Cher Monsieur, I am staying here in Bourgesfor a while. The main bookshop has an announcement of a new novel from you early next month and I hope all is well with you. My parents are well and send you their best wishes. I would be delighted to get some news of you. Write to the concierge of my hotel, without mentioning my name either on the envelope or in the letter. Hoping to hear from you . . . Manfred Keyserling (Untersturmfuhrer) (2nd Lieutenant)
Letter to Simenon, 30 October 1940
In August 1939 Simenon and Tigy were in Porquerolles entertaining a friend from Germany, the Graf Hermann von Keyserling, the philosopher and man of letters who had been a warm admirer of Simenon’s work for some years and who had first written to him in 1936 and invited him in irresistible style to stay. (‘I hope you are not anti-alcoholic. I need an atmosphere of excess in order to escape from my inhibitions although I am normally of temperate habits.’) It was Keyserling who had dubbed Simenon ‘an idiot genius’, a label of which the still young writer was extremely proud. But on 23 August the local paper announced the NaziSoviet pact, and on 26 August France began a general mobilisation. Keyserling had to be packed off home quickly, before the trains were cancelled. He would probably have travelled via Nice and Italy rather than undertake the long journey across the length of France. A week later, on 1 September, with the news of
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Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Simenon and Tigy closed the house and, with Boule and their son Marc, who had been born in April, left Porquerolles for what was to be the last time as a family * although none of them could have known it then.
Marc’s birth had been preceded by a trek first across France and then into Belgium. At a time when husbands are generally advised to make sure their wives are resting Simenon had decided that since Tigy was 39, and even though she was eight months pregnant, and even though war had been declared, she should have the best advice, and they would go to Strasbourg so that she could be ‘ suivie by Professor Lucien Pautrier, a distinguished gynaecologist who was also a family friend. (Simenon had dedicated his major work, Le testament Donadieu, to Pautrier in 1936.) Simenon was in fact obsessed with the possibility that the baby would not be healthy. Shortly after they had settled in the Chateau de Scarrachbergheim - where Simenon wrote Malempin (The Family Lie), a novel about a doctor’s concern for his invalid son - there was a border alert and Alsace became a restricted area. Professor Pautrier advised the couple to head for Brussels where he had a trusted colleague. Belgium had the advantages of being both a neutral country and a native land. When Marc was born, on 19 April, Simenon was so worried that at the crucial moment he had to leave the hospital to be sick. He wrote later that he could not even remember whether or not his mother had come from Liege to see her splendid new grandchild, although he had a vivid memory of the arrival of Tigy’s mother. Shortly after the birth they returned to Nieul where Marc was christened. There was a big party. The child’s godfather was Professor Pautrier, who came all the way from Strasbourg. Vlaminck came down from Paris, but since both he and his wife were Protestants the godmother was their daughter Edwige, known as ‘ L’Amazone ’. Forty people sat down to lunch and Simenon ordered enough champagne to see him through the party and the next two years. He said later that he had arranged for all his children to be baptised so that if they grew up to marry Catholics none of them would have to undergo Tigy’s ordeal of catechism, followed by baptism, confession and Communion all in one day. In Simenon’s memory the day was dominated by Vlaminck, ‘a sort of Gargantua in riding breeches and boots, with a red scarf wrapped round his neck, his ringing voice and categorical statements betraying his
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presence wherever he went in the garden’. It was to be the last party before the war. On 3 September at 10 a.m. Simenon, sitting in a cafe in La Rochelle with his new secretary, a striking-looking girl called Anne de Bretagne (Boule called her ‘la Bretonne), heard the news of the French and British declaration of war over the cafe radio. That night he opened several more bottles of champagne ‘to chase away dark thoughts’.
Simenon played virtually no part at all in the Second World War yet it had a profound effect on his life. When war broke out he and Tigy were well placed. The decision to abandon Paris for the second time had paid off. They were both happy with their life in the country near La Rochelle. His work was selling as well as ever and was attracting more and more serious critical attention. Marc was nearly six months old, they had enough money to live on the scale that amused them, and Boule was present to cook, run the house and play her still undiscovered role in brightening up her master’s afternoons. But though very little that was really frightening or disagreeable occurred to Simenon during the war it nonetheless shattered his peace of mind. Afterwards, when it became possible for the Simenons to resume the life they had been leading in 1939, he decided instead to leave France, to leave Europe, and to start a new life in the United States.
