When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  Bad conscience? Maybe. Not I. I feel, perhaps wrongly, on an equal footing with youth.

  They talk about scientific progress, technological progress, of the conquest of space …

  The rhythm of these various progressions, like the growth of populations, inevitably takes on an ever greater acceleration. But the discovery of Asia, then of America, were just as overwhelming in their time as that of the planets – which has not yet taken place.

  Fire, then gunpowder, brought about as much change for young people as the atomic bomb.

  They also talk about the transformation of traditional morality, as if a traditional morality had ever existed – especially for the young!

  More words. What do they mean? That they no longer marry for a dowry, become civil servants, wear a certain kind of suit? Even that is false.

  They are trying to find their way as we have all tried to find ours, and, as the young have always done, they mistrust the solutions that their elders tell them are final.

  What change is there in the basic instincts, common to all men as to all animals: to bare one’s claws, to conquer one or more females, to reproduce, to raise offspring – and to eat, of course?

  Gide used to talk to me about how the novelist must remain unattached. Must not love (in depth), must not have children, so as to dedicate himself to his art alone. Must not worry about money, he would have added if he’d dared, he who never had to worry about it.

  Which is exactly the same as escaping (trying to) from the basic instincts. What is left? Some words, some sentences, some mental acrobatics, which to my mind is nothing.

  Was he aware of this in his last weeks when he was surrounded by his daughter, of whom he had seen so little, and his grandchildren? I received no letters during that period and I don’t know anything about it. A film shows him with children on his lap. But what was he thinking?

  Yesterday again they declared that youth no longer reads. Always the word ‘youth’. As if they were talking about a homogeneous group. As if anyone knows what youth reads! As if it were not as various as the rest of the population. What about old age? Why not assume that it thinks this or that, reacts in this or that way, reads this book and doesn’t like such films …

  Is Mauriac representative of old age, or is it the serene Rostand observing his frogs? Or, again, is it that still curious and lively André Siegfried, younger at eighty than so many others at fifty? Or my worthy grandfather, in the old days, sitting on the stoop of his hat shop on the Rue Puits-en-Sock?

  After dreaming, one often has the impression of having had that dream before, even several times. I have the same feeling about writing these words, and I wonder if, rereading, I wouldn’t find the same thoughts expressed two or three times in the same terms. It’s very possible, for my mind goes in circles and I suppose I’m no exception. How long it takes to encompass the most modest subject! And how it always seems we are rediscovering it!

  Wednesday, 22 February

  Re sex. Inexhaustible subject. I’ve already written about it here. I’d be curious to know what I would have written about it twenty years, thirty years, forty years ago, what I shall write (or would write) in ten, twenty, thirty years.

  Desire to explain this need for ‘light sex’, as one says ‘light conversation’.

  For me, physical love with a beloved person has always something serious, even dramatic about it. It is akin to religion, to worship. It is a thing complete in itself, total.

  I don’t dare say that it is like my ‘difficult’ books as compared to my Maigrets, but I’m tempted to make the comparison.

  Once, when I was young, these kinds of adventures, more or less without future, probably served some need to reassure myself. Such a woman, from such a background, apparently inaccessible, would allow herself to be had … The distance was bridged …

  It’s a long time since that has happened to me. Why do I go on? Why does it remain a near necessity for my stability? I’ve written elsewhere on the subject. I was asked to treat one of the seven deadly sins for the radio, and I chose lust.

  ‘A Panegyric to Lust’, which never went out over the air, needless to say. If I remember correctly, I said that lust, pure sexuality, was man’s means of restoring himself at the springs of vitality. Of finding the purity of childhood again.

  I am still of that opinion. In our complicated society, in which we are only pawns, the solace of being naked, of committing certain acts, without need of complication or explanation, without sentimentality.

  This relates to what I was writing about the boat trips, about the wolves, etc., in the context of the logic of my behaviour. In order not to feel a prisoner of society I need to pat a passing thigh, to make love without declaring it, without passion, to have sex on the spur of the moment, in my study or any place else, as it was once done, as it is still done, in the equatorial forest or in Tahiti. I know whereof I speak. I’ve been there.

  It puts all pretences in their place, all conventions. Five minutes between two doors is enough to turn values upside down.

  A great surprise to me when I first came to Paris and in the years after that: no woman, whether ‘good’ or worldly, no movie star, has as beautiful a body as certain professionals do. Not one of them could earn her living by making love.

  For me, it is a kind of righting of balance. False values go down, true ones go up.

  And above all, as with the Maigrets, it allows me to keep the same separate place for love that I give my real novels. No comparison.

  D. will understand. It doesn’t matter if others don’t. For a long time now she has understood, but I have the impression that for the first time I have discovered a really satisfying answer to a question many people have asked me – but that she and I have never needed to ask.

  Because, instinctively, we have understood.

