‘Which day did they lock you up?’
‘They locked me up on the day of the liberation!’
1950s music-hall patter by Sacha Guitry
In deciding, so far as possible, to continue working normally throughout the occupation Simenon was taking the same decision as the great majority of writers and people in general. His wartime books were slightly less numerous than at other periods, but they included some of his best. The romans included Lafuite de M. Monde, La veuve Couderc (Ticket of Leave) and La verite sur Bebe Donge (The Trial of Bebe Donge ), as well as Pedigree. The ‘Maigrets’ included Les caves du Majestic (Maigret and the Hotel Majestic ) and Signe Picpus (To Any Lengths). But if Simenon’s production rate fell slightly, Gallimard’s publication rate did not. There was a backlog to draw on, and despite the war-time restrictions on paper Gallimard published two Simenons in 1940, six in 1941, five in 1942, two in 1943 and three in 1944. So Simenon’s name remained before the public and his income remained high.
Many of his friends were among those who rather enjoyed the occupation, in a slightly guarded way. Certainly in the world of letters the regie du jeu was ‘opportunism’. You did nothing ‘against France’ but you did as much as possible, with or without German assistance, to make the most of whatever opportunities came your way. A small number of writers declined this opportunity, Camus and ‘Vercors’ being among the leading examples. A few others went too far in the opposite direction. For this
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Robert Brasillach was shot, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle avoided his treason trial by committing suicide and Bernard Grasset - who published a French edition of Mein Kampf - was disgraced. But the line between what was acceptable and what was not was not always clear. On 10 June 1944, four days after the Allied landings in Normandy, German and Alsatian soldiers serving with the SS ‘Das Reich’ division massacred 642 villagers in Oradour-surGlane, 160 kilometres to the south-east of St Mesmin-le-Vieux. It was also the day when Paris saw the premiere of a new play, Huis clos, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was heavily committed to the production and extremely worried that it might be wrecked by an electricity cut due to a bombing raid. It was a stiflingly hot night but all passed off well at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, and fortunately the reviews, including the German reviews, were good. Meanwhile the deportation trains continued to roll through Paris carrying, among thousands of others, the poet and film scenarist Robert Desnos, who was being sent first to the concentration camp at Compiegne and then to Buchenwald, for being Jewish, while the streets of Paris still contained posters for his latest film.
A few days after the opening of Huis clos, with Allied forces still battling to break out of the beachhead, Sartre chaired a public debate in Paris ‘on the state of the theatre’. With him on the platform were Camus and Cocteau. This was well judged of Cocteau, an old friend of Simenon’s, who had enjoyed the occupation more than most. Both Sartre and Camus were members of the ‘Comite National des Ecrivains’ (CNE), a resistance organisation under Communist Party domination which was well ahead with its plans for the post-war purge or epuration. The CNE had already started to publish draft versions of its lethal black list, but Cocteau’s name never appeared on that list. Early in March, Cocteau had received the following letter from Max Jacob:
Dear Jean,
I am writing to you from a railway wagon thanks to one of the gendarmes who are guarding us. We will shortly be arriving at Drancy. That is all I have to say. Sacha [Guitry] said when he was asked to intervene for my sister, ‘If it had been him I could have done something’! Well, it is me. With love, Max.
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Cocteau was able to attend Max Jacob’s funeral later that month. Jacob, born Jewish, later a Catholic, one of Simenon’s earliest and warmest admirers, died in Drancy of misery and exposure at the age of 68 before his influential friends could do anything to get him back.
If Gide sometimes seemed to suffer from a detachment that brought him surprisingly close to the borderline of the unacceptable, Cocteau danced along that line like a trapeze artist. Throughout the occupation he maintained close contact with the German authorities, men such as Karl Epting, who directed the Institut Allemand and who was the de facto organiser of the ‘collaboration intellectuelle . For Cocteau the occupation was his ‘belle epoque’. He had written to a friend at the beginning of the occupation that he found it ‘a fascinating time except for the lack of opium’. When his play L’eternel retour opened in 1943 the Japanese ambassador was among those he invited. And when the Nazi regime’s favourite sculptor, Arno Breker, came to Paris for an exhibition of his work in the Orangerie in May 1942, Cocteau published a front-page tribute to him in. a weekly review. By the time Breker died in 1991 he had spent years, pointing out that he had never held a Nazi Party card. This was true, but in 1943 Breker told a writer from the paper Comoedia that he always chose the models for his athletic statues from ‘splendid physical specimens of a race renewed and purified’.
Cocteau’s tribute to Breker was exuberant even by his own standards:
I salute you, Breker. I salute you from the haute patrie [exalted homeland] of poets. The country where countries do not exist, except in so far as each of us contributes the fruits of our nation’s work. I salute you because in that exalted homeland, where we are fellow citizens, you speak to me of France.
Non-residents of the ‘ haute patrie ’ might be forgiven for wondering what exactly Breker’s iron-muscled, pure Teutons had to say to Cocteau about France, apart from the fact that they were fashioned from bronze obtained by melting down French statues, including a fine statue of Victor Hugo taken in 1941 from the streets outside the Orangerie where Breker’s work was displayed. But in stating that poets were untouched by politics - a view also
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held by Hitler - Cocteau was exaggerating the olympian detachment of Gide and shadowing the stance of the Communist Picasso, who sometimes frequented the German beau monde with Cocteau and who once told the German officer and diarist Ernst Junger, ‘You and I, sitting down together as we are now, could sign a peace treaty this afternoon. Tonight the lights could go up all over Paris.’
Cocteau also cultivated Junger, and took care to invite him to a reading of his new play in February 1942. But eventually, as for Gide, his homosexuality came in useful and he managed to make himself unpopular enough with the extreme right to pick up some serviceable insults. The collaborationist critic Lucien Rebatet described one of Cocteau’s plays as ‘the prototype of the theatre of inverts’, and subsequently a performance of Les enfants terribles was booed by a cabal from the PPF, the French Fascist Party. Cocteau remained in touch with Simenon during the occupation. When Simenon came to Paris they sometimes spent the evening together, and on 16 May 1944, three weeks before D-Day, Cocteau wrote to Simenon with characteristic enthusiasm:
Dear Georges,
I will read your book [possibly an advance copy of Lafuite de M. Monde] at once. It will be my very first relaxation after weeks of work and exhaustion. As you know, I could never refuse you anything and I will do the drawings whatever happens. I think of you ceaselessly,
With love . . .
Two other friends of Simenon’s, Pierre Benoit and Vlaminck, were also among those who paid public tribute to Breker. His publisher, Gaston Gallimard, was not reported to be present, but he had different preoccupations. In 1939 Gallimard, a co-founder of the Nouvelle Revue Fran^aise, was temporarily acting as editor. He absented himself from Paris that autumn, awaiting developments, and did not return until October 1940, four months after the armistice. The German authorities regarded the NRF as highly suspect - ‘ judeo-bolsheviste , high finance and communism’ rolled into one. The magazine’s offices were closed that November, but it suited the Germans far better to keep the paper going, and for that they needed the agreement of the editorial
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committee and a sympathetic editor. In becoming the editor Drieu La Rochelle signed his own death warrant, but Gallimard also remained a force behind the scenes throughout the occupation, being among those who selected the editorial committee. This participation may have helped Gallimard to obtain the paper necessary to continue publishing throughout the war. Among the books he published were Les voyageurs de Vimperiale by Raymond Aron. This book, by a Jewish intellectual ‘bolshevik’ working for de Gaulle in London, was violently attacked in Je Suis Partout, the collaborationist review, and had to be withdrawn. The editors of Je Suis Partout were particularly angry with Gallimard because he had simultaneously refused to publish an anti-semitic work, Les decombres, by Lucien Rebatet, on the grounds that he lacked the paper.
Another friend of Simenon’s, Marcel Pagnol, took a harder line. Pagnol was vulnerable to influence because he was running his own film studio in Marseille and wanted to keep it open. He agreed to develop some Vichy government propaganda films but he continued to employ the French Jewish actor Harry Baur, who merely had to supply a certificate stating that he was a Christian, a formality which is said to have cost Baur a lot of money. Pagnol also refused a valuable subsidy from Continental, the German production company run by Alfred Greven, which did everything it could to take over the French film industry. And it was in the matter of working with Continental that Simenon came closest to crossing the line.
German control of the French film industry was gradual but increasingly effective. German newsreels were shown, but, since these frequently provoked demonstrations, they could only be shown with the police present and the lights up. Three-quarters of French cinemas were in the Occupied Zone, and in these the Germans banned all pre-war American or British films with Jewish actors. The Vichy government’s COIC (Comite d’Organisation Cinematographique) barred all Jews from working in the film industry on 3 October 1940. As the war progressed, the French film industry was starved of funds and Continental progressively took its place, making the huge number of 220 feature films in four years. And among the most popular films for French cinema audiences, desperate to escape from the miseries of the real world outside the hall, were detective thrillers.
Before the outbreak of war Simenon sold film rights in only three of his books, and none of them was much of a success. During the four years of the occupation nine of his books were . filmed, more than any other French writer, including Balzac. The majority of these films, five of them, were produced by Continental. In May 1941 Simenon was invited to, and was reported to have attended, a lunch given at Ledoyen restaurant in the Champs-Elysees by Continental. Also present were Arletty, Harry Baur, Danielle Darrieux, Henri Decoin and Maurice Tourneur. Decoin and Tourneur were to direct two of the films for Continental which were based on books by Simenon, and Decoin was to adapt another, Annette et la dame blonde, the first to be made. Following the lunch Simenon signed a contract with Continental for Annette et la dame blonde, on which shooting started in September, and for Les inconnus dans la maison, on which shooting started in November. Henri Decoin adapted the first and directed the second. If Simenon had any doubts about what role Continental wished to play in the French cinema during the occupation they must have been dispelled when he saw the programme accompanying Les inconnus dans la maison.
In Simenon’s book the murderer bears a foreign-sounding name, Justin Luska. The book is, if anything, pro-semitic: Luska is said to have been a victim of anti-semitism as a child. ‘Because of his red hair, his name, his real first name which was Ephraim, and the eastern origins of his father, Luska was the bete noire of his schoolfellows . . .’ But Luska’s Jewishness, which is marginal to the plot of the book, was emphasised in Decoin’s film, which was then distributed with a work of crude anti-semitic propaganda called Les corrupteurs. Anti-Jewish propaganda was frequently presented in this way, an overtly anti-semitic propaganda film setting the context for a more interesting film in which the same message was consequently implied. In the context of the programme the film of Les inconnus became an anti-semitic film, and took its place plainly enough in ‘la chasse aux juifs’. But when Continental came back to Simenon with, proposals to buy the film rights of three of his new ‘Maigrets’, Signe Picpus, Cecile est morte and Les caves du Majestic, Simenon agreed. There is no doubt that the film rights were negotiated by Simenon himself. He confirmed in Memoires intimes that.he had always negotiated his own film and radio rights personally. Picpus was filmed in October
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1942, only four months after the book was published; Cecile est morte, directed by Maurice Tourneur, was filmed in December 1943; and shooting started on Les caves du Majestic as late as February 1944. In this case shooting was delayed because the screenplay was written by Charles Spaak, whose brother was in the Resistance. In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested Spaak, hoping to flush out his brother, and imprisoned him in Fresnes. The fact that he was working for Continental did not get Charles Spaak out of Fresnes, but it did get him a pencil and paper so that he could finish his work in prison. By this time the Resistance underground newspapers such as L’Ecran Francis were beginning to attack Continental and all who worked with it. The issue of March 1944 attacked the scenarist of one of Continental’s most famous films, Le corbeau, and the June issue attacked anyone who had taken Continental’s money: ‘That money has a dirty smell and it will linger on.’ The same issue singled out Nova Film, producers of Les corrupteurs, for special attack.
Simenon also sold numerous radio rights to Radio-Paris during the occupation. After the liberation Radio-Paris was denounced as an instrument of German propaganda, and its leading news announcer, Jean-Herold Paquis, was shot. It was agreed however that actors and broadcasters who had merely continued to exercise their professions without deliberate political involvement were culpable of nothing. But on another occasion Simenon came closer to an involvement that might have caused him serious embarrassment later on.
On 19 August 1941, Le Petit Parisien reported that a new literary prize had been established in Paris to replace the Prix Goncourt, which had not been awarded in 1940. The new prize was called the Prix de la Nouvelle France, and the jury, which had reached its decision over lunch at the Tour d’Argent, was made up of twelve members: Pierre Benoit, Abel Hermant, Bernard Grasset, Paul Fort, Abel Bonnard, Sacha Guitry, Jean de La Varende, Pierre Mac Orlan, Henri Troyat, Drieu La Rochelle, Jean Luchaire and Georges Simenon. Of the twelve, Benoit, Paul Fort and Sacha Guitry were all friends of Simenon. And of the twelve members, nine got into serious trouble after the war. Bonnard was sentenced to death, Abel Hermant got life imprisonment, Paul Benoit was blacklisted and arrested, Jean Luchaire was shot, Sacha Guitry was imprisoned, Paul Fort was blacklisted, Jean de
La Varende was blacklisted, Bernard Grasset was blacklisted and sentenced to national disgrace, exile and confiscation of property, and Drieu La Rochelle only escaped the firing squad by taking an overdose, slashing his wrists and putting his head in a gas oven. Perhaps it was as well for Simenon that the Prix Goncourt was restored later in 1941 and that the Prix de la Nouvelle France became redundant.*
To savour to the full the pleasures of lunch at Ledoyen or Le Tour d’Argent during the occupation one has to recall the scarcity of food in the rest of the city. The whole of the area of St Germain was said to have smelt of cabbage and ersatz coffee. And when the mass murderer Dr Petiot absentmindedly allowed his domestic boiler to overheat while it was crammed with human remains one day in March 1944, and thick black smoke began to pour out of the chimney at 21 rue Le Sueur and a dreadful smell spread round the quartier, his neighbours did nothing at first because ‘people were cooking such extraordinary things all the time’. After the record harvest of 1943 the daily bread ration was increased by 25 grammes. Butter and cheese were rationed at 200 grammes a month, meat at 300 grammes. In these circumstances tuberculosis became endemic and the infantile mortality rate rose sharply. To ‘eat well and to eat a lot’ - duck in the Tour d’Argent, sole meuniere at Jimmy’s, bouillabaisse at Drouant - ‘gave one a feeling of power’, as Ernst Junger recorded in his Journal. When municipal restaurants were charging 4 francs for a meal, and when management dining-rooms were charging 25 francs, one dish in a good restaurant might cost 55 francs, lunch for four people 650 francs. Naturally restaurants able to serve food at these prices had ways of avoiding the draconian rationing regulations, which was why they were able to provide a memorable meal for the juror of the Prix de la Nouvelle France.
Shortly before the liberation an event occurred that was to have more important consequences for Simenon’s life than the Second
* All three Goncourt prizes awarded under the Occupation went to books published by Gallimard. At the end of the war four members of the Academie Goncourt were expelled and blacklisted, and Gallimard did not win another Prix Goncourt until 1949.
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World War. While living at St Mesmin he had acquired the habit of taking a daily siesta in a small building near the farmhouse. At about 3 p.m. Boule would wake him with a cup of coffee and they would make love. It was a routine as settled as a marriage and had been carried on for fifteen years. One afternoon ‘the door of the little room opened and there before us stood Tigy, pale and stiff, dressed in her usual beige dungarees . . . Neither of us dared to move.’ Tigy beckoned Simenon outside ‘with a gesture worthy of the Comedie Fran^aise and told him to show ‘cette fille la the door. Simenon was upset by this reference to Boule, ‘whom we had considered a member of the family for twenty years’, and he refused to dismiss her, but Tigy said, ‘It’s her or me.’ In order to distract Tigy from Boule, Simenon told his wife that he had been unfaithful to her ‘hundreds of times’, and frequently with people she knew, including her friends. They went inside the house to give Marc his tea and then returned to the garden where they stayed talking till dusk. Simenon pointed out that neither Tigy nor he could bear to be separated from Marc. He reminded her of the red arrows which the Germans had recently painted on all the crossroads and which were rumoured to indicate the direction to be taken by all male civilians in the region when the Germans gave the order. If that happened, he argued, Tigy would be left with Marc, with only Boule to help her. And if they were both taken as aliens then Marc would be left with only Boule. It was not a time when people lightly separated small children from their familiar companions and Tigy had little choice. By the evening they had decided to stay together as friends, to keep their marriage going for the sake of Marc, but to give each other their freedom. Tigy would no longer threaten suicide if Simenon were to be unfaithful to her. And he would no longer be ‘forced’ to deceive her several times a week. He wrote in Un homme comme un autre, ‘I had deceived her for twenty-two years. I had made love more frequently behind a door than in a bed ... A man never forgives a woman who forces him to tell lies.’ What has never been explained is why Tigy, after twenty years, should have taken it into her head to check up on her husband. If it was because she found an anonymous note on the kitchen table there is every chance it would have been written by Boule.
Just before this incident took place, in April 1944, Simenon wrote his finest book of the war period, Lafuite de M. Monde, a
story that reflected his state of mind after four years of German occupation and an unsatisfactory emotional life. M. Monde is a wealthy man married to a woman for whom he has no strong feelings. He looks on marriage as a means of having children; he had never wanted to be ‘a tree without fruit’. One day he decides to walk out of his home, disappear and start a new life. He leaves Paris and takes the train to Marseille where he falls in with a girl who gets a job as a hostess in a casino. He is ready ‘to go as far as he can’, he reflects that some people doing this end up as ‘clochards\ But instead he finds himself working in a nightclub in Nice. His job is to sit behind a spyhole watching the staff at work, to make sure that they don’t cheat the management. Everything about his new life amazes him. The colour of third-class rail tickets, the smell of his own sweat when he goes to bed in a cheap hotel without having a bath. One day his first wife comes into the nightclub. She has become a morphine addict. M. Monde leaves his spyhole and saves her from the hopeless life she is leading and takes her back to Paris where he puts her in the care of a doctor. He then returns home without giving a word of explanation to anyone.