In September 1939 Belgium remained neutral and there was, therefore, no general Belgian mobilisation. At first, during the eight months of the ‘phoney war’, life in the Vendee continued very much as before. It was only on 10 May 1940, when Germany attacked Holland, that the call for all Belgian reservists, including Simenon, came - needless to say far too late. At Nieul-sur-Mer it was another beautiful day. The radio reported that German tanks had passed through the Ardennes forest and entered southern Belgium. Then the massive artillery fort at Eben Emael, twenty miles north of Liege and a key point in Belgium’s defences, was attacked by German commandos and captured almost at once. After lunch Simenon and Tigy searched the house for his military belt and jacket, which he had not worn since leaving Liege in 1922. As they did so refugees were beginning to pour across the Belgian frontier into France. That evening Simenon set his alarm clock and telephoned for a taxi to take him early next morning to the railway station in La Rochelle. In the morning while he shaved
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Boule brought his usual enormous bowl of coffee in what she called his ‘chamber-pot’. Then he dressed himself in a uniform of his own invention, which included riding breeches and a kepi. It seemed to him that Tigy showed no particular emotion when he left; outwardly she remained as calm as ever. His own thoughts were chiefly for Marc.
There was nothing in Simenon that was attracted to the heroic. His experience as a child made him look on the martial simplicities as unconvincing. Perhaps it was as well, therefore, that his life as a soldier ended on the day it began. When his train reached the Gare Montparnasse he saw a notice instructing Belgian nationals returning for military duty to report first to their embassy, which was in the rue de Surene near the Madeleine. By the time Simenon arrived an enormous crowd of men - many, he noted, middleaged and pot-bellied — had gathered outside. Some had been there since the previous day. Simenon had a friend at the embassy and managed to pass a note through the gates. He was sent away for lunch and told to return later. He telephoned a friend of Tigy’s, Charley Delmas, wife of a La Rochelle notable, Franck Delmas, who would later die in a concentration camp, and she invited him to join her. He crossed the Seine and walked along the Quai d’Orsay to her apartment, feeling rather foolish in his tall Belgian kepi with its tassel and pompom. ‘He burst in,’ remembered Charley Delmas, ‘collapsed on the sofa, hid his face in his hands and sobbed, “Going to war isn’t funny, but I’ll have to do my duty with the rest. The worst thing is leaving my wife and son . . .’” After a delicious lunch, prepared by the maid, Simenon took what was to be his first and last military privilege and asked if he could stroke Mme Delmas’s legs before leaving. He thought it might be his final opportunity. She smiled and beckoned him to her on the sofa:
If I were to say that my interest was chaste no one would believe me, but it was the truth. My hand stopped at the top of her long silk stocking, at the point where I could feel her bare skin ... I got up, satisfied and probably blushing, and at the door we kissed each other goodbye on the cheeks. She was a tall young woman, a brunette, elegant and very beautiful . . . and I was very fond of her.
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Then he turned, straightened his shoulders and strode off to war.
But when Simenon got back to the embassy he found that the authorities had other plans for him. The roads to Belgium were already blocked with convoys of people fleeing south, it was impossible to send reservists up to their units. Instead the embassy wanted Simenon to become Commissioner for Belgian refugees. The French government had designated the La Rochelle area as the reception centre for all Belgian refugees and Simenon had excellent connections in the region. He was given full powers to requisition Belgian property and he had a blank cheque from the Belgian government to pay for any goods or services provided by the French authorities. He was told to take the first train back to La Rochelle and to start work the following day, by which time the prejet and the mayor would have been informed. He took the night train and walked into his house early on the morning of 12 May, twenty-four hours after he had left it. Only Boule was awake. Tigy had already put a large framed photograph of him on her bedside table, ‘as if I were already dead’. Shortly after his arrival the telephone rang. It was the local prefet telling him that four large Belgian fishing boats had broken through the boom into the port of La Rochelle; the crews spoke only Flemish, there were women and children on board, and they were refusing to leave. Simenon’s work had begun.
In Memoires intimes Simenon was to claim that over a period of five months he was responsible for 300,000 Belgian refugees, whereas the real total was probably 55,000 refugees in two months. In his ‘‘Compte-rendu de Mission, dated 17 August 1940, he estimated that the number of Belgian refugees in the department of the Charente-Inferieure was 18,000. But whatever the figure it was extremely hard work which by several accounts he accomplished effectively, doing everything possible until the job was finished and the refugees, following the armistice, had been sent back to their homes in Belgium. Simenon was a man of exceptional energy and considerable powers of organisation but some of his motivation for working with such devotion for the refugees may have come from a sense that he had benefited from an extraordinary stroke of luck. While thousands of his fellow Belgians were ordered into barracks outside Paris and thousands of others were killed or wounded or taken prisoner he, thanks to his official contacts, had been ordered home to his sanctuary in the
French countryside where he could expect to stay, feeding himself and his family and practising his profession for the duration of the war. He did not even have to experience the inconveniences and hazards of Teocode\ For the remainder of May and up to the armistice of 22 June the refugee trains succeeded each other at La Rochelle. Some of them had been moving for three weeks before reaching the city. Some had been machine-gunned or bombed and were crowded with wounded or dying people.
