INTIMATE MEMOIRS

Saturday, February i6, 1980

My tiny little girl,

I know that you are dead, and yet this is not the first time I am writing you. You would have liked to go out quietly, without disturbing a soul. But your death touched off legal and other mechanisms, so that even now lawyers and counselors are trying to work out the problems created by your mother's obstinacy, which may sooner or later have to be settled in court.

Our friend Dr. Jean Martinon, of Cannes, whom you were supposed to speak to by phone, was the one who gave the alarm. Martinon called over and over again, and finally found out that the line had been disconnected. He called .Marc, the one of your brothers who lives closest to Paris. Marc and .\lylene rushed to the Champs-Elysées and found the door to your apartment locked from the inside. The concierge did not have a duplicate key, so they had to call the police, who came right away and got a locksmith.

Your apartment was impeccably orderly and clean, as if, before leaving, you had given it a thorough going over, including laundering and ironing your clothes and linens. Everything was in its place. And you lay on the bed, with a small red hole in your chest.

Where did that single-shot .22 pistol come from? Who bought the cartridges?

A judicial investigation was started: coroner, public prosecutor, police laboratory specialists, and, from my little house in Lausanne, I watched all the legal brouhaha I had so often described in my novels.

Once the on-site investigation was over and your body was taken to the

morgue, I was able to get them to skip the autopsy, but I phoned and asked the pohce superintendent to put seals on both your doors.

They were removed for a few hours about a month ago, to permit an official inventory to be drawn up by an appraiser, in the presence of a notary, a court clerk, the neighborhood police superintendent, two lawyers, your mother's and the one representing us, as well as your three brothers, and of course your mother, and Aitken, who was representing me because I can no longer travel, all of them hovering about near your bed, which was just the way it had been found almost two years ago.

After which the seals were affixed again, and I have no idea when they will ever come off. It's a little as if your body were still warm, after all those days!

Since I was unable to, Aitken was the one who sat beside the driver of the hearse and brought you back to Lausanne, as you wished. I was waiting for you, and you were laid out in a room at the city undertaker's, where, bereft, I spent nearly an hour alone with you.

I scrupulously carried out your last wishes, found on your bed. No ceremony. The next day, just a few people gathered before your casket while an organist played some of the Johann Sebastian Bach music we both loved. Flowers galore. Mine were armfuls and armfuls of white lilacs, which, in my view, harmonized with the laughing little girl I had known.

In the front row to the left, four men shoulder to shoulder: your three brothers, Marc, Johnny, and Pierre, and me beside the narrow aisle.

On the other side, your mother and a woman I don't know.

Behind your brothers and me, Mylène, Boule, and Teresa, followed by two or three of your friends whom you had asked me to invite.

Twenty minutes of motionlessness and music. At the signal of the funeral director, I left first, after making a date with your brothers for the following day. Teresa was waiting for me outside and she brought me home, staring vacantly, as if I had suddenly become a very old man.

Sitting on either side of the fireplace, she and I knew that at the same moment, your body was being cremated. I had made certain, as you had urgently asked of me, that the wedding ring you had begged me to buy for you when you were about eight years old, and which you had had enlarged a number of times, was not taken off your finger.

The next morning, early, the undertaker's man brought us the box with your ashes, and, once we were alone, I fulfilled your last wish: to have those white ashes strewn over the little garden of our pink house.

A little later, your brothers came in. The sun was bright, the grass a fine green.

For the last time, I was sleepwalking as I had done in my childhood, but, as I kept looking out on the garden, the violent pain that had kept me doubled over during the long week of waiting gave way to a feeling of tenderness, which I still experience every time I see that garden and the birds pecking in it, and, considering the position of my armchair, which you know so well, that happens a hundred times a day.

I've gotten into the habit of saying good morning to you when the shutters are opened, and good night in the evening when they are closed, as well as talking inwardly to you.

It took me a long time to get used once again to living like everybody else.

On the white shelves, alongside my desk, large file boxes began piling up, one on the other. The hundreds of letters of yours and mine, your first childish compositions, your intimate diaries and innumerable pictures, your datebooks, your jottings, your memos to yourself—everything concrete that remained of my little Marie-Jo was there, before my eyes, and I was waiting for the moment when I would be able to touch it.

It took almost two years for me to feel strong enough to plunge into your past, your whole life, and, by the same token, into my own past too, in which, as I then realized more than I ever had before, you occupy so great a place.

Your confidences, when we sat facing one another, each in his own armchair, when you read me your disquieting poems, when, accompanying yourself on the guitar, you sang, to tunes we both liked, songs you had made up, with English words; the last cassettes you sent me, some of them so heartrending; everything that had made up the essence of your pathetic life, I now began to understand, should not ever be scattered about. I understand, my little girl, your desire that these records of your radiant existence, your dark hours and your struggles, should not disappear.

I told you one day, and I think I even wrote you, that a being is not completely dead so long as he remains alive in the heart of another. And you are still alive within mc, .so alive that I can write to you and speak to you as if you were going to read and hear me, answer me while looking at me with your eyes brimming with confidence and love.

The more I live in your intimacy, the more certain I am that you were an exceptional being, of rare lucidity, moved by an almost cruel determination to discover the truth. So that your death has become a t]uasi-heroic

action, and, as you well know, as you so shyly let me understand, all of that cannot go to waste.

That is why, after thinking it over a great deal, and having taken the measure of my strength, I am starting today, in pen and ink, in school notebooks very much like the ones you used, which I ordered especially, to write the story of a being whom I cherish and who will no longer be dead to anyone.

This book will be not mine but yours.

You had an almost painful need to express yourself, whether in writing, painting, dance, theater, or the movies. Your true vocation was writing. You felt that later on and you acted on it. And you also brought Marie-Jo back to life much better than I ever could.

Until tomorrow, my little girl.

He was tall

He was skinny

With his big feet and his big nose

He looked starved

So tall

So skinny

How ridiculous he was!

Always looking a little starved, to be sure, like all Belgians who were not rich and could not buy their rations on the black market. I was a little over fourteen years old, and our family doctor had told me—as I was later to be informed erroneously about myself—that my father had only two more years before him. That time, it was correct; he had been suffering for a long time with angina pectoris, for which at the time there was no cure.

And yet that poem, of which I can't remember the rest, which I had

scribbled on a bit of paper in the attic, where I hid away in spite of my immense admiration and almost adoration for my father, had a sprightly little lilt to it.

That was in the summer of 1917, and since I knew I would not be able to continue studying at the Jesuit school on Rue Saint-Gilles for the two years remaining before mv baccalauréat, I wandered, for the most part early in the morning or late at night, through the crowded working-class streets or the greenery of the hills.

I was hungr)', yes, hungr\' for everything, for traces of sun on the houses, for trees and faces, hungry* for all the women I passed whose wiggling hips were enough to give me almost painful erections. How many times did I not satisfy that hunger with young local girls older than I in the doorways of houses on dark streets. Or else I would furtively sneak into one of those houses with a window in which a more or less fat and desirable woman sat placidly knitting, until she drew the yellowish curtain as soon as a customer came in.

Other curtains made me dream at night, when, behind their barely luminous screen, I could make out the moving shadows of a man and woman coming and going as if the couple they formed were thus sheltered from the world and its realities.

I was hungr\' for life, and I wandered through marketplaces gazing here at the vegetables, there at the multicolored fruit, elsewhere again at the displays of flowers.

"Big nose," yes, my little Marie-Jo, for I was inhaling life through my nostrils, through my every pore, the colors, the lights, the odors and noises of the streets.

I have already told all of this, at a diff^erent age, in another context, and this time I am evoking it for you, in whom, I am sure, it will cause certain fibers to vibrate, and for your brothers too, who knew me less well than you did.

We were poor. Not really poor, not at the very bottom of that social scale the bourgeois, the haves, the rich invent everywhere in the world, which moved me to indignation: Weren't wc all human beings?

At the very bottom of the scale at that time were the factory workers, whose children my mother called "hoodlums" when they played noisily in the streets. One rung above were the artisans, for they also worked with their hands and also got dirty. Wc were on the rung above that, the third one. .My father was a clerk, a bookkeeper, always dressed in dark clothes, dignified and immaculate. Today such people arc called "white-collar" work-

ers. In those days they were called "brain workers," because they earned their living through their minds. Had he not, contrary to what was true of his brothers, passed his Latin-Greek baccalauréat?

Those brain workers were, in point of fact, poorer than the artisans and the blue-collar workers. You could easily see that by going through the streets on the children's holiday, the feast of St. Nicholas, whom the Americans have turned into Santa Glaus, that white-bearded Father Ghristmas driving his reindeer-powered sleigh across the rooftops.

In the working-class streets, I saw kids proudly playing with cars that had nickel-plated pedals, bicycles their own size, complicated building sets, whereas all I had got, in addition to the traditional gingerbread and the fruit dish with the orange in the middle, were some new tubes of paint, to replace the used-up ones in my paintbox, which dated back several years. Like you, I was crazy about painting, but all I ever did was unimaginatively copy picture postcards.

Now do you understand why, so much later, when you and your brothers opened your sumptuous Ghristmas presents, I sometimes involuntarily smiled nostalgically? You were rich. Nothing caused you wonderment, so you were less lucky than I had been. I was often afraid for you. I even sometimes pitied you. After all, it's lucky to be born poor and be able to appreciate a simple orange at its true value.

I worked as a clerk in a bookstore and was not ashamed to have to wait on my school chums from the Gollège Saint-Servais. I became a cub reporter and was finally able to buy the bike I had been dreaming of since earliest childhood. True, my means were still very limited; I still wore clothes that looked elegant on the dummies in the store windows but began to shrink the minute it rained, so that my pants were too short, my shoulders too tight.

That was only a slight shadow cast over life, which I was embracing to the full, a life in which everything was important, the silhouette of a woman scarcely seen, the faces that went by like those of paintings in an exhibit, the yellowing of the leaves and the silky green of grasses in the sun.

Did you, did any of the four of you, know any of that, in the huge gardens that surrounded our houses and our châteaux? I would not swear to it, and I feel somewhat guilty about it. A chauffeur drove you to school and brought you back home. A nursemaid or governess was there to greet you, ready to satisfy all your desires.

What would my fate be? I did not know, and the question often filled me with distasteful anxiety.

Yet, the four of you were to know that question too. In my case, it was not attributed to "genes," but just heredity. The book written by a professor

who scoured three provinces to root out my origins later informed me that mv earliest known ancestors, back in the seventeenth centurv, were people of the land, not prosperous farmers, but laborers who rented out the strength of their arms by the week, the month, or the year.

Those are vour ancestors too, at least on your paternal side. The maternal ones are important too, but, as far as my first wife, Tigy, and my second wife, from Canada, are concerned, I know much less about them.

You met Tigv at Marc's house, my little girl, and like your brothers you affectionately called her Mamiche. You probably visited her in her house at Nieul-sur-Mer, in the Charente-Maritime, near the city of La Rochelle. Do vou know, my sons and my daughter, that I fixed up that very old house, which centuries before had been a priory, with the idea that one day my grandchildren would spend their vacations there? That is more or less what happened, but I am no longer there to see you, since Tigy and I got divorced, even though we remain the best of friends.

I met her . . . Well, that would seem to concern only Marc and his children, but in reality it concerns all four of you, for I am convinced that our environment and all of the contacts we have during our childhood and adolescence have an influence on our characters and our destinies.

As a reporter on the Gazette de Liège, I had by chance fallen in with a bunch of young art students, painters just graduated from the Academy or about to be graduated. Through them, I met a girl, Régine Renchon, whose first name displeased me, so I renamed her Tigy, which has no real meaning, certainly not that of queen.

She was rather tall, wore a brown coat of no special shape and low-heeled shoes. On her hair, which was brown too, parted in the middle and rolled into buns, a brown hat of the same material, shaped like a Basque beret. No lace, no embroidery, no frills or furbelows. She walked with long determined steps, looking neither to left nor to right, her eyes, under their heavy eyebrows, gazing straight ahead.

She had a lively intelligence, wide knowledge, especially of art, and within the small group that her friends and I made up everyone was impressed by her sharp retorts, always jolly but sometimes tinted with unmali-cious irony.

Was it love at first sight? No, but I did seek out her company. I still dreamed of two shadows i)ehind a slightly lighted blind, and it occurred to me that it would be nice some evening to be with her in the shelter of that blind, to be one of the two shadows.

Three months later, after having spent an evening a week at her studio, I got into the habit of waiting for her at nine at night outside the Academy,

where she was taking a Hve-model nude course. I would walk her back, arm in arm, to her place by way of streets selected because they were the least brightly lighted and had the least traffic, and, although we sometimes stopped to kiss, we talked mainly about Phidias and Praxiteles, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Plato, Villon, Spinoza, and Nietzsche.

Love? Yes, of course, but mainly an intellectual one, in which the flesh eventually played its part, but without frenzy or ecstasy.

She lived with her family in a huge, impressive house, with an entryway dating back to the time of carrriages, a great porte-cochere, old stables at the back of the courtyard, and a broad marble double stairway leading up to the main floor. The family spent most of their time on the second floor, and soon I was going up there every evening, to stay until ten.

A living room with period furniture; a young sister, Tita, with her braids still down her back, who played the piano while her father, who looked like a smug well-to-do bourgeois, turned the pages of the music for her; her mother, small and broad, always on the go; and a little girl as pretty as a Chinese porcelain, who danced all by herself and was to die very soon because she was a mongoloid.

My father-in-law-to-be had almost the same background as the Sime-nons. Orphaned at an early age, he had made his way as an apprentice cabinetmaker, and a neighboring family, with many children of their own, had adopted him. What was one more when there were already seven or eight and no inheritance to worry about passing on? My mother-in-law-to-be was one of those five or six children, and she fell in love with the boy her family had adopted.

The father was a most extraordinary fellow. Working as laborer or foreman in a boiler factory at Valenciennes, on the French side of the border, he had invented a new system for cleaning boilers, which had been widely adopted. Having thus become an inventor, and being able to live off the royalties of his invention, he had given up active work and spent his days sitting in his armchair, looking serious and pensive. When he was asked what he was thinking about, he would answer, "I'm inventing. . . ."

Unfortunately, he never invented anything more, and the day came when he simply had to get a job to keep the pot boiling. Since he had a fine baritone voice, he became the cantor of the parish church. By a curious coincidence, the father of my second wife, whom I will refer to as D., as I have been doing for the past fifteen years, had also been a church cantor, in Canada, shortly after his marriage.

My Renchon father-in-law, once he got married, went up the scale

quickly, and when I knew him, he was the most famous decorator and maker of luxur\- furniture of his own design in the city. My uncle Henri-de-Tougres, Henri-the-Rich, mv mother's brother, had called upon his serv-ices, as had so many others, when he furnished his château in Limbourg.

My father-in-law had four children, as I was to have four. He lost one of them, a daughter, as I lost a daughter. But did we lose her? Doesn't the missing child remain the more alive in us? That was what happened to my father-in-law. And what happened to me, my darling little girl.

I was seventeen when I met Tigy. I was eighteen when, after enlisting instead of waiting to be conscripted, I was sent to spend a freezing winter with the occupation troops in the Rote Kaserne (or Red Barracks) in Aix-la-Chapelle, where I saw women going to do their marketing with a wheelbarrow full of hundred-, then thousand-, and eventually million-mark bills, whereas we, my fellow soldiers and I, with our close-shorn heads, could dine in the most expensive restaurants on our daily pay of twenty-five Belgian centimes.

Ever)' day, with frozen fingers, I wrote a long letter to Tigy, sometimes two, and I suppose she kept them. They were a hymn to love, because my heart was running over with it. I later understood that it was a hymn to woman, rather than to one person in particular. I confess that I would enjoy rereading those feverish phrases, probably the most romantic I have ever written in my life.

In order not to remain separated from Tigy, I put in for and got a transfer to Liège, to the Lancers Barracks, less than a quarter of a mile from my mother's home, and every evening, at eight o'clock, I was able to climb the two flights that led to my future in-laws' living room.

My father died while I, in Antwerp on an assignment for the Gazette, was making love to a distant cousin of mine in a house of assignation. When I got back, I found Tigy and her father waiting for me at the train, to break the news gently to me.

My father was laid out, fully dressed, with his hands crossed on his chest, and I had to make an effort to bring my lips to his cold brow.

I was nineteen. A few months later, i left Liege for Paris, uhere I had been promised a job as secretary to a writer, very famous at the time but forgotten today.

I am not forgetting, Marie-Jo, that this is your book, and consequently your brothers' book too. I apologize for having gone so far back into my past. I think it was necessary, even if 1 have dwelt on a few things 1 have said

before. Even though many years went by before the birth of your eldest brother, Marc, whom you were so often to run to for comfort, I am now at last about to get around to him. Good night, little girl.

A poorly lighted railroad-station platform, at night, in Liège, with fog to make it more dramatic. On the platform, Tigy and her father, whose faces and good-bye waves were a blur to me through the moist, dirty windows. It was December 14,1922, a date that must seem terribly long ago to you but to me seems very recent.

As day broke, the outskirts of Paris, houses rising like cliffs on either side of the tracks, poor, gray houses, most of which had lights in the windows, in which common people were dressing hurriedly so as to rush toward their day's work. The Gare du Nord, a horrible station, in which I don't know how many trains poured out their human cargo; half asleep and cranky, they headed in droves toward the doors.

It was raining, and before long the icy water had gone through my cotton raincoat and my worn-out soles. My fake-leather suitcase, with all my worldly goods in it, was heavy and made me lean to one side as I walked. "Madame, would you have a room available, not too expensive?" "Full up."

Every place in Paris hotels was filled up in this postwar period.

As I looked around, there were buildings different from the ones I was used to, an astounding amount of traffic—streetcars, hansom cabs, and taxis all intermingled. A long sloping street. Five, six, maybe ten more or less appealing hotels.

"Full up," the answer came each time, dry and impersonal, and the wet cold went through me more and more.

A circular intersection. A boulevard to the left, Rochechouart, whose name I knew from novels. So this was Montmartre! A dirty, gray Montmartre.

A windmill across the boulevard. The Moulin Rouge. Empty, closed

cabarets with names like the Dead Rat, and Heaven and Hell . . . Place Pigalle. Place Blanche. I dragged along, my hand getting numb from that suitcase, but I felt happv.

Place Clichy. The Brasserie Weber, where so many painters and, especially, famous writers had sat on the terrace. In December, there was no terrace and, through the rain, vou couldn't even see the lights inside.

Boulevard des Batignolles. Bringing back an old refrain heard on the street comers of Liège: "Maria, Maria, the terror of the Batignolles . . ."

A street on the right with a hotel sign. "Excuse me, sir, would you . . ." Yes, there was a free room, up under the eaves, a floor above where the red carpet on the stairs ended.

I put down my load. I rush to the address sent me by the writer whose secretary' I was supposed to become. At the end of a cul-de-sac, a small stunted house. The door is wide open. A voice calls down to me from the top of the stairs, "Come on up!"

All gray, all din\\ all dull, like certain government offices open to the public. Two young women, a man with a flushed face and red hair, another, older, better turned out, with a small brown mustache.

He introduces himself. "Captain T. . . ."

"I came for the job of . . ."

"Oh, you're the young Belgian? Do you speak French?"

I was never to be the writer's secretary. One of the two young women with long, madonnalike faces has that job, and what they are looking for now is an office boy. So much for my dreams. I'm happy enough to be in Paris and earning my way, unlike so many of the other young men and girls whom trains from the provinces spew forth every day in the capital's railway stations.

Paris! I hat is all that matters.

"You'll be paid six hundred francs a month."

"Yes, sir."

"Call me Captain."

In reality I have been hired to work for an extreme right-wing political league, of which my novelist is the president. He lives on the ground floor.

They show me the place. A kitchen table covered by wrapping paper stuck on with thumbtacks. Two hours later, I am admitted into the holy of holies, and a fat man with a hoarse voice, a monocle in his eye, gives me the once-over.

"You the little Belgian?"

"Yes, sir."

A noble sweep of the hand to show me the door. I would only one more time enter this room, which, for the people upstairs, who now include me, has something sacred about it.

I'm hungry. I'm always going to be hungry; this time not because of war or occupation, but because all I earn is six hundred francs a month and I've promised my mother two hundred and fifty. I get along mostly on bread, Camembert cheese, or tripe à la mode de Caen, the greasy gravy of which helps wash down quite a lot of bread.

At the corner of Boulevard des Batignolles, a big food store attracts me like a magnet. A whole windowful of cold dishes, lobster salads, halves of crayfish in aspic or mayonnaise, dishes of assorted cold cuts, and, my face pressed against the windowpane, I salivate the way my horses did, back in the barracks, after an outing.

Someday . . .

I am not ambitious. I never will be during my whole career, which starts off so humbly. I am happy, today, for that more than modest start, which drew me closer to the common people of my hometown neighborhood. I did not detrain at the Gare du Nord "to conquer Paris," as one of my fellow Belgians so proudly told me he had, only to leave France and his great hopes behind two months later. I came because ... In truth, mainly because Tigy is a painter and wants to immerse herself in the atmosphere of Montparnasse, where, in those days, you rubbed elbows with all the painters in the world.

We met them at the Dôme, at the Jockey, and some of them, Vlaminck, Derain, Kisling, Picasso, were to become friends of ours.

Before that, two months of weighing and stamping letters and packages, carrying them to the post office, addressing envelopes to league members, for use in case of emergency meetings. For instance, to discuss strikes, such as the Métro and streetcar strike, when the military engineering students of the Ecole Polytechnique, in uniforms and white gloves, manned the throttles until the strikers had to come back to work.

My novelist summons me again to the holy of holies.

"How would you like to become private secretary to one of our great friends who has just lost his father? He is the bearer of one of the great names in French history and . . ."

Okay. I ring the bell at his home, an impressive town house on elegant Rue La Boétie. A concierge in livery. A huge vestibule furnished with real period furniture. A sitting room through the door of which I can see a ballroom that can accommodate two hundred people, with gilded chairs and

settees all around and chandeliers whose crystal pendants, tarnished by time, begin to tinkle when I take a timid step toward them.

I am no longer in the present, but in a past I had pictured only through Saint-Simon, Stendhal, and Balzac. Everything goes back at least to Louis XIII, and then from Louis to Louis till the one who lost his head. "If monsieur will come with me." A valet, youthful and blond, still with a country smell about him, although decked out in black trousers and a starched white jacket, shows me into another room, which could be an office, where I find a handsome man with an open face, a bit past fortv-five, with some white hairs at the temples. It is eleven in the morning, and he is in a silk dressing gown, over fighter silk pajamas, and looking at me rather welcomingly.

"Not married, I suppose?"

"I'll be getting married in March."

His face darkens.

"I travel a great deal, and my secretary' has to go with me. I spend parts of each year in one or another of my châteaux."

He is not showing off. To him, that's natural. His family, the de Tracys, has been noble since the thirteenth centur\'. He himself, born a viscount, became a count when his elder brother was killed in the war, and now a marquis at the recent death of his father.

"I wouldn't want to be taking a wife along. . . ."

".\ly wife-to-be and I are mainly just good friends. She is a painter and has to think of her career."

"In that case, I'll take you on, for a trial period. But you'll have to promise me ..." I promise.

I buy the secondhand tuxedo of a young fellow from Liège, now in Paris, destined to become a king's prosecutor, then a member of the Belgian Academy, which he will force me to join one day too, and where he will sponsor me.

A very modest wedding ceremony, despite the Renchons' impressive home. Three carriages outside the door. ligy and her father are in the first, her mother and grandmother in the second, my mother and I in the third. On the way, 1 have nothing to say to my mother, who is sniffling, and, in order to try to cheer her up, I explain to her how in France they fry potatoes in oil instead of lard.

Church of Saintc-\'éronique. No f)rgan march. Just the usual habitués scattered among the pews. The Renchons are atheists and Kniilc /ola is their god.

Actually, the Renchons' son, Yvan, his wife, and Tita must have been there too, but I don't remember them.

Never having been baptized, Tigy had to take three weeks of private catechism lessons. She was baptized yesterday, and early this morning took her first communion, so now she can have a religious wedding such as my mother demanded. That is why, unbeliever though I am, I made sure, children, that all four of you were baptized.

A crowd at the city hall for the civil ceremony, because here I am Little Sim, the reporter who for three years covered that beat with rather tart reports. My colleagues are all there. A deputy mayor officiates, making a somewhat rambling speech, at times slipping into Walloon, and pronounces us man and wife. My colleagues have chipped in to buy us a big red-and-white cut-glass heart.

Carriages. This time I am with Tigy and not with my mother, who must be in a carriage with some of the members of the enemy clan. She never cared for the Renchons, or for Tigy. "My lord, Georges, how ugly she is!" she exclaimed after I had introduced my fiancée to her.

And as for those people in the fine town house on Rue Louvrex, "they're just grandiveux^' —a Walloon word that means something like "upstarts." But it wasn't my father-in-law's fault that he had acquired the stature people attribute to the upper bourgeoisie and his profession required him to wear suits made by fine tailors.

Luncheon for ten at most, just the family. My mother's eyes are red, though at times she squeezes out a forced smile. The conversation is full of embarrassing holes.

Fortunately, Tigy and I are taking the afternoon train, and for the first time we get to go into her bedroom to change. Outside the door, we can hear the heavy breathing of my father-in-law, who adores all his children, but Tigy especially.

Unlike me, he dreamed of turning each of his children into an artist, and the strange thing is, he succeeded.

Yvan, who was ten years or so older than I and was an architect, was one of the first, at least in Belgium, to study the structural resistance of reinforced concrete, at a time when other architects were still concerned only with its aesthetic aspects. He pondered the then poorly understood problem of soundproofing, which won him the job of architect to Queen Elisabeth, the wife of King Albert, a great patroness of artists, especially musicians, for she herself was a violinist.

Yvan was the one who erected a huge building with soundproof studios for her foundation. Every year, it took in a batch of promising young

H

musicians, who could study there and give concerts in auditoriums of various sizes without anv financial worries.

Yvan lived long enough—he died ten years ago or so—to see his son, whom I was ver\- fond of, also become an architect and, I have been told, a highlv regarded one.

For Tig)', eldest of the daughters, there was painting, the Academy of Fine Arts, exhibitions. Does she still paint? I have no idea; she never discusses it in the friendly letters she writes me.

Tita, whom I was secretlv in love with, won a first prize at the Conserv-ator\' and later gave piano concerts in many cities and on French radio. She married a piano tuner, the son of a pohce superintendent—O Maigret! She turned to giving lessons as she got older and, once widowed, settled somewhere in Touraine.

The last time we saw one another was in Liège, when I went there with Teresa. Her husband was still alive, which did not keep us from hugging each other tenderlv in a café. Teresa and she looked at each other with more than understanding, a kind of complicity', and exchanged affectionate smiles.

.\lv marquis turned out to be a real fairy-tale nobleman, with several châteaux throughout France, vineyards in the Loire country, forests, fields, and tenanted farms (twenty-eight around one of the châteaux), landholdings near Paris, rice fields in Italy, a huge Islamic-style villa in Tunisia, town houses in various cities, and who knows what else.

Until his father died, he had spent most of his time at the Jockey Club, hunting, and attending parties in aristocratic châteaux, since over the centuries his family, through a series of brilliant matches, had become related to all the old nobility of France and other countries.

The death of his father left him with a mass of paperwork and other problems of which he understood nothing. And I, at twenty, was supposed to get him out of the mess.

First stop: Aix-les-Bains, where he took the cure each year and where at great expense he had had set up the kind of bungalow the British Army used in India. Of course, ligy was along, unknown to him, but I alone went with him to fish for char in the lake.

Then to a château, the oldest, smallest one, surrounded by a famous vineyard, but filled with books piled up over the centuries, which delighted me.

Tigy was there too, in a very good inn, on the opposite bank of the Loire.

Yet I was writing, for I had a need to write, just as I had been writing before I left Paris. But now I was writing to make a living, to earn some food.

«5

and what I wrote was not literature but little stories for the risqué weeklies, Le Rire, La Vie parisienne, Sourire, Sans Gêne, and eventually for the big daily Le Matin, at which I was to meet and become a friend of the great Colette.

"Too literary, my little Sim," she would tell me. "Make it simpler, simpler, and simpler. . . ."

She whose writing was as elegant as the tendrils of a grapevine!

Another château, the one with the twenty-eight sharecropped farms, forests full of game, and ponds that had to be emptied each year to get rid of tons of carp and pike.

Up to me to organize the hunting dinners, to place each person exactly where his rank dictated, because those people are ticklish on that point; and the huge morning buffets, while the beaters waited, the ten game wardens stood at attention at the foot of the porch, and the dogs barked.

Little did I dream that someday I would have my own big-game preserve, in the Orléans forest, that I would be disgusted from the first day, after finishing off a wounded young deer, and that, under the terms of the bill of sale, I had to hold at least one hunt a week for a year, though not necessarily in person, thank God! I was replaced for the occasion by my good pal Maurice Constantin-Weyer.

Phone calls, sometimes at night, to a banker in Paris, London, or elsewhere, with whom the marquis wanted to discuss some financial deal that had just occurred to him.

In this way I learned that a well-born gentleman doesn't pay the bills from Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, his tailor, or his wife's couturière before being dunned for a year or two. And also that bills from small suppliers or artisans get paid only after some delay, and then only after crossing out the figures with a red pencil and replacing them with others ten or twenty percent lower. "Those people inflate their prices because of our name. . . ."

I learned that there were, that perhaps there still are, very rare first editions of Pascal and other famous authors in the unexplored libraries handed down from fathers to sons through the centuries.

I learned a great many things in two years, and, although I rather liked my marquis, he would sometimes lapse into a Talleyrand smile, because I remained unshakably the little boy from Outremeuse, that special, separate area across the river from the heart of Liège, and my rebellions were therefore the more violent.

I needed to be in Paris to get on with my little stories, to sell them, to try, perhaps, even to write "dime novels" or "potboilers."

Tigy was always along, incognito, sometimes a dozen miles away, and

I hiked over to spend the night with her and was back at the château at eight in the morning. I don't recall that the marquis ever met her.

He and I parted good friends, and I was to see him again several times, on a different level, once even when I went to try to buy one of his châteaux, of course only one of the smallest ones.

Good night, .\larie-Jo, and good night, boys.

As far as I can go back in my memory, I always find an unsatisfied hunger to know everything about whatever lives or does not live. I wanted to be not just myself, so young and insignificant, but all people, those of the land and of the sea, the blacksmith, the gardener, the bricklayer, and all those to be found on the different rungs of the well-known social ladder.

To learn my trade, which I was just getting into, I forced myself through the apprenticeship everyone must have—virtuosos doing their scales or professional athletes spending years developing their muscles and reflexes. I wonder today, at seventy-seven, whether my whole life was not spent learning and doing scales, both studying in the university of the streets and reading all available books until I was dizzy.

Here, again, I find the joy of expressing myself, although with the same anxiety I experienced for sixty years—no longer by way of a typewriter, or a tape recorder—I find again, I say, in using a pen, that same exaltation, as if life were starting all over again.

Barely a week ago, one of my foreign readers, who told me he had read everj'thing I had written, found himself at odds with his son and asked me to referee, by answering just one question: "Is work a joy or, on the contrary, a punishment inflicted upon us which we accept only with sullen rebellion?"

As against the Bible, which has the God of the Jews and the Christians saying, "Thou shalt earn thy bread by the sweat of thy brow," I answered that work brings us both joy and pride, provided, however, that we had the gf)od sense or good luck to choose work that interests and absorbs us, which, unfonunately, is not given to everyone in our society.

You know something of that, my darling, you who tried so early to adapt to several disciplines, and who, after giving them up at times, still went back to them during your last days.

I told you, at the beginning of these notebooks, that I would speak of you and your environment, especially of your mother and your brothers.

But before getting around to everything you wrote during your short but very full existence, I believe I have to situate you and bring out everything that made you into the exceptional being you were, that you continue to be for me and no doubt for several others. So I need to tell you and your brothers in all frankness what I was, because the image that each of us conceives of his parents is necessarily incomplete.

Some of my confidences are not new. I have often spoken of myself in my books, even through the characters of my novels. More and more people have read everything I've written. Yet their letters prove to me that they did not all conceive the same image of me.

So, what about the others? What about you four?

You, for one, really read and even reread everything, making notes in the margins, and the questions you asked me, your comments, prove to me that you were always trying to understand me. As for your three brothers, I don't know what they may have read, because they are men, and men show a certain resistance toward asking questions and revealing themselves in confidences. They saw me with their children's and adolescents' eyes. They did not choose the images indelibly imprinted on their brains, and now it is more difficult for them to open up before an old man.

Don't be afraid, Marie-Jo darling; I won't go on long talking about myself, however much of a joy it is for me to chat with the four of you without constraint. I will try to give an overview of what you have not known, what you know only partially about my life, not by following the calendar, but providing you with some quick images, some simple sketches of what, to my mind, counted.

I had got as far as my marquis, whom I left to take flight, as I had taken flight from Liège, toward adventure. He taught me a great deal, in a discreetly affectionate way.

Just one more image, which will remind all of you of some of my reactions. For a time, in Liège, mixing with young painters, with art students, I had affected a floppy broad-brimmed black hat, big loose bow tie, also black, and let my then heavy, wavy hair grow long. Wasn't that putting on a kind of uniform, and do I not have an instinctive distrust of all uniforms, as also of all medals, diplomas, titles, and honors?

Now, at the marquis's, I had again let my hair grow long, although only moderately in terms of yesterday's and the day before yesterday's hippies. One eyening when he and I were haying dinner alone in one of his town houses—we both had a penchant for kippered herrings, which we ordered from his butler more often than was decent—he came close and, with a paternal gesture, slightly raised the blond curls that hung down the back of my neck. I can't say that his gesture was sarcastic or scornful, but I understood that it meant "Really, do you need all that?"

The next day, I went to the barber.

For my part, I also felt something about him that would not have made him happy. He had inherited a newspaper in the former province of Berry. Then, this man of the past, who lived surrounded by his glorious ancestors and dealt only with his peers, decided, at forty-five, that he wanted to become a senator. Why? True, one of his ancestors had been a peer of France, but that was when there was a king. What he was going after was a political position, in a republic more democratic than it is now. And I wrote—for his signature—campaign articles—until he realized that he hadn't the slightest chance of getting elected.

Small weakness of one of us; small weakness of the other.

A tiny hotel room on Rue des Dames, in the populous Batignolles quarter, once again. This time, there were two of us, not exactly to go hungr)', but to do without a great many things. Tigy, who had never had to cook, heated, on a window-sill hot plate, dishes we bought precooked, since a sign at the foot of the stairs warned tenants that they were forbidden to do any cooking in their rooms on pain of immediate expulsion.

.My stories were becoming more numerous, and, not being able to afford to buy it, I had rented a clickety old typewriter. I increased the number of my pen names as the papers I contributed to grew in number, and we were able quite often to go to Montparnas.se to rub elbows with the painters everyone was talking about and to visit the galleries on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and Rue La Boétie.

How many pictures I fell in love with and would have liked to buy! F.vcn the cheapest were too much for my purse, and some of them today are to be found only in museums or are worth fortunes.

My time had not yet come. I didn't have a proper calling card. I could not even tell the world I was writing, because I was still an apprentice, writing little stories signed (jom (jut, Plick and Plock, P<jum and /ette, or Aramis, which collectors fight over now that I am an old man.

«(>

I worked very fast. I sometimes wrote as many as eight stories in a day, and we were thus able to rent one huge room and a smaller one on the ground floor of one of the magnificent buildings on one-time Place Royale, which, during the French Revolution, was renamed Place des Vosges.

A short vacation by the sea, in Normandy, where we visit a newly made woman friend who has a house there as lovely and naive as a child's toy. She has no guest room, but she won't let us go and insists that we spend our vacation in her village near Etretat. So we rent an empty room in a farmhouse.

We have no furniture and are not about to buy any, not even a bed, for just a few weeks. No matter: I ask the farmer's wife, who spoke old Norman, to let us have two or three bundles of straw, which Tigy and I spread on the bare floor. She lends us a pair of sheets, an unpainted table, a single chair, and there we are, set up for several months, because your mother and I, Marc, are so happy there that we decide to stay on awhile.

The farmers wonder whether we haven't just come out of prison, since we are comfortable sleeping on straw. Our two little windows have no curtains, so the farmer's daughter and her girl friends—including the one who was to become Boule and join our family, of which today she is the center even more than I—come after dark to watch us make love and then watch me wash afterward at a basin just in front of the window.

"What do you think it looks like?" they ask, and think it over.

Then they agree. "Like a mushroom."

Boule, whose name is Henriette, worked for our friend a few hours a day. At thirteen or fourteen, she had left school to work as a nursemaid at the château. Yet she remained quite unaware of the facts of life, apart from the "mushroom," and I soon felt curiosity, affection, and desire for her. When, in the fall, we returned to Place des Vosges, she went with us, and the three of us were to live together in greatest intimacy.

Tigy was uncompromisingly jealous and informed me that the day she found out I was unfaithful to her she would commit suicide. I lived for twenty years with that threat hanging over me.

Boule and I, during those first years, were only half unfaithful to her, then three-quarters, then nine-tenths, for the three of us were living in two rooms.

I have always avoided, and still avoid, in spite of the change of moral standards that has occurred since my adolescence, depriving an innocent girl

of what her husband someday might hope to have given to him. As if it were a right, without any counterpart, to be sure.

You must be laughing, my little Pierre, who now stand six foot two and some but who are the youngest of the family, you who have the same need for women as I but who are lucky enough to be living in a time when all those complications have vanished.

I had sex with virgins only three times in my life. The first was Tigy. The second, Boule, in the old château in the Orléans forest where we lived during the thirties. The third was a young girl with firm breasts, with whom I had the most tender of relationships and who today is one of Teresa's and my best friends.

When I explained mv reticence to her, despite the unfulfilled sex we had had together, she laughed, with the fine, warm, and witty laugh she has retained through the years, and three or four days later, as we were hugging one another, she triumphantly announced: "Now, you can."

I understood. In order to overcome my scruples, she had gone to the trouble of getting herself deflowered, and I don't even know by whom.

Place des \'osges. Tigy at last had room in which to paint. At that time, on Place Constantin-Pecqueur in Montmartre, they used to hold what was called the "Foire aux Croûtes" (Junk Art Fair), an open-air show in which young artists hung their canvases or drawings from trees or from lines strung between the trees.

To make them attractive to eventual buyers, the works had to be framed, and I used to go to Rue de Bondy to buy framing wood by the meter. Then to the saw, glue, and nails. They weren't always quite right angles, but who cared? For those petty bourgeois who went from painter to painter, wasn't all that mattered the discovery of the future Renoir or Modigliani, who would make a fortune for them?

As for models, we found them in the low-down bals musette of Rue de L>appe, not yet a part of the standard Paris-by-Night tour. These, as well as a joint in La V'illette, were where the gigolos and gigolettes, as they were called, got together, the real members of "the life," girls, often very young, who, barely arrived in Paris from their provincial homes, had been turned out on the sidewalks of Boulevard Sébastopol, with the nightly reward of being allowed to dance the Java with their pimps. Wc would take them home, the women to pose nude, less often the men, whose faces were those of real toughs, and I igy would sketch them in charcoal.

"You look so tense," Tigy said to me once at Place Constantin-Pec-queur. "Go sit down some place in a café, or take a walk. You're scaring the customers away."

I took her advice, sat down on a terrace on Rue Caulaincourt, and wrote my first dime novel, Le Roman d'une dactylo (A Stenog's Romance),* not without first having read several that the same publisher had brought out, to find out how they were done.

The publisher Ferenczi accepted it and ordered more from me, of various lengths and types. Because I was still writing at a very rapid clip, I spread my business among the four or five companies in Paris specializing in this type of book.

Each collection had its own taboos. In some, the word "mistress" was forbidden, and in none did couples "make love," but "their lips met," or, if you were very daring, you could picture them in "an embrace."

There were collections especially aimed at the young, and the encyclopedic Grand Larousse, which I had succeeded in buying, told me all I had to know about the flora and fauna of a given area of Africa, Asia, or South America, as well as about the native tribes. Se Ma Tsien — le Sacrificateur (Se Ma Tsien, the Sacrificer), Le Sous-marin dans la forêt (The Submarine in the Forest), and so many, many more titles. The whole world was my oyster, and the universe of Grand Larousse was certainly exciting to write about.

Love stories for shopgirls, full of misfortunes. But lots of love and marriage at the end. La Fiancée aux mains de glace (The Fiancée with Icy Hands), Miss Baby, for I had become the "friend," as those novels put it, of Josephine Baker, whom I would have married had I not, even though still unknown, recoiled from becoming just Mr. Baker. I even went with Tigy to the island of Aix, off La Rochelle, to try to forget her, and we were not to see each other again until thirty years later, in New York, still both as much in love with the other as ever.

Up to eighty typewritten pages of these novels a day, so that we were almost becoming rich, compared with what we had been.

A free apartment on the third floor of our building, and we rent it, while keeping the ground floor to become Tigy's studio.

The 1925 Exposition of Decorative Arts fascinates us, and I order from an avant-garde decorator there the décor and furnishings of our new place.

•If a work has not been published in English, a literal translation of the French title is given in roman type (as here); if the work has been published in English, the title under which the work appeared in English is given in italics. — publisher

a

Stand-up bar covered with frosted glass that was Hghted from below by any number of bulbs, so that having cocktails, when there were a number of us, was like a fireworks display.

Me as bartender, in a white turtleneck sweater, grabbing the bottles one after the other to make the proper mixtures. Some representatives from Montparnasse, from Foujita to \^ertès too—but why enumerate them? Sometimes Josephine herself, in all her glory, some Russian ballerinas, the daughter of an Asian ambassador, and at three in the morning a certain number of naked bodies with others stretched out on the black velvet cushions on which thev would spend the rest of the night, while at 6:00 a.m. I would settle down to mv tvpewriter for my daily eighty pages . . .

Then Porquerolles, where at the time there were only a few summer people and where we are able to spend several months thanks to Tig)^'s having sold a large nude to an Armenian art lover for eight hundred francs. And there, for me, going from rock to rock at the edge of the absolutely transparent water, contemplation, the fascination of the life of fishes and other marine animals, always on the alert, always on the lookout.

Multicolored fishes not intended only for bouillabaisse, crabs, morays, congers, and rays, an infinite fauna without a second's respite, eating those smaller than they, or eaten by those larger. A permanent drama, in the water made iridescent by the sun, which always made my head spin.

And me, not getting the promised overdue money order from one or the other of my publishers, spending a week sucking on an empty pipe, for want of the thirty or forty centimes to buy myself some tobacco.

The endless struggle for life, in a word!

Porquerolles, where I was to have my house and my boats, has remained one of the high places of my life. I knew every one of its hundred and thirty inhabitants at the time. I felt at home. I have been told the island has so changed since the war that I don't dare go back.

Touring France by way of its rivers and canals. Tigy, Boule, our dog, Olaf (a Great Dane), and me on board a little boat with a tent to shelter Boule at night, which, come morning, would become my office. My typewriter on a folding table. My backside on a folding chair. And a canoe, dragging behind, holding our mattresses, our supplies, and our cookware.

A page out of my life, but when they're written down, pages have a way of becoming unbearably long.

Good night, little girl. Good night, you three big fellows, my sons.

If the sea with its intense life overwhelmed me, it also conquered me, and for a long time I would think only of it. Not of a place on the sand, under the sun, between almost naked bodies shiny with suntan oil, not the sea of the many-colored parasols, the casinos, and the big concrete cubes with their large bay windows, but the primitive and eternal sea from which all life came, with its languors and its furies, its primordial cruelty. The sea!

I who had lived nineteen years on the concrete of an industrial town almost Nordic in character had seen it, or, rather, sensed it, like a postcard, only at Ostend during a brief trip. Now I am filled with a passion for it that has taken hold of all of me, and just as soon as I am back in Paris I decide to have a boat built, a real one, that can stand up to the sea.

This is not to be one of those time-passing playthings the graceful sweep of whose white sails can be watched from afar, even less one of those little affairs with powerful motors, leaving a wake of foam behind, that can turn your head with their speed. Such boats don't caress the sea, but seem to tear it wrathfully apart. What I am dreaming of, what I want, is a robust boat, slightly sprawling, like those of the northern fishermen, big enough for the four of us, Tigy, Boule, Olaf, and me, to live on.

I rush to Fecamp, where, even from the railroad station, you can smell the strong aroma of cod and herring, and where there are still a few sailing Newfoundlanders among the black metal hulls bumping together in the port awaiting the signal to be off. Boule's home village is only a few miles away, atop its white cliff. Her father lived through a score of campaigns into Newfoundland waters on a schooner that made it back to home port only after eight months at sea. Eleven times, following his return home, he left his wife with child before going again, on the shorter herring campaign, which starts to the north of the British coast and follows the fish's annual exodus southward toward Fecamp.

I don't stay at a hotel, but in a café at the port, frequented by sailors, where there are two or three primitive rooms for rent. By day, I am at the shipyard, working out the details of my boat with the builder. It will be made

of thick oak, with a rather short mast, so that the heavy cashew-colored sails can be raised by one man alone.

In Paris, without neglecting my stories and dime novels, I bury myself in the Coastal Captain^s Manual and the tables of logarithms, the usefulness of which escaped me when thev were taught in school and I refused to study them. In the almost provincial atmosphere of Place des \'osges at the time, I familiarize mvself with the use of the mariner's compass and sextant, the vearbook of tides, logbooks and drift calculations, how to improvise a wheel in case of accident, and, finally and foremost, the handling of sails. Even though mv boat is to have an auxiliary motor to facilitate the way in and out of ports.

No white hull, no sails made to look like gulls for the people lying on the beach to admire as they go gracefully by. Heavy, solid stuff, rubberized sails, reddish-brown, to resist the brutal assault of a squall and the onset of deterioration.

Sometimes I go to Fecamp alone, sleeping there for two or three nights, which I devote to my passion for women, as great as my recent love of the sea.

The boat begins to take shape, and, because it has the roughness of our distant ancestor, I baptize it the Ostrogoth. It has bunks without springs, a table with a faucet connected to the reservoir of drinking water, a short, stocky coal-burning stove, on which Boule will do the cooking for nearly two years, and only later will I find out that those two years are to change my life.

We bought yellow slickers, half-hip boots with wooden soles, waterproof hats.

We were not playing games, the day we sailed out of port, all flags flying, for the sea has its traditions too.

Le Havre. Up the Seine to Rouen, making our way between freighters that look like mountains to us. The Seine as far as Paris, where we tie up at the tip of Vert-Galant, right in the middle of Pont-Neuf, and get our boat christened, out of respect for tradition, by the curé of Notre-Dame, while a great crowd of gapers and friends looks on. Three days of living it up, drinking and carousing, the boat mobbed from hold to top deck, and never knowing whom you might be sharing your bunk with.

Time to leave. Through the canals, we get to the Mcusc, to Belgium, for a short stopover in Ticgc. I lolland. Macstricht. I he flat country that Brel sang so well about, but no better than you, Marie-Jo, when, even at your last visit, so near the time when you left for good, sitting on the arm of my chair, you brought tears to my eyes.

The flat country, you see, Belgian and Dutch Limbourg, is where my roots were. On my mother's as well as my father's side. The sky there is immense, for want of any hills. The distance is more distant than anywhere else, what with the white and red spots of the little houses that look like toys so far apart.

Wider and wider canals, and ocean-going boats. Amsterdam, which I was to take the three of you to, for Pierre wasn't born yet. The Zuider Zee, then really a sea, for it had not yet been padlocked behind a colossal dike, to gain more arable land and leave it only a lake. In the middle of the Zuider Zee, we were unable to see land, for the first time, and, sails swelling, we headed for Friesland, for the little port of Staveren, where we were going to spend the winter. Soon, every morning we had to break the ice away with a pike to keep the wood from cracking under its pressure.

We reached Delfzijl, at the estuary of the Ems, and then the great German port of Emden. The city welcomed us cordially, even though we flew a French flag because a boat flies the flag of the country in which it was built.

Wilhelmshaven, already high up in the North Sea, the old war port in which a hundred-odd disarmed German submarines were slowly rusting away. Why not tie up to one of those wrecks, since I didn't find a berth at the wharves? Alas, the port police saw us and severely enjoined us to follow them to another mooring spot. There were students parading by on the quays, and Boule's unmistakably feminine shape inevitably caught their eyes.

I was working. For Détective, a magazine published by Gallimard, under the editorship of my two friends the Kessel brothers, Joseph (Jef to his friends) and Georges, I was writing a series of mystery stories for which readers were supposed to guess the solutions. "Thirteen Mysteries," the first series, brought so much mail to the magazine that mailmen had to haul it in by the sackful, and more than forty people had to be hired to check the answers.

Jef asked me for another series of thirteen, which he wanted harder to figure out, so they would have fewer answers to choose among: "Thirteen Enigmas." Followed by the even-harder-to-guess "Thirteen Culprits."

One evening, as Tigy and I were asleep in our bunks. Boule was dancing on deck with I don't know how many students, and a professor who happened to walk by took offense, for World War I had not been over so very long. He ordered them, in a rough sergeant's tone, to leave the boat on the double. Which they did not do. Unfortunately, since we had been planning to go on to Hamburg, and then perhaps to Belgium.

The next morning, a plain-clothes inspector from some police force or

other came aboard to interrogate me, for two hours. My typewriter was an especially suspicious-looking object to him. He demanded to be shown what I was writing. I have no idea whether he could read French, but he led me awav to a big building with dark walls, where, after a long wait, I was confronted by what seemed a ver^' important functionary.

"Are vou French?" he asked.

"No. Belgian."

"Then why are you flying a French flag?"

I explained it to him.

"Why did you come in to Wilhelmshaven? Since the end of the war not a single French boat has put in here."

I kept trying to make sense out of the questions he threw at me, often unexpectedly, since he kept craftily switching the subject.

"And how does it happen that you receive telegrams that are signed 'Detective'?"

This one spoke French well, in spite of his accent. He had probably been part of the occupation forces.

"Are you a detective?"

"No. That's a weekly that publishes crime stories."

"Then, are you a policeman?"

"No, but I write stories about detectives."

"Why?"

"Because I get orders for them."

"In other words, you are carrying out orders?"

This was my first experience of the third degree, and I was sweating abundantly. I remember that he pressed a button, and an employee came rushing in to take down a short text he dictated to him. Was it a warrant for my arrest? Was I going to get locked up in one of those German prisons that French papers so obligingly described in lurid detail? What about my wife? And Boule, and Olaf, and my Ostrogoth?

The important character sucked on his cigar in silence, as he eyed me with curiosity, and I kept quiet too. I was not quite twenty-five, and 1 looked younger. What was he thinking about as he stared at me with his light eyes? The employee came back and handed him several copies of a typed statement. He shoved one of them toward me.

"Sign it."

"But I understand only a little German."

"Where did you learn it?"

"At school, in I>icge. But I wasn't very good in German."

"Because you don't like our language?"

Finally, 1 signed the thing. I Ic then signed it too, and rubber-stamped

it two or three times. Another copy to be signed, and then another. He got up and announced to me in a toneless voice, which this time seemed almost kind, that I was under orders to be out of German waters by that evening.

"But, that's impossible! I have to fill up with water and gas and lay in supplies."

"I'll close my eyes until tomorrow noon. I'm advising the port authorities. Tomorrow noon, don't forget!"

And the next day at noon, there I was, waiting for the raising of the huge bridge, which was being crossed by streetcars, autos, trucks, and a cloud of bicycles. The center of the gigantic bridge finally began to rise, and I slipped humbly out among the boats that, like mine, were taking advantage of the tide. Where to go? I was no longer allowed to sail in German waters. I didn't dare to go on the high seas to continue our voyage north; that would have meant going up to Norway through straits that were always rough and often covered with haze.

We headed back to Delfzijl, where I discovered that my boat, which had been built of green wood, instead of the wood several years old I had been promised, now needed recaulking. Which meant that the Ostrogoth would be drydocked, and men dressed in white outfits would, for an indeterminate time, be stuffing oakum between the planks of the deck and between the boards of the hull with great blows from their hammers, making our comfortable cabin resound like the inside of a bell, and then spreading burning tar over all the cracks.

Other boats, alongside ours, were undergoing the same sort of noisy treatment, and yet I considered it would be humiliating to go to a hotel. Besides, I needed to write, just as I needed to when I was fifteen and still need to at seventy-seven.

In the evening, calm returned. The caulkers went home, and we could have dinner and sleep in peace, provided we got up early enough in the morning. We were used to doing that.

I found the solution as I wandered around the port. Beyond a dam, I discovered a stagnant-water canal, which was no longer used for anything but to float out from inland the tree trunks that covered almost the whole width of it, and an old abandoned barge at the edge of a green-decked quay spotted with little pink and white houses.

I apologize, children, for having taken so long, but for me, and for you too, these apparently insignificant events are of great importance.

In the half-rotted barge, in which rats merrily swam, I brought together some old crates, set up my typewriter on the highest one, sat on one just below that, and rested my feet on a still lower one, barely above the level of the stagnant water. Two days later, I began a novel, which might be a

dime novel like the others, or perhaps something else. It turned out to be Piotr-Je-Letton (Maigret and the Enïgmatk Lett), in which for the first time there appears one Maigret, who, I didn't know then, was to haunt me for so manv years and turn my whole life around.

Two years later, when these novels began to appear on a monthly basis, I would no longer be an apprentice, but a novelist, a full-fledged professional. And two vears bevond that, I was to free myself from the detective novel and write the novels that were being born in me: La Maison du canal (House by the Canal), Les Gens d'en face (The Window Over the Way), L'Ane rouge (The Xightclub), Les Pitard (A Wife at Sea), and others.

You were not to be born, as I had had the luck to be, among the common people, which is something I am often sorry about. Willy-nilly, you would inevitablv be a daughter and sons to luxury born. At Delfzijl, I didn't know that yet. And that was not what I intended when I created .Maigret, whom I would be obliged to call back into harness every time I tried to have him retire.

The money from Détective allowed Tigy and me to rush up toward the Arctic Ocean, not on the Ostrogoth, but on board a big boat, the deck of which housed cows and pigs as well as barrels of cod, as it lazily navigated, from port to port, up the coast of Norway, taking us beyond North Cape, to Kirkenes. There, beyond a narrow band of Finland, with field glasses we could see Russian soldiers patrolling their border.

To get there, our keel had had to break its way through ice. In sleds drawn by reindeer, we crisscrossed Lapland, from reindeer-hide tent to reindeer-hide tent, across the endless white expanse, and we ourselves were dressed like Lapps, not for local color or to make pretty snapshots, but because otherwise we would have been unable to withstand the below-freezing temperatures.

For years, Tigy and I alternately visited cold regions and torrid ones, crossed the Equator several times in different oceans, got to know every one of the continents. And my typewriter—no longer that old one I had once rented—followed us everywhere, in a specially upholstered box. I wrote everywhere too, in Panama as well as in Tahiti and Australia.

What was our destination? Where were wc headed? Everywhere. Nowhere.

In search of what? Not local color, to be sure, but humankind. We didn't "travel," for everywhere we felt at home. Planes did not yet cross continents and oceans. Ocean liners to<jk forty-five days to go from Sydney to London, with innumerable stopovers in Asia, the Near East, and the Mediterranean.

I was writing, not about what I was seeing. Instead, characters I had met in my childhood in Liège, then later in Paris, in the French provinces, where I settled, as if for life, at times in a château, at others in a farmhouse.

When we got back, we found our faithful Boule and good old Olaf, as well as crates full of mail, often asking: "Where the devil are they running to?" We were running almost endlessly, after humankind, after life; we were running in order to learn, and, although I may have stopped running, I never stop learning.

About the four of you, for example. Why not? Aren't you the most important part of what I will leave behind?

I am going to delve back into your childhood, now that you have all gone your separate ways, and you, Marie-Jo, are forever in my little garden, where one day I will join you.

As for the character who ended up being my friend, he still exists, but in bronze now, larger than life-size, at the very spot where he was born fifty years ago, on the bank of a disused canal where the barge that served as his cradle must long since have slowly dissolved in the stagnant water. I owe him a great debt, because it was thanks to him that I ceased being an amateur and became a novelist.

Now, I have ceased being that. I am a father, writing, as I suppose every father writes, to his children. Not at such length, no doubt. Nor perhaps so tenderly.

Good night, you four.

6

All my life I've been curious about everything, not only about man, whom I have watched living at the four corners of the world, about woman, whom I have pursued almost painfully because my need to fuse myself into her often became like a throb within me, but also about the sea and the earth, which I respect as a believer respects and venerates his god, about trees, about the smallest insects, about the least little being, still formless, living in the air or beneath the water.

I have had dogs and cats, Hke everyone, and horses. With one of these, true bonds of mutual affection were estabhshed—an Arabian thoroughbred, bought from a circus, that was white and Ught gray, ardent, as impatient as I, and we became friends to the point that he would let no one else ride him, not even Tigy. I never tugged at his bit, and needed neither spur nor whip; I spoke to him, in mv own voice, with my legs hugging his flanks, and he answered me with movements of his ears.

We were living then at La Richardière, not a château, but an old country- estate not far from La Rochelle, with a narrow tower that in olden days was called a "dovecote."

When we came home, sometimes after hours of riding by the sea, over the flat wetlands of the Vendée, which were slashed by canals that had to be leaped over, I unsaddled him and took off his bridle before entering the courtvard, and he would roll voluptuously in the grass. No one disturbed him until he got near the kitchen and knocked a few times at the window with his muzzle to ask Boule for his customary hunks of bread—or sometimes cookies. There were four other horses in the stable and a laughing young red-headed groom to take care of them.

In the big pond, which at high tide got its ration of sea water, swam some five hundred ducks, going in and out of the little green houses on an islet. Behind the vegetable garden, we raised white rabbits with red eyes, which old women from the village regularly came to pluck. About fifty white turkeys walked peacefully around among the geese and chickens. The biggest one, the most impressive, was nicknamed Maigret, because he took over with authority whenever a fight loomed between two males. One might have thought he was in charge of the barnyard police. In the woods, we raised pheasants, which we never slaughtered and which came and ate out of our hands.

From Ankara, we had brought back three young wolves. One of them had a broken paw and could not be saved by the veterinarian. The female, which until then had been very nice, broke out with a kind of eczema all over her body. She refused to allow the prescribed salve to be used on her, became irritable and threatening, and she had to be given a final shot.

That left Sazi, a big muscular male who followed us on a leash when we went walking along a narrow canal leading to the sea. He often spent the evening in the big studio that was both our living room and our office, where he felt comfortable.

For my trotter, I had bought a sulky and delighted in going to La Rochelle to do the marketing with this equipage.

ligy's workshop, above the studio, for a long time was the habitat of I don't know how many exotic birds, which we had bought by couples on

Malta, in those days the great bird market. With the windows closed, they were free to fly all over the room, and when it had to be aired out, they voluntarily returned to the great birdhouse. Where were we coming from when we acquired those shimmering birds? From Turkey or from Russia and the Black Sea?

I was a great one for picking mushrooms, the ones that grew in the wet fields at dawn and the ones in the forests.

I practiced indoor boxing and, until not long ago, exercised every morning on a punching bag just about every place I ever lived. Later, all three of you boys had your own boxing gloves and a punching bag in your playroom, and I taught you the basics of that art of self-defense.

At seventeen, in Liège, I had ridden the highways of the Ardennes on big American motorcycles. They didn't belong to me, of course, but to the Gazette, which got them in exchange for free publicity.

I went in for golf, canoeing, volleyball.

I even— But this is beginning to sound like a litany, the longest of all, the litany of the saints, and I have read the Bible and the Gospels many times over.

I fished with ground bait in the Seine, above Morsang and at the dam at La Citanguette, trolled for pike among the reeds along the canal, and later tried my hand at deep trout and char fishing in the Lake of Geneva, without ever catching any.

I did underwater diving at Porquerolles before Cousteau was ever heard of, then professional fishing with my "lateen" and my sailor, Tado, trawling, seining of all sorts, even for lobster, whole nights through, with drift nets, for which I needed six strong-armed sailor-fishermen.

Tado and I spent entire nights off the Riviera's Levant Islands, and when our faithful companion Olaf died of old age, Tado and I went out there to give him a deep-sea burial. At that time, my own wish too was to be returned, someday as far off as possible, to the living cradle of the sea.

A little farm, during World War II, in the hills of the Vendée. Three cows, which I milked myself, and an immense vegetable garden that I tended with the help of an octogenarian gardener who had never in his life been outside his village, not even to the neighboring small town. He had never been on a train either, and when one passed he watched it with a distrustful, if not hostile, eye. Another gardener, in another place, neither smoked nor chewed tobacco, but always had to have a sprig of violet in his mouth, so I had to keep some growing in the hothouse all year round.

I crisscrossed the Mediterranean in a topsail schooner a hundred feet long, customarily used for the transport of old iron junk, which I rented for a year from an Italian shipowner, complete with its bare-chested crew, who

wore handkerchiefs knotted at the four corners on their heads. In each port where we dropped anchor we would issue a challenge to the local boules team.

I have worn white tie and tails as often as five times a week when, in Paris, we were living in a very elegant apartment on Boulevard Richard Wallace and following the sheeplike herd of the great of the earth, the successful artists, and the habitués who went from opening night to opening night and to exclusive suppers in very high-toned nightclubs, where you could be admitted only if you had the credentials to get by the liveried doorman.

At that time I drove my Chrysler, which had come straight from America and aroused curiosity wherever we stopped, or my convertible Delage, with its endlesslv long hood. I had my own table at Fouquet's and at .Maxim's and belonged to I don't know how many gastronomic clubs which held weekly or monthly luncheons in the restaurants of famous chefs.

And yet I was writing novel after novel, I don't know when, I don't know in what state. When I wanted to take my sacrosanct walk, which helped me build up the still-vague idea for a new book, I crossed the bridge, a few steps away, and lost myself in the teeming, lively streets of Puteaux or Billancourt, where, in their habitual cafés, at counters made of real zinc, I clinked glasses with workers from the Renault and other factories, with whom I felt more at home than with my friends.

I spent a lot of time with the human flotsam in the Mouff^etard neighborhood, out beyond the Latin Quarter, where the old men slept "on the rope" in flophouses above sordid hole-in-the-wall cafés. A real rope was stretched in front of them, and they rested their heads on it to sleep a few hours after eating (most often out of garbage cans). As soon as the sun was up, the owner would let the ropes fall, row by row, to wake the sleepers, whose heads fell forward on the hard tables.

I knew bankers, newspaper publishers, producers whose names are still bandied about today, and high-flying swindlers, including Ou.stric, Mme Hanau, and Stavisky, and I was often present at the marked-card games held in fancy hotels at which impeccable gentlemen fleeced rich foreigners or provincial industrialists.

I got my clothes from a famous English tailor and went to London for my hats and to Milan for my neckties.

I intimately knew André, when he was the owner of the casinos at Deauville, \a: rou(|uct, La Baulc, and C^annes, where a well-known Cireek held the bank all night at table stakes while his yacht kept its steam up in the port so he might get away quickly in case of mischance. He was no adventurer, but a man who had studied extensively, spoke I don't know how

many languages, and as each card was faced up he did immediate mental calculations of the probabilities remaining, according to the mathematical formulas of Henri Poincaré.

The nervous tension he was under and the effort he expended facing the two layouts with several million francs' worth of chips on them were such that a time came when he just had to relax. At that point, he would let an assistant take over and disappear through a little door, beyond which a pretty girl, never twice the same, was waiting for him, always kept in readiness by some unseen supplier. Less than ten minutes later, he came back to his place in front of the green baize table, refreshed and alert, as if he had just been bathed in the Fountain of Youth.

The most beautiful women of the demimonde were allowed into the gaming room only if they were wearing very expensive hats bought from the milliner who in private life was married to the manager.

I gambled, sometimes for rather high stakes, but André, who liked me, steered me away from the chemin de fer and roulette tables by pointing to the great crystal chandeliers that lighted the rooms. "You see, Simenon, if the gamblers had any chance of winning, those chandeliers, which have been up there for half a century, would long ago have been sold at auction."

I rarely gambled again. Nor did I smoke opium again, as some good women friends urged me to, because I could see that women reach the heights of sexual excitement under the effect of the drug, whereas men experience exactly opposite effects.

I was a regular backstage and went to supper with playwrights and stars.

I had swimming pools here and there, in America, in France, and in Switzerland, where I had the finest one built on my estate at Epalinges, which I lovingly designed myself, thinking that at last I was settled for all time.

The swimming pool and the house now are empty, and you children, who spent part of your youth there and who brought my grandchildren there to visit, will someday decide the fate of that property. I avoid going by it except from time to time to look at the birches I planted there without hope of ever seeing them grow into robust, proud trees. That, they have become.

Did I have periods of snobbery? Did I try pulling the wool over people's eyes? Did I derive pleasure from playing a certain role and associating with certain circles? I have asked myself those questions and think I can frankly answer no.

I wanted to see everything, try everything. In one of the first interviews

I ever gave, almost fifty years ago, the newspaperman asked me: "How does it happen that there are never any society people or important personages in anv of your novels?"

I had to think about that. When I was with my boss the marquis, I had rubbed elbows with the aristocracy and leaders of high finance and had seen them at close range. I nevertheless answered: "I'll never be able to create a banker character until I've shared breakfast boiled eggs with a real banker."

I have done so since, with one of the most famous. I have done so with all kinds of people whose names appear in the papers or who are listed in Bottin Mondain or Annuaire des Châteaux. I have even been listed in both, myself. I have known ministers and heads of state. Wasn't I obliged to seek men out everywhere, at everv level of that well-known scale?

You will find few such people in my novels, children, and Maigret, when he was absolutely forced to do so in carrying out his functions, mixed with them only reluctantly and always felt uncomfortable. But not out of timidity.

That brings me back to my search for man. Did I finally find him? Can I, after so many years, give up my exhausting quest?

The man I prefer is not to be found in drawing rooms, or among those whose pictures appear on billboards; even less in those fortresses that are called "banks." And that goes even more for official government buildings.

Peasants, if there are any left? Workers? Scientists? Intellectuals with sophisticated vocabularies?

My preference, to be perfectly frank, is still for the black, shiny-skinned man I was able to meet in his tribal home in the heart of the bush country or the equatorial forest, who at that time lived far from white people and had no idea of what the word "money" meant.

He was naked, slept in a straw hut that was built in one day by a few people getting together, on everybody's land, and in the morning, shortly before the sun rose, he picked up his little bow and his very pointed little arrows to go off with a lithe but careful step, without the slightest sound, on the qui vive, attentive to the slightest fluttering of the high grass or the leaves of the trees, while his wife or wives, naked as himself and shining in the sun, surrounded by large-eyed children, crushed the millet in mortars hewn by stones out of wood.

In this man, and those women, I discovered a human dignity that I f(jund nowhere else. Ihey could barely be seen or heard as they blended in with nature and lived at its rhythm.

Did they smell bad, as some people claim? They, on the other hand, are made uncomfortable when thev meet white people by an odor that reminds

them of that of a corpse. They have thick lips, kinky hair. But who estab-Hshed the canon of human beauty? If I were to draw a Venus capable of being put alongside the V'enuses of Greece, I would go looking for her in Africa, to the extent that there still may be some in the pure state.

It happens that they eat their fellow man? They are cannibals? Well, weren't we, in some distant past? I have met four sailors, one of them a captain, who had also eaten some, or at least sucked out the still-hot blood to survive. Some three or four years ago, newspapers reported how a group of young men, whose plane had gone down in the Andes, far from any possible help, had eaten the weaker of their comrades. They were what are usually called "young men of good families," with good manners, university students to boot, and all of them fervent Christians.

I have no concern with racial problems. I ignore them. Millions of years ago, I probably would have found along the banks of the Seine, the Rhine, the Po, the Danube, or the Dnieper, the man I have so long sought, who had learned life not between walls but at the so much truer school of nature.

All of us once were naked men, or, in less temperate climates, men dressed in the skins of animals, which we then did not kill without a purpose, not unless we were hungry; not just for the pleasure of killing, in a word, or to reassure ourselves of our own superiority or power. Why are we ashamed of those faraway ancestors? They certainly left deep traces within us, and, in some among us, those ancient reflexes reappear unexpectedly.

What do we do with those people, who nonetheless are like us? We tag them with names, which in each war I have seen dreamed up to humiliate the enemy or to give us good reasons to kill him without remorse; with pride, on the contrary, as our fliers added a star to their planes for every enemy plane they downed, as our foot soldiers cut a notch in the stocks of their rifles every time they killed a man.

As for the naked man, he was satisfied to live at the rhythm of the earth, the sea, and the sky, and when he looked for a god, he selected a star or a familiar animal.

In my drawer I have my silver badge as a superintendent of the Police Judiciaire, in the name of my friend Maigret, it is true, with the number oooo on it; the prefect of police has number oooi. In Arizona, I was given a deputy sheriffs star and I always carried a long-barreled Colt in the glove compartment of my car. I never fired a shot.

If I have pursued some of my fellow humans, they were all women, since I have ever been on the lookout for love, for physical love and tenderness.

That is the most exhausting and also the most discouraging hunt there is, because, in the society we have elaborated, or, rather, that others who

were shrewder or more grasping elaborated for us, little by little, always more constt-icting century by century, love and tenderness are rarer than diamonds, especiallv that tenderness we all dream of, the need for which is riveted to our bodies, and which, if we do not achieve it, accounts more and more for a world full of malcontents, unstable characters, robots, and unhappy people.

Toward the middle of the year 1937, living in my luxurious apartment on Boulevard Richard Wallace, I was suddenly seized with revolt against my surroundings, against the puppet role I was playing in the world of puppets I had penetrated in order to get to know it. I was disgusted by the life I was leading, and I still wonder today how, since the days on the Ostrogoth, I was able to write six novels a year for Gallimard, in spite of all my travels through Europe and over five continents. Not simply novels that were not detective stories, but what I called "hard" novels, and on top of that the short stories, news reportage, and, several months each year, fishing at Porquerolles, where it was so hot that, beginning at 4:00 a.m. to write a chapter in my minaret, I would end up stark naked by the time I finished it.

One morning, I said to Tig^': "I want to work someplace else, in a small house my own size, far from cities, far from tourists, with the sea close by."

We departed in August or September, in our convertible, leaving Boule behind to take care of the apartment. I can remember that morning very well, the warmth in the air, the slight murmur of the leaves in the Bois de Boulogne, and, in front of our building, the Hispano-Suizas, Rolls-Royces, and Packards of the tenants, all movie stars or producers. I was never again to set foot in that building.

The problem before us was to find a house sufficiently isolated, at the seaside, not too big, where I could hide away and write. Especially, far from crowds and the tourists 1 had seen year after year invading Porquerolles— for the rush t(; the seashore had already started then, as the rush to the ski slopes was to start later on.

You will never guess, Marc old man, where we started on our quest for

happiness. By the shortest routes we headed straight up to Delfzijl, in northernmost Holland, for the country of our dreams could be anywhere at all. And from there, in leisurely stages, we followed the coastline, going gradually farther and farther south. We wanted none of the beaches, to be sure, with their hotels that all looked alike and their summer mobs. But neither could we build in a desert of dunes from which we would have to go much too far to fetch supplies.

Nothing in Holland, that Holland I love so much—all four of you have some Dutch blood in your veins—or in Belgium, where the entire coast is nothing but one long beach interrupted by three or four seaports.

. . . The Vendée . . . that region of France that is flat, like Limbourg —the section of Belgium, Holland, and Germany from which so many of our ancestors came—and consequently has much more sky than you find anywhere else, the special kind of luminosity that Vermeer so beautifully captured in his paintings ... I feel I am getting near my goal. From time to time, for want of a coastal road, we have to make an inland detour, only to rejoin the shore some ten or twenty kilometers farther on.

One clear morning (why are my recollections almost always of early morning and sunshine?), we suddenly come out at a cove and see a turreted house we know very well, meadows where once I ran so much, a few white farmhouses: La Richardière appears to us, decrepit and with most of its shutters closed. Tears roll down my cheeks and my chest feels tight.

At last we have found what we are looking for, after six weeks or two months on the prowl.

This is where I want to live, near La Rochelle, where I could go twice a week with Boule to do the marketing.

A phone call to Dr. Bécheval, at Nieul-sur-Mer, whose practice now extends over four or five neighboring villages, and who has remained our good friend. Luncheon at his home. His surprise when we anxiously ask him, long before dessert is served: "Do you know of a house for sale, as isolated as possible?"

La Richardière is occupied by its old owner, who had always refused to sell it to us. He and his wife have set themselves up in two or three rooms and let the rest of it go empty. Bécheval thinks it over, shakes his head.

Of course, there might be Old Man Gauthier's place. A farmer whose daughter worked for us way back when.

"It's five hundred meters from the sea. They say he intends to sell it and move in with one of his children at Lagord. If that's true, it'll take a lot of work to put it in shape."

Your mother and I look at each other, our eyes shining. It's quite a large

house, hidden away behind an old wall and a low building. It can barely be seen from the path that leads to the oyster beds and mussel fields. It is built of fine local white stone, and the way in to it is bv a tiny little door that leads to a huge mulberry tree in the middle of a nondescript garden.

There is another, larger, garden on the other side of the house, surrounded bv walls with fruit trees growing against them—something the Charente people are so proud of, because it shows how mild their climate is—a palm tree, the top of which reaches the roof.

We had to negotiate for a long time, because that's the way it's done in the country-. One day Old Man Gauthier was ready to sell; the next day he wasn't so sure anymore. A month later, however, the bill of sale was signed in an arcaded street in La Rochelle. As we came out of the lawyer's office, I remember saying nostalgically to Tigy: "A real grandmother's house, where the grandchildren come for their vacations . . ."

Did those words have any influence on your mother? I can't say.

Feverish months, with old local workmen busying themselves all over the place. Your mother made several trips to Paris to send down to Nieul a lot of furniture.

Tapping the walls with the white-haired bricklayer, we discovered three or four windows that had been walled off long, long before, as people used to do in the last century in the country, because taxes in those days were levied not on income, but on the number of doors and windows one had, and the number of pianos and dogs, except for watchdogs. We also brought to light an immense door surrounded by antique sculptures. As I was later to learn, the house had in olden days been a priory, and in what was to become my office we found wall recesses that had housed statues of saints.

A very old linden tree. A highly promising vegetable garden. A silted-up stream, two or three meters wide, which one crossed by way of a wooden bridge, and apple trees, plus bamboos so close together that Boule dubbed this end of the garden "the Congo."

We traveled a great deal while the work was being done, seeking out furniture fit to go with the house, three or four centuries old. Mostly Louis XIII furniture, heavy and solid. The ground floor was being tiled with those fine hard red bricks of the South called "tommettes."

Your mother, Boulc, Olaf, and I set ourselves up for the duration of the work in a typical little villa, called "My Dream" or something, on the outskirts of La Kochcllc, and every morning, while the two women went to Nieul on the various errands they had to run, I would write, not novels, which would have required too much concentration, but fifty-page stories,

one a day, which later appeared under the titles Le Petit Docteur (The Little Doctor), Maigret revient (Maigret Returns), and Les Dossiers de VAgence O (The Files of O Agency).

At noon, with my work finished, I would rush to Nieul, where lunch was waiting for me, and spend the afternoon digging, planting, hammering, or whatever else. We were all stimulated and excited. When the sun began to go down, we would all go and have a swim in the nearby ocean.

By knocking out some recently added walls, we had turned the second floor into a huge room dominated by a monumental fireplace made of white stone with delicate moldings. We had to put in a septic tank, clean out the old well, have an impressive kitchen stove built that would also supply us with hot water for a bathroom lighted on three sides by windows. My punching bag, my rowing machine, my dumbbells all fitted in there quite easily (yes, indeed, dumbbells, Marc my boy, which were probably what gave you your taste for muscle development).

The work went on for months, during which we were able to see our first flowers burst into bloom. The trees against the wall were heavy with huge pears and apples, and there was one fine, sunny, sheltered flower bed in the garden that was reserved for all sorts of aromatic herbs, among which Boule delighted in making her selections.

Grandmother's house!

That, it finally was, smart-looking on the outside, bright and comfortable within, and the hallway outside my office had walls covered from floor to ceiling with all our books. There was even a hothouse now, beyond the vegetable garden. To keep the wasps from getting into the fruit, I bagged each piece separately in a small cellophane envelope so they could ripen out of harm's way.

By August, everything was in place, including the fruit storage bin I had put up, with its openwork pull-out shelves, and a laundry in a little building that stood between us and the path to the sea.

The village blacksmith, who was young and full of ideas, had patiently hammered out two fine grillwork gates that we had designed together, to separate the two gardens. While he was at it, over the broad tree-lined walk, he had put up hoops on which vines of various kinds would soon be creeping up.

Again, just like Grandma's.

And it was on an August day (or morning?), when everything was ready, that your mother said to me, quite simply: "Now, I'm ready to have a baby."

She didn't have to tell me that twice. That very day, perhaps within the

hour, you were conceived. Marc, in the room on the second floor, where a kind of carved wood communion bench separated our two beds, which by day were couches. Conceived but not vet born, and, before vou were to see the hght, you would be subjected to manv involuntary travels and adventures.

The house at Xieul is still there, the same as always, I presume, and Tig\', who has turned into a very alert grandmother, still lives there. Your two children, .Marc, did and still do spend their vacations there. Your brothers and your sister, who were to be bom much later, also were and still today are given the warmest of welcomes there, even though they were born of a diff^erent mother.

So, as you see, you are not only the son of a man and a woman, but, if I may so express it, also the son of a house, for, without Nieul—as we familiarly refer to it, just as if it were a person—you might never have existed.

How much hunting we had to do, from Delfzijl to La Rochelle, to end up with you! And how many other complications besides. That was 1938, and you were born in 1939, dates that are as important to you as they are to history.

8

A dazzling month of August. The sun came into our house through its many windows, and I must have written a novel in my new office, where I felt like a god. What I remember mostly is the garden and the barnyard, which had been set up in the nearest corner and in which we raised only leghorns, because of their whiteness.

I had a new secretary, youngish, with big merry eyes, a greedy mouth; she was greedy for everything, not only things to cat, but also sun, movement, colors, and I can still see her, one afternoon, bringing from the farm across the way barrowfuls of hot manure, which we spread on the flower beds.

Everyone worked in the garden, I igy, Boulc, the secretary, whose

name was Annette, and I. All in overalls under which, because of the heat, we wore nothing else. We were in a hurry to see the garden bloom in time for your birth.

Already, a man with a hoarse and commanding voice had been screaming over the radio in a language none of us understood, probably beating his fist on the lectern. I'm not sure, because there was no television yet. One name was always recognizable in his speeches: Danzig, which Tigy and I had been through when we were going to Latvia, then Poland, Hungary, Romania, and all over Europe. We had not seen the city or its port because the train went through with all doors sealed, curtains down, while uniformed armed men patrolled the corridors, rifles cocked. A narrow band of Poland, that country's only outlet to the sea, cut Germany in two.

We were far from believing that the imprecations of the man who was getting so angry might, so soon after we had settled in, tear us away from our jubilation.

You were minuscule, my big Marc, still close in size to the spermatozoon I had imparted to your mother and which month by month was going to grow bigger inside her. So you probably don't remember your prenatal peregrinations, although today some scientists claim that we unconsciously have a certain memory of that period when we swam like little fishes inside a liquid universe.

Tricolor posters on the walls, at the city hall of our little village of Nieul. France was calling up some of its categories of reservists, and England, which did not have obligatory military service, was enlisting young men to lend a hand to its professional army.

Was this war? Everyone thought so, and a phrase ran from mouth to mouth, usually pronounced with venom: "To die for Danzig!"

Where was this old Danzig that came back more and more often from the lips of the madman with the threatening voice? Was war going to start tomorrow, or the next day? Would a general call-up follow a few days after partial mobilization? If so, I would be called back to Belgium, far from Nieul, and there was a good chance I might not be there to see you born. Worry gave way to panic, and cars became more and more numerous on the roads. Why, as long as it was still possible, shouldn't I drive Tigy to Belgium, where her family would welcome her and welcome you when the time came?

We still had the enormous Chrysler bought back in 1932 or 1933, a heavy, powerful car such as they don't make anymore. We had had a solid steel platform built on its rear end to house the barrels of wine we used to buy

in Burgundy, the Loire countr)-, or the Bordeaux area, from small growers. We preferred to carry our wine away in this manner, thus being sure that it would actually be the wine we had tasted at the wineries.

A black trunk that two men could hardly carry when it was full—and how full it was!—was loaded on this rear carrier. The car was filled with everything that might come in handy over what seemed a rather long period ahead. Neither Boule, who really was a member of our little family, nor Annette, nor our Breton charwoman, nor Olaf went with us. At the last minute, I wanted to go and say good-bye to the desk I had hardly used, and I was surprised to see a robin perched on it, not even scared off by my entrance.

We drove all night long, slowly, for there were no expressways in those days and I didn't want to shake your mother up. Once across the Loire, we passed a veritable procession of cars as heavily laden as our own, all going in the opposite direction, south. They looked at us, unable to understand why we were the only ones heading north, where the enemy might be invading an\' day now. On the roofs of some of the cars, we saw, for the first time, mattresses held down by ropes. Also for the first time, I drove twenty-three hours at a stretch, slowed by denser and denser bottlenecks.

The sea at Calais, then sand dunes and the Belgian border near De Panne. A border guard comes to check on our identities, and gives us a worried once-over. "Where are you going?"

"To Brussels or Liège. I expect to be called up, and my wife's family are all there."

Another border guard rushes into the office to answer a ringing phone. His colleague holding our passports says: "Wait . . ."

I have the feeling something is happening. He goes toward the office, and the minutes go by while Belgian cars waiting to cross into France grow impatient. It was around five in the afternoon, and a red sun shone over the place.

My border guard appears at last at the top of the steps, still holding our passports. He yells delightedly: "Peace!"

Everybody looks at everyone else, incredulous.

"They've just signed a treaty at Munich—Chamberlain, Daladicr, Mussolini, Hitler. . . ."

\ \c whispers to me as he holds out the passports: "You can head back home!"

I immediately thought of that robin perched on my desk, and in the little house in Lau.sanne where I am writing now, we have a redbreast that hops around in the garden and seems to wink at us.

We spent the night at De Panne, where, as was the custom in those days, we were served hot shrimps with fresh bread and butter for breakfast. Then we started back, still against the current, for now we were again passing those cars with the mattresses on top that we had seen before going south.

It seems that at the very moment the customs man was announcing the good news to us, Daladier was getting down from his plane and, hoisted by the mob that had assembled at Le Bourget, being passed from hand to hand overhead to the roar of acclamations. Just a few moments before, he had been trembling with fear of the kind of reception he thought the French might give him.

Our house at last. Boule, Annette, the Breton woman, and Olaf. No robin on my desk or in the garden. I never saw him again. He must have felt his part had been played.

You were growing bigger, and your mother's belly expanded from week to week. Finally it seemed too heavy to carry, but that did not keep Tigy from doing her share in the garden. It was apple-picking time, and we started with the ones on the old tree near the stream, which, although scraggy, gave us fine sweet-smelling pippins, golden yellow with little darker spots on them. They couldn't be picked by hand, because we would have broken the branches off, so I had had clippers attached to the end of a bamboo pole that we worked with cords strung through rings, like those on fishing rods. The fruit fell gently into a bag placed near the clippers and did not get bruised.

Then we went after the trellises on which we grew pears and apples as big and fine as the ones you see in the pages of illustrated magazines.

My fruit storage room would finally be put to use and its many slatted shelves would be filled, labeled with the names of the species they held. Soon, immediately on opening the door one felt invaded by an aroma both sweet and spicy at the same time, an aroma I would never forget. I had to go to the room every two or three days to turn the fruit over and throw out the pieces that were turning rotten.

During the period of the spring tides, at break of day one could hear horses pulling old wagons toward the sea; a man or woman stood in them, holding the reins. These were the mussel farmers, in their rubber boots, on their way, as the water receded, to take care of their mussel fields, and sometimes also of their oyster beds, where the small oysters brought up farther out were left to grow and fatten.

Between La Rochelle and the tip of L'Aiguillon, the farmer is not only

a man of the land but also a man of the sea. I liked to go and watch them work. The women, even the old and fat ones, wore wide trousers and heavy sweaters, a bucket on their backs, and brightly colored kerchiefs on their heads. The men, partly sinking into the mud or using a light punt, went to inspect the mussels, which they moved about as they got fatter.

Five or six whitewashed cabins were lined up on the grassy knoll, and I found out one day that by buying the house at Nieul I had acquired the right to build one of these. My old bricklayer with the white hair and constantly red face got to work on it. I wanted a fireplace, bought two weatherworn wooden benches and a table, and on the brick floor spread a pandanus rug brought back long before from Tahiti. A single window looked out on the sea, and I thought that someday I would like to write here, that vou would bring your first boat, your pails and shovels here.

Our little cabin was used only once or twice, to change into our bathing suits.