La fuite de M. Monde is a story about a man trapped by a marriage and by a way of life. When M. Monde arrives in Marseille he makes his way to the Vieux Port: ‘He saw the water and just beside him the little boats crowded together, rocking slightly to the breathing of the sea. ’ Simenon’s description of the Mediterranean reflected his own war-time longing for Porquerolles, which he had not seen for five years: ‘The light was typical of a Mediterranean inlet, the ever-present sunlight, but diluted, diffused, almost broken up as if through a prism, suddenly violet for example, or green . . .’ M. Monde is also concerned about running out of time. He is 48 - ‘a man who has already reached life’s downhill slope’. Simenon was 41 when he wrote this. As a consolation M. Monde has his son. Simenon, since the birth of Marc, had felt much happier about describing parental relationships, something he had felt incapable of doing when he invented Maigret. There are also parts of Simenon’s childhood in M. Monde: ‘Once just after Lent he had experienced a period of acute mysticism, and had spent days and nights practising spiritual exercises in search of perfection. ’ And there are other aspects of his life which for his creator represented hope
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rather than experience. For M. Monde eventually finds salvation by way of flight. And when he returns to his house in Paris his friends notice that ‘this man was no longer overshadowed, he had no more phantoms, and he looked you in the eyes with a cold serenity’.
After finishing M. Monde, Simenon did not write a book for a year, which in view of surrounding events was hardly surprising. If there was to be a second exodus in front of the Allied forces, in the reverse direction, then the Simenons this time would be at the head of the line rather than the end of it. In fact the Vendee lay on the route of one of the major running battles of the liberation, the line of march of the SS ‘Das Reich’ Division from the south of France towards Normandy. Resistance opposition to this was to be one of the organisation’s main battle honours. In the spring of 1944 members of the maquis and parachuted saboteurs started to arrive in the region, and some of them came to the house in St Mesmin-le-Vieux for supplies. They also requisitioned the canary-yellow car which Simenon had kept hidden under some bales of straw since moving into the farmhouse. The car was repainted green and two heavy machine-guns were mounted in it, a development which must have worried Simenon since he knew that if his own involvement were to be revealed deportation would probably be the least unpleasant thing that would happen to him. Shortly afterwards systematic railway sabotage started in the area, and one night a German army car was machine-gunned three kilometres from St Mesmin and three German soldiers were killed, one of them a colonel. Reprisals were carried out at the neighbouring hamlet of La Chapelle. The villagers of St Mesmin watched the flames burning all night. ‘It was the price of a German colonel,’ Simenon wrote. In one of the houses destroyed a stock of pictures was hidden which had been saved from destruction in 1940; it included works by Renoir, Leger and Derain.
Simenon regarded war as a succession of muddle, fear, treachery and deceit, and because of his public success during the dark years of the occupation he lived through some of the worst moments of his war at the time of the liberation. He knew what followed liberation: epuration, the purge. He had lived through this once already; it was among the most vivid memories of his childhood. On 7 January 1943, two months after he had failed to make his escape to the Vichy Zone, Simenon finished writing
Pedigree. The last pages contain an appalled description of early scenes in the 1918 purge of Liege:
The war was over . . . and suddenly like a signal the noise of a shop window being shattered. It was a charcuterie, whose owner had worked with the Germans . . . Ten, twenty, fifty charcuteries suffer the same fate . . . then in a dark corner the outline of a human form struggling against half-a-dozen furious men. Roger looked on without understanding. They were in the process of stripping a woman . . . the police stood by, inactive.
As the liberation of France approached, Continental Films were advertising their latest deal with Simenon all over France while the underground editions of Les Lettres Frangaises, more and more widely diffused, published frequent attacks on ‘the film company which was under the orders of its Nazi boss, Monsieur Greven’.
Simenon’s true feelings about surrounding events were revealed one afternoon while he was working in his vegetable garden and Boule came to tell him that some members of the FFI had been asking for him. The FFI were the Resistance, but they were by that time a wild and unpredictable bunch, quite capable of taking the law into their own hands. Boule had said that Simenon was out and they had said they would come back in an hour or so. Simenon panicked and immediately concealed himself behind the tall hedge at the bottom of the garden. Boule brought out a haversack which Tigy had already prepared for such an occasion. It contained clothes, food, morphine and a hypodermic syringe. Simenon sent a message to a neighbour whom he trusted and the man came by on a motorbike and took him to a farm, where he spent two nights sleeping in a barn. Then, as the battle approached, Tigy, Marc and Boule joined him and the whole family went to a well-hidden field where various other villagers, including the local doctor, gathered. Here for two days they formed part of a small community of refugees who were in hiding in the open air, all of whom felt safer in the fields than they did in their own houses.
To explain his panic many years later Simenon claimed that the people calling at the house had not been resisters, but Germans. He even said that on their return one of them had been identified
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as a woman who strongly resembled a notorious female associate of the Gestapo known as ‘Mademoiselle Docteur’. The picture he presented in Memoires intimes was of a man who had been sheltering and supplying the resistance, on the run from a last-minute round-up by the departing Gestapo. But Tigy and Boule were in no doubt (when asked about the incident by Fenton Bresler, in one of his invaluable interviews) that the callers had been people claiming to be in the Resistance. When Boule was asked in 1991 if the FFI were ‘mauvais gargons’ she replied, ‘Ils n’etaient pas toujours tres intelligents. ’ In fact there was no shame in fleeing from the selfappointed members of the FFI during the days of the liberation. The FFI numbered among them many brave men who were determined to fight for the honour of France, but also many chancers and violent criminals or Communist hatchet-men, out to settle obscure scores of their own or to line their pockets or simply to kill people for the fun of killing. They were particularly dangerous in remote areas like the Vendee where it was to be many weeks before they were brought under full military discipline. The question is, therefore, why did Simenon change the story? Did he do it because he had forgotten the facts? That seems unlikely. The answer is probably because in later years the truth about the epuration had been suppressed, and he felt it would require too much explanation to establish why he had fled from the FFI, who had by then been transformed into mythical heroes. At the time he was subconsciously expecting trouble, and even if he did not feel that he had done anything wrong he knew how little use that argument would be in adverse circumstances.
When the family were at last able to return to the house Simenon fell ill and was diagnosed as suffering from pleurisy. His illness was brought on as much by nervous exhaustion as by anything else. Earlier in the year the doctor who accompanied him to Paris for the definitive consultation about his heart said that Simenon appeared to be so ill when boarding the train in the morning that he had to be pushed on to it. A few hours later, having been told that there was nothing wrong with his heart, he felt fit enough for a night on the tiles with Cocteau and Pagnol. All his life Simenon had a tendency to hysterical illness, and in the late summer of 1944 took to his bed for four months suffering from pain and fevers and being nursed as though he were in danger of death. In November he was finally judged well enough
to convalesce at the nearby resort of Les Sables d’Olonne, and he went to a hotel called Les Roches Noires. By this time the war had moved on, but in Paris the intellectual epuration was at its height. A move to Les Sables d’Olonne, fifty kilometres further away from Paris, was in itself a reassurance. Having been through two wars, two defeats, two occupations and two epurations, Simenon was, for the time being, a case of ‘civilian shell-shock’.
Tigy went back to their house in Nieul, which was in poor condition after over four years of military occupation. Boule and Marc accompanied Simenon, and, for the first time in their sixteen-year relationship, Boule and Simenon shared a bedroom. Tigy was exhausted by the effort of nursing her imaginative husband, and exasperated with his behaviour in general. But Boule stood by him. In a house beside Les Roches Noires Simenon found another refugee from the epuration, a woman living alone, formerly a schoolteacher, whose head had been shaved by the ‘Resistants de Septembre’, as some of the FFI were mockingly called. ‘What she had done was no concern of ours,’ Simenon wrote at the time. ‘Her hair was growing again, which would not have been the case with her breasts, which she only just managed to stop them from cutting off instead. She remained calm, nonetheless, and harboured no hatred for anyone.’ And she agreed to teach Marc to read and write.
On 18 January 1945 Simenon wrote the last chapter of Je me souviens, which he had put aside in June 1941, when he started Pedigree. It was also at Les Sables d’Olonne that he wrote some of the stories that were later to be collected under the title Le bateau d’Emile and reread Balzac, Zola and Proust, as well as the Old and New Testaments. Je me souviens ends with a description of an incident which obviously marked him and which throws an interesting light on his morale at the end of the occupation. There was a woman staying at their hotel who dined at the table next to Simenon’s and who had made a considerable fuss of him, giving the impression that she was excited to be living in the same house as ‘a famous writer’. One day, after an acquaintance of several weeks, they started to talk about the post-war world and Simenon said he hoped the workers and the ‘ petites gens’ would do better this time than they had done before the war. At which point, without warning, the friendly woman at the neighbouring table replied, ‘Well I hope Communism puts you back among the
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people, where you belong!’ The woman’s sudden malice hurt Simenon deeply.
It was also at Les Sables d’Olonne that Simenon resumed contact with Gide. He had heard nothing from Gide since the latter had fled to Algiers in August 1942. Simenon obtained his address there from Gallimard and in December 1944 received a letter which Gide had dated 11 December. ‘How happy I am to hear from you at last,’ Gide wrote. ‘. . . I have been very worried about you, imagining you in a zone that was still unliberated and at the mercy of German tricks [‘ brimades ’] which are so frequently cruel.’
Gide, carrying on from where he had been so rudely interrupted, wrote that Simenon was a prisoner of his early success and suffered from a false reputation like Baudelaire or Chopin. The whole point of Gide’s forthcoming paper on Simenon would be to show that he was ‘much more important than was generally recognised’. Simenon’s most serious limitation, in Gide’s view, was that almost all of his characters were ‘abouliques’ , people suffering from a loss of will-power. He urged him to show that heroes, headstrong and wilful people, could also be ‘driven’. It was because Simenon himself was the opposite of ‘ aboulique that Gide had hoped for so much from Pedigree, but he now thought it better to postpone publication.
In his reply, dated 18 December, Simenon wrote:
Mon cher maitre, mon grand ami . . . We only have perhaps two, three or four chances of real friendship in life . . . two or three chances of real contact with another human being, which one should seize with both hands. What foolishness to refuse such a gift from the Gods. And the deeper I plunge into your work, the further I want to go . . .
Simenon was later to confess that he had never been able to read Gide’s novels, so the first part of this letter seems to be polite rather than sincere. But having finished with the flattery he started to discuss his own work, and the tone of the letter changes:
Towards the end of March this year, having finished Lafuite de M. Monde, which will be published in three weeks’ time, I had the strong impression, which I still have, that a period of my
life had closed and that another was going to start . . . For a very long time I have had the intuition that you would help me to unravel this crisis of maturity which has been so painful . . . God knows I await your advice more impatiently than ever.
Talking of his work Simenon said that he thought the long period of introspection forced on him by the war had been beneficial and that he now felt a great impatience to start writing again. As for Pedigree, he agreed with Gide’s opinion of it, wondered if it had been a mistake to write it and said that he had no intention of publishing it without further advice from Gide.* He ended the letter by saying that his wife and son were with him at Les Sables d’Olonne, and that his son, aged 5V2, had been his real companion during ‘ les annees mornes’. He signed the letter ‘ Votre Simenon .