  Friday, 24 February

  Hangover. Because I took a drink the other day when I came out of the dentist’s office. Again the next day. And yesterday, with my English Maigret, much too much. Today I’m licking my wounds like an animal. Always this feeling of shame. Feeling of melancholy. This is the only time when I’ve known what that word means. In spite of it, gave two radio interviews this morning.

  Also, as always, extreme sensuality. Once, in Paris, after a fairly wild night (in 1952) while D. was packing the trunks for our return to the United States, I called three or four women to our apartment, one after another. That was sexuality in its natural state.

  D. is in town. I know where. I know for how long. It’s barely twenty minutes since I woke up and already I feel quite lost. I find the paper that she was reading during my siesta in my study along with her cigarette butts. I look at the clock.

  Saturday, 25 February

  Yesterday morning, by accident, and without my expecting it in the least, I lived through ten minutes that I think will remain in my memory as do certain childhood scenes. I had a hangover. I was waiting for my two radio reporters at eleven o’clock. I went into the garden and the sun was as warm as in April or May. The blackbirds were hopping about. All the crocuses were in bloom, especially the yellow ones.

  Then, surprised, enchanted, I saw some tiny bees, so small in fact that at first I took them for some other insect (there are hives five hundred yards from our garden as the crow flies).

  They were awkward, hesitant. Some barely knew how to use their wings. All the same they penetrated the flowers, bumping against the petals, hardly able to get out again. I imagine they were the first bees of the year – on their first excursion, just as last year at the same time, also in the garden, Pierre took his first steps.

  I finally located several larger, more practised bees, and I wondered if they were not there to teach the others, to show them what had to be done.

  I stayed a long time watching them and I treasure my poignant memory of that clumsy ballet. Soon I shall go to see if they are back at work, if they have gained confidence and skill. But the same sun never shines twice.
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br />   D. not here. Gone to the hairdresser and I had to wake up, get up, alone.

  Is it possible that this can create such a void and make me so restless?

  Sunday, 26 February

  Another beautiful Sunday. Children in the garden. D. is dressing and we are going for the papers in Lausanne.

  Dinner yesterday (which I found fascinating) with a half-dozen psychiatrists, among whom were the head of one of the most famous clinics, another who is the director of a prison-asylum where four hundred criminals are held, and a third who is the author of authoritative works – two others more interested in psychotherapy.

  Almost all of them were trying to reassure themselves, to be sure they were on the right track, that they were doing a useful job. Same look as the professor I spoke of earlier.

  And for me too an occasion to reassure myself. More and more, even from the beginning, my characters, to my mind, go to a point where the psychiatrists can take them over. I mean that my patients, carried a few steps further, would become theirs. And there is an overlapping in our lives, a common zone, where those patients are both mine and theirs. I take so-called normal men and carry them as far as possible without reaching the pathological.

  In Case of Emergency was published when Jaccoud committed (?) his crime and I was struck by the similarity of that affair not only with that novel but with another one written earlier. I followed the trial. I studied his dossier in depth. Of course I was not doing this for literary or journalistic purposes.

  Later, when I felt I understood, I wrote L’Ours en Peluche, in which I tried to set down that part of the affair I felt no one had understood.

  That was an extreme case, and in my heart I was not sure of my interpretation. The discussion yesterday fully reassured me, and I was delighted, for, if I’m not mistaken about this one, there’s a chance that many other characters of mine are also true.

  Only one of the guests yesterday was making an effort to shine. All the others were trying … trying to what? Like me, to reassure themselves. Man needs the conviction that he is doing something ‘worthwhile’, something ‘useful’, something that couldn’t be done by somebody else.

  This explains many disappointed hopes, many lives dedicated to a very small segment of human activity – and many breakdowns when this conviction is suddenly shaken. Man needs faith, not in a god – unless to be told that he is right – but faith in himself.

  Many of these people envy me and often admit it: they imagine that a large audience is reassuring, whereas all they have is the respect of certain of their ‘peers’ all over the world.

  Or their titles and decorations, which, I think, have never reassured anyone.

  Monday, 27 February

  Yesterday (after so many others) read a work on criminology (American) tracing the definition of crime – and the criminal – through the ages.

  I wonder if the essential characteristic of crime isn’t its illogic, which would explain why in the Middle Ages it was attributed to demons taking possession of a human being, and why today the psychiatrist is more and more often called in. But doesn’t psychiatry, the kind which is less concerned with lesions and traumas than with behaviour, also go beyond logic?

  Following a recent aeroplane crash, specialists in charge of the investigation (which will take several months) have been stressing that an aeroplane is a man-made machine, that airlines are managed by men, pilots are human beings, etc., concluding that for this reason a certain percentage of errors and failures is inevitable.

  Doesn’t the same thing apply to crime? And isn’t a certain percentage of human beings almost inevitably destined to … etc.

  Lesson in humility for judges and moralists.

  Saturday, 4 March

  A notion that seems new to me but which seems more and more to have taken root in the minds of the masses: the right to health. Not just to medical care, which will soon be entirely free, to hospitalization, etc., but to being cured. For the doctor is expected to cure by hook or by crook and governments have a ministry of health, they recruit doctors, nurses, specialists of all kinds. It has become the most expensive piece of administrative machinery.

  I suppose that the sorcerer, precursor of the doctor, as still today in primitive tribes, was once a man who assumed power for his own ends, like chieftains, then kings, emperors, dictators. The idea came not from the community but from an individual.

  When was this process reversed? Today it is the community that demands doctors, teaches them, pays them.

  Curiously, the number of doctors per patient is nearly the same, it would appear, as that of sorcerers in the primitive forest.

  In the most highly developed countries, one doctor to eight hundred inhabitants. Wasn’t there one sorcerer to a tribe and weren’t those tribes made up of about that many individuals?

  I am writing at Johnny’s bedside. He’s had the flu since Monday with a pretty high fever, while my wife is in the clinic where I go to see her, shuttling back and forth.

  Human values change with circumstances. During the war of 1914, life, the survival of a unit, often depended on a jack-of-all-trades, a sort of tramp or ignorant woodsman who suddenly became more important than the officer or the specialized soldier to the comfort and morale of his comrades.

  Suddenly the nurse has the same importance to the individual. To the point where men of a certain age who are rich enough to afford anything choose to marry theirs to assure themselves care.

  I always hesitate to tell stories, above all about third parties. However, these two seem to me so significant that I shall try to tell them so that it won’t be possible to guess the identities. They came to me first-hand and I know that all the details are correct.

  More than twenty-five years ago, a gynaecologist then in fashion received a telephone call.

  ‘This is Mr So-and-So. I should like to have an appointment with the professor.’

  ‘The professor does not see men.’

  A quarter of an hour later, another telephone call.

  ‘This is His Highness, Prince …’

  An internationally known name. A colossal fortune. The professor received him. The prince, already an old man – dead today – explained that he had two children by former wives, that he had just met a beautiful lower class girl whom he would like to marry, but by whom he first wanted to have a child.

  He was not sure that one of his sons was his own (he was wrong about that, since the son resembles him unmistakably), and this time he wanted to take all precautions.

  What he wanted from the gynaecologist was this. The young woman was to enter the clinic during her fertile period. The prince would join her there and give semen for artificial insemination. The woman was to stay incommunicado for a month. No man was to go near her. So that …

  And without waiting for an answer, the prince went to get the young woman in question from the waiting room.

  ‘Examine her first, to make sure she can give me a child.’

  The doctor examined her from head to toe in an adjacent office and discovered she had an atrophied uterus which ruled out all hope of maternity. The young woman pleaded, wept. Her future was at stake …

  ‘Please don’t tell him, I beg you …’

  Why give this information to an old man who, anyway, already had two male heirs?

  The gynaecologist said nothing. The couple left, came back three weeks later, was shut into one of the rooms, the prince with a bottle which he was to fill.

  An hour passed. Suddenly the alarm bell rang through the clinic. Nurses rushed in, found the man naked on the bed, the room in disorder. The woman also naked, neither of them understanding what all the excitement was about. The prince had simply pushed the wrong button. He wanted to see the doctor. The latter came, saw that the bottle was still empty.

  ‘I wanted to ask you if it matters if the sperm is mixed with saliva.’

  The doctor shrugged. ‘Not at all.’

  And the procedure continued. The bottle
was returned. A little later, the insemination which could have no effect took place. Some time later, the prince telephoned from a foreign capital to complain of the lack of results.

  ‘Had you considered,’ the doctor asked, ‘that you might be the one who was deficient?’

  I forgot to say that in the course of the first conversation, the prince had suddenly lowered his trousers and showed his member to the doctor, who had said:

  ‘I examine women, not men.’

  So he complained on the telephone:

  ‘But I showed you …’

  ‘I can’t come to any conclusions by examining you. It will require an analysis …’

  This was done. The results were not promising.

  ‘Your spermatozoa are barely active. Many of them have no tails, etc.’

  All this is entirely authentic. The prince married the young woman, who is a princess today and received in every court that still exists. She did not have a child. She is one of the best-known women in the world and newspapers are continually publishing her picture.

  The other story is also connected with gynaecology. It happened in another clinic, several years later. A couple introduced themselves. Also princely, belonging to one of the reigning families of Europe. This time too it was a matter of artificial insemination. But the husband, who was impotent, could not be the donor. The couple asked if the procedure was possible, and spoke of going to Rome to ask for the Pope’s authorization.

  ‘You won’t get it.’

  ‘You don’t expect me to take a lover …’

  The couple insisted. The doctor, to get rid of them, got out of it with a vague promise. Some time later, telephone call from the wife: