When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  Calm too, but without emptiness, at home, where D. has again made a step forward, and has almost regained her self-confidence. Just a little longer and she will be back to her real life.

  A wish to invite K. (former chief of Geneva police, then called to the Congo by the UN to reorganize their police) to lunch and, afterwards, to chat peacefully by the fire. A little like passing an hour or two with Maigret.

  K. and I speak the same language, or almost, and we understand each other in half sentences. It’s rare that the desire comes to me to invite someone. Perhaps because he understands the workings of certain games, the need to assure myself that my own intuition hasn’t deceived me?

  I hope that he has read L’Ours en Peluche. Have forgotten to send him a copy. It is true that I never send them. Would also like the advice of Dr D. of ‘Rives de Prangins’,* with whom I also feel on an equal footing, although most of his professional knowledge and experiences are beyond me.

  In a few minutes the children and their two little friends are going to give a concert for the parents of those friends and for us. I look forward to it with more pleasure than to a real show. Johnny’s face, leaning over his drums, fascinates me, seems suddenly adult, and Marie-Jo becomes a different person, which makes me think I don’t really know her, that there is an inner life in her which eludes me.

  Yesterday Pierre finally began to say ‘Daddy’ after having resisted it for so long. And, at the same time, as if it came to him overnight, he calls everyone by name.

  Soon, if I have the time, I want to talk about D.’s and the children’s future when I am no longer here. The question is raised, in too brief a form, in my will. I have a few little thoughts on the subject. It is true that it will no longer be my problem.

  Tuesday, 3 January 1961

  11 o’clock in the morning

  It’s raining. The children are making music in the playroom. D. is in her boudoir. The secretaries are back in the office. Life has resumed its normal course after the holidays.

  My last paragraph yesterday made me go back to the past. When Marc was born, in 1939, I was living in Nieul-sur-Mer, five or six kilometres from La Rochelle, one kilometre across the fields from La Richardière, where I had lived from 1932 to 1935, if I’m not mistaken.

  As always, the truth is more complex. I had been living nearly six months of the year, sometimes more, in Porquerolles, in a small house oddly flanked by a minaret, and it was in that minaret overlooking the port that I had arranged my study. I had a fishing boat, with a pointed bow, which I had had built in Cagnes-sur-Mer, as many nets as a fisherman, and a sailor who spoke pirate’s slang (of Neapolitan origin) named Tado.

  In 1935, returning from a trip around the world (or 1936?), I rented and furnished, according to the taste of the decorators of the period, a conventional modern apartment in Neuilly at 3 Boulevard Richard-Wallace opposite the park of Bagatelle.

  I had also rented the Château de la Cour-Dieu, in the forest of Orléans, near Ingrannes. Actually, it was the priory of a ruined Cistercian abbey. I had taken my horses, sulky, buggy, etc., there.

  I had bought a clearing, a few kilometres away in the middle of the forest, with a dilapidated farm in it, with the idea of building the house of my dreams there, a huge one-storey house with a large interior court, stables, kennels, etc. I had even rented a hunting preserve and I was organizing beats twice a week.

  Having wounded a young deer at the first beat and being forced to finish it off, I gave up shooting. But I was obliged, by contract, to hold two beats every week.

  What else was I doing at the same time? Today I am flabbergasted by that dispersion which left me nothing but confused memories. Ah yes, I was dressing in English style, was buying my hats in London, wearing a bowler in the afternoon, going to Le Fouquet’s and, in winter, in Paris, I did not miss any chance to dress in tails and high hat. I was a member of the Yacht Motor Club of France, the Escholiers, the Sporting Club …

  I don’t recognize myself very well in this picture. I was even wearing a pearl in my necktie!

  One day, disgusted, unable to work in Paris, I left in a car for the North of Holland to find a simple house somewhere along the seashore where I could live like a peasant. I used to say, I remember: the house one would have liked to be one’s grandmother’s.

  Travelled south, in short stages along the North Sea, then the Channel. After Normandy, Brittany, the Vendée, finally the outskirts of La Rochelle, which I had left five years earlier.

  And there, tears came to my eyes, as if I had returned to my native land. I looked for a house. I found one. I bought it. I began work on it. Tearing down walls, opening bricked-up windows, once more I found that it was the remainder of an old abbey, and there were niches for saints in what would be my study.

  I gave up Cour-Dieu, but I kept the clearing where the workmen had not yet begun. I kept the apartment in Neuilly and ‘Les Tamaris’ in Porquerolles.

  Marc was born in Nieul in 1939 a few months before the war, and I, who had looked so hard for a nest, I wondered where I would live when he was of school age. I thought of everything, of climate, of studies, of the university. Of myself, who would be getting old when he was twenty. (I’m there now!)

  I decided that soon I would look for a house in Aix-en-Provence or near there. I would be two jumps from the sea, from Porquerolles, in a region I loved, in a town of the size I like, and where there are excellent educational facilities. At least – I still hesitated – unless I took up residence in the United States, for it appeared to me that the time had come for a young man to be brought up in both the European and the American way.

  In September the war broke out. In August 1940 I left for the Vendée in order to rest after the fatigue and emotion of working with refugees. I didn’t yet know that I would never return to Nieul, that later I would give it to my first wife, that Marc was going to live at Fontenay-le-Comte first, three months in a house on the waterfront, two years in the Château de Terreneuve, then in the woods at Saint-Mesmin-le-Vieux, to end, with the Liberation, at Les Sables-d’Olonne.

  After which several months in Paris, in my old lodgings at the Place des Vosges which my friend Ziza had looked after, and off to London, Canada, and the United States.

  So that it was in Florida that Marc went to school for the first time, then in Arizona, then in California, and later in Connecticut, where I finally bought Shadow Rock Farm, which I still own, and where we were to live for five years.

  Marc did not come back to Europe, to Cannes, until he was sixteen years old, with a brother and sister born in America.

  Two years later, he continued his studies in Switzerland before settling in Paris and getting married there.

  I foresaw everything except …

  In the end, reality was not so far removed from my projects, at least one of them.

  Will it be the same with all the plans that I want to make for D. and for the other children, of which there are now three, once I am no longer here, which will certainly happen some day.

  It reassures me to try to imagine them in such and such a place, in a certain atmosphere. At the same time it is partly a matter of personal geography.

  Plato considered that the ideal city would have, I think (the book is five yards from me, but, once more, I refuse to get up to make sure of the number), five thousand inhabitants.

  Doesn’t this correspond to a city of a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants today, so long as it’s a university town? It is because Lausanne fits this concept that I settled here, and after four years I am still content with my choice.

  Shouldn’t it be almost the same, after me, for the children? With the difference that, since they will not be able to live in such a large house, with as big a staff, distance from the town would complicate the least details of life.

  If D. and they decide to remain in Switzerland, on the heights of Lausanne, near buses and trams, there are charming villas and even apartment houses which simplify life.
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  For I am the one who complicates it in this house, with my work and my demands.

  Will they want to stay in Switzerland? Myself, if I am still here when the children are bigger, will I not wish to finish their education in France?

  Apart from this, life must be made pleasant for D., and I fear the long distance from Paris, where we have most of our friends.

  Versailles? I’ve always dreamed of it. But I’ve been there recently. It has become a tourist town and the neighbourhood is inhabited by a restless crowd of snobs, as bad for the children as the Côte d’Azur.

  Aix-en-Provence again? Maybe. Aren’t there airfields, army camps, and a great deal of tourism there too now?

  If they need or want the South, I’d prefer Nîmes, near Montpellier and its university. Only for D. that’s far from Paris, and even if only on business she will have to go there often.

  There remains, as for Maigret, the Loire valley, Orléans or Tours, Saumur, for example.

  Rouen is depressing and rainy. Caen is too new a city, though it offers the advantage of being near the sea.

  At the moment I incline to the Loire valley, a big airy house surrounded by a garden at the outskirts of the city.

  Vain speculation, I know, I’ve had some experience.

  Wherever they decide to go, wherever D. decides to take them, I know they will be happy and I hope they will never be sad thinking of me, that they will say that I had a full life, that they gave me all the happiness possible.

  No museum of mementoes. Nothing to make them sad. On the contrary. Let them remember me almost as a clown and sometimes, at meals, let them burst out laughing thinking of me, as they do now.

  Loire valley? Lausanne? Nîmes?

  I’m entertaining myself, children, thinking of you, preferably of you grown up, all adults, for I haven’t the slightest wish to leave you and I hope to do it as late as possible.

  But I sketched many plans for Marc when I was only forty. Isn’t it fair that I should make some for you at almost fifty-eight?

  No! D. is going to frown. Let’s not talk about it any more. Long live Echandens and life in January 1961.

  Who knows? Perhaps, after all, I shall see all my children married and then we’ll have to find a house for two somewhere, and from time to time, my darling D., we will try, with our old legs to climb the narrow staircase of your doll’s house in Cagnes-sur-Mer. I doubt whether we shall get to that point – excuse me, that I’ll come to that point, but I could always be carried upstairs.

  Just now there may be fighting in Belgium. They may already be fighting there. They are fighting in Laos, in Algeria, in the Congo.

  And I, nice and warm in my study, with the rain falling outside as in my childhood, I’m thinking of my old age.

  Wednesday, 4 January 1961, morning

  It is sad to watch a being to whom one feels attached in every fibre struggling to regain her balance, her strength, her joy in living. One knows, as doctors know it, that in the last analysis this is finally only a question of chemistry, or glands, of a little too much of this or of that, or too little; that, little by little, the lack or the excess will be remedied.

  It’s a question of time, of groping, of keeping one’s peace of mind, and, in a word, of confidence. But it is just this confidence that is almost impossible to achieve – otherwise, it would be so easy.

  The patient – I do not say the sick man or woman since there is no true sickness to speak of – attributes his or her state to different causes, most often moral ones. He argues with himself, lies to himself, a little as if he didn’t want to get well. For to get well would be to agree, to admit to himself that all his phantoms are imaginary.

  A subtle shifting of reality takes place (for physical reasons) and it is that reality which he begins to flee from. So he submerges himself, and when he comes to the surface, is tempted to plunge back down again.

  How to help her? Every word, every attitude, runs the risk of being wrongly interpreted. The other day I wrote that I was walking on tiptoe.

  Yesterday, the day before, I believed that we were coming back to the surface. This morning we have to begin all over. She is trying, with all her strength. But, fatally, she is trying in the wrong direction.

  The experience of earlier depressions is useless. Each time she loses all confidence. Not her fault. Because we are at the mercy of a hundredth of a milligram of acid.

  In a few days I will smile about it and she will smile about it.

  Last evening, on television, another charge by mounted police in Belgium. And once again there is talk of separation between Flemings and Walloons as at the time I was reporter on the Gazette de Liège. This time the Socialists are at the head of the movement. Their leader is a certain Renard, editor of La Wallonie. This paper was almost a turning point for me, which very few people know.

  I was working on a Catholic and conservative paper (it is no longer so) near the Place Saint-Lambert because it happened to be the first job on a paper I could find, on the day when I suddenly decided, at the age of sixteen and a half, to become a reporter. To tell the truth, I had no idea of its political colour.

  La Wallonie, at that period, was considered by conservative people, including my parents, as a sort of emanation of the Devil, and its editors had the reputation of men who carried knives between their teeth.

  Among them, I was friendly (in spite of the difference in ages) with the editor-in-chief, Isi Delvigne, and a deputy of the party called Troclet, who still wore a very Bohemian flowing necktie.

  I was only a kid. On the Gazette they were careful not to entrust me with any tasks that had to do with politics except, during elections, the accounts of electoral speeches by our candidates.

  As is the rule, of all the journalists of Liège we were the worst paid (I noticed later that it is always the same: the further right a paper is, the less it pays its staff; if it is Catholic on top of that, you can starve).

  One day Isi Delvigne took me aside and proposed that I come to work for La Wallonie, not just as an editor, but with the promise that when I was twenty-one I’d be listed among their candidates for elections, local and provincial at first, legislative later.

  It was an assured fortune and future. At that period, in fact, the parties of the Left in Belgium had few educated elements, lacked cadres, as one says today, and I remember candidates and even men elected to office who barely knew how to read or write.

  For a long time I had wanted to become a novelist. I had published a first book: Au Pont des Arches. I had written a second: Jehan Pinaguet, which my editor-in-chief had forbidden me to publish (I had found a publisher, or rather a lady-publisher, an older woman but very attractive, whom my youth must have stimulated) because there was a priest who smacked of heresy among its characters.

  Politics? Literature?

  Did I really hesitate? Anyway, I was tempted. The thought of manipulating the masses, of speaking from the podium, organizing impressive parades, fighting for a cause …

  I said No. Without regret, I really believe. It is none the less true that one night, a little drunk, crossing the Passerelle in a fog, and also in a poetic mood, I declared to my friend Lafnet, who was taking me home:

  ‘At forty I shall be a minister or a member of the Academy!’

  At fifty-eight I am neither one nor the other. For I meant the French Academy, of course. I wasn’t speaking seriously, just metaphorically, since, a Belgian, I knew that the Quai Conti was closed to me.

  But a minister I would certainly have been at the specified age if I had joined La Wallonie and the party. It happened to several of my age group who were less well equipped than I.

  As to becoming an Academician, there is no question of that, of course. I’ve expressed my opinions – sincerely – on this subject as on that of decorations.

  I’m happy I never became a minister, never dabbled in politics wherever I was.

  But still that was a turning point, a decision which it was necessary to make,
at an age when I hadn’t the slightest maturity. I certainly did not weigh the pros and cons. I followed my instinct. The other way was easier and put an end to my problems at the time.

  I stayed on the pious Gazette until my military service, which I got over with ahead of the draft, and at nineteen and a half I went to Paris where, after some menial secretarial jobs, I was soon busy writing popular novels all day long under fifteen or sixteen pseudonyms before taking my own name again.

  Yesterday there was fighting in Belgium, but no decisive battle. This disappoints me somewhat. On the whole, my instinct enables me to foresee events quite accurately, I have had proof of it recently in rereading my old reporting.

  Where I am invariably wrong is in my sense of timing. Events always take longer to ripen than I think.

  Perhaps it is the same for personal tragedies and even for illnesses. Whether it is a matter of nature, of men, of crowds, it could be said that there is a nearly immutable rhythm to which I am not attuned, which I have a tendency to anticipate.

  This is also true for D., with whom I become impatient because she isn’t getting well when she has scarcely begun to take care of herself and when she has to counterbalance more than a year of worry and extreme fatigue.

  The children dismantled the Christmas tree this morning, with the same pleasure with which they had trimmed it, the same impatience.

  Pierre, who has been eating with us for three days only, has proved the life and soul of the family table and meals have become delightful.

  Thursday, 5 January 1961

  A relapse for D. yesterday, suddenly, at the same hour as in December. Same pains. Same utter fatigue. Fortunately less crushing, perhaps because we know. I watch over her from morning to night, look about fifty times a day into whatever room she’s in, not because of restlessness but because I would like to help her.