When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  If one of them, at the end of his search, finally found one – even more if it were himself – I haven’t met him yet.

  That would change everything. On that, one could build … I don’t know … not a morality, which I don’t care for … build a world, perhaps, which would really be made to our measure?

  Short of that, they speak in brief sentences that are noncommittal, that are like bait on a line, they watch, they smile, they open or close their mouths, and from time to time one is tempted to wink at the other.

  Don’t primitive peoples express all these things – and much better! – in their sculptures and masks?

  Since last night a small machine weighing as little as a 4-CV (and which may make no more noise) has been on its way to Venus.

  14 February 1961

  (Children, I wouldn’t want you to imagine, because of yesterday’s notes, for instance, that one day in February 1961 your father thought of himself as an old man, or even felt old. He doesn’t at all, and I undoubtedly owe that to you, for by living with you I am plunged into youth once more. If I’m talking about old men, then, or middle-aged men, it’s because I am at least halfway between them and you – more than halfway, alas! – and I’m beginning to understand them while still able to look at them from the outside. Finally, I should say that I am surely at the ideal age to see both sides. How wonderful it would be to stop time!)

  Still on the subject of old men, there are some left – not for long, though – who in my eyes belong to a particular species which I always observe with curiosity mixed with some envy. They are country people from the little villages, whom one sees congregating at the fairs or in the inns.

  They are eighty or more. They all were babies at the same time, went to school, to all the burials, all the marriages, all the baptisms of the countryside together.

  They remember their games together, their fights of other days. Their life has passed in an enclosed world, which must have been reassuring. And yet, looking at them closely, in spite of their simplicity, their lack of philosophical curiosity, it seems to me that I’ve found that same question in their eyes that I was talking about yesterday.

  Also, I wrote a sentence that doesn’t really make sense and I want to correct it. But I can’t see how to do it. I spoke of building a world made to our own measure. This doesn’t stand close examination. Build a world? Who? Us? How? Why? And what is our measure? Whose measure? The measure of what? How did I fall into such bad writing? And yet, behind these clumsy words, I feel that there is something.

  Lumumba has been assassinated. I wonder if his death isn’t going to speed up the end of a certain society which I despise. Somewhere in this notebook I was wondering if cynical people really exist, people strong enough to be cynical. Is this one of the proofs?

  I’m not sure yet. Men are obliged to make themselves believe that they are right, and they manage to do so without much trouble. From that point on, everything becomes easy, including a certain Machiavellianism which is more apparent than real.

  The African business is no closer to me than other world affairs and still Lumumba’s death makes me as sad as if he were someone I knew well.

  Thursday, 16 February

  My son Pierre has got into the habit of dropping in on me in my study. Yesterday he devoted himself to the inspection of my drawers, respectfully, without touching anything. At a certain point, when I was busy writing, he came to take my hand, led me to a piece of furniture, and showed me a key that he could not turn in the lock.

  I discussed with D. the changes necessitated by the ages of the children. Johnny is inheriting Pierre’s room in the spring, and vice versa. We’re putting in a bathroom for Johnny, who then won’t have to share his brother’s and sister’s, etc.

  It’s like a wave, advancing slowly, imperceptibly. All of a sudden you see the landscape has changed. Difficulty of organizing vacations that three children of different ages can enjoy equally. And all these little problems change from year to year.

  Delicious, almost complete relaxation. Last night D. and I worked together on the translation of an article by Miller about me. More precisely, D. made a first draft and together we then tried to reproduce the spirit of the original. No arguments. Everything very smooth.

  I believe this is our first collaboration of this kind, since as a rule each of us does his own clearly separate work. I was delighted by it. The crocuses are in flower. Soon the tulips will be. And I’m forgetting to think about my next book. Next Tuesday I’m going to have a wisdom tooth pulled, because my cheeks are too thick for the dentist to work on it.

  Lessons with my daughter now, then to town with D. Life is beautiful.

  Friday, 17 February

  Full of gentle euphoria. Then a letter from Marc, and here I am, suddenly anxious, upset. Why are we so apprehensive for our children when they are becoming men while we had no fear for ourselves as we rounded the same cape?

  Isn’t it because of a retrospective fear which overcomes us at the thought of all we risked without realizing it? I was a hundred times more foolhardy than he at his age, and I’m no less frightened by the least of his follies.

  I’ve seen young people become men in spite of and against all odds, some of them, often, the very ones a psychological observer would have classified as almost hopeless cases. It is also true that I’ve seen others who failed, and for almost as long as I can remember, I have felt an anguish over spoiled lives, which made me invent and describe, when I was fourteen, maybe in 1917, the profession of ‘restorer of destinies’, a sort of Maigret as doctor, psychiatrist, etc., a kind of consulting God-the-Father, in fact, and I had no idea that this profession was actually in the offing, replaced that of confessor: the psychoanalyst.

  I just made a mistake. The expression in my childish mind was not restorer but mender. ‘Mender of destinies!’ If only there were such a thing!

  And my good friend Miller, who believes me strong, invulnerable, and who, in his article, attributes to me serenity in the face of every test! In what concerns myself, perhaps. And yet! When it is a matter of my wife, my children …

  Wasn’t I unconsciously thinking of that impossibly serene man, of that God-the-Father of my old dreams, when I spoke the other day of the man without flaw?

  End of my serenity for a few days. Went out with Marie-Joe and we got ready for her eighth birthday. Just now we were walking along gaily with our arms around each other’s waists like lovers, on the Rue de Bourg, and I think she was happy to see people turning to look.

  Three times since lunch have gone up to Johnny’s room, where he had taken refuge to read, to tell him funny stories I found for him in papers and magazines. This morning I went to meet Pierre in the village, but because of the fog didn’t find him.

  Later on, how will those two find their way to be men? I hope to be still around, although I know now that a moment comes when we are no help to our children – except to rescue them when they’ve got themselves into trouble.

  In an article on Gide I read that he always seemed a bit strained, tentative, that people who spoke forcefully like Malraux or Saint-Exupéry, etc., impressed him, and he seemed to envy them. I knew him enough to know it’s true. But I also believe that I know the reason for this reaction. He did not affirm. He doubted everything. He hesitated to offer an opinion.

  And he regarded as wonders those men who knew everything, decided everything without hesitation, as if they were in possession of the truth.

  I suddenly have the impression of knowing him better, of appreciating him more than when we saw each other and wrote to each other.

  Monday, 20 February 1961

  I may have found a subject for a novel, which is none other than the one I failed at last year (before the Maigret), The Train, but written in the first person, which would change the lighting, the rhythm, and, except for the opening, the story. I must grope about for a few days to know if I’m getting into it or not.

  Last evening, after a peaceful fa
mily Sunday, during which only D. worked straight through, a passing remark of hers amused me. She had gone on dictating after dinner. Towards ten thirty she came upstairs and joined me in the drawing room, exhausted. As usual, she read the papers for a quarter of an hour for a change of pace. But when she finished reading them, she asked me quite naturally:

  ‘Can’t I read your notebook?’

  ‘But you read it three days ago.’

  ‘I thought you’d written in it since then …’

  It’s becoming a habit, then. And the fact is that I sometimes want to write for the sake of writing, or rather of relating, going over the small events of the past.

  These have been so distorted in the press, or by my friends in the telling, that they don’t correspond to any reality.

  But last night I realized that the things I’ve done that have taken on a quasi-legendary quality were done quite naturally, quite logically. The very fact that they are too natural and too logical makes them extraordinary. To relate them in detail seems to me long and tedious, yet if I abridge and simplify, I’ll fall into another sort of artifice.

  The business of the canals, for example (and perhaps someday the one about the wolves), takes on an exaggerated importance under a journalist’s pen, and also a meaning I don’t recognize. They talk about canal boats. I have never had a canal boat. Before the Ostrogoth – a fishing cutter ten metres long that I had built at Fécamp, and on board which I lived all the time I was in Holland and in Germany – I did indeed travel through the rivers and canals of France, but not in a canal boat: on board a five-metre mahogany craft that must have been the lifeboat of a big yacht.

  Why the rivers and canals? I had been living in France for three years. Outside Paris, I had made only a few trips to the provinces. I had observed that most of the cities and towns faced not towards the road or railway, but towards the river, the stream, or the canal, which is natural.

  The memory of the canal from Liège to Maestricht, opposite my Aunt Maria’s house at Coronmeuse, must have had some influence too. I always had wanted to travel around France by navigable waterways.

  I wasn’t rich. I must have been writing from forty to eighty pages of a popular novel each day. No question of buying a yacht. No question, either, of sleeping in inns or hotels.

  It was almost a problem in arithmetic. I looked for a good fishing boat, which I found on sale at Sartrouville. In order to be able to sleep on it, I had the centre thwart removed, which left a place to put two kapok mattresses at night. I had uprights installed, and removable supports for a solid waterproof awning with canvas curtains on the sides, forming a regular cabin.

  The boat was called the Ginette and I didn’t unchristen it. But it was necessary to take the maid, Boule, who was then twenty years old and is with me today, and my dog Olaf, a slate-coloured Great Dane who measured seventy-five centimetres at the withers.

  I also had to take along my typewriter, supplies of paper, a tent (for Boule, and for me to work in the mornings), a folding table, also folding chairs, pots, dishes. All this wouldn’t fit on board, so I bought a light flat-bottomed barge three metres fifty long, for which I got an awning made. So during the trip the supplies followed in our wake.

  That was in 1925. Camping wasn’t yet fashionable, still less this style of navigation. Aluminium motors didn’t exist in Europe so I bought an outboard Archimède, bronze and cast iron, that weighed more than forty kilos and could work up a speed of about ten kilometres an hour.

  We left, my first wife, Boule, the dog, the typewriter and I, in March, by the Marne, then the canal from the Marne to the Saône, before sailing down the latter, the Rhône to Avignon, and from there to Grau-du-Roi.

  As a rule we would stop in the country in order to pitch the tent in a meadow, near a wood if possible. In the morning I would work there. Sometimes we would stay two or three days in the same place.

