When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  All this is vague, forced. Perhaps I can best sum it up in one sentence:

  Someone who desperately wants to do everything right, who desperately wants to do everything.

  And who cannot understand, who will never understand, that there are limits to human powers.

  All her life, behind her window, holding her own to her bosom, she will look out at the passers-by asking herself why …

  Enough! I’ll end on a lighter note: why isn’t she, why aren’t we all, God Almighty?

  And all her life she will be torn with anguish, other people’s anguish and her own.

  All her life she will eat her heart out, sure that she is inadequate to her task.

  Against this, I’m helpless.

  21 December 1960

  Even as a small child, as long ago as I can remember, I used to become so emotional that I would sob all by myself or clench my fists with rage, with helplessness – and this still happens to me at fifty-eight. The human being is capable of the greatest heroism, the greatest sacrifices. He is capable of devoting his entire life to the sole concern of making another being happy. Is this not what is called love? And yet, he is incapable of dominating an access of ill-humour caused by a trifle, a minor untruth, a troubled night, a headache, a fleeting irritation.

  The same person who understood the other or others so well, who at bottom still understands, suddenly becomes unreachable, gripped by a fixed idea, and there he is, unhappy and humiliated, a victim of an objectless rage – or one whose object is ridiculous.

  If this happened only to the weak, the ignorant, the obtuse, the violent-tempered. Not so! it happens to the best.

  This, perhaps, is what in my eyes gives the truest measure of man. And the most humiliating.

  In the same vein, man is capable of absolute sincerity and countless are those who have preferred death to retraction. Yet I would bet that even these were not above petty deceptions.

  22 December 1960

  In Le Fils I took an actuary as a character. These are unquestionably the people who cast the coldest eye on human life, passions, etc., since they study man only from the point of view of insurance companies. So many chances for such an individual to live so many years, to have a fire, an automobile accident, a personal tragedy … calculated in figures …

  They don’t, as for instance many doctors do, read a paper at the Academy of Medicine, write an article or a report for a journal, or present a daring hypothesis calculated to lend importance to the author.

  The actuary is a boring gentleman. He may occasionally be mistaken in a particular case. Not too often. Never in his general forecasts, where it is not a matter of science but of money, the sacred money of the companies.

  The world as seen by these people. No room for philosophy, for feelings, no place at all for the approximate, for the nuances of art. A sort of X-ray of the world, of society.

  All that has to be false. And yet close enough to the truth, since the estimates have to be more or less accurate.

  Good risk. Poor risk. Bad risk.

  In contrast to them, the psychologists, who, in place of figures, use abstract terms. It is true that psychologists, in their turn, make tests, establish quotas, norms, apply them even to children.

  All this to lead up to a nomenclature. No inclination to describe a state of mind, a psychological state. Only a timetable: a schedule.

  Woke at eight o’clock. Melting snow, still white on the fields. There are workmen all over the house. They have replaced the floors in the dining room and in the playroom. For a week furniture piled in the hall of the second floor and in the drawing room as if in preparation for an auction. Now, a cleaning team (of five or six) attacks the house floor by floor. This morning, it’s the turn of my study and the kitchen.

  Three or four cups of tea.

  I shave and take my bath, listening to the radio while my wife has her massage.

  Nine o’clock. Massage until 9:50. I dress, go down to read the mail in one of the first-floor offices.

  In town with Marie-Jo. Take the five prints that B. Buffet sent me for Christmas to the framer. Then send chocolates to someone who was left off the list yesterday.

  Florist. Sent flowers to different people in Lausanne for Christmas. The out-of-town ones were ordered yesterday by telephone.

  Stationers. Buy paper for Christmas wrapping.

  Then, still with Marie-Jo, buy a present for her little friend.

  Back at eleven thirty. The Christmas tree has come. We’ll trim it tomorrow when Johnny will be on vacation.

  Glance at papers. At 12:45 we go to lunch at the inn (for lack of usable kitchen. The whole household goes in teams).

  When we get back I light a fire in my former study on the ground floor. Papers. Leave at three o’clock with D. Errands. I to the tailor to try on some smoking jackets.

  Then to some other place, to buy sheepskin jacket. D. during this time is shopping for clothes for Pierre and underwear for Marie-Jo. We run into each other from store to store the length of the Rue de Bourg.

  Choose a present for a woman who just had a baby.

  Buy a mackinaw for D.

  When we get back, the upholsterer is finishing hanging the curtains returned from the cleaner, the carpet man brings back the clean carpets too.

  In the halls, on the stairs, we meet people we don’t know.

  The new jazz drums for Johnny have come and I spend an hour putting them together, for there are always mysterious things to fiddle with.

  6:45 to the inn, where we all dine together, with the cook, the valet, and one of the maids.

  Back again. News programme on French TV. Put Johnny to bed after having looked at his school drawings, which surprise me.

  Another half hour of television, alone in the drawing room. Then rejoin D. in her office. Back to drawing room upstairs, where we show the nurse our purchases for Pierre.

  That’s all. I forgot. This morning I ordered holly and mistletoe. And this afternoon I bought myself some gloves.

  It is still snowing. It may be a white Christmas.

  This time that’s really all. We are going to go upstairs, kiss the children, take a phenobarbital, and sleep. I haven’t done any thinking. I think of nothing. The proof! Tomorrow waking at eight o’clock. Tea. Bath. Drive D. to the hairdresser at ten o’clock. I will probably do errands and in the afternoon I will put the lights up on the tree. Then I’ll watch the children decorate it.

  I don’t know just why, opening this notebook with the idea of writing: nothing, I thought of my actuary.

  Incidentally. Met Geraldine Chaplin, who is sixteen. She was carrying Christmas packages. Everyone at her house has the flu.

  23 December

  Hallelujah!

  24 December

  The Christmas spirit. At last!

  25 December

  Is it from Epictetus? I think so. Anyway, I’m too lazy to find the source, less than three yards from me. ‘Of the ten evils we fear, only one happens to us. So, we will suffer nine times for nothing.’ Very approximate quotation.

  A perfect Christmas, in spite of my fears. One of the best, the most perfect, the most ‘complete’.

  Thank you, God!

  And, last night, two good hours, real ones, with D. That makes up for everything.

  30 December 1960

  10 o’clock in the morning

  Strange end of the year. We have everything. The children are in good shape. I too. D. has nothing wrong organically. Nevertheless … Three times, five times a day the colour of life changes. In the evening, I go to sleep confident, D. in my arms, sure that the release will come. And in the morning it begins all over again.

  She’s trying, though. If not, all would be grey, without a ray of sun. The moment must not have come yet. It can happen soon, tomorrow, in ten days, and then our life will go back to its true rhythm. She is worn out and, suddenly, without energy, incapable of taking things lightly.

  We are all subject to this and at th
is very point medical science, as a rule so cocksure, is the most helpless. An infinitesimal change in the quantity of such and such an acid and our whole equilibrium is threatened. It has happened before and I feel confident because I know she will respond suddenly. In the meantime …

  The day I first met her, in New York, when, after our luncheon at the Brussels, we went for a walk in Central Park, she left me to do an errand, promising to meet me at the Drake. I waited for her for about an hour. I didn’t know her.

  At first I read peacefully. Then for the first time in my life I felt a painful contraction in my breast and said to myself:

  ‘Maybe she won’t come.’

  Since then, I have had that sensation again each time there has been the slightest cloud between us.

  This time the cloud is not mental; it is neither misunderstanding nor irritation, none of the things that can separate, for an hour, people who love each other.

  A chemical formula. A reaction which will come. She is in bed, this morning, which is best. Perhaps this afternoon? … Tomorrow? …

  I am going to the tailor with Johnny. There is snow. It is freezing. The sun is shining.

  I am waiting.

  Soon, perhaps, to change my mood, I’ll try to write, without much conviction, on another subject. But for the moment nothing outside of D. is important. I prefer that she should not read this before the reaction has occurred. Then she will be able to smile about it with me.

  Four o’clock. Success? Partial success? I should know that it is not a question of hours but of weeks, and all the same I always count in hours.

  Instead of going to bed as she meant to do at one point, D. came to walk in the snow with Johnny and Marie-Jo. All four in furred parkas in the white village, we must have made a winter scene for a calendar. Now, I am going out again with Pierre. I have had enough of my armchair by the fire. I need air, cold, movement, activity.

  Five o’clock. I’ve been much more affected than I could have believed, yesterday and the day before, by pictures of the Belgian troubles on television. I don’t feel myself any more Belgian than French, American, or Swiss, I must already have said so. Belgium is the country where, I think, I would least like to live, while, if I had a preference (I haven’t for the moment), it is the only place that I would designate as the ‘resting place for my ashes’. I say ashes, for I want to be cremated.

  The pictures of slow, silent crowds in the streets lined with closed shutters recalled to me the strike in my childhood which I tried to describe in Pedigree. And suddenly I feel very near, very involved with these people (I speak of a social class that I scarcely know, that I never was a part of, and which, actually, I almost feared).

  I also react to the events in Algeria, of course, and I am distressed by the behind-the-scenes intrigues there and in the Congo.

  Last evening, however, in bed, I was tempted to make a gesture and only hesitated because it would have seemed theatrical.

  In 1952 I had to be forced (correspondence proves it) to join the Belgian Academy. I only went near the place once. On the same trip, I was given the decoration of officer of the Order of the Crown, as a surprise, and I swear I wasn’t expecting it.

  The journalists thought I was moved while actually I was upset, upset above all at having to say thanks. At the Brussels Exhibition, for which I had reluctantly accepted the presidency of the Film Festival, I was given another decoration, Commander, I believe – I know nothing about it – of the Order of Leopold. And this time I blushed, furiously, because I had been given this distinction … at the distribution of the Festival prizes, as if in payment for having accepted this boring job!

  I don’t belong to any society. I have never been secretary, treasurer, honorary president of anything whatsoever.

  I confess that I would like to send my resignation to that academy of which I am only a nominal member, to send back the two decorations which I have worn just once and, at the same time, send back to France the Legion of Honour which I was given when I was in New York. (It was said that I had solicited it. It has been said of others. I know this is not so.)

  This is how things happened. My friend Georges Charensol, of the Nouvelles Littéraires, wrote me that he and his friends had proposed me for the Legion of Honour; all he wanted me to do was to sign a form. On the face of it, it was an application. But I would have rejected Charensol and my friends at the Nouvelles Littéraires by not signing.

  In short, I would like to be rid of these medals which were given me by people whom I don’t respect, who represent a world that has always been foreign to me.

  I am tempted to send a telegram to La Wallonie which is at the head of the rebel movement of the Belgian people to tell them that I am with them.

  But these are theatrical gestures that go against my grain. Where is freedom? And isn’t silence sometimes the more difficult option?

  I begin to understand a terrible saying of Léon Blum’s in the French Chamber in 1936: ‘Bourgeois, I hate you!’

  I know, I have met, I still meet here, in Paris, in Cannes, in Venice, in Nice, in the luxury hotels, and in night clubs the people Léon Blum was speaking of and whom I knew only slightly at that period, because of whom there is fighting in the Congo, in Algeria, in Cuba, and, in some measure, all over the world, the people who are waiting for the end of the Belgian crisis in the hope that the government will be ‘tough’ …

  I even had one to dinner last week.

  And I believe that I hate them too.

  Or at least that I would hate them if I really thought them capable of the Machiavellianism of which they boast and if, in my heart of hearts, because of the close view I get of them, I did not know that they are pitiable.

  But that they should draw me into their inner sanctums or cover me with their hardware …

  I’ve given the medals I’ve received to my children to play with and make fun of. I swear, no matter what the circumstances, never to accept another ribbon, another medal, another title.

  31 December 1960

  Yesterday, 30 December 1960, when everywhere in the world cavalry is motorized, and even hearses; when horses are no longer kept for the big White House parades (too expensive), etc., etc., in 1960, yes, yesterday, I saw mounted police charge a crowd with drawn swords.

  I saw them on television. It happened in Brussels. It was sudden, anachronistic, a Detaille painting in motion.

  No doubt Algerian paratroopers’ machine guns are more murderous, and even the so-called practice grenades.

  I would be surprised if those horsemen and those waving swords did not stay in the minds of tens of thousands of people who watched the spectacle on their screens like a sort of nightmare.

  It is true that during the last war and after, torture was used in a perfectly official way, as in the Middle Ages.

  However, the papers were amazed – and indignant – that some people, white or black, were dismissed during the recent and continuing troubles in the Congo.

  I’m not speaking of us this morning, of D. and me. Chut! … Who knows? … I’m walking on tiptoe …

  1 January, 3:30 a.m.

  Good, excellent New Year’s Eve. All the staff out, including the nurse, Pierre and Marie-Jo in bed. Johnny with us at the television until eleven thirty. D. and I to bed at two thirty. Good awakening. Good morning. Johnny, Pierre, and I going to Morges, then Lausanne, while Marie-Jo paints a canvas for a present for her brother.

  Everyone out again. Nana comes in and stays in the house with Pierre while D., the two children and I go to lunch at the Lausanne-Palace. Almost perfect mood, perfect, finally, after a threat of storm.

  It’s a little like the time between two seasons. Such comparisons are overused, but one rediscovers them in experiencing them. Between our states of well-being – physical and mental – and the states of the sky, there are analogies, above all in the between-times, when the weather is neither good nor bad, when it is neither winter nor spring, neither summer or autumn.

  E
verything can change in a moment in one direction or the other. One feels worried, sometimes oppressed. Perhaps, after all, the same laws govern these transformations. We make artificial ones for each kind, for man, for the different races, the different categories, the animals, the vegetables, the planets, when there is probably a certain unity that we miss.

  That’s encouraging. If there is not yet secure, stable good weather on the barometer this time, still, for as long as it lasts, it promises that this will come soon.

  I’m beginning to relax, to think of my next novel. A Maigret? A non-Maigret? I would prefer the latter but perhaps I’d be playing safe to put off a real novel until March.

  The children have been delightful, all three, and Marc telephoned us before going to spend New Year’s Eve with a friend in Versailles.

  D. was adorable. Should I say that my only fear is that she became a little too much so, too quickly? With each of my little illnesses, flus, etc., the doctors got me up a day or two too soon and I’ve had to go back to bed.

  I don’t want that to happen to her. When one has reached, as in her case, the depths of fatigue and inner discouragement – the kind when one blames oneself without wanting to admit it – convalescence is slower than for a serious illness.

  I hope that hers will be rather pleasant, almost voluptuous.

  Now I am sure of a recovery. And it is because it is no longer a question of more than days, of hours, that I note the stages. This is not literary, psychological, or medical abstraction. It’s a need, because our whole life is at stake. And I hope that she will only read these last pages when she is in top form – to smile at them.

  Leave again for a drive with Pierre and Nana.

  2 January 1961

  Lausanne empty as in a nightmare or a Chirico canvas of the Montparnasse period. Neither weekday nor Sunday. An impression of tension, of waiting. But tomorrow, at five minutes to eight the Place Saint-François will have its usual look, with its great banks devouring their hurrying employees.