In another letter, also written in December, but to Francois Mauriac, Gide was more open than he had been to Simenon, to whom he had simply said that he expected to return to Paris in the spring. To Mauriac he wrote, ‘I will not suffer too much by prolonging my exile until the spring . . . waiting until the moral and physical temperature has become a little more clement.’ Gide was in an unusual position. Driven out of Nice and then Tunisia as a left-wing homosexual and anti-collaborator, he now hesitated to return in case he was branded defeatist, an anti-Communist and a Petainist. In the chaos of the liberation the French Communist Party was extremely powerful and well-organised. The word ‘epuration was one which came naturally to Communist lips. The committed Communist intellectual Louis Aragon, an influential member of the Party, had had it in for Gide since before the war, when the latter had published Retour d’URSS', a condemnation of Stalinism. Now Aragon was asking hostile questions about Gide’s contributions to Drieu’s NRF and to the collaborationist, wartime Figaro.
Others among Simenon’s friends and acquaintances were in worse trouble. Pierre Benoit and Vlaminck were both in hiding
* In fact Simenon was to publish Pedigree three years later without taking account of Gide’s view, and he subsequently explained the delay in publication by saying that he had for a long time wished to spare his mother’s feelings. If that was indeed the case he chose a strange time to publish it, since it came out shortly after the death of his brother Christian.
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from the Resistance. Benoit was eventually arrested in Dax. But while he was still in prison awaiting trial Louis Aragon arranged for him to be released and removed from the black list, apparently in exchange for serialisation rights for the Communist newspaper Ce Soir to Benoit’s best-selling novel L’Atlantide. Another friend, the actor Michel Simon, found himself in the ridiculous position of being blacklisted (for having played Tosca in fascist Italy), on the run, and at the same time being pursued by a casting director who wanted him to play a resistance hero in a new film. Simon agreed to play the part, but only on condition that he could keep his ‘disguise’, a thick beard and a tangled mop of hair. He still had the beard when he played the part of M. Hire in the film Panique , shot in 1946. Vlaminck stayed on the black list. His most serious offence had been to accept an invitation to tour Nazi Germany as one of an official delegation of artists from France. In later years Simenon was to claim that he and Pierre Benoit became close friends only after the war, although they ‘had already met once or twice on the terrace of Fouquet’s’. He did not mention the jury of the Prix de la Nouvelle France. Pierre Fresnay, star of Le corbeau, who had spoken the voice-over in Les inconnus dans la maison, was arrested and imprisoned for six weeks. Les inconnus was attacked in Les Lettres Francises in March 1944 because it had been distributed by Continental in Germany under the new title The Youth of France and had thus presented the whole of French youth as gangsters.
By May 1945, ten months after taking to his bed, Simenon felt confident enough to leave his country retreat and go to Paris. But he had decided to abandon France as soon as possible. Sending Marc and Boule back to Tigy in Nieul he set off for Paris in the company of an attractive young secretary whom he subsequently called ‘Odette’ since he had forgotten her real name. The epuration had been going full swing for nearly a year and Simenon had not been listed by the Comite National des Ecrivains, nor had he been denounced in L’Ecran Frangais or Les Lettres Frangaises .*
* According to the late Maurice Richardson, as reported in The Mystery of Georges Simenon by Fenton Bresler, Louis Aragon ‘was spreading it all over Paris that the creator of Maigret was a leading collaborator’. Richardson was a fine journalist and a magnificent gossip, and - thanks to its inclusion in Bresler’s book - this remark has been widely republished in France and Belgium; but it would be rash to accept that Simenon was accused of collaboration on the sole authority of an anecdote by
Nonetheless, Simenon was determined to get out of the country. Even if Aragon could be faced down there was the possibility of a Communist election victory. Bernard de Fallois is in no doubt that Simenon left France in 1945 because ‘he was frightened that the Russians were coming’. While waiting to leave Simenon found Paris as welcoming as it had been during the years of occupation; only the uniforms had changed. The problems of the black market were the same and the names of the ‘good’ restaurants which were doing whatever was necessary to bypass the restrictions were circulated by word of mouth. There was some difficulty in finding a hotel room, but Simenon, with his usual luck (it might be more true to say with his usual energy), found one in the Claridge on the Champs-Elysees.
The main trauma suffered in Paris during the summer of 1945 was no longer the hunt for collaborators but the return of the deportees from the prisons and concentration camps. Every day thousands arrived, many of them members of the legion of the living dead. From April to August the government had to welcome an average of 50,000 cases a week. Among them was Odette’s father, a returning prisoner of war. Odette accompanied her father home, but without inconveniencing Simenon who, on the same day, met a former ‘Girl Guide’ who had been one of his helpers with the Belgian refugees in 1940 and whom he now found ‘less gamine . She filled the vacant position of secretary and moved into his room at the Claridge. Marc and Boule came up from Nieul and Simenon installed them in their old apartment in the place des Vosges, where he joined Boule in the double bed until Tigy arrived, at which point he returned to his room in the Claridge where his ‘Girl Guide’ was waiting. She spent the days in the queue outside the British consulate waiting to apply for British visas. All transatlantic sailings in the summer of 1945 went via Liverpool or Southampton, the French ports having been destroyed by German sabotage or Allied bombings. Once the British visa was secured it was necessary to get the far more
Maurice Richardson. A reading of L’Ecran Fran (a is, Les Lettres Francises and Ce Soir, the three publications immediately available to Aragon for denunciations, shows no trace of Simenon’s name in any of the lists of suspected collaborators or in any of the hundreds of reports on the same subject. It seems that Simenon was neither denounced nor blacklisted, although several of his associates in the film world were.
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elusive American visa. For a Belgian to get a United States visa, the armistice with Germany having been signed only on 8 May, was extremely difficult, but Simenon found a way round the problem when he heard that a former editor of Le Journal whom he had known well before the war was now a man of influence in the ministry of information. Simenon called on him in his office in the avenue Friedland and his friend suggested that the solution would be to send him on a government mission, in his case ‘a mission to American and Canadian publishers’.
One day while Simenon happened to be in the apartment in the place des Vosges, visiting Marc and Tigy, a message was brought in saying that someone was waiting to see him in the gardens outside. He found his brother Christian sitting on a bench and refusing to come in because it was too dangerous. Simenon had last seen his brother in 1940 when Christian’s boat, returning from Matadi on the outbreak of war, had put in briefly at La Rochelle. Christian was at that time in charge of a load of Belgian government gold which he later claimed to have returned to Brussels, in itself an unhelpful act just after the fall of Belgium. French gold was at the same time being shipped out of Bordeaux for safe-keeping in London. In fact it was never entirely clear whether or not Christian had accounted for the Congolese gold. During the occupation he had joined the Belgian fascist ‘Rex’ movement and, having driven a car while his fellow Rexists carried out machine-gun attacks on groups of Resisters, was now on the run and in fear of his life. He had managed to get into France and was appealing to Georges to help him. The solution Georges eventually proposed was that Christian should sign up with the French Foreign Legion under a false name. The Legion was prepared to accept wanted collaborators without asking questions (and was even prepared to recruit former members of the SS), so Christian was assured of a welcome. In later years Simenon said that it was Andre Gide who had suggested the Foreign Legion, although by the time he made this public Gide was dead so there is no confirmation that it was in fact his idea.
Once he had seen Christian safely out of Paris, and given him the money he would need until he had joined up, Simenon did not do the obvious thing and go to Liege to see his mother. Although he had not seen Henriette since April 1939, when Marc was born, and although he had never been to thank her for her help in
supplying him with the necessary birth certificates in 1943, he was prepared to set out for the United States for an indefinite stay without saying goodbye to her. The breach between them may have been greater than he acknowledged, or he may have been frightened that his own appearance in Liege would reactivate interest in Christian’s or his own war-time activities.
One morning, while he was lying in bed with his ‘Girl Guide’ in the Claridge, the telephone rang; Gide was on the line. After their subsequent meeting Simenon wrote to apologise for talking only about himself. He offered to take Gide out to dinner at ‘a good restaurant’ and referred to his ‘quasi-filial devotion’. Their relationship, at least as it appears in their correspondence, remained that of master and pupil - Gide friendly and intrigued, anxious to guide Simenon along the paths of literary righteousness; Simenon flattered, intimidated (‘I am always so nervous because deep down I am unconvinced that I deserve your precious friendship’) and, finally, rejecting. They spent two days together at Gide’s sister-in-law’s house in Normandy, and in July Gide introduced Simenon to another admirer, Raymond Mortimer, ‘un gargon charmanf, who was staying with the British ambassador, Duff Cooper. It was in the letter containing the invitation to meet Mortimer, written on Bastille Day 1945, that Gide made his famous comparison between Simenon and Camus, saying of La veuve Couderc (written in April 1940) that it was ‘remarkably analogous with L’etranger [published in 1942], about which everyone is talking, but that it goes much further, without appearing to do so, which as we know, is the height of art’.
The evening with Raymond Mortimer was judged a great success. ‘After a delicious dinner at a black market restaurant (for which Simenon paid) Gide went home, and Simenon took me to a fair in Montmartre with roundabouts and shooting alleys . . .’ Mortimer wrote later. Gide, who all this time was furiously devouring previously unread Simenons, next wanted to introduce Simenon to one of his oldest friends, the novelist, academician and Nobel prize winner Roger Martin du Gard. This meeting, too, took place, Martin du Gard writing on 9 August to thank Simenon for the dinner, wishing him a pleasant journey, and calling him a Jastueux vagabond ’. Simenon was still in Paris for the VJ-day procession, which took place after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and followed the Japanese surrender
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on 15 August. He and Marc watched the parade from his balcony in the Claridge overlooking the Champs-Elysees. Simenon, who regarded war as an atrocity and victory as an imposter, must have viewed the VJ-day celebrations with particular distaste. For him France was a country, like Belgium and Germany, which had just lost a war, but which, unlike Belgium and Germany, was pretending to have won it. The French role in the atomic bombing of Japanese cities had been nil and the French decision to celebrate as another victory the use of the most terrible weapon yet invented, even though France had never used that weapon, crystallised his dislike for General de Gaulle, whom he regarded from then on as ‘ cocorico ’. In Quand j’etais vieux he would write of de Gaulle’s ‘conceit . . . his scorn of the opinions of others’.
But little of this mattered in August 1945. The American visas had come through, and they were on the point of departure. He was leaving France, the influence of Gide and even his publishers Gallimard. He was wiping the slate clean and starting his life again. His last surviving contribution to this part of his correspondence with Gide was written at the end of July and ends, ‘I have the impression that I am beginning to know you better, and I like you more, though remaining all the time deeply “impressed”.’ No doubt Simenon’s liking and admiration for Gide were entirely sincere, but he seems at the same time to have found it an unbalanced relationship, and an invitation to enter a world which - despite his self-confidence in 1937 when he had spoken of winning the Nobel prize - he knew he could never call his own.
Just before leaving Simenon made the necessary arrangements to change his publishers. He increasingly resented the fact that Gallimard did not take his work sufficiently seriously and treated him as a merely popular novelist. While he had been convalescing at Les Sables d’Olonne he had received from an unknown Danish publisher, Sven Nielsen, the proofs of a novel by an unknown Norwegian author. This was Traque by Arthur Omre, for which, most unusually, he agreed to write a preface. When Simenon came to Paris he met Nielsen and they became close friends. In defiance of all the advice he had received Simenon gave Nielsen the manuscript of the earlier, factual version of Pedigree. Nielsen published this under the title Je me souviens on 24 December 1945,
in his infant publishing house Les Presses de la Cite, which is today, after several changes of ownership, the largest publishing group in France. The foundation of the house’s success was undoubtedly Simenon and from 1947 onwards he gave all but four of his books to Nielsen, sending only one more novel to Gallimard. His desertion came at a bad time for Gallimard, who was not fully forgiven for his activity during the occupation until 1949.* This decision - to leave Gallimard for an unknown, thoroughly commercial, publisher — did Simenon’s literary reputation in France no good at all. The silences of the great cathedral of French publishing are as eloquent as its sermons, and can be more devastating than the most savage criticism from less influential directions. For Simenon there was little chance from then on of a Prix Nobel. Gide never published his much-discussed paper on the ‘importance’ of Simenon; the manuscript was either lost or unfinished, and it seems clear that he too was disappointed by his protege’s rejection of his advice and patronage, confirmed by the decision to publish first Je me souviens and then Pedigree.
Also before leaving France, Simenon met Pierre Lazareff, his pre-war journalistic patron, who had spent the war running an agency for French actors in Hollywood. Lazareff had by now left France-Soir and had started a new paper, untainted by any form of collaboration and called Liberation. Simenon agreed to write a short story for Lazareff and went to the village of St Fargeau-surSeine, upstream from Paris, for a few days to write it. They were to be the last days of his life spent on the banks of a river which had inspired so much of his work. Earlier, in the Hotel Cambrai in the rue de Turenne, he had written La pipe de Maigret and the title story of Le bateau d } Emile. The only remaining formality to be completed before the departure for London was to buy the tickets, and here Simenon was surprised to learn from Tigy that he would need to buy only three, as Boule would not be coming with them.
The failure to take Boule to America in 1945 was one of the few
* How deep the wound went is shown by the fact that as late as 1991 the house of Gallimard was still refusing to allow Les Presses de la Cite to include any of the fiftythree titles Simenon had placed with Gallimard between 1934 and 1954 in the posthumously collected edition of the author’s works (which was nonetheless circulated under the title ‘Tout Simenon’).
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marital battles which Simenon fought and lost. The reason he lost it was because Tigy no longer had to take the initiative in ridding herself of Boule. All she had to do was refuse to go to America. She told Simenon that if Boule came she would refuse to take Marc out of France. Now it was no longer a case of‘her or me’, but of ‘her or us’. No French court would have given Simenon custody of Marc against his mother’s wishes, and there was no question, in the conditions of 1945, of Simenon wanting to push matters that far with Tigy. With the greatest reluctance he had to agree to leave Boule behind, although he considered her a full member of the family. There is a sad picture taken at about this time of Simenon’s family. It is the only picture of Boule and Marc together; it looks like a farewell photograph, and the saddest faces in it are those of Marc and Boule. Simenon’s failure to defend Boule’s position on this occasion had an important influence on his subsequent behaviour towards Tigy. His miscalculation had been to underestimate the depth of Tigy’s resentment over his conduct with Boule. When he noted in the spring of 1945 that Tigy and Boule were ‘getting on very well’ he was deluding himself.
The Simenons flew from Le Bourget to Croydon to find a capital city which, though it had never been occupied, had suffered far more from the war than Paris had. For Simenon, London was the capital of the liberators, ‘the English, the Americans, the Canadians, and a few French regiments as well’, and he noted that some people in France would never forgive these foreigners for putting them in the position of owing them their freedom. London, for Tigy and Simenon, had always meant the Savoy Hotel, which they found open and undamaged. There were English royalties waiting for him at the bank, so - to the Savoy, with their thirty pieces of luggage. Simenon sent an article to France-Soir about life in post-war London; it was one way of saying goodbye to all the friends he had failed to see before his departure. He called on George Routledge & Sons to check his royalty statements, and he opened a Canadian bank account, since they had decided to start their North American adventure in French-speaking Quebec where they intended to learn English. In London, Marc was kept amused by repeated trips on the pleasuresteamers plying between Westminster Pier and Tower Bridge,
which passed the lines of ocean-going boats moored in the Upper Pool. He also made friends with the porters outside the Savoy and learnt how to whistle for taxis. Simenon and Tigy had separate rooms, and in the evenings Simenon would set out across this new, strange city by himself, in search of adventure. ‘I discovered,’ he wrote later, ‘that Englishwomen were not the cold, dull creatures of legend.’
They had to wait for a month before they could sail. The first move was to register with the committee which allocated berths on all transatlantic passages. There was such a demand for tickets that passenger vessel movements were regulated and the available number of berths were pooled and allocated at very short notice on stated priorities. It was the heyday of iron bureaucracy in a London which met any request for information, let alone any hint of a complaint, with the sneering response, ‘Don’t you know there’s been a war on?’ Once registered the Simenons were told to wait in their hotel since instructions to board the boat train to Liverpool or Southampton could come at any time and at one hour’s notice. Boat tickets could not, however, be purchased before the order to embark was issued. So when the order eventually arrived, one day in September, Simenon, rushing to buy the tickets, found a long queue in front of a single booking office window. He reached the head of the queue with only minutes to spare to find that his arrival had coincided with that of the tea trolley. ‘I offered the clerk my papers. He looked away. While I fumed he drank his tea, in greedy little sips, and nibbled his piece of cake. ’
They were finally booked on to a small Swedish cargo vessel which had berths for twelve passengers and which, since it was carrying no cargo, gave them a rough passage through the equinoctial gales. Tigy and Marc shared a cabin. Simenon was lodged with ‘un monsieur inconnu ’. During the voyage he became friendly with the only obvious criminal on board, a Frenchman who was smuggling two litres of‘essence of roses’ into the United States as the basis of his future fortune, and whose mistress concealed her diamonds in a plain leather bracelet. And so they bucketed their way across the Atlantic, the perfume smuggler and the phoney government emissary, among the very first Europeans to enjoy the privilege of boarding the transatlantic boat, their presence a tribute to personal influence and bureaucratic ineptitude. In
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New York they were met by ‘Colonel’ Justin O’Brien, whom Simenon had first met in Paris some months before and who had resumed teaching English literature at Columbia University in New York. In order to get the Simenons through immigration formalities as quickly as possible O’Brien had climbed back into his colonel’s uniform. Waving goodbye to the perfume smuggler, the phoney chef-de-mission and the phoney colonel clambered into a yellow cab and set off for the hotel. At least the skyscrapers were real.
PART III