  Sometimes we had to stop in a town, as for instance at Châlons and at Lyons. To supply our needs my typewriter had to turn out its daily pages. So at five o’clock in the morning, I had to put up my folding table on the dock and type there until eleven in the morning.

  As I tell it, this sounds like forced eccentricity when it was only the logical outcome of a decision I had made … Same at Grau-du-Roi. Impossible to stay in port because of the mosquitoes and noise.

  It was in June, out of season (at that time!). I took the Ginette out to sea, opposite the beach, and I anchored securely. I continued to sleep aboard. The tent, pitched on the beach, served as a dining room, workroom (very early in the morning, because of the heat), and as a bedroom for Boule.

  I like to have my coffee as soon as I get up. Result: I would blow a horn to signal Boule. She, tray in hand, would go into the water and wade out to the Ginette, where the waves would be up to her breasts.

  If we went to the Casino at night, how to get back on board? By stripping naked and swimming.

  There are a thousand details of this kind, improbable or comical but, again, not forced.

  This lasted six or seven months. Sometimes editors’ money orders didn’t reach our next stop and we would have to wait, living on our supplies.

  Along the Canal du Midi, I would occasionally arrive, at nine at night, at a village several kilometres inland, wearing a bathing suit, because it was midsummer. I had come to buy bread, canned goods, and the villagers wondered where on earth I came from.

  Again, this was in 1925.

  So no canal boat, no barge, nothing out of the ordinary except the desire to see France in a certain way. I was not disappointed.

  Later people talked about my wolves as if I had a passion for wild animals. It’s a great deal simpler than that. We were in the garden of the French Embassy in Ankara when a sort of tramp stuck his head over the wall, showed us a sack, and said something in his own language. Chambrun, the ambassador, translated for me:

  ‘He’s just captured three young wolves.’

  ‘And he wants to sell them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I was very fond of dogs. I immediately thought of crossing German sheepdogs with wolves. I bought the three little beasts, which went to Istanbul in our sleeping car. At La Richardière, where I was then living, cages had to be built where the wolves could live once they were grown. In the same way I had also bought a Karabakh bitch there (I was told the word means black head) – a very savage breed that herded huge flocks of sheep in that part of the country.

  The wolves grew. The female had to be put to sleep when she got a skin ailment that made her vicious. One of the males was hurt and also had to be killed.

  The last of them lived for several years at La Richardière and used to follow me on a leash on my country walks – in the evening he played in my study. There never was any cross-breeding. When I left for my trip around the world, the servants refused to take care of him in our absence and I sent him to the Vincennes Zoo. I went to see him a few times there and we recognized each other.

  Nothing eccentric here, either. We were having coffee in a garden … a tramp passed carrying a bag … Wolves … Why not? And out of that it all grew.

  Today I have something better than a boat or wolves. I have children. Quite naturally, logically too, my life revolves around them and my wife.

  But on the day when I suddenly asked myself what I was doing in America, this did not prevent me from deciding to move my whole little world.

  And here we are. In Switzerland! Why am I, a Belgian, a French writer, with my Canadian wife, and my children who were born in the United States, why are we in the Canton of Vaud?

  It is just as simple, just as logical, provided you don’t form it into something fanciful, aren’t looking for something picturesque, for a good story, or, in other words, as long as journalists and biographers leave it alone.

  Unfortunately, they don’t leave it alone, and the simplest things become so false you could scream.

  Tomorrow I’m having a wisdom tooth pulled and I’m nervous about it
because up to now I haven’t had a single tooth pulled in at least twenty-five years. I’ll take D. with me to the dentist.

  Tuesday, 21 February 1961

  Wisdom tooth pulled this morning, no pain, which proves once more that … etc., etc. Friday he’s taking out the one above it. Delicious harmony between D. and me. We always live in harmony, to be sure, and even intensely so, but this time there is the kind of agreement between us that couples have who walk thigh to thigh as if with a single movement. It’s very pleasant.

  A while ago I was setting down my schedule. Here’s another example for this week. Yesterday went with Johnny to buy paper hats, harmonicas, etc., for Marie-Jo’s friends.

  Tomorrow, Marie-Jo’s birthday. There will be some people here whom D. and I will have to take care of, and I will have to take a run into town to sign a paper at the notary’s.

  Friday, taped interview for the Swiss radio in the morning and second wisdom tooth in the afternoon.

  Saturday, dinner at Dr D.’s, the psychiatrist who heads Rives des Prangins, with another French psychiatrist.

  And Monday I go with D. to the clinic, where she is having a minor operation. I’ll stay with her for the three or four days she needs to be there. Tuesday, dentist. Friday too. And, if everything is all right, the following Monday, novel. Of which, during all this time, I will think without thinking, trying to put myself into a state of grace.

  We’ve become so contented at home, so absorbed in our routine, that a dinner like Saturday’s takes on the proportions of an event.

  There are people, especially in my field, who have dinner in town every evening. I did once. It now seems horrifying to me.

  Yesterday, on television, once again they were discussing today’s youth, who are represented to us as being different from the youth of any other time. I don’t understand. It is the leitmotiv of the newspapers, the radio … One would think that my whole generation, and even those who are in their forties, were afraid of these emerging young as if they were afraid of being brought to trial.