany and which was the foundation of the Liege black market. Smuggled goods included eggs and butter as well as watches and leather goods, where the mark-up in Belgium was 50 per cent. Simenon himself had intimate childhood experience of smuggling and the black market both on his own account and from his expeditions with his mother. Although his readers probably would not have guessed it from what he wrote, there was one oblique reference to those days. On the train approaching the border, he noted, ‘small packages are folded into a bundle of dirty washing . . . and the skirts of some women contain mysterious

THE MAN WHO WASN’T MAIGRET

folds which recall the outline of the war-time smugglers of corn and potatoes.’ He discovered that on a particular day in the week 965 passports for Germany had been issued at the town hall, showing that smuggling was a mass pursuit in the city at that time. ‘Not only is legitimate commerce suffering as a result,’ wrote Simenon, ‘but such behaviour is doing nothing for Belgian prestige in the country of the vanquished . . . Let the state take up its responsibilities!’ This conclusion was as public-spirited as his attack on the unfortunate echevin, but for many of his readers it would have been less amusing. It was one thing to expose the town hall, but in exposing a racket which was supported by nearly a thousand fellow citizens every day ‘Sim’ was attacking the man in the street and the woman behind the market stall. But he no longer cared. He was on top of the world. He was about to start one year’s military service, and then he would be leaving for Paris.

To show his independence from everything to do with Liege Simenon decided to circulate Les ridicules. On 26 November he distributed one copy to each of his four friends; they were so angry with him that they all destroyed their copies. ‘There was nothing malicious in the portrait I drew of my friends,’ Simenon was to write later in Jour et nuit:

I described them without harshness as I saw them, but probably

not as they saw themselves. However for several months afterwards I reproached myself for having written this little volume

and felt awkward and guilty each time I met one of my victims.

The pamphlet never mentioned the names of the author or victims but described their physical appearance and mannerisms so well that it was perfectly obvious who was referred to. One painter was mocked for having painted his wife in labour. Two friends, who were inseparable, were told that they formed a normal human personality only when they were together. And Simenon mocked Lafnet’s use of a spiritual vocabulary, and his initial admiration for ‘this artist who had read so much’ was turned instead into a portrait of a man parroting from his latest book, incapable of thinking for himself. His victims were the painters of‘La Caque’ who had been generous enough to illustrate Au Pont des Arches only the year before, and it was no consolation

to any of them when their friend ended by suggesting that he himself was the most ridiculous of all. It did not carry the same sting. Les ridicules was a pitiless study of four of Simenon’s friends whose talents were unequal to their ambitions; the only copy to survive was the one presented to Tigy.

‘The most important day in a man’s life is the day of his father’s death,’ Simenon wrote in LeJils (The Son ) in 1956. For him that day came on 28 November 1921, a Monday. He had spent the day in Antwerp, where the Gazette had sent him on a story, although for much of the time he had been in a hotel de passe with a distant cousin. On his return to Les Guillemins station at 7 o’clock that evening it was to find Tigy and her father waiting for him at the end of the platform — ‘Mon petit Georges , you must be brave.’ Desire had died suddenly in his office in the rue Sohet, just by the railway station. The body had been taken back to the house in the rue de l’Enseignement. By the time his son arrived Desire ‘was already laid out on his bed, surrounded by candles and all the equipment which they bring out for the dead and which fills me with horror’. His father was fully dressed, hands crossed piously on his chest, and Simenon ‘had to make an effort to brush his cold forehead with my lips’. He had experienced hubris; this calamity was his punishment. The year had been one long triumph, from the day in the spring when he published his first novel to the moment two days before the death of his father when he danced on the grave of his friendship with ‘La Caque’. He had mocked the chairman of his own newspaper with impunity in Nanesse and had scored a public victory over the city’s deputy mayor. Although he was engaged to Tigy, he retained his sexual freedom and had indeed been celebrating it that morning. He must have felt that the whole world was his and that he was untouchable, instead of being in the miserable position he had occupied just three years earlier. And then he walked along a railway platform and found he had lost the person he loved most in his life. ‘No one ever understood what passed between father and son. There were no words to describe it. There had only ever been the two of them.’ Time did little to heal this wound, and at the end of his life Simenon could still write, ‘Scarcely a day has gone by, since my father’s death, when I have not thought of him.’

When Desire died there were only 300 francs in his wallet and it

THE MAN WHO WASN’T MAIGRET

was all the ready money the family had available. It was not enough to pay for the funeral. Simenon was forced in these circumstances to approach several of his wealthy uncles to ask for a loan. All refused. The uncles in question were Joseph Croissant, who had a colonial produce business on the Quai Coronmeuse and who was married to Simenon’s Aunt Josephine, and Jean-Mathieu Schrooten, the wholesale grocer married to Aunt Louisa who had arranged for Henriette to sell wine to the German soldiers. A third uncle, Henri Briill, also declined to make a loan and instead removed valuable family furniture from Henriette’s house after the funeral, taking it to his ‘chateau’ in the Limbourg and replacing it with cheap furniture. Faced with a triple refusal, Simenon went to M. Demarteau. ‘If I had not been able to borrow some money from the Gazette to pay the undertaker, my father would have gone to a pauper’s grave,’ he wrote in De la cave au grenier in 1977, still settling scores with the Brulls in Liege from his refuge in Lausanne fifty-six years later. The funeral cortege which started from the rue de l’Enseignement included Charles Coomans, his first cousin on the Simenon side, who remembered that for the occasion Georges wore his army uniform. On 5 December he was due to report for military service.

His grief over his father’s death did not blind Georges to the alarming prospect of his mother in her new role as legal head of the family. He lost no time and even before joining up went to a magistrate and applied for ‘a declaration of majority’ or ’emancipation . He had been earning his living for over three years, he was engaged to be married and he had volunteered to bring forward his military service, all were factors in his favour. From now on Simenon had all the duties and freedoms of an adult, although for the time being his home address was still the rue de l’Enseignement.

Simenon’s picture of his position in life as a member of the ‘petites gens’ is not entirely supported by the story of his military service. Years later he recalled that he had joined the army on the morning after his father’s funeral, but the Belgian National Defence Ministry records state that for the class of 1920 the ‘ appel sous les armes ’ was for the Monday of the week following Desire’s death. Simenon, who had learnt to ride demonstration HarleyDavidson motor-cycles for the Gazette de Liege, applied for enlistment in the motorised infantry, not realising that if his request

THE DEATH OF A JOURNALIST

were granted he would be posted abroad. The fact that he had brought forward his service meant that his request was granted without difficulty but his love of motor-cycles did not grow into a love of occupied Germany. The winter was very cold, there was no food and not much fuel or money. He continued to send articles back to the Gazette in which he described the comforts of the Belgian army beside the miseries of the German population, but after one month in the ‘Rote Kaserne’ in Aix-la-Chapelle he had had enough and his application to be posted back to the 2nd Lancers in Liege as sole support of a fatherless family, was granted.

The posting may not have been due to personal connections, but what followed undoubtedly was. Relieved to find that he was no longer a member of any occupying force, Simenon, now stationed at the cavalry barracks in the boulevard de la Constitution, a few minutes’ walk from his mother’s house, learning to break and ride horses, resumed his regular contributions as ‘M. le Coq’. By February he was interviewing President Poincare of France (whom he found wearing a dressinggown in his suite in the Hotel Suede, which was probably more interesting than breaking horses). Since much of M. le Coq’s journalistic material came from life in the Caserne Cavalier Fonck his superiors eventually noticed that one of the 2nd Lancers in the barracks was writing in the newspapers about army life. His commanding officer summoned him and at first threatened him with military prison for this breach of regulations. Then, having discovered who ‘Cavalier Simenon’ was, the colonel - an old friend of Joseph Demarteau - responded to a request from the Gazette and allowed Simenon to abandon his military duties as long as he continued to sleep in the barracks at night and refrained from writing about life in the Caserne Cavalier Fonck. Personal connections had triumphed again. Since the house in the rue de 3’Enseignement was only a few minutes’ walk from the barracks, and since Simenon was now reporting daily to the Gazette rather than to the barracks, it was not long before he had abandoned his uniform, leaving instructions for the adjutant to telephone him if he were needed. The official reason for his absence was illness: he had spent a short time in the military hospital situated on a hill overlooking the College St Servais with a fever. By September he felt sufficiently confident of his special status to risk the colonel’s

THE MAN WHO WASN’T MAIGRET

wrath and write once again about military affairs, in this case a double murder in the Belgian army of occupation stationed in Germany. But before that happened there was the death of Kleine.