Is mv memorv' impregnated only by sunny days? Yet I can see the snow falling, silently covering ground and trees; that happened that very year, which was colder than usual in the region, so cold that I used to wear the black otter hat I had bought in Norway.

One morning, we saw our quenouille trees covered, not with fruit, but with big brownish motionless birds. A heron, our first heron at Nieul, stood stock still on the frozen stream. It was your mother, I guess, who first went near the birds with the swollen plumage, which were thrushes. Cold-struck, they no longer had the strength to move and were just waiting to die. Was it with some secret hope that they had perched so close to a house, within easy reach, as if asking for help?

We brought them into the kitchen, a few at a time, of course not getting them anywhere near the stove. Although we could still feel their hearts beating weakly beneath the soft chest feathers, they remained stiff and inert.

Tig)' and I remembered how we had treated our guinea fowls when we lived at La Richardière. Boule heated up some red wine, which we sweetened and spiced heavily, and we all started putting it into the birds' beaks, drop by drop. After a short time, their eyes began to shine and looked us over with curiosity and without fear. A few more drops and the little bodies were trembling, the claws hanging on to the fingers that held them.

The first to get this treatment began to stand up, still tottering, and we went out and plucked others off the trees, as we might have plucked fruit. Soon, there were no dark spots left on the branches, but thrushes trying out their first steps and their first flutterings all over our kitchen.

Outside, everything was white. Snowflakes were still falling but the air

had lost its bite. When the Httle group of birds seemed up to it, we carried them out, in a washbasket, to the Congo, where they could be sheltered by the bamboos, and on the way we caused a woodcock to take flight.

I don't remember, my Marc, that we ever told you that ordinary story. You were not yet officially born, not supposed to see or hear anything. How many times, later on and even now, were you not to save injured animals, not only birds but also small and large mammals and even snakes!

I was thirty-five at this time. Your mother was thirty-eight. She had never had any babies, and sometimes I worried that her delivery might be difficult, even dangerous. Privately, I confided this to our friend Dr. Béche-val and asked him if there was a good private hospital in La Rochelle, for at that time public hospitals were used almost exclusively for charity cases. Now, there's a term I heard a great deal in my childhood but which has almost disappeared from current usage.

Bécheval shook his head. "I would feel better about it if Tigy were in Paris or somewhere else."

He was rather outspoken where his fellow doctors were concerned. I understood what the shaking of his head and his comment meant.

"Your friend Pautrier, whom you introduced to me and who is a professor at Strasbourg, would be able to give you better advice than I can," he went on.

The Strasbourg hospital was not a hospital for charity cases, nor even an ordinary kind of hospital. I was quite familiar with it. I had given a talk there and met a number of the professors. There was a huge park on the St. Nicholas Canal, practically in the center of town. Small buildings spaced far apart, some amphitheaters, and, for each professor, two or three private rooms in his own personal pavilion.

I was enthusiastic about the idea and discussed it with Tigy, who was no less relieved by it than I. That very evening, we phoned Strasbourg, and Pautrier approved highly of our plan.

"You'll be surrounded by all kinds of friends, and the gynecologist-obstetrician, Professor Keller, is world famous. I'll talk to him about it, and I'm sure he'll be delighted to take care of Tigy."

We expected you to be born in April but, for fear of early labor and urged on by our impatience, we set out at the beginning of March and spent quite a little time, on all sorts of local roads, trying to find the château of Scharrachbergheim, which Pautrier had rented for us.

We had lived in other châteaux, and, in the Orléans forest, in a Cistercian abbey, where in the park one could still see the skeleton of the ancient

church. Yet this chateau now before us left us speechless. It stood, all red stone set off against the greenery below and about it, in the middle of a moat of bluish-green water, which one crossed by a drawbridge that actually worked.

Once inside, more wonderment. The walls were so thick that within the opening of a window I was able to set up a table for my typewriter, my chair, as well as a small file cabinet. And all the windows were like this, their little greenish panes lighting rooms so huge that the old furniture looked like children's playthings.

So you were to be born in Strasbourg and spend your first weeks in this feudal château. The ne.xt day, a short, round, pink, graying man, after examining your mother, reassured us with a kind smile. He was Professor Keller. The man, one might say, who invented the idea of a saltless diet during the last months of pregnancy. Tigy was already following that regimen, for Pautrier had phoned us and told her about it.

Tigy was strong; I never knew her to be sick, except perhaps for a few days of discomfort, especially during the worst heat spells at Porquerolles.

We went into Strasbourg, for prenatal examinations, once a week. I had sent for Annette, whom I missed, and the Breton woman remained alone to take care of our house. We didn't read the papers, especially here, where most of them were printed in German, or, more precisely, in Alsatian. I might add that we didn't really read the papers at Nieul either. We didn't have time for them, and we were not much concerned about Danzig or the Sudetenland, another pet subject of the gentleman who yelled so loud.

I was still writing my novels, which Gallimard brought out at the rate of six a year. Even in the commotion of Parisian life, I always found time —I don't know how—to fulfill the terms of the contract signed in 1934, which we extended every year.

At Nieul, even while I was busy with apples and thrushes, with the seedlings in the small hothouse, and the cabin by the sea, I wrote Chez Krull and Le Bourgmestre de Fumes (Burgomaster of Fumes) first, both of which, coincidentally, were set in Belgium. In January, when your arrival was getting near, I wrote a book about fatherhood, Les Inconnus dans la maison (Strangers in the House). Here, surrounded by the moat beyond which there was an extensive park full of old trees, I began to write Malempin (The Family Lie), the story of a father and his son.

Add to that listing a Maigret here and there, to keep my hand in, but I can't be sure of that; at the time, I didn't yet put dates on my manuscripts.

Here, I must admit, the sky was often gray and I lost count of the rainy days.

I am hesitant about taking a small break here, Marc, to make a confession to you. I hope it won't hurt you, the way D.'s book hurt Marie-Jo and drove her to despair.

Why did I expect that the baby would be a girl, when most men dream only of having a son? Who planted that idea in my subconscious? My love for women, for woman, which goes back to my childhood? The wish to be able to select dresses for a little girl? I rather think it was a presentiment, and a presentiment that misled me, a fact that was to make me extremely happy.

The days went by at Scharrachbergheim quietly, with me a little bit nervous. Then one afternoon, between March lo and 15—I don't remember exactly—our friend Pautrier arrives unexpectedly at the château, with a long face and not smiling, as he usually was.

"I've just had lunch with the local prefect," he says. "He knows about your presence here. He knows you are expecting a child. . . ."

I feel a pinch of anxiety in my chest.

"He wants you to leave as soon as possible. . . ."

I stare at him wide-eyed, as if I have just been accused of having done something wrong.

"Confidentially," he goes on, "last week he opened envelope number two."

Pautrier explains to me that every prefect has in his safe several sealed envelopes, which he is to open only on orders of the government. Because of the Danzig Corridor, which the Treaty of Versailles, after the 1914-1918 war, cut out of the German Empire for the benefit of Poland, and because of the Sudetenland, that is, the one-time German territories incorporated into Czechoslovakia, the gentleman who is no longer shouting has, unusually, deployed some troops and dangerous weaponry, which threaten several frontiers.

"Envelope number two, now opened, is just a prelude to number one, detailing extraordinary precautions to be taken."

"And what about number one, which the prefect expects to get the order to open shortly?"

"That one means general mobilization."

Pautrier stops for a moment, and then says in a hollow voice: "And the organized removal of all inhabitants in the border area. The prefect doesn't want to be caught with an about-to-be-delivered woman on his hands."

Pautrier, your mother, and I talk in low voices for a long time.

"When do you advise us to leave?"

"This very night. The child might come any day."

"WTiere to?"

"Belgium is still neutral. So it won't be bound by the treaties that bind England and France."

"It was invaded in 1914, and I was there, with my parents, in the cellar, listening to the hoofbeats of the uhlans' horses in the streets and the shelling of the forts of Liège."

"At the highest levels, they expect, if war breaks out, that there will be a frontal attack on the Maginot Line."

"What does Professor Keller say?"

"One of his former students and assistants, whom he trusts as much as he does himself, is practicing in Brussels and on the staff of the best hospital in Europe, the Edith Cavell Clinic. Since there is no way of telling whether Tig)' won't have her first pains on the way, his best nurse will go along with you, taking full equipment for emergencies."

Tigy and I look at each other. She does not flinch, does not even pale at the idea of possibly giving birth in a car—which would present some difficulties—more likely at the roadside. We both go into Strasbourg, while Boule finishes packing at the château and Annette is busy phoning to get herself a train reservation.

Keller is satisfied with his examination. "You have nothing to fear. The midwife who will go with you has my fullest confidence."

A woman dressed in white, slightly bulging in all directions, with light hair, blue eyes, and a happy smile on her lips. I have forgotten her name. I buy road maps. We have to take the shortest route. Good old Marc, now where will you finally see the light of day?

We leave at nightfall, and I drive carefully. Your mother is next to me, her belly looking as though it were about to burst. We pass several armored trucks, but there are not many of them yet.

Belgian border. Soon there are forests as far as the eye can see. For how many miles? Tigy is holding the map on her belly as if it were a lectern. "First road to the right," she says.

The sky is finally growing pale, and then yellowish, and at last we start seeing big patches of blue. Just as we get into the suburbs of Brussels, the sun lights up the brick houses. I easily find my way to the Gare du Nord, which I am familiar with, and the Palace Hotel, where we have reserved a suite. All four of us have breakfast together, or, rather, all five, counting you, and then the nurse, who won't hear of going to bed for a rest, as I suggest she should, heads for the station. I phone the doctor, who sounds nice and gives us an appointment for that afternoon. Boulc is emptying the trunk and the suitcases. This trip has rather upset her.

The doctor is tall, with an open face. He takes ligy into his examining

room and, when he comes out, is very reassuring. "Your wife and the baby are none the worse for the trip, and it may be a week yet before she is ready to deUver."

I forgot to mention that, as we came through an almost new section of the city, we stopped off for a moment to see Yvan Renchon, Tigy's brother. The breakfast table was set for five. Only Yvan and his wife were sitting at it, but the three children were soon down, sleepy-eyed, in mussed pajamas, still smelling of warm beds. They kissed their mother and father, and then us.

I looked at them avidly, hoping that someday, perhaps . . . For I felt like a father already.

9

Popular belief has it that a good fairy watches over the birth of every baby. I am not sure I believe in fairies, but one of them certainly helped your mother and me to wait for you and then take back to Nieul the little man-child who had been conceived there and for whom the house had been set up. I am still impatient, like all young people, in spite of my age, and when I want something, I want it right away. When we were in Brussels we had been waiting for you for nine months, and the nervousness I had been trying to hide from Tigy was almost turning into anxiety.

I was pawing the ground. Whereas your mother kept a calmness I have rarely seen her lose, and looked at me with a slightly compassionate, if not mocking, eye. Fortunately, we had made that brief stop at Yvan's. His wife, Yvonne (Yvan and Yvonne, like the words for a song), for the next two weeks was going to take over without ever appearing to.

I had not seen much of her in the elder Renchons' big house in Liège, where the young couple lived quite separately on another floor. My recollection of her was rather vague. Certainly a fine-looking brunette, but one who seemed continuously ill at ease and rarely laughed.

The day after we moved into the Palace, she phoned to ask whether she might come and see us. Now, less furtively than during the family breakfast the day before, I was able to observe her at my leisure.

Yvonne, who is approximately the same age as I, had become a real woman, much surer of herself, and softer at the same time, and her three childbirths, instead of prematurely aging her, had given her a fullness and serenit\- such as I had rarely come across. A mother by instinct, she carried out her duties without ever grumbling or complaining, and seemed able to juggle her various homemaking tasks, doing everything herself and vet finding time for her own leisure pursuits.

Your weight didn't keep Tig\' from still walking briskly, and Yvonne came to pick her up every afternoon to take her to the stores, where, on her advice, vour mother bought ever\'thing you would need. Yvonne knew the cit}- inside out, and indulged in the local tradition of stopping at one of the tearooms or pastr\' shops where the young and less young ladies of the cit)^ gathered after leaving the department stores loaded down with packages.

\\'hat creamv pastries thev then consumed! And what laughter could be heard in those sweet-smelling places! They gained weight little by little. They laughed heartily about it, since fashion did not yet call for women thin as a rail.

Yvonne was not fat, and if her silhouette had rounded out a bit, that only made her pleasanter to look at, especially since she had retained her limbemess and, since the Liège days, had become much more vivacious. They wanted no part of me on those daily excursions, perhaps because, as back at the Junk Art Fair, my nervousness showed too much.

"Are you familiar with Avenue Louise, Georges?"

Of course I knew Avenue Louise, the most famous street in Brussels.

"On the left, you'll find a store with three display windows that will interest you. . . ."

I went there, all the while wondering whether Tigy's water might not have broken in one of those shops from which they returned with things new to me, light and fluffy kinds of garments that in the end constituted a baby's full layette, to say nothing of the pink cans and jars of talcum powder, creams, and oils, all variously scented.

The store on Avenue Louise appeared at first glance to be the finest in the world, and I do believe that at the time it was the only one of its kind. Later, I never found anything to equal it in Paris, London, or New York.

Three huge floors of things of everv kind, from baby carriages and strollers to the most varied kinds of furniture for children's rooms, with toys, bathincttes, and everything else to go with them. I came back from that first visit with my arms full.

I was sorr\' now that, before leaving N'ieul, I had l)<)ught in a little shop in La Rochelle what was needed for your future nursery. Here, everything seemed so much finer! I was nevertheless proud when I thought of the

surprise in store for you when we got you home, which I had had to order well in advance: a bathtub, a real baby-sized bathtub, solidly attached to the wall, so that your mother would not have to bend over.

I returned there almost every day, always buying things that we might never use but that appealed to me as likely to please you. Tigy and Yvonne had already bought the traditional baptismal gown, made of Brussels lace, naturally. Wasn't that one way for us to feel we were already with you?

One afternoon, as she was coming home with Yvonne, your mother's water broke, without her realizing it, just being surprised at what was happening to her, and I could at last breathe more freely. The breaking of the water, I had been told, was the prelude to confinement, or, rather, to the labor that preceded it.

Phone call to the gynecologist. I was so excited the calm doctor must have thought I had lost my wits.

"Take her to the Cavell Clinic, where they have a room reserved for her. I'll drop by and see her later in the day."

A magnificent, almost new hospital, at the edge of the famous Bois de la Cambre. I admiringly contemplated the main building, but the three of us were shown to a smaller building, surrounded by greenery, for your good fairy was still with us.

Everything was light and cheery, and the nurses and midwives wore charming caps that identified them as part of Cavell. I was to find out that they had a school for nurses and midwives, many of them physicians' daughters, and that while studying there they were required to wear the Cavell uniform even off duty.

To me, they all seemed to be pretty and laughing. There was no hospital or clinic atmosphere, and at times it seemed more like a boarding school. The head nurse of Maternity too, despite the strict discipline they enforced, had a soft voice and a maternal smile.

The sun was setting. During all those days in Brussels, all I can remember is sunshine and blue skies. It may well have rained and the wind may have blown. I guess I didn't notice, or else my memory, as almost always, just refused to record the drabness.

"Madame, do you think I might sleep here, on a folding cot?"

She looked at me as one does at a child. "Do you want to very much?"

I didn't want to be separated from you, my Marc, or to be awakened in my room at the Palace by a voice telling me you were born.

"It can be arranged. Provided you are out of the hospital every morning by six."

"That would not bother me." Hadn't I been getting up since childhood

before anvone else in the house, including my parents, and later sat down

at my rvpewriter bv six in the morning?

"You'll also have to promise that you'll control yourself. . . ."

I gave her my promise, but I'm not at all sure she thought I could keep

it.

"And behave yourself with our girls."

"Good morning, doctor."

Thev put Yvonne and me out, and we take a walk on the lawn. Tulips are beginning to bud, and tulips are one of my favorite flowers. The doctor comes and joins us a little later.

"Everything's fine. But I do think it may take rather long. . . ."

Well, I have a cot to sleep on, but they don't serve me any meals. So I seek out a little restaurant in the neighborhood, and find one, sparklingly clean, at the corner of a quiet, residential street. In the morning, I drive across town to our hotel, where Boule is impatiently waiting.

"Is he born yet?"

"Not yet."

Boule, who adores children, is rather frightened by babies, maybe because thev seem so fragile to her. I take my bath, shave, and go for coffrée and shrimp salad by way of breakfast, adding to it a glass of beer as an afterthought.

Babies, I have been told, during the last months usually kick their mothers' bellies. I have had nothing to do with any babies before, except for one Simenon niece to whom I was godfather when I was twelve but whom I saw mainly during the ceremony in church.

For at least two months we have been able to feel you moving around by putting a hand on your mother's belly. It sometimes thrusts up in spots. Not violently. Tigy told me one night that it wasn't painful and that it seemed more like a little greeting. I know you well, my Marc, whom I have often called "my sweet Marc," especially when I saw you watching the sky with dreamy eyes and you seemed to come back from another world when you heard my voice. What were you dreaming of inside your mother's warm womb? One might have thought you liked it there and were trying not to leave it to come out into this big-people's world. I almost believe you were already dreaming.

However that may be, you kept us all with bated breath for several days, days of the same routine. I arrived at ten-thirty. At noon they put me out, and I went to have lunch at the little corner restaurant, which smcllcd, above all, of beer. It was mainly a neighborhood café, where the local habitués came

at their appointed hours to have a game of cards. I would return from there slowly, by way of the affluent, almost empty streets.

Yvonne arrived at two o'clock, always well dressed, with her comforting smile that inspires confidence.

"Go take a walk outside, Georges. I'm staying here till five, which leaves me the time to prepare my supper."

In Belgium, people have "supper" at six or six-thirty in the evening, just as they do here in Switzerland.

I went back to my Paradis des Enfants on Avenue Louise, and the manager informed me that he not only sold ready-made furniture but also manufactured it to order, with the kind of wood and in the style the customer specified. Twenty years later, I was to remember that store while I was awaiting the birth of your brother Pierre, and I designed furniture for the nursery that might serve till the age of six, to be made of cherry, one of my favorite woods, because it is cheerful.

I also walked around the downtown streets, then went to the hotel, where Boule always had the same question for me: "Still nothing?"

It irritated me. Any little thing irritated me, because I was beginning to be worried. But then, hadn't I been for the last nine months? Why wasn't this child moving around more than it was and why hadn't the real labor pains started yet? The doctor kept reassuring me in a routine way, and each time I wondered whether he was telling me the truth.

As I passed by an open door, I caught sight of a woman with white hair, lying in a bed next to a cradle. She looked briefly at me and quickly turned her head away, as if she were ashamed. And the fact was, as one of the young Cavell girls told me, she was, if not ashamed, at least ill at ease with other people and even, it seemed, with her husband.

"She is fifty-two. She already has two grown children, including a married daughter. When this happened to her, she blushed and mumbled, 'At my age, who would have thought it was possible?' "

Good old mother who for years had considered herself an old woman and now looked with such surprise and tenderness at the little thing she had just brought into the world, when her own daughter perhaps was also pregnant!

She and I had a talk that evening.

"It's especially on account of friends, neighbors . . . They must have been laughing behind my back, or thinking I had caught God knows what kind of sickness, when they saw me getting so fat. ... At the beginning, that's what I thought too. And so did my husband."

I met the husband, a man with short gray hair and pink cheeks who wasn't embarrassed bv it at all, but, on the contrary, proud of his feat. "It's really something, isn't it? At our age ..." And he burst into a heart)- Brussels laugh.

Dinner at my little café-restaurant, where the owner used to come over to talk to me.

"When is it due?"

"I don't know. We're waiting."

"Here, we're used to that, you know. You're not our first!"

Should I say she looked good or bad? Your mother was in pain, with her hands crossed over her belly, and little plaintive cries crept in between her moans. I called the nurse on dut)-, who asked me, as if it were the most obvious thing: "Ever\' how many minutes?"

I was a greenhorn, an apprentice father.

"Her pains?"

"I don't know. Maybe every half hour . . ."

"Then we have lots of time. When she starts yelling every three minutes . . ."

Which the doctor confirmed to me toward the end of the morning, after I got back from the Palace.

"Is this normal, doctor? It's two days now that . . ."

"It happens often with primiparas of her age."

Well, then, what about that old lady next door? How long had her husband had to wait?

"I'll be back again this afternoon. She's in good spirits," the doctor said.

I kept repeating the word "primiparas" to myself, because it was new to me, and made me think it was probably more suited to veterinarians. Good old Marc!

One afternoon, finally, the midwife put mc out, telling me that the contractions had started and that she was phoning for the doctor. I went and phoned to your good fairy, who was also mine and your mother's, and who got there after putting her own children to bed.

"Is it due tonight?"

"The doctor is there. We're waiting, but it can't go on much longer."

We walked in the moonlight on the lawn and I stopped to look at the yellow tulips as if 1 were asking them to be a good omen. Yvonne would leave mc from time to time to go into the pavilion, from which, for that night. I was barred. Fortunately during one of the times she was away, I suddenly l>cgan throwing up on the grass.

"Is she having a lot of pain, Yvonne?"

"It's a bad time to go through, but afterward you forget all about it."

Husbands were not allowed, in those days, to be present at their wives' confinements, because it was feared that they would need the doctor and nurses more than the woman would. I was still a rookie at it, as they say in the army, but much later, I got my hash mark and was allowed to be present, dressed in hospital gown and mask, at the birth of one of your brothers and your sister. I didn't bother anyone. After all, it's more of a strain to stay in the wings, even if the wings happen to be a fine green lawn dotted with blooming daisies and tulips.

Finally, when I no longer dared look at my watch, Yvonne appeared and joyfully called to me: "Hurry up!"

There was no need to urge me. I rushed toward the room, pushing nurses out of the way, opening the door, just as Yvonne added: "It's a boy."

And, as I looked at Tigy, very pale but smiling nonetheless, then at the little rectangular cradle in which you were waving your arms and legs, I felt like crying as, quite without my will, in my head ran bits of a song I had heard in Paris ten years before: "The little boy was me, that the stork had brought, ought, ought. ..."

You were not green, as, according to my grandmother Simenon, I had been at birth. You were red and whiny. I took pictures of you, stark naked, lying on the table on which the nurse had placed you, then I asked for permission to pick you up.

You had been born, my son. You weighed, they said, seven pounds and eleven ounces, and your voice was a lot harsher than it is today.

"Are you happy, Georges?"

Didn't it show? I was as if drunk.

"Now, let her rest. Come back early in the afternoon."

"Did everything go all right?"

"You see how it turned out."

"They didn't have to use any . . ."

I didn't dare pronounce the word "forceps," which had haunted me so.

"They didn't need anything except the mother's pushing."

At times, Tigy, exhausted, closed her eyes. I left in my car, with scarcely a thought for our fairy Yvonne, who stayed behind, and as I drove along, I tooted my horn from time to time, while I sang at the top of my lungs: ""J'ai un ploustiquet en brique, En brique, en brique ..." Which might be translated: I've a kid who's full of tricks, Made of bricks, made of bricks . . .

I kept repeating those words endlessly. They must have been coming back to me from the depths of my earUest childhood in Liège. In the local patois there, a ploiistiquet is a little boy, and "made of bricks" of course had to mean he was as solid as the bricks they make the local houses from.

Solid as a brick. I had a child solid as a brick, with two arms, r^vo legs, a big chest, which could be gauged from his yelling power, and a well-formed head, without any trace of those damned forceps I had so worried about. Toot . . . Toot . . . Just like a car with newlyweds in it . . . People turned to look at me, and I didn't give a good goddamn.

I got to the Palace and yelled at the door to our suite: "He's born. It's a boy!"

Boule turned pale with emotion, and no one could then have foreseen that she would be the one to take care of bringing up this son's own son and daughter later on.

It was a great feeling, Marc. Some relief!

But you know it as well as I do, because you've been through it too. Vou were young then. Your wife too. I was thirty-six and felt that I was alreadv aging. You know what I had been doing for the previous several weeks, if not months? Intensive calisthenics, so that you wouldn't be disappointed when you first set eyes on me.

Now, back to the road. I'm going to have to transport you once again, if onlv to get back home to Nieul, your real nest. Not right away, to my great regret. At the time that you were born, recently delivered mothers stayed in bed, and then in their rooms, for at least two weeks, and our good doctor advised us not to take you on a trip before you were at least a month old, preferably older.

And to think that the first flowers we had planted in the garden to welcome you had probably already bloomed. You were born on April i8, and the next afternoon I had to go to register you at the city hall of Uccle, the district in which the Edith Cavell Clinic was located.

What did I do in the interim? Where did I eat? I've forgotten. It doesn't matter. I had a son, a little ploustiquet made of bricks, the sun was in its heaven lighting the city as if for a feast day, and I—I don't know what. I was as happy as 1 am today. I think the sun is shining today too. And if it isn't, that's just too bad for it.

lO

It's good to find peace of body and mind again after undergoing a long period of nervous tension and sometimes feeling a lurking anxiety deep within oneself. One is enveloped in a kind of savory, beatific lassitude, and everything becomes fine and good. The days now were going by much faster than during that long night of your birth, and your mother and I could wait peacefully, with all our thoughts on your definitive(?) transplantation to your home at Nieul-sur-Mer, furnished with such delight and so brightly awaiting us not far from the sea, which your baby eyes were soon to discover.

Your mother. Marc old man, was able to nurse you at her breast only a few days, which presented no problem because, as the doctor put it, the main thing was that you had sucked her first milk, which contained the cholostrum that a newborn baby needs. One morning, at Cavell, when I returned from my little café, I saw a nurse working hard over an ugly machine that was attached to Tigy's breast, but that mechanical "milker" was no more successful than you, and I was secretly relieved, for otherwise it would have been up to me to work that inhuman contraption, for months perhaps, and I just didn't feel up to it.

The Renchons arrived from Liège, and the first thing your good gray-haired grandmother did was to grab you up in her arms and kiss you. The young father I was interfered, saying that a new baby was supposed to have the least possible contact with people who came in from out of doors. I hurt your grandmother, naturally, for, as the eldest in her family, she had raised several of her sisters and brothers.

I tried to make up for it but was too awkward and uncontrolled about it, and Mother Renchon was to hold it against me for quite a while, forgiving me only when I apologized to her and explained how inexperienced and sorry I was.

You seemed to me such a precious treasure, my Marc, and I had awaited you for almost twenty years! For others to touch you, to handle you, to make you their own treasure, however slightly, seemed sacrilegious to me.

Did my mother come too? I don't remember. She must surely have come by, on tiptoe, fading back as was her custom, and if she said anything, it was only in a timid voice devoid of anv great warmth. To this grandmother, at your birth, didn't you belong, after all, to the enemy clan?

As for Boule, it took me a little while to understand her reaction. I expected her to be ver\- enthusiastic. But she remained silent as she looked at you, able to muster only a banal "Yes, he's fine-looking. Really a fine boy . . ."

Poor Boule, almost twenty years before, she had attached herself to a young couple and thus acquired a new family, to whom she had totally devoted herself. She too, in her small fisherman's home atop a Normandy cliff, had seen many younger brothers and younger sisters arrive. The tradition, in her family, was that a girl at six or seven must be ready to help with the latest addition, for the mother alone could never cope with eleven children to raise.

Water had to be drawn from the well, in winter as well as summer, wood had to be cut and the fire kept up in their small house, where a kettle hanging from the end of a chain was the cooking pot for their meals. A new child, in the circumstances, was an ordinary event taken for granted. And here we were, after so many long years, making the birth of a baby an event as solemn as if it had been the birth of an heir to a throne. What place would be left for her now, in the family and in our hearts?

Once you were born, I was no longer allowed to sleep on the cot. So I moved into the Château de Tervueren, all by myself, and that was literally true, for I quickly realized that I was the only lodger there. Have you ever discovered you were all alone in a cathedral?

Everything was too big, the hallways, through which a car could have been driven, the bedrooms, which with a few partitions might each have become a suite. Steps echoed hollowly in the emptiness, beneath ceilings high enough for giants, and the only persons one met, from time to time, were stock figures, maîtres d'hôtel in white tie and tails, waiters in white jackets starched as stiff as coats of armor, which would have seemed more appropriate in this place, room valets in yellow-and-black vests and red hair (maybe they didn't all have red hair, but that's how I remember them), chambermaids in their white caps and lace aprons over their black uniforms, and a giant doorman in gold-braided livery, wearing a high hat with a cockade. What the devil did he have to do, at the foot of the outside steps, in fair weather and foul? I Ic was standing guard, obviously. But over what?