I have written 349 novels, but all that amounts to nothing. I have not yet started the work I really want to do . . . When I am 40 I will publish my first real novel, and by the time I am 45 I will have won the Nobel prize . . . Everything else I have predicted so far has come to pass. So, I will win the Nobel prize in 1947.
Simenon, aged 34 (December 1937)
The fact that Simenon first admitted to drinking heavily when he was writing the early ‘Maigrets’ was not coincidental. Maigret was first visualised under the influence of schnapps. Nine of the first twelve ‘Maigrets’ were written while Simenon was living on the Ostrogoth, and boats are notoriously conducive to increased drinking, either because the boat is under way, which is thirsty work, or because the boat is stationary and one is bored. But most of all Simenon was drinking because of the strain involved in his new method of writing. The fact that he drank while writing was quite well known, and was the subject of a satirical attack in the magazine Pere Ubu. He had begun to immerse himself in his principal character; the way to literary achievement involved possession, the possession of the character by Simenon and, gradually, the possession of Simenon by the character. Simenon created Maigret by living him; he created the detective in the same way he described the detective undertaking an enquiry in the very first book, Pietr-le-Letton. Maigret attaches himself to his suspects,
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‘he casts about, he waits, he watches out for, “la fissure ” [the crack] — the first sign of the man behind the adversary’. This process of immersion and of casting about was exhausting for Simenon. Between the spring of 1930 and the end of 1931 he wrote thirteen Maigret books, an average of one every seven weeks, and the process drained his energy far more than the massproduction of 147 pulp fictions in seven years, an average of one every two and a half weeks. By the end of 1931 Simenon was worn out. He decided that it was time for a complete change. He had already abandoned Paris in favour of life on board the Ostrogoth. Now, with some sadness, he sold the Ostrogoth and looked around for a home in the country. He had made a lot of money and he wanted a break. He was to write only four ‘Maigrets’ in 1932, an average of one every thirteen weeks, half his previous rate. He felt ready to start writing something else but he needed something to write about. Provincial France and the north European canal system had given him Maigret; now he needed something less familiar.
By April 1932, Simenon’s search for a house was over and he and Tigy had moved into La Richardiere, a sixteenth-century gentilhommiere or country mansion near La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast in the Charente-Maritime. This part of the country was to be their base in war and peace for most of the next thirteen years, virtually all the remaining time that Simenon was to spend in France. In 1966 (when he was very unhappy) Simenon wrote in the visitors’ book of the Cafe de la Paix of La Rochelle, ‘In memory of the happiest days of my life’.
Having sold the Ostrogoth, Simenon and Tigy had gone first, in December 1931, to a villa in Cap d’Antibes, but they had not settled there and Simenon decided that if he could not live in both the north and the south he should have something of each. What he said he wanted most when he was in Antibes was ‘fog’, according to Boule. Simenon, making the same point rather differently, said that what attracted him to La Rochelle above all else was the light: ‘In the region of La Rochelle I found exactly the light of Holland, the radiance you find in the skies of Vermeer.’ The house they found was for rent, not for sale, although it was probably the house he would most have liked to own of all the houses he lived in. La Richardiere had a tower, and stables and a farmyard, and its own land running down to the sea, and there
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was a small lake which took in sea water at spring tides. There was a walled vegetable garden and a wood. Simenon and Tigy had adjoining rooms on the first floor where he could write and she could paint. At this stage in his career Simenon relied considerably on Tigy’s support and criticism. When he was planning a book they would go on long walks together, and at the end of a day’s writing he would hand her the typescript. Many years later he would say that the best books he wrote were those written during the years when he had Tigy to criticise them. When he was writing he would get up at 6 a.m. and the house had to be absolutely silent. He wrote as though he were in a trance, according to Tigy. Tigy painted a lot at La Richardiere. She signed her pictures ‘Regine Sim’, in loyalty to the nom de plume that her husband had already abandoned. In the stables there were five horses, in the lake 400 ducks, and there were rabbits, turkeys, geese and chickens, as well as pheasants in the woods. After a while there were also two wolves, from Turkey, which were kept in their own enclosure. There was also a mongoose which was tame enough to wander round the estate until it wandered into the wood and was inevitably, since it moved, shot by a passing hunter.
Simenon was by now a very well-known man. In La Rochelle he became something of a celebrity. He would ride into the walled city on his pure blood Arab stallion to visit the fishmarket or to play bridge at the Cafe de la Paix. While he was at the card table he paid a boy to hold the horse’s head, and after a while the mayor of La Rochelle arranged for a ring to be put into the pavement outside the cafe and the boy was no longer required. At the fishmarket Simenon would buy dozens of fresh sardines which he liked to eat raw. This meant that Boule had to fillet them while they were still alive, then place them in the fridge for several hours. Boule did not find filleting live sardines easy and there were noisy scenes when Simenon returned on his horse, which he rode bareback, carrying a basket full of sardines. Simenon enjoyed cooking and specialised in Belgian dishes, especially soups. One of their Parisian friends who frequently visited them at La Rochelle was the painter Vlaminck. He enjoyed his visits but he saw Simenon with candid eyes. ‘I’ve been to have lunch with Georges Simenon,’ he wrote later:
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Simenon likes luxuriousness and comfort; beautiful cars, beautiful fabrics, expensive things. He has a marked taste for everything that distinguishes the rich man from the premier verm. When he travels he stays in sumptuous palaces and dines in the most celebrated restaurants. But when he writes he sets his stories in seedy hotels jumping with fleas, in shady bars and in low dives. His heroes are the poor and starving, men who are dragged down by misery and become murderers or suicides.
It was not in La Rochelle that Simenon was going to find the originals of these heroes.
In June 1932, two months after moving into the new house, Simenon and Tigy left La Richardiere in Boule’s charge and set out on a journey across Africa. Simenon had by now made so much money from Maigret that he could afford to travel to remote parts of the world in comfort.* But he did not intend to spend his own money. The trip would be paid for by journalism.
Simenon and Tigy sailed from Marseille to Alexandria and then flew from Cairo by Imperial Airways via Wadi Haifa to the southern Sudan and the border of the Belgian Congo. It was the first time Simenon had left Europe. In the Sudan they bought an old Fiat and drove on uncertain roads to Stanleyville. Then began the long descent of the Congo river to the port of Matadi, where Georges’s brother Christian occupied a senior position in the port administration. Christian was by this time married to a girl from Liege, Blanche Binet. They had married in 1928, had left shortly afterwards for the Congo, and Blanche had given birth to a son, ‘Georget’, named after Georges, in February 1932, seven months before the arrival in Matadi of Tigy and Simenon. The West African climate was so unhealthy that it was not long before
* Following the bal anthropometrique in February 1931, Fayard had published a total of eleven ‘Maigrets’ by the end of the year. Before setting out Simenon supplied them with six more unpublished titles. The ‘Maigrets’ had been such an enormous success that they were already being filmed. Jean Renoir had pursued Simenon across France to sign the first film contract for La nuit du carrefour, and had eventually caught up with him where the Ostrogoth was moored in the port of Ouistreham in October 1931. Simenon himself tried to film La tete d’un homme in the basement of the Hotel Carlton on the Champs-Elysees, but abandoned the project abruptly just before leaving for Africa.
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Christian and Blanche sent little Georget back to Liege, where he was brought up by his doting grandmother.
At the time Citroen cars had organised an African rally and publicised it with a film called L’Afrique vous parle — ‘Africa is talking to you!’ When Simenon returned he subtitled his series of articles for the magazine Voila! ‘I’Afrique vous parle: elle vous dit merde ’. In years to come he was to recount many times how he had always seen through colonialism, and even before his journey through Africa had been a resolute opponent of it. In fact what he wrote at the time in Voila! and in the several novels which were based on his experience was both more complicated and more original. He calculated the cost of a colonial railway as ‘one dead black man every sleeper and one dead white man every kilometre’. He came across one of these black men himself, a man who was still alive but who was about to die. He had been working in a construction gang on the Sudanese-Congo border and earlier in the day an enormous boulder had crushed his leg. The nearest doctor was 150 miles away and there was no means of reaching help. The black man was doomed to die of tetanus before anything could be done for him and so his friends were going to finish him off and eat him that night.
Simenon took these horrors in his stride. He was chiefly irritated by the prevailing ‘exotic’ approach to Africa and decided that it was a place where people were, essentially, much the same as anywhere else in the world. He was unreceptive to any suggestion that a different history, a different language, a different culture or climate, might make people different. He was more interested in noting the similarities between peoples. It was an essential part of his personal philosophy that ‘ Vhomme nu was always the same. In Africa his conclusion was that colonialism was a fraud and that it would have been better to leave the people of Africa in peace than to make any attempt to introduce education or medical care or democratic government. Civilisation was for Africa a mistake. Describing the tragi-comedy of the building of the colonial railway whose eventual purpose was a mystery, Simenon concluded:
The cotton crop had failed, coffee was being sold at a loss,
nobody wanted to buy rubber, the tourists would find nothing
to see, and the Africans could not afford the price of a railway
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ticket. That left just Africa itself, laughing as it watched the human insects running round in circles until they died . . .
, When he returned from Africa Simenon wrote that he hated it:
When you are there you sweat, you groan, you drag yourself around and you end by hating everyone including yourself. You swear you’ll never go back, and then as soon as you reach France you find nostalgia creeping in.
As for colonialism, Simenon’s chief objection to it, at the time, was for the effect it had on the white colonials. He was contemptuous of the easy life they led and the airs they gave themselves. He did not spare his brother Christian, noting that his African nickname - ‘the white man with the loud voice’ - could be taken two ways. Georges was not impressed when Christian told him, proudly, that he was able to sell his empty tins of petits pois for the same price he had paid for them when they were full, because the Africans needed the metal to make into ornamental souvenirs. At times Simenon’s African journalism and novels read like an attempt to put Christian in his place. His brother may have gone out to the Congo and done rather well for himself, he seems to be saying, but this was what his life was really like. That at least is how Henriette must have read them back in Liege.
Simenon and Tigy’s trip to Africa lasted three months. They returned by sea from Matadi along the West Coast. They took a French boat heading for Bordeaux and calling on the way at French colonial ports such as Port-Gentil and Libreville. It was in a hotel in Libreville that Simenon finally found the material for his first ‘exotic’ novel, Le coup de lune (Tropic Moon).
On his return to France Simenon installed a punchbag at La Richardiere, finding, perhaps, as is suggested by the photographs taken at that time, that he had put on weight. The 1930s were the only time in his life when he did put on weight. He was eating well, staying in expensive hotels and surrounding himself with luxuries. It was a period when memories of his childhood and family battle-cry ‘ J’aifaim ’ faded a little and were replaced by the motto ‘I’m full’, meaning ‘I’m happy’. His other innovation on returning from Africa was to construct a reed-hut in the park of
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La Richardiere. He wanted it to be an authentic African hut so he indented, in the best colonial style, for a platoon of native troops from a colonial regiment and set them to work cutting reeds, chopping wood and binding the wood together with wire. The men had almost forgotten how to build a hut, and since Simenon did not feel at ease in the colonial role he soon asked Boule to serve the soldiers with drinks (it was a hot day), and then more drinks. Before too long the soldiers had become so drunk that they were incapable of continuing work. They passed out or became unmanageable and before the day was out a second detachment of colonial troops had to be summoned to overpower the first detachment and return it to barracks. The hut was never finished.
Simenon’s impressions of Africa, set out in Voila! and his subsequent books, were resented in official circles, and when he tried to revisit the French colonies in 1936 he was refused a visa. He gave a dramatised account of this refusal in 1976, saying that he had been sitting in the Cafe Maurice in Porquerolles with some friends one evening, discussing his imminent departure, when from behind him a voice had boomed out a prohibition, and turning he had seen a man in shirtsleeves who identified himself as Pierre Cot, the minister of the interior. Pierre Cot was actually the junior minister for air at that time, but the refusal of a visa was real enough.
Simenon went on one other long tour while living at La Richardiere. In 1933 he and Tigy set off across Europe, again charging part of their costs to magazines. They first headed for Berlin, where they stayed at the Hotel Adlon and where Simenon found himself in the lift with Hitler. He then watched Hitler in friendly conversation with the Kaiserin Herminie, the second wife of the last Kaiser. Simenon noted that Hitler was an ordinary looking little man and a much less impressive sight than the cossetted Prussian army officers he had encountered in the streets of Liege. During this visit Simenon was contacted by the Communists, who told him that they had been able to bug Nazi headquarters and knew that the Nazis were about to commit a political outrage but did not know precisely what it would be. He wired a story to Paris-Soir s foreign desk on the impending ‘coup de force , but the newspaper’s foreign desk spiked it. Forty-eight hours later the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag building in Berlin
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and managed to throw the blame for this shocking event on to the Communists. Shortly after that Hitler came to power.
Simenon and Tigy continued their journey to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania. In Vilnius he met one of his mother’s former lodgers and found to his amusement that she had called her son ‘Christian’, apparently after his brother. He entitled his series of articles about Eastern Europe for Le Jour ‘Peuples qui ont faint’. After travelling through Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, Simenon’s conclusion, emphasised in his ominous title, was that there was trouble ahead for Europe. But the crowning journalistic achievement of the journey was an interview he managed to secure with a man who was a specialist on trouble in Europe and who was generally unavailable for interview. In June the Simenons reached Istanbul and the special correspondent of Paris-Soir applied for permission to meet Trotsky.
In 1933 it was extremely difficult to gain access to the former Soviet leader, who was in exile and in fear of his life. He was living on the island of Prinkipo, off Constantinople, when Simenon wrote to him and succeeded in getting permission to call. This was a genuine journalistic ‘scoop’. Simenon took the boat out to Prinkipo one hot afternoon. Having crossed the police barricade and entered the walled enclosure surrounding Trotsky’s villa he was greeted by Trotsky’s secretary. ‘The secretary was not Russian. He was a young man from the North, bounding with health, pink-cheeked and clear-eyed and he spoke French as though he had been born in Paris.’ The young man in question, unnamed in Simenon’s article for Paris-Soir, was called Rudolph Klement.
Klement had been born in Hamburg in 1910. He was a gifted linguist who had joined the Trotskyist movement in 1932 and been chosen as one of the exiled dictator’s bodyguard and secretariat. He learnt Russian in six months, he already spoke fluent German and French, and he arrived on the island of Prinkipo in April 1933, four weeks before the arrival of Simenon’s letter. The reason why Simenon was given the interview, where so many others had failed (although he did not realise it at the time), was partly because the arrival of Klement meant that Simenon’s questions and Trotsky’s answers could be typed up in French at once, and partly because Trotsky, having recently applied in great secrecy for a French visa, was anxious to gain a little favourable
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publicity in the French press. Prinkipo was too isolated and too close to the Soviet Union. The Turkish authorities were not able to give Trotsky all the assurances he needed about his safety, and his presence on the island was widely known. The time had come to move on and Trotsky’s idea was to go into hiding in France. He knew that if the French government allowed him in they would make a serious effort to keep his presence a secret and to protect him.
Simenon took a photograph of the wandering revolutionary seated at his desk and noted that he had been reading Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit which had profoundly troubled him. Simenon asked Trotsky only three questions, which had had to be submitted in writing in advance as the great man had been too frequently misquoted in the press to agree to any other method. The questions concerned the role of race in human evolution, the historical role of dictatorships and the necessity of violent change in the march of progress. Trotsky used these questions to restate his ideas on Hitler, National Socialism, the threat of war, the fate of Europe and the future of nation states - all pitched for a popular readership. When Simenon walked into Trotsky’s study he was handed a typed copy of the answers to his three questions, in French, which he had to sign. He was allowed to remove a second copy, and was also allowed one or two supplementary questions.
Simenon’s interview was published in Paris-Soir on 16 June 1933, and in July Trotsky received his French visa and Rudolph Klement accompanied him to Paris. They set up house in a villa called ‘Ker Monique’ in Barbizon, and for nearly a year Trotsky was able to live quietly in this village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. Klement would drive into Paris to the central post office in the rue du Louvre to collect the letters which had been sent poste restante. One night in April 1934 he was stopped by the gendarmes because his lights were not working properly. His papers were not in order either. Klement was arrested, the presence of Trotsky was discovered, the press were informed and L’Humanite, the Communist Party newspaper, led a violent press campaign for his immediate expulsion. In June 1935 Trotsky was expelled. Klement remained, in fear and in hiding, knowing that from now on he was a target for the liquidators of the NKVD. In due course a headless body was pulled from the Seine which was almost certainly his. That was in August 1938. Klement had been
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working in two small rooms, one in the rue Notre Dame-desChamps and the other in the passage de Vanves, where he was sheltered by a future detective-story writer, Leo Malet. The police never established who killed Rudolph Klement but it is known that a man called ‘Jacques Mornard’, a mysterious Trotskyist sympathiser, arrived in Paris early in July, disappeared, ostensibly to Belgium, in mid-July, and reappeared one month later to be present at the founding conference of the 4th International. Klement had been preparing this conference at the time of his disappearance on 14 July. Just before his disappearance his briefcase containing confidential papers about the conference was stolen on the Metro. ‘Jacques Mornard’ made many friends among the Trotskyists at the 4th International and won their confidence sufficiently to gain an introduction to Trotsky himself three years later, in Mexico City, by which time he was known as ‘Raimond Mercader’ and armed with an ice-pick.
Simenon never realised the part his ‘scoop’ may have played in the murder of Rudolph Klement and the assassination of Trotsky. The nearest he came to the political underworld was when he agreed to investigate the ‘Stavisky affair’ for Paris-Soir, Marianne and L’Excelsior from January to April 1934. This major financial scandal led to the downfall of Daladier’s government, several members of which were suspected of having profited from it, and also led to serious political disorders in central Paris and to an attack on the Chambre des Deputes by a royalist mob. Simenon’s attempts to throw light on the affair were not very impressive as examples of investigative journalism (this did not stop him from describing them later as an ‘essential’ part of the enquiry), but they were more impressive as background research for an eventual political novel. He started his investigation in a way no reporter would, sitting in a cafe offering to pay for information. Later he claimed that a senior police officer stuck a gun in his ribs and warned him off, and that he responded by sticking his own gun into the policeman’s ribs and refusing to be warned. He eventually wrote eleven articles in Paris-Soir which drew the readers’ attention to a rich cast of characters but took the search for the facts no further.
On returning from his European tour Simenon told Fayard that in future he would be writing no more about his famous and
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extremely popular detective. He was becoming tired of the jokes in Le Canard Enchaine ( £ M. Georges Simenon makes his living by killing someone every month and then discovering the murderer ) and he wanted to win a reputation as a serious novelist. From now on he would write novels. He had in fact already published two titles with Fayard, Le relais d’Alsace (The Man from Everywhere) and Le passager du ‘Polarlys’ (The Mystery of the ‘Polarlys’), but though neither contained Maigret both were essentially detective stories about theft and murder. Just as Maigret appeared in several books before the launching of the Maigret series, so Simenon continued to write detective stories while attempting to escape from the identity of being the man who wrote Maigret stories. But by June 1933 Simenon had also written three genuine romans durs, La maison du canal (The House by the Canal), Les fiangailles de M. Hire (Mr Hire’s Engagement) and Le coup de lune.
When Simenon told Fayard that Maigret was in retirement the publisher could hardly believe his ears, and this time decided to exert himself. First this lucrative but tiresome author had abandoned the pulp novels which were so profitable; now he intended to abandon the ‘Maigrets’ which had replaced them. Fortunately Fayard had him under contract to deliver seven more ‘pulps’ and two ‘Maigrets’, and now he insisted that Simenon fulfil these contracts. It was a very expensive mistake. Fayard had never drawn up a contract with options on future romans durs, but was publishing them as they came along. Simenon was therefore free to take these elsewhere. He was so irritated by Fayard’s insistence on enforcing the pulp contract that he decided to find another publisher, and it was at just that moment that Gaston Gallimard, owner of the most prestigious publishing house in France, decided to add Simenon to his list.
Gallimard invited Simenon to his office and the interview that followed, as recounted by Simenon to Fenton Bresler, however implausible, has become famous. Gallimard having secured Simenon’s agreement in principle suggested that they discuss the terms of the contract over a good lunch on another occasion. Simenon replied:
‘Listen, Monsieur Gallimard. In the first place we will never
have lunch together. I detest these business lunches where one
talks about everything except business, and eventually has to
DEA TH OF A PL A YBOY
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make another appointment for a second such lunch. We will discuss the contract in your office with your secretary taking notes, the door shut and the telephone off the hook, and we will reach an agreement in less than half an hour. And furthermore I will never call you “Gaston” as everyone else here seems to do, and please stop calling me u cher ami ” because I also detest expressions of that sort. Tell me the time and the day, I will return to your office, the contract will last one year and when the time comes to renew it you will in future come to my house.’
The conditions of the contract which was eventually signed were exceptionally favourable to the author. Simenon would provide six books a year at regular intervals and author and publisher would split the gross profits 50:50. Simenon would be involved in the calculation of gross profits. Gallimard could take it or leave it. He took it. It was a bolder decision than has been generally recognised and a tribute to Gaston Gallimard’s ability. Because although he was acquiring a best-selling author, Simenon was only a best-seller of ‘pulps’ and ‘Maigrets’. In backing him as a major producer of quality general fiction, Gallimard was backing his own judgment.
The contract, signed in October 1933, did not take effect until 1934. When he signed, Simenon had a stock of six unpublished romans completed, of which only two were destined for Fayard. He therefore started his contract with four books in hand, which was just as well, because his life was about to enter a turbulent period, and from 1934 to 1936 he was going to write an average of fewer than four books a year, a situation which meant that in 1937 he was facing the possibility of an unprecedented situation, an inability to supply his publisher with the number of titles for which he was contracted. Since Gallimard was sending him regular advances of 50,000 francs, since he was earning in the region of 1 million francs a year, and since he was spending the money like water, something had to be done to redress the situation.
The trouble had started in March 1934 when Simenon and Tigy had to face the fact that the lease to La Richardiere was up and the owner still refused to sell them the property. They had spent a lot of money on the house and had always hoped that they would eventually be able to buy it. Although they had only a two-year
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lease the owner had given them the impression that anything might be possible in due course. Instead they found that not only would he not sell them the property, he would not even renew the lease. Homeless, they went to Porquerolles, where Simenon chartered a large sailing boat for a year and they spent much of that summer cruising the Mediterranean. Then, in September, Simenon took the lease of a chateau in the forest of Orleans called the Chateau de la Cour-Dieu, near Ingrannes. It was a former Cistercian abbey and the property included 10,000 hectares of private hunting. At Cour-Dieu, Simenon only once organised a hunt during which he succeeded in wounding a stag, which he was subsequently obliged to finish off. He said later that it was the last time he picked up a shotgun. And Tigy did not like the forest. It depressed her. Their life together had lost much of its point with the departure from La Richardiere. Simenon was no longer as emotionally dependent on her as he had been at first. He no longer needed a ball and chain in order to prevent himself from committing some serious betise.
Simenon never accepted that he was a un obsede sexuel, a sexual maniac. He considered his sexual appetite entirely normal; what was unusual was the extent to which he was successful in gratifying it. When living in Paris he was frequently ‘obliged’ to lie with four different women in the same day. In Un homme comme un autre he explained his constant need for sexual congress by:
my extreme curiosity and also the need I had for a form of contact which only sexual relations could satisfy . . . Women have always been exceptional people for me whom I have vainly tried to understand. It has been a lifelong, ceaseless quest. And how could I have created dozens, perhaps hundreds, of female characters in my novels if I had not experienced these adventures which lasted for two hours or ten minutes?
He made love for the same reason that he wrote: because he had an unsatisfied hunger for human contact. He described this as ‘a devouring hunger for women’ and said that when he was a young man it was so acute that he literally suffered physical pain at the thought that there would be so many women who would escape him. He did his best to ensure that this number should be as small
as possible and during the course of his life had sex with far more women than he could subsequently remember. He finally estimated that the total was 10,000; his second wife said that it was 1200. But however many it was, it is possible to meet and to know something of many of his partners even today because he described them again and again in his novels.
The way in which Simenon relied on his casual acquaintances to provide characters for his fiction is shown by the story of Pilar, the Spanish nursemaid whom he met and seduced on New Year’s Day 1923, when he was alone in Paris. The unadorned story was retold in Les anneaux de Bicetre (The Patient), published in 1962; earlier a more elaborate and fictionalised version had been given in Le passage de la ligne, published in 1958. But Pilar is not alone. Scores of similar girls appear in his work. Twelve of his characters are called ‘Lili’, eight are called ‘Lola’, twelve are called ‘Lea’. Lea, typically, is young, unmarried, sometimes a prostitute or hostess (‘ entraineuse’) in a bar, sometimes the mistress of one of the principal characters, once a ‘ strip-teaseuse’, once a 60-year-old ‘clocharde ’. She was in origin probably a girl whom Simenon met one day when he was drinking at the bar of La Coupole and whom he subsequently slept with, remembered and then brought back to life. No one, virtually no one, in Paris is called ‘Zulma’, but three characters in Simenon are called ‘Zulma’, two prostitutes and a typist. Zulma too, whoever she was, clearly left her impression. The names are repeated and so are the occupations; ‘ entraineuse’, "femme de chambre’, "bonne’, "bonne d’enfants’. "Serveuse de cafe was the first occupation of fifteen girls called ‘Julie’. ‘Germaine’ starts her journey through his fiction as a switchboard operator at Le Petit Parisien, the newspaper which brought the serialisation rights to several of his novels, and the name subsequently appears in twenty-seven books, ‘Germaine’ at one point achieving the position of "patronne de maison close’. Nursemaid, hat-check girl, seamstress, shop assistant, Celine, Irma, Sylvie, Jeanne. Whether they were ‘Parisiennes of a certain age . . . their bodies creamier and more desirable . . . who had seen a lot, heard a lot, learnt a lot but who instead of losing their relish for life threw themselves into it with greater vigour’; or whether they were "professionnelles de passage’, who switched to using "tu when they began to undress, a fine point of etiquette, who knew the best gossip about their customers, the town’s prominent citizens,
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and how precisely to establish correct relations with the local police commissaire, they served their creator’s purposes equally well.
In the Maigret books these girls are sometimes treated tragically; the policeman notes the swift progression of the newly arrived country girl from hotel maid, to dancer in a cheap cabaret, to street-walker, a process that, with the assistance of a plausible enough young man, could be effected in a few weeks. But ‘Maigret’ was not Simenon. Maigret was a compassionate observer of society; Simenon was an observant participant. Maigret expressed only part of his creator’s personality.
John Simenon considers that his father’s sexual vigour may have been a consequence of the family’s acute sense of smell and wonders whether, since it is impossible to develop the capacity for sexual desire if one lacks a sense of smell, a heightened sense of smell leads to a heightened level of desire. Was Georges Simenon fated all his life to be led by the nose? Certainly his earliest descriptions of sexual interest were linked to a sense of smell, notably the marketwomen described in the early teenage novel Jehan Pinaguet. But Simenon’s interest in sex started very young. He remembered his young aunts breast-feeding their children in the kitchen at the rue Puits-en-Sock and so made an association between sex and food which predated even his precocious interest in marketwomen. This fascination echoes through his fiction down the years. In Le petit saint (The Little Saint ) the mother of the hero, when he is a little boy, is a sluttish, easygoing, marketwoman, a tender mother as well as being an occasional prostitute, who bends low and ‘generously displays her breasts’ every time she wants a male neighbour to help her carry a tub of hot water up the stairs. And the neighbour is glad to do so. The trick works. He never says no. In the same book Loulou, a plump masseuse, picks up a young artist outside a stationery shop near the Palais Royal, takes him home and refuses to let him pay. In Dimanche (Sunday ) Emile, who is about to poison his wife, visits a prostitute in Cannes and is careless, and she complains because her bruises will show later in the day when she goes to the beach. In Les volets verts (The Heart of a Man) the drunken old actor, also called Emile, has the housemaid Camille, just after she has run his bath, while his wife is preoccupied with the child next door: “‘Lie down.” “Like this, right away?” “Like this, right away.” ’ These are
among the hundreds of incidents and casual conversations remembered by a writer who celebrated his appointment as the Marquis de Tracy’s secretary by visiting, for the first time, one of .the elegant prostitutes working outside the Madeleine, and who celebrated his last night as a bachelor with ‘ deux Hollandaises plantureuses’’ (two ample Dutch ladies) whom he found himself trapped between on a bench at the Lapin Agile: ‘the room was so crowded that I found I was able to slip my hands shamelessly beneath their dresses, which only made them laugh even more. ’
Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically. Simenon had sex every day and every few months indulged in a frenzied orgy of work. As time passed his outbreaks of work became slightly less frequent, but he maintained his sexual discipline unflinchingly, as though it were a hygienic necessity. For most people, as Bernard Pivot has observed, sex is a distraction from work, but Simenon ‘ baisait comme il respirait ’. In his case, work was a distraction from sex. Several months would pass and one day he would withdraw into himself, and write a novel with the same sudden, violent energy with which he made love, his books frequently ending in a psychic explosion - a murder, a suicide or some other doom. When the book was finished he would return to the sexual attack. He was himself again.
Tigy never understood this side of her husband’s nature. Although she herself was not particularly interested in sex she remained conventionally jealous, and Simenon felt obliged to conceal his activities. He later claimed that she repeatedly threatened to kill herself if he were ever unfaithful to her, but it seems that this was more a form of words than a serious threat and that Simenon later exaggerated its importance in order to justify his own position. In any event, since he was unfaithful to her several times a week, and sometimes several times a day, he was finding married life a bit of a strain, and matters were not helped by the fact that they had no children. The loss of La Richardiere meant that they now had no home to raise a family in.
In order to distract himself from these problems Simenon resumed a way of life which interfered with his writing. In January 1935 he and Tigy set out on a world tour which lasted over eight months and during which Simenon produced only one novel, Ceux de la soif, during a two-month pause in Tahiti. He claimed, again to Fenton Bresler, that when passing through
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