When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  How to explain my behaviour, then? By a sort of innocence, of openness? I don’t think so. More by a certain feeling that I am on an equal footing with men, whoever they are.

  It is with the other column, of faults, that I want to start, since I began with my children.

  Though, at the time of the Gazette de Liège, when I was sixteen and a half to nineteen years old, I had two women available to me each day, almost every day, at one moment or another, I would be like a dog in rut.

  An example. A case that comes back to me. In Belgium at that time, as in Amsterdam to this day, there were strange houses: a dimly lit ground floor; half-open curtains behind which could be seen one or two women knitting or reading, raising their heads when they heard the step of a passer-by.

  These houses, the same as in Amsterdam, were not necessarily in deserted or disreputable streets. There was one on the Boulevard de la Constitution just opposite the largest secondary school, and I had to pass in front of it each time I came back from the centre of town through the Passerelle.

  I was passing this way one night at about ten o’clock. I did not see the familiar silhouette, but a splendid Negress, and suddenly I felt that it was absolutely necessary for me to enter and make love with her. I had never known a Negress.

  I had only a small sum in my pocket. I hesitated. My father was already sick, dying. A little while before, he had given me his watch, a silver watch with the arms of Belgium on it, which he had won in a shooting match, for my father was an enthusiastic marksman (I still have three silver plates engraved with the same arms, won in the same way).

  Shamefacedly, I paid with the watch, and it was one of the acts that I regret most, not for moral reasons, but because it would mean so much to me to have this souvenir of my father, who was to die a year later. At home, I was obliged to lie about it. Then to declare the loss of the watch to the police. And if it had been found it might have had far-reaching consequences.

  It is only a small example. At the same time, I spent evening after evening all by myself in the most disreputable streets, where I risked being beaten up at every corner.

  Later I did the same, almost all through my life, more out of curiosity than desire. When I was living on the Place des Vosges, as for instance around 1923–1924, the Rue de Lappe and other streets around the Bastille were not tourist attractions the way they are today.

  In the dance halls they would pull a knife for a Yes or a No, and I have seen a woman’s throat cut beside me in a bar.

  At that time, my first wife was a painter and, to find models for her, I would go there to look for them, late at night. It was a curious world and one found girls there who had arrived in Paris from Brittany or Normandy only two months ago and were already on the streets.

  I took them home. Men would follow me from a distance. Some of them threatening me.

  During the same period I spent nights wandering, unarmed, on the old defence works which still existed, near La Villette, on the Rue de Flandre, and the neighbourhood of the Canal Saint-Martin held no secrets for me.

  I did the same thing in Montmartre and in the twentieth arrondissement and I admit that to my human curiosity was almost always added a certain sexual excitement. I have made love in the streets and the passageways where the unexpected arrival of a policeman could have changed my future.

  Much later, in Cairo, I was wandering alone at night (with a revolver in my pocket) in the red-light district, which was as big as a Paris arrondissement, and I used to follow women through the alleys to houses that I could never have found by myself.

  The same at Aswan, even in Panama, in Guayaquil, and almost all over the world.

  I never had the sense of running risks. It is only now, retrospectively, that I feel fear.

  As I feel it in the parallel area of which I have spoken. In Liège, at the Gazette, I already had the habit of borrowing two or three months’ salary from the cashier and I wonder still how, finally, I managed to repay it.

  In Paris I did the same thing, except that I had no salary. Having earned by a miracle, the day before the rent was due, the sum required to pay it, I would spend it in a night club. I earned money fast enough, with stories and popular novels, but even when the Maigrets brought me much more, when I had several houses at once, a car, a chauffeur, etc., I was only working to pay off debts.

  ‘It’s the only way to make myself work,’ I used to say.

  Which was false, since I still have a middle-class soul and when I go several days without working I feel full of guilt, like a man who does not deserve the bread he eats.

  I’ve owed money all over town. And I’ve seen too many cases where that has led to serious compromises.

  Why did I have the luck to get out of it?

  If I saw one of my children acting that way, I would shudder.

  Sometimes when it seemed to be provoking fate, it appeared to me a natural act. I’ve mentioned my affair with a married woman. It has happened that I took her in her own house when her husband, busy in a neighbouring room, was talking to us through the half-open door.

  Isn’t that a case where if there had been a tragedy I would really have been the one responsible?

  The severity of American laws in sexual matters is well known. Well aware of it, one evening when I was feeling good I crossed the centre of the city from east to west through the most brightly lit, the busiest streets and avenues, in a taxi with a woman, the two of us in a position … which, aside from any scandal, would have got us at least five years in prison and expulsion from the country afterwards.

  Again, I did not mean it as a challenge. I am, by nature, a man who respects rules. If I do not believe in them, I pretend that they must be followed out of respect for others. And in forty years’ driving I have never had a single ticket, not even for parking my car illegally.

  I believe that I am a decent man, anyway in the sense that I give to that word. I have become more and more scrupulous in my own affairs and I am rarely satisfied with myself.