Assisted by the Belgian vice-consul, a French official, fifty Belgian soldiers and the local ‘Girl Guides’, Simenon set up a reception centre outside the station and a camp nearby where people could be lodged and fed. The wounded and pregnant had to be dispersed through the local hospitals. Many local volunteers, including Charley Delmas, offered their help. Simenon got to know the Rochelais notables better than in time of peace. One woman asked him only to quarter refugees of breeding in her house, another spent days on end peeling vegetables and serving soup in the circus tent which served as a kitchen. Simenon operated with a desk and telephone from a green-painted hut outside the camp gates. Many of the refugees arrived locked into their carriages and the symbol of Simenon’s authority was the pass key which enabled him to release them. Others arrived by car; one family used a hearse. One night a lorry arrived and without explanation dumped the bodies of five old men dressed in grey tunics. They were without papers, and since the autopsies showed that they had all died of natural causes he concluded that they were from a Belgian hospice and that the journey had simply proved too much for them. Simenon used his own car, a powerful model painted canary yellow and decorated with the prefers tricolour cockade, to move around the district. If the roof and bonnet were put to use he could carry up to twelve passengers. When there was nowhere else to place the refugees he would take them home to Nieul and they would sleep on the floor of the salon after Boule had fed them on bread and soup. Sometimes, if there was a refugee mother of young children, it was Boule who slept on the floor of the salon, much to her indignation. ‘I was not very charitable,’ she recalls today.
The refugees arrived in larger and larger numbers as the fighting drew closer to La Rochelle, and it was possible to follow the discouraging progress of the battle by asking where they had
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come from. Among the first arrivals was a community of 1200 Jewish diamond cutters from Antwerp, who were sent on to the port of Royan, at the mouth of the Gironde. La Rochelle was continually bombed by the Germans. Sometimes Simenon had to sleep on a bench at the station, sometimes he had to abandon the car and jump into a ditch. Occasionally among the flood of refugees he would recognise a friend from Liege, or Paris, for by the end no distinction was made in nationalities. The population of La Rochelle doubled from its original 50,000 as it was invaded by a mass of people who choked every road. They were exhausted, frightened, sometimes wounded; they included defeated soldiers, families still trying to transport all their belongings in a handcart and lone children separated from their parents; and they were all heading for Simenon’s camp because it was literally the end of the road, there was nowhere else to go.
Simenon guessed the news of the armistice on 22 June from the shouts and tears of joy that swept through the camp. The refugees were pleased because they thought that they would at last be allowed home. Eventually they were, but it meant that Simenon’s task started all over again. Working this time with Obersturmfiihrer Hartmann of the Feld-Kommandantur, Simenon went to Bordeaux to arrange for trains, provisions, medical supplies and escorts to be made available, and it was not until 12 August that the last train left and he could hand in the keys of the reception centre and resign his commission.
By this time the house in Nieul-sur-Mer had become a dangerous place to live. Hardly had the German bombardment of La Rochelle ceased than the British one started. A petrol refinery had been erected between the house and the military harbour of La Pallice 5 kilometres to the south. One night one of the petrol tanks was hit by a bomb and Simenon had to drive through a sheet of flame that had spread across the road, cutting him off from home. Fortunately the storage tanks nearest the house did not go up; they were only 100 metres from their boundary stream. Simenon and Tigy decided that they must try and find somewhere inland where they and Marc would be safe. There was already a German officer quartered in Nieul, and he was sleeping in Simenon’s study.
They moved three times during the war, but never very far from La Rochelle. In August they rented a farmhouse in the forest
of Vouvant. This was in the Vendee, fifty kilometres north-east of Nieul. Then, after a month, they were able to move to one wing of the Chateau de Terreneuve in the nearby town of Fontenay-le.Comte, where they were to remain for nearly two years. It was here, shortly after moving in, that Simenon received the discreet letter from Untersturmfiihrer Manfred Keyserling. Manfred was at the time attached to the Armistice Commission, working as an interpreter. He cannot remember receiving any response to his letter. In July 1942 they moved north again, to a more remote part of the Vendee, the hamlet of St Mesmin-le-Vieux, where they stayed until the liberation. Their own house at Nieul was requisitioned for the duration by the German army.
As aliens Simenon and Tigy were at first in some danger of being interned, but in the event it merely became necessary for them to report weekly to the local police station, a chore which after a time they were allowed to overlook. In each of their temporary houses Simenon spent much of the time cultivating his garden, but what had started as a refreshing distraction after the stale pleasures of Paris was now, literally, a way of life. The main daily problem for most people in France during the occupation was hunger and lack of fuel. The Simenons were perfectly placed to overcome both. Much of the day was spent in the ancient pursuits of the peasant:
I remembered the war of 1914, the successive years when I felt the continual pinch of hunger and the queues outside school buildings which had been converted into food distribution centres. In the playgrounds ‘la soupe populaire was poured into whatever vessel the people in the crowd held forward.
As early as 1939 Simenon started to dig up the flower beds in the garden at Nieul in order to sow peas and beans and plant potatoes and turnips. Each time they moved the work had to be started again. At Vouvant a vegetable garden already existed and there were fruit trees, but they did not stay there long enough to harvest anything. At the Chateau Terreneuve there was a park and they could keep chickens, geese, guinea fowl, a donkey for Marc, a goat and even cows. Bread, milk, butter and clothes were all rationed, so with their own vegetable garden, orchard, beehives and dairy they were in a strong position to barter. Before
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setting out across country in search of petrol, Simenon would put a sackful of live chickens into the boot of the car. Later, when the car was converted to run off charcoal, the charcoal stove which drove it occupied most of the boot.
Sometimes Simenon’s discoveries about country life were belated. He was surprised to learn, for instance, that a cow gives milk only for a certain number of months after calving. Then he was delighted to hear that one could get round this problem by keeping a second cow and putting it to the bull after an appropriate interval. He ended up with three cows and produced so much butter and milk, as well as meat, that he was able to supply friends in Paris with many of their needs. After a time he felt capable of raising a pig and ended by raising two pigs a year, weighing 200 kilograms each. He was by his own account a success as a peasant farmer and his greatest triumph occurred when the local corn merchant, a figure of some importance, called on him to ask if it was true that he had succeeded in raising aubergines despite the unsuitability of the local climate and soil. It was true, and the novelist was respectfully invited to inspect the corn merchant’s garden and advise his gardener. Market days would be spent gossiping over several glasses of wine. He called the marketwomen by their names and the men by their Christian names and became a member of the select group who knew which stream could produce 200 crayfish in a single night and where partridges might be trapped. The partridges, too, went to Paris when Boule started to complain that she no longer knew what to do with them in the kitchen.
Apart from the struggle to provide food Simenon’s account of country life during the occupation is notably undramatic. In the bars of Fontenay in 1941 the customers, hunched over their petits blancs or pastis, were not apparently discussing the German army’s advance on Moscow, or the significance of Pearl Harbor, but the revenge some village boys had taken on a prosperous farmer who was in the habit of inviting them to lower their trousers. They had attacked him en masse , stripped him, and tarred and feathered his bottom; the local doctor had had to be called in to set him to rights. The farmer made no complaint to the police. The older generation won less glory after carrying out a multiple assault on an elderly and drunken Polish woman. She normally kept open house and permitted a wide range of familiar gestures but the rule
was one at a time. Simenon saw several of his drinking companions disappear to the district court and thence to prison after a night of excessive disorder. Apart from these excitements there .were the usual highlights of the rural calendar, including a monthly horse fair to which Simenon would take Marc whenever he could.
His happiest memories of this period were all of Marc. If Simenon was away for the day it was Marc he looked for first on his return as he leaned out of the railway carriage window. On Sundays he and the little boy would walk into Fontenay, crossing the bridge over the river to buy the newspapers and a picture book. They would go on to the Cafe du Pont-Neuf where Marc would sit on the high bench swinging his legs beneath the marbletopped table, while his father sipped a petit blanc and he examined the world of waiters dressed in long white aprons that was reflected in the mirrors that lined the walls. On Friday 2 May 1941 Simenon wrote an account of how he had spent the previous day, a public holiday, with his son. ‘Yesterday we had such a day as one remembers for the rest of one’s life.’ It had been an idyll. ‘On other mornings the sky was as beautiful, on other evenings the sunset was as splendid. But yesterday, from dawn onwards, was a day which exemplified spring, it was as though it was the spring of your childhood.’ A few days earlier Tigy had cut Marc’s hair and put a few locks into tissue paper:
Together we two set out, just us two, your hand in mine, along the alley beneath the chestnut trees which were in flower. Magpies were nesting, the cows were in the meadow; the mare and the donkey watched our progress . . .You would not have been surprised if the donkey had lifted its head as we passed and said ‘Good-morning, Marc!’
Throughout that day Simenon examined the world with the eyes of a 2-year-old child. When they reached the town a chattering band of boys and girls were setting out on bicycles for a day in the country. That morning Marshal Petain had made a speech on the radio to the workers of France declaring that in future Mayday would be a symbol of ‘union and friendship’ rather than ‘division
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and hatred’ and assuring his audience that all was right with the world. In the evening they saw the cyclists return decked with flowers, like good members of the republic of ‘ travail, famille, patrie. ’ Earlier, in the afternoon, father and son had returned to the house and after lunch had fallen asleep with Tigy, all in the same sun-filled room, listening to the cries of the guinea fowl. There had been German soldiers in Fontenay, hundreds of them ‘in their grey uniforms crowding the pavements’. They had even come into the park of the chateau and taken photographs of the house. German soldiers in Fontenay were a rarity. Their camp was on a plateau beyond the town and apart frorp sentries outside the military headquarters they were seldom seen. In his memory of the day’s happiness Simenon suppressed the soldiers, overlooking them just as his son would. The intensity of his pleasure in the day partly stemmed from his own conviction that he would soon be dead.
One day some months earlier, while cutting wood with Marc in the grounds of the chateau, Simenon had received a painful stab in the chest from a branch which sprang back at him. He decided that it would be sensible to have an x-ray in case he had broken a rib. The radiologist he consulted in Fontenay told him that his ribs were fine but that his heart was in an advanced state of decay, ‘enlarged and worn out’, and that he had at most two years to live. Simenon limped home in a state of shock. He had been told to give up drink, sex, exercise, hard work and much of his food. If he followed these instructions he might last the full two years. He left the doctor’s consulting room in despair. Simenon’s reaction, in December 1940, was to sit down and write a volume of memoirs that was eventually published in 1945 under the title Je me souviens, but which he later suppressed for many years and which has never been translated into English.
The picture of Simenon’s war as presented in Je me souviens and later expanded in Memoires intimes is of a man who, while living in bucolic retirement and struggling to make ends meet, is first placed under sentence of death for two years by an incompetent or possibly malicious doctor, and then threatened with ‘Night and Fog’ (the concentration camp) by a malicious inspector from the Commissariat-General aux Questions Juives; finally he is hunted
by a Gestapo torturer in the last moments of the occupation. The facts were rather different.
When Simenon returned to his house after the consultation to give the news to Tigy and Boule, Tigy — as always - remained calm, apart from ‘going rigid’, which was her way of expressing her feelings. Boule burst into tears. Tigy in fact found the news almost incredible. Her husband after all was in visibly good health. He took exercise, he was physically vigorous, he lived for much of the time in the open air, war-time food restrictions were if anything to his advantage. She went to see the radiologist herself and he told her that there must have been a misunderstanding and that there was nothing very seriously wrong; her husband’s health gave no particular cause for alarm. Simenon refused to be reassured and his own doctor, who was one of his regular bridge partners at the Cafe du Pont-Neuf, urged him to go to Paris to get a second opinion from a specialist. Simenon claimed that this was impossible because as an alien he would not be given a permit to travel to Paris. Tigy pointed out later that such permits were not needed unless one wanted to go to the coast. Eventually Simenon was persuaded to go to Paris to see the country’s leading heart specialist. He dated the visit February 1944, but long before that he had resumed a normal, vigorous life. The visit to the radiologist had been in the autumn of 1940. He started Je me souviens that December and put it aside in June of the following year. In the twelve months that followed the x-ray and ‘death sentence’ he wrote an autobiography, seven novels and five short stories. Not only was he working at twice his usual rate throughout 1941, but he seems to have been smoking his pipe while he was writing Je me souviens, drinking moderately, and even starting an affair with a shopkeeper in Fontenay-le-Comte. And in May 1941 he was reported to have been present at a large banquet in Paris, which suggests that he was by then not only working but eating and travelling freely without any need for a permit. Simenon’s fear of illness was genuine, but it does not seem to have lasted nearly as long as he later claimed, and it seems to have owed as much to his own hypochondria as to a misdiagnosis. The hypochondria was made worse by his memories of his father’s death - at the same age and from the same condition - and by memories of war. The events had coincided once; now he convinced himself that they would do so again.
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Je me souviens was, according to its author, written for Marc, so that on growing up as a fatherless child he would know something of his family history. But Simenon was writing under the stress of fear - fear of illness and of war — and the number of inaccuracies which the book contains about his family story suggests that a more accurate title would have been Je ne me souviens pas. It is in this book that the story first appears of the Simenons’ Breton descent, a story the writer attributed to ‘a family legend’. Before writing a word of the book Simenon drew a family tree. It is here, where his pen first touched the paper, that the fiction began.
‘The Pedigree of Marc Simenon,’ reads the caption ‘by his father’. And on the facing page is a note: ‘The Simenon family since the installation in Vlijtingen, Limbourg, of a Simenon who came from Nantes and who, wounded during the campaign in Russia, married the daughter of a Limbourg farmer.’ The accompanying plan suggests that Simenon did not know the year of his father’s birth, did not know the year of his grandfather’s birth or the year in which he had died, and did not know either the name or the year of birth of his great-grandfather. Nor did he know the correct number of his grandmother’s children; furthermore there are two question marks too many for the uncles or aunts who died in infancy, thus increasing the total to the apocryphal thirteen. The facts were that Simenon’s grandfather, Chretien, the hatter who had been christened Christiaan, had been born in Vlijtingen in 1841. Chretien’s father, Lambert, identified as ‘Simenon of Vlijtingen’ on the novelist’s chart, had been born in Vlijtingen in 1809 (not 1830), and his father, also called Lambert - ‘Simenon the First of Nantes’ on the chart - had been born in Vlijtingen in 1774. This was the only Simenon in the direct line who according to the family legend, could have been ‘a Napoleonic soldier’. But since grandfather Chretien was born in 1841 he would have known and remembered his grandmother, Ida Vanherft, who died in Vlijtingen in 1849, and he would have known that his grandfather was not a Napoleonic soldier but was Lambert Simenon of Vlijtingen, son of Lambert Simenon of Riemst and father of Lambert Simenon of Vlijtingen. So grandfather Christiaan, the son of an illiterate labourer from Vlijtingen, latterly Chretien, the hatter of the rue Puits-en-Sock, Outremeuse, may have deliberately altered his ancestry and exer
cised an early family talent for fiction. Or his grandson, Georges, a novelist, may have invented the whole story to amuse Marc, and to improve the plot of Je me souviens .*
As for the life of bucolic retirement, there is evidence to suggest that although Simenon’s main interests during the war, as before and after it, remained in his work, he was in constant touch with life in Paris, either making or receiving several visits. When he wrote about the war in Je me souviens it was in a curiously detached way. ‘Will America come to Europe?’ he wrote on 2 May 1941. ‘There is talk of America entering the war. Yesterday the English were in Greece, today the Germans drove them out and took their place. The Japanese are in China and the Australians are in Egypt. ’ These distant events, viewed from the leafy sanctuaries of the Vendee, take on a dreamlike quality in Simenon’s account. Whereas in his lengthy correspondence with friends such as Andre Gide, Simenon was his normal wideawake self.
In May 1941 Gaston Gallimard’s son Claude, who was living in Paris but who had been given a laissez-passer by the Germans to travel in the Vichy Zone, called on Simenon at Fontenay-leComte, just as he would have been obliged to do in peace-time under the terms of their contract. Gallimard was on his way to visit Andre Gide, who was living on the Cote d’Azur, and he offered to take a copy of the first eleven chapters of Je me souviens with him for Gide’s inspection. Gide had become the most powerful advocate of the serious merits of Simenon’s work, and the two had been in regular correspondence since December 1938. One year later Simenon wrote to Gide offering him his best wishes for 1940: ‘I expect Belgium to call me up any day . . . but I feel no need to anticipate heroism.’ He added that he had written three novels since the outbreak of war:
In a world that seems to be on the point of collapse I attach
myself to the likes of II pleut, bergere . . . And I admit with
* In the conditions of 1940 Simenon, living on sufferance as a registered alien, may also have wished that he was of Breton descent. In L’Ane-Rouge he had already transferred whole portions of his Liege childhood to the Breton port of Nantes, and later he noted that there was a common Breton surname, ‘Simonon’.
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some shame that I am more concerned about your reactions to these books than I am about the war news ... To keep the family pot on the boil I thought of writing some more ‘Maigrets’. What do you think?
Gide chose to reply on 28 May, that is at the height of the Battle of France, at which time he was staying in Vence at the Villa La Conque. He noted that the battle was going so badly that it seemed as though it would shortly be impossible for them to continue their correspondence. However, a series of postcards from Cannes, Grasse and Nice reached Fontenay-le-Comte after the armistice. In 1941 Gide advised Simenon to abandon the firstperson narration of Je me souviens, to fictionalise the characters by changing their names and to type out his work as usual, rather than writing it in pen and ink. All this advice Simenon faithfully followed, starting work on the new draft promptly. The letter to Marc ‘from a father under a death sentence’ was put aside, and Pedigree, as it was later to be called, was transformed into a fullblown novel of childhood and development. In September 1941, in the Grand Hotel at Grasse, Gide was still criticising Pedigree. Some of his comments read like a coaching course - ‘En general: tres bon travail, a continuer sans defaillance ’ (On the whole, very good work. To be continued without fail). The last surviving letter from Gide on the subject of Pedigree is dated 21 August 1942, and was posted from Tunis. ‘Yes, I am in Tunis . . .’ his note of two months earlier had opened, on a slightly defiant note. Referring to the fact that he would no longer be able to visit Simenon, as he had half promised, Gide explained, ‘I left Nice for African soil in the hope of finding the peaceful rapture [‘wne tranquille exaltation ] which is propitious for work.’ In the event Gide did little work in North Africa although soon after his arrival, at the age of 73, he wrote in his Journal that he had enjoyed ‘two nights of pleasure such as I had not expected to experience at my age’ with a young indigene. The typescript of Pedigree continued to arrive for his comments but he no longer considered that it would be ‘the major work’ which he one day expected Simenon to write.
Simenon came to look on Gide almost as a father, a role which the senior novelist would not have appreciated. Simenon addressed him in his letters as ‘Mon cher maitre ’ and Gide’s attitude
to the war would certainly have been taken as an example for his own. What passed for Gide, he must have reasoned, would pass for him. Gide was French, the most prominent of literary critics, a Student of philosophy and one of the most committed intellectuals of the day. In 1939 Gide had had enough courage to sign a public statement in favour of the imprisoned pacifist Jean Giono. In 1940 he was critical of the terms of the armistice while expressing his admiration for Petain’s speech announcing the decision to surrender.* One of the most dishonourable clauses in the armistice was Article 19, which stipulated that France should hand over all antiNazi German citizens who had taken refuge on French territory. Committed left-wing French intellectuals, such as Gide and Andre Malraux, were also considered by many to be at risk of punishment. But Gide nonetheless turned down the offer of a visa which was made by an American committee in 1940. At that time he was living with his daughter Catherine at Cabris and did not consider himself to be in danger. In 1942 Gide received a visit from Sartre who had been released from prisoner-of-war camp and who while undertaking a bicycling marathon of the Vichy Zone was considering the possibility of resistance. Sartre was not the obvious man to lead a resistance network and Gide, perhaps sensibly, turned him down too. Anyone wishing to follow the fine thread of Gide’s war-time ideology would have to take into account the fact that in 1941 Gide remained on good terms with the Nouvelle Revue Fran^aise ( NRF ), the paper he had helped to found but which had become a collaborationist publication under the editorship of Drieu La Rochelle. The German ambassador, Otto Abetz, said, ‘There are three things that count in France. Communism, “high finance” and the NRF. ’ It was to Drieu that Gide wrote in August 1942 when he wanted copies of Simenon’s books that were unobtainable in Sidi Bou Said, and he continued to submit his articles at a time when Andre Malraux refused to do so and while Francois Mauriac not only did so but allowed his articles to be prefaced and altered under German guidance.
Then, in 1942, Gide gave a lecture in Nice on the Belgian prosepoet ITenri Michaux. This was singled out for a noisy demonstration by the extreme-right ‘Legion des Combattants’ (suc
* He did not know that Petain’s original speech had been so abject that he had been advised to alter it.
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cessors of the organisation for which Simenon had once worked as an office-boy), whose views on prose-poetry proved to be fiercely critical. So in May of that year Gide left the Cote d’Azur for Tunis. In November Algeria was liberated by the Allies and southern France and Tunisia were occupied by the Germans. The ‘Legion des Combattants’ pursued Gide from Nice to Germanoccupied Tunisia. Gide went into hiding and claimed in a letter to Simenon dated 11 December 1944 that it was this interruption which had forced him to abandon his long-planned paper on Simenon’s work. After a month in hiding Gide left Tunis and flew to Algiers, which was then under a provisional Gaullist government.
In his attitude to the war Gide displayed all the patrician detachment of the French intellectual faced with Nazism and the Fall of France. In Algiers Gide felt at home. Fie was once more able to obtain copies of the NRF. ‘Extremely interesting piece by Drieu,’ noted Gide in his Journal in 1943. ‘Admittedly while I congratulate myself on resigning, I have to acknowledge the persuasiveness of many of Drieu’s arguments.’ He was never a warm supporter of General de Gaulle, but he was at least able to immerse himself in the literary squabbles of an ill-assorted Free French community that included Saint-Exupery and Jef Kessel.
The timely persecution by the ‘Legion des Combattants’ helped Gide to establish his rather flimsy Free French credentials. Otherwise they would have rested on the hostility shown to him by Vichy propagandists. In Vichy legend there were three reasons for the defeat of 1940 - the film Quai des Brumes starring Jean Gabin (about a heroic deserter); paid holidays; and Andre Gide. This argument was supported by a series of articles in Le Figaro Litteraire in October 1940, arguing that intellectuals had betrayed their political responsibilities and that Gide, Cocteau and others had been directly responsible for the defeat A Gide’s final offence in Vichy’s eyes was to have gone into exile. But had he stayed his homosexuality and left-wing views might have earned him the same fate at the hands of the milice' as Federico Garda Lorca suffered at the hands of the falange outside Granada in 1936. Finally Gide’s governing attitude to the war was marked by a
* One of the most famous cartoons of the period in reaction to this argument showed a French peasant being reproached for reading too much Gide and Proust.
lofty serenity. In his Journal he wrote of the Allied and enemy radio broadcasts, ‘To fight brutes, one needs brutes, and so we are all brutalised. ’ If he needed an example of how to behave under occupation Simenon was offered a rich choice by Andre Gide.
In December 1939 when Simenon wrote to Gide to say he was thinking of returning to Maigret he started work on Cecile est morte (Maigret and the Spinster). In 1940, as he recovered from the shock of his consultation with the radiologist, he wrote two romans and two more ‘Maigrets’, as well as Je me souviens. In 1941 he wrote three more romans, three ‘Maigrets’ and the first part of the final version of Pedigree (Pedigree). In 1942 he wrote only one novel and most of his time was spent on the second and final parts of Pedigree. During nearly six years of hostilities in Europe Simenon wrote twenty-two books and twenty-one short stories. None of them took the war as a theme or even mentioned its existence with the exception of the unpublished memoir, Je me souviens. But since Simenon was writing for immediate publication this is hardly surprising. French interest in literature during the war, like people’s interest in the cinema, was primarily escapist, apart from which all books had to be passed by the German censors, the cunningly-named ‘Comite de Publication et de la Censure de la Propagande’, run by the friendly and intelligent Obersturmfuhrer Heller. The paper supply available to publishers was reduced from 32,000 tonnes in 1938 to 3000 tonnes in 1943, so long print-runs were impossible. But the rate of library lending in Paris doubled and much of the shortage of paper was compensated for by the growing list of banned authors and subjects. One thousand titles were pulped, with the full co-operation of French publishers anxious to keep their businesses alive. The ‘Liste Otto’, as it was called, was composed of books hostile to Germany or books by English, American or Jewish authors. The Petainist regime favoured, on the other hand, books exalting Napoleon and Joan of Arc, heroes of the eternal war against England, but also books about the family, rustic values and social harmony. Simenon did not qualify under any of these headings but he was not disqualified either and he remained a favourite among French readers throughout the war.
His least productive year was 1942. In July, Simenon, Tigy, Marc and Boule left Fontenay-le-Comte for the greater obscurity of a farmhouse in the little village of St Mesmin-le-Vieux. The
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Chateau de Terreneuve was said to be too damp for Marc, which provided a plausible reason for the move. But towards the end of their time at Fontenay there had also been an unpleasant incident with an inspector from the Commissariat-General aux Questions Juives. In May 1942 this agency was taken over by a brutish antisemite known as ‘Louis Darquier de Pellepoix’, who succeeded the foppish anti-semite Xavier Vallat and whose brief was to speed up the number of Jewish deportations. One of de Pellepoix’s inspectors visited Simenon and told him that his name was obviously derived from Simon and that he must be Jewish. He was given one month to produce the birth and baptism certificates of himself, his parents and his four grandparents in order to prove that he had three non-Jewish grandparents. Simenon offered to show the inspector evidence that he had not been circumcised, but this offer was declined on the grounds that it was inconclusive. Instead he had to write to his mother in Liege and ask for her assistance.
The inspector also accused Simenon of trading on the black market, which was undoubtedly true. There seems to be some possibility that the visit followed an anonymous denunciation. Simenon had become a prominent and obviously wealthy member of the community in Fontenay and he may have aroused jealousy and disapproval. In January of that year he had been visited by a Parisian, ‘la Mome Crevette’ Spinelly, by now a celebrated variety artist but still boasting that she ‘wore no knickers in order not to miss an opportunity’; and there had been local publicity along the lines of ‘a Parisian encounter at Fontenay-le-Comte’. Shortly afterwards Jean Tissier, the actor, had come to stay for the world premiere of La maison des sept jeunes filles, a film based on one of Simenon’s least interesting novels, written in 1937. On this occasion Simenon had turned up for the premiere with his latest mistress, a local shopkeeper, on his arm, a flaunting of convention that may have caused resentment. Further suspicions were aroused by his occasional visits to the Kommandantur, although these were invariably made at the request of a neighbour with a problem, because Simenon had a rudimentary grasp of German. Whatever the reasons, in July, directly after Henriette had supplied enough certificates to satisfy the inspector from the Commissariat-General, the Simenons left Fontenay. And in September Simenon remained sufficiently rat
tied by the experience to dissociate himself publicly from the Jewish community.
The actor Raimu, his friend and the star of the film of Les . inconnus dans la maison, had been criticised for making too much money during the occupation. This was a criticism to which Simenon himself was sensitive, but the terms in which he chose to defend Raimu are surprising. In an article for the magazine Vedette, published on 5 September 1942, Simenon referred to the smugness (‘ complaisance ’) with which the newspapers frequently quoted the incomes of film-stars like Raimu, and then wrote:
Do the same newspapers publish their proprietor’s salaries? Do they work out the price in francs and dollars of the telephonecalls made by this or that Rothschild or this or that shark speculating against the franc on the Stock Exchange? No, it’s always the actor or the star. Watch out! Raimu is greedy ... he has a bad character; in other words when he is offered contracts by Monsieur Ixovitch or some other Zetovief he does not sign them with his eyes shut. As a matter of fact, have the newspapers ever examined the salaries of these gentlemen? Never. It’s always the actor who is hounded by the tax inspectors or the professional cadgers.
Apart from its insensitivity to current events, the suggestion that a film-actor had been exploited by Jewish producers was extraordinarily inept in France in 1942.
By November Simenon was sufficiently depressed with life under the occupation to make a rather desperate move to escape from their new home in St Mesmin-le-Vieux. He obtained car number-plates and false papers from an acquaintance who had a permanent pass to take his car into the Vichy Zone, and he borrowed a large hearse to transport the family and some of their belongings. But on the morning of 11 November, as they were about to set off, they heard the news of the German occupation of the Vichy Zone. There was nowhere left to flee to.