  That is the reason why there are few years in my life which I can imagine reliving in a carefree way. I always feel uneasy in remembering myself as I was thirty, twenty years ago. Will I some day be ashamed of myself today?

  When I sent out my first press copies (Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien and M. Gallet, décédé) I was foolishly proud enough to sign those for the greatest writers and critics with only a ridiculous and cocky ‘Cordially’, as if from one day to the next I had become their equal.

  I’ve spoken of my suits cut in London, of the pearl in my tie, of the apartment done by a ‘decorator de luxe’ on the Boulevard Richard-Wallace.

  How, in spite of all that, did I manage to find my way? And how many times, with the slightest slip, could it have been a catastrophe?

  All the same I have achieved a certain balance, at least I don’t feel too ashamed of myself, I’m able, most often, to look myself in the face.

  Then I think of others, some of them for a time my friends, my colleagues, or my relatives, who ended badly.

  The responsibility of parents we talk so much about today! Would my parents have been responsible if something bad had happened to me? God knows they took their roles seriously, following to the letter the precepts of morality and religion.

  Me, I don’t presume any right to interfere, except to speak gently to them, and, as I do to Johnny, to tell them things of the sort I tell here.

  I hope there won’t be other details coming back to me, as with the preceding entry. There are hundreds, buried in my memory; I don’t want to tell them, or to remember them. Not out of shame or embarrassment, but because they are without interest and this would take on the tenor of a pose.

  Isn’t it simpler to say, without searching further:

  ‘I’m only a man.’

  Either my children will understand or they will not. I hope they understand, although that assumes certain risks. I mean that they must run some risks.

  Amen!

  I took a walk
to the village with Johnny. We came back with Pierre and the nurse, whom we met. I played the drums in the children’s playroom and they did not make fun of my clumsiness but seemed rather troubled by it, they who have rhythm under their skins.

  Then an errand in town, to leave something at the laboratory. When I got back, I found D. at her typewriter. A joyful noise, which delighted me.

  I want to raise my hand as if in school, to say that I’ve forgotten an important detail and to ask permission to explain. It’s a matter of the question of drink, the question of alcoholism. There’s a great deal about it in my novels. There are legends on this subject. I would like to take my bearings on this. That will be for tomorrow.

  Now I am going to listen to the results of the referendum knowing that I will suffer, for I am persuaded that all the phoniness we have watched in the last few weeks will bear fruit, especially since fifty-five per cent of the voters are women and they vote emotionally or sentimentally. It’s none of my business. I am not French, I don’t even live in France. But when I speak of it, I still say, without being aware of it:

  ‘At home!’

  Even if it were happening in China I couldn’t stop myself from getting excited and agonizing over it. Trickery on both sides, certainly, and bad faith, and intrigues. There is nevertheless a certain tone, a certain conceit, a certain contempt for men, of what those people call the mob, which makes me shudder and want to fight. Soon, in front of the television, my toes will contract. And it is I who, when D. gets indignant, tell her that she will get over it in time, that she is not yet quite grown-up!

  Is one ever quite grown-up? For myself, the longer I live, the more I doubt it. And I don’t hide it from my children and I avoid saying to them:

  ‘When you’re grown-up …’

  ‘Behave like a grown-up …’

  If they took it into their heads to do it?

  Monday, 9 January 1961

  Last night, after a perfect day, followed by a marvellous hour, a brutal, unexpected relapse for D. I wanted to comfort her, first tenderly, then by reasoning with her.

  What did I say to provoke a painful crisis? I don’t know at all. I searched in vain. There she is, depressed, beaten, and anything I say hurts or wounds her. Words are like drops of acid on a burn. I must be quiet. And go on waiting.

  Everything I’ve learned about men, ironically, is useless to me when it is a matter of the one I love the most. I must be calm, not panic. I admit, however, that I am tempted to call for help, that I need someone to reassure me, to take the situation in hand. Alas! There is no one and she no longer has confidence in doctors.

  Afternoon

  The obsession of ageing. I’ve known it for several years. It is a subject that has rarely been treated in depth, without romanticism, without sentimentality, even by doctors who have only just now managed to invent gerontology.

  Goethe’s Faust seems to me as false as the rest. The only sentence which struck me with its truth was Trotsky’s and I no longer know where to find it again. At present I think I’ve rounded the cape, at least if this isn’t only a remission.

  It’s even more pathetic when one suffers from this obsession falsely, in anticipation. That’s the case with D. at the moment, and with her, I believe, it is not so much herself that she is thinking of as of a certain part she plays that she wishes to go on playing for ever, and which indeed she plays admirably, lover, mother, wife, mistress of the house, businesswoman.

  She is afraid that some day she will become to her children, especially the youngest, only a kind of grandmother. She is afraid of not fully playing her triple part with me.

  Falsely, I repeat, because of I don’t know what, because of an as yet unknown organic or metabolic trouble, probably, which will have disappeared in a few weeks.

  In other words, in a few weeks she will be completely herself again, with all her activity – and her physical well-being restored.

  Meantime, she refuses to believe it. She is buried in her conviction of a definite decline which medical opinion contradicts.

  She no more believes what I say than she does the doctors. I’m sorry not to have recorded the telephone conversation she just had with one of our medical men, a professor of the Lausanne Faculty. I am sure that if we played back the tape in a few weeks we would both find it high comedy.

  It’s tragic not to be able to help, not to be able to transmit my trust, my certainty.

  How approximate all this is! Speaking of my novels, I have said that I would like to write with a burin on copper, like an engraver. In this case, it would take a scalpel to get to the truth.

  10 January 1961

  Day before yesterday, or yesterday, it doesn’t matter, I thought of alcohol. I wasn’t able to write what I had in mind at the time and I’m doing it today – exactly as I thought of it day before yesterday.

  There will be legends about this too. Certain people have seen me working on red wine, others on cider, or muscatel, on whisky, on grog, I don’t know what else, and for each it is an eternal verity. Those who have seen me drunk will always see me as drunk, and the contrary is also true.

  That, precisely, is a question that has preoccupied me because, of all the dangers I have run, some of which I have cited, this is undoubtedly the most serious. It preoccupied me so much that I have studied the question as only some specialists in Europe and in the United States have done, in medical works as well as in reviews, and in the domain of criminology too. I could fill a notebook with statistics.

  Why? Perhaps because I just missed becoming an alcoholic – and the worst kind, the worst for me, I mean.

  When I was a child there was neither wine nor liquor in the house, and when someone came to visit I had to run down to the corner store to buy a decilitre (retail) of Cusenier. (?) My father never drank, occasionally a bock, less than a pint of light beer, on Sunday mornings, when he went to play cards in the Café de la Renaissance. For a long time I went with him.

  The words ‘He drinks’ were uttered in our house with consternation. For the strongest of reasons, my mother had a horror of alcohol. Her father was ruined by drunkenness, her eldest brother, Léopold, became a sort of bum (an occasional house painter, after university studies) of whom the family was ashamed. One sister, an alcoholic, died very young in an insane asylum and another, my Aunt Maria, made such ‘Novenas’ that she had to be shut up in her room, from which she managed to escape sometimes.

  Nothing of this on my father’s side. But hadn’t he something to be afraid of ? Drink spoiled my father’s life too and one could say that indirectly he died of it, but that is another story.

  My first introduction to alcohol took place during the war. We were hungry. Food was very inadequate. All this I’ve already mentioned. In ‘the sideboard’ there was a small decanter containing eau-de-vie meant to impregnate the circles of waxed paper with which jars of jam were covered.

  One day, at about the age of fourteen, alone in the house, I drank a swallow, out of curiosity. Then, as it gave me a feeling of well-being, I tried it again the next week, being careful to replace what I had drunk with water, so that soon there was nothing but water in the decanter. For a long time it was believed in the house that the alcohol content had evaporated.

  I don’t think this incident has anything to do with drunkenness, with the taste for alcohol, but that it was both the attraction of forbidden fruit and the need for a certain comfort in my empty stomach.

  As a reporter, I eschewed drinking for a long time, until a friend who worked in the front office of the paper took me for a glass of ale to the Café de la Bourse at five o’clock. It was strong beer, pale ale, served, as is the custom in Belgium, in silver goblets, and I think that it was the goblet, with its rich metal and its reflections, along with the cosy atmosphere of the café, that seduced me more than the beer. In any case we got into the habit of going there at the end of each afternoon and having a glass or two of pale ale.

  Next, at seventeen, I met the little
group of painters and ‘poets’ of Liège and we formed a sort of club, ‘The Keg’, which I’ve had occasion to describe (particularly in Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien) and where, at least once a week, we got drunk deliberately.

  Nevertheless, I felt no need to drink, and never did I go into a café alone, preferring to spend my money on cherries, in season, or on pastry; preferring, when I had to go into a public establishment, a café-filtre dear to the people of Liège (with the filter in silver, again!).

  It was in Paris that I began to see on my table at the ‘Dîners de Paris’ (3.50 francs for the meal, including wine, Passage Jouffroy) a small bottle of red wine whose contents couldn’t have exceeded a quarter of a litre.

  For several years that was all I required except when, with friends, we decided to have an orgy.

  It was at Montparnasse that I began to drink more, because it was the fashion; all the painters of the period (except Vlaminck) were heavy drinkers, while the American novelists whom we were beginning to admire, Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc., were even more so.

  Actually at that time I drank mostly to do as the others did, and when in 1925 or 1926 I took the second-floor apartment on the Place des Vosges (up to then I only had lodgings on the ground floor) I installed a superb American bar there, very ‘modern art’, where I officiated almost daily as barkeeper. That was the period of complicated cocktails and I knew all the recipes. The biggest part of my income, obviously, went into liquor.

  An anecdote, in passing. One morning, at about eleven o’clock, a painter friend brought one of his clients to see me, a big wine merchant from Béziers. Of course I went behind the bar. I served. At the moment of leaving, I saw the merchant coughing, turning towards my friend, going through his pockets, murmuring in an aside to him. Scarcely out of the door, I found out afterwards, he said to my friend: