When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  We go on talking about money out of habit, tradition, when money no longer represents anything real, much less anything stable. We might as well count in cowries or in beans. Yet it’s in the name of these cowries that people uphold this policy or that, and incite if not massacres – for the present – at least good-sized killings.

  Besides that, reading the classified advertisements in the French, American, Swiss, English, no matter what papers, is depressing:

  ‘Discreet loans to civil servants, no formalities …’

  ‘Two rooms with kitchen in a pleasant suburb …’

  ‘Credit facilities …’

  ‘Twenty per cent discount on all merchandise …’

  Millions and hundreds of millions of people for whom ‘every penny counts’, each franc or each cent, are looking for lodgings, food, clothing, with incomes that won’t cover all these needs at once …

  ‘Mamma, my shoes leak …’

  I knew how that was in my childhood.

  ‘I’ll buy you new ones next month. This month your father needs trousers …’

  There aren’t enough cowries.

  Today, civil servants are protest-marching in the streets of Paris. For two weeks the teachers were on strike. They threaten to go out again.

  There aren’t enough cowries for everybody.

  Besides, when people have them they buy what they need. When they buy, prices go up. When prices go up …

  And then, who would be rich if there were no poor people?

  24 April

  Since Friday, more ‘historic’ days and nights, not only in Cuba, Laos, the Congo, or Angola, but in France and Algeria. Uprisings. Even the word ‘revolution’ is spoken. And last night, while tanks patrolled Paris, arms were distributed to the populace.

  I listen to the radio hourly, as everybody does. My reaction? I admit to a certain satisfaction because events prove I wasn’t mistaken in what I foresaw, so my judgement isn’t so far wrong.

  We were going to spend ten days in Paris after the revision of my last novel. Our suite was reserved at the Georges V and engagements were made with friends. We hesitated, gave up the trip at the last minute, and are glad of it. Not because of personal danger, but rather for fear of being separated from our children, knowing they would be worried here with us there.

  One sometimes wonders what So-and-So was doing during the Three Glorious Days or the Commune …

  As for us, Friday evening we had some friends in, people who on the face of it shouldn’t have been very entertaining, two professors from the Faculty of Medicine and two psychiatrists. We spent one of the pleasantest evenings we’ve had at Echandens.

  We are often bored by people who are supposed to be bright or witty. At our house they can turn into dead weights, and we’ve passed tedious hours with them.

  On Saturday, from seven thirty to four in the morning we had a bit of everything. Some serious discussions which I’ll remember. And also, some almost childlike gaiety: one of the psychiatrists (whose life has not been an easy one) at the piano, a professor at the drums, delighted to take our Johnny’s place, another, his shirt pulled out of his pants and his socks pulled up over them, did Russian dances with me, while the head of the sanatorium played the triangle … A sort of gaiety that I haven’t experienced in a long time. I went so far as to give a mock striptease …

  Then stories, not just funny ones, but all true, throwing unexpected lights on human nature.

  If students had appeared that night at our house, they would have been dumbstruck, probably, because the minimum age of the men was fifty. As it happened, each of the women, whether pretty or interesting, was a true wife and lover, in love with her husband.

  Generals were invading Algeria. Another general, raised to power by them, accused them of treason …

  We were having a jolly time putting everything in perspective, which is not necessarily the one History will choose for it.

  We found this morning that for the first time, yesterday, French television broadcast all night appeals from de Gaulle, Debré, Malraux, etc., who all look like very small men to me.

  Will History think otherwise? Will they be turned into heroes? It’s possible. In that case, all of History will have to be revised.

  As for us, we went to bed early, D. and I, stiff and exhausted by our unaccustomed frolics.

  And this evening we’re going to play bridge at another medic’s house.

  Unawareness? Lack of sense of proportion?

  In my opinion, it’s the opposite.

  Generals explain themselves, posing as heroes. One and all, one against all, they try to rouse the rabble. Suddenly they appeal to the very people they usually despise and consider inconsequential.

  My impression as a distant but contemporary witness? Of being present not at a tragedy, nor even at a comedy of character, but at a vaudeville skit.

  Too bad men have to die, for whom these gentlemen don’t care a shit.

  I’m going to try to telephone Marc, who is there. That’s my only worry. Let’s hope he isn’t ‘dope’ enough, as D. says, to get involved.

  I’d rather know that, like us, he did a striptease and danced Cossack dances between two discussions of biology.

  Wednesday, 26 April 1961

  Last night, in the course of two or three hours – in one hour, in fact – the famous revolt of the generals, which we have been told of in dramatic tones for the past four days, collapsed with only a few shots fired: three policemen wounded, we’re told. But, we had been told previously, the ‘criminal’ generals were the leading lights of the army, specialists in psychological warfare, whom de Gaulle, at one time, chose for his most delicate missions.

  So for three or four days airfields were closed, the people were told to be ready to intervene. Volunteers were given uniforms and arms, specialists called up. Paris was overrun by armoured units recalled from Germany. Last night I heard from Paris that a pass was required for travelling the roads of France.

  Finally de Gaulle assumed complete control.

  In an hour … With no real fighting!

  I would do better to write nothing about it, not to be like the armchair strategists or prophets of the Café du Commerce, when actually I know nothing. Do contemporaries ever know the truth about what is happening? No more than judges or the public know of a court trial. Each has his small piece of the truth.

  Later, memoirs will be published, white papers. Even in these there is only fragmentary or distorted truth, so that History is scarcely better served.

  But quite possibly I’m wrong. This morning my feeling is still that of great fraud. I know some of the protagonists. Was it a matter of inflating a harmless uprising so as to seize the powers de Gaulle has always dreamed of ? Of putting an end to the protests of government employees and workers who were marching in the streets and threatening the government last week?

  When the danger is past, will de Gaulle keep these emergency powers and use them against non-rebels?

  This morning we are told it is all over. I wonder if it isn’t just beginning. And if the people aren’t going to question many things, if they won’t suspect many mysteries in this event, as I do.

  The reaction may be long-lasting. The cry ‘Down with Fascism!’ has been heard.

  Do people realize that it is the Debrés, the Freys, etc., with their idea of a ‘single’ party, of a ‘great traditional party’, who are the Fascists in this affair?

  Up to a certain point the deception is a common one in times like these, and that’s why I do not hope for a return to normal in the near future. Nevertheless it seems to me that all this false glory, all this strictly verbal grandeur is doomed and will be swept away.

  I even wonder if there isn’t real revolution in the air, just the thing they wanted to suppress or avoid.

  Tomorrow there will be an appeal for calm in the name of the negotiations at Evian or elsewhere. Then it will be another pretext, the prestige of France, the arrival of the Kennedys, the di
fficulties in Otan, what have you.

  In the meantime, I am returning to my revision of Je me souviens, which I hope to finish today; regret time spent listening to this rather distorted news, trying to understand, to come to a conclusion.

  Once more, it’s not my department. I hate politics, but, like Romain Rolland’s Clérambault, an antimilitarist who surprised himself by falling into step with a military band in August 1914, I respond in spite of myself because I always have a confused hope that the politicians are going to bite the dust, that the people will finally see the light and sweep them out.

  To be replaced by what? By others, to be sure. History shows us that. So? What good is it to rejoice or mope?

  Be satisfied with plying your trade and telling stories, with busying yourself with man, not men.

  27 April 1961

  I know I’m wrong, my children, that later, when you come across the words ‘politics’ on these pages, you’ll smile indulgently:

  ‘There goes Daddy, off the track again.’

  But now Johnny, at least, who follows the news on television with me, has the same reactions. On certain evenings I can feel him boiling with rage, and on certain others, like yesterday and the day before, the enormity of what he hears plunges him into a sort of discouraged dejection.

  Isn’t there anyone in France to write a new J’accuse? I admit I’ve wondered if I could resist the temptation, if I were French.

  All politics irritate me, certainly, since a just and satisfying system has yet to be found.

  But in the circumstances, it is no longer simply a matter of politics. It is a matter of a man who sets himself up, and whom others set up as an example and who strikes me as a real Tartuffe. I would like to have the time, the patience, the inclination to compare his contradictions listed in facing columns.

  He was the one who once upon a time proclaimed the right to rebellion, the right to individual action, to the use of plastic bombs, to gunfire or knife fighting in the Métro, and it was he again who spoke of the Algerian rebellion with complete scorn for three years.

  And when I say complete … He has just faced a coup d’état himself – a rather modest, desperate one – and already he is announcing a merciless purge, recalling another purge to us, over which he presided and which must have caused nearly as many deaths in France as the German repression during the war if not more.

  Now, on the pretext of these days in Algiers (the third or fourth time, if you count the one that put him in power, with the same men acting for him this time), now, I repeat, that he has complete authority, he has no intention of giving it up and announces that freedom cannot be defended in a modern country … except by the restriction of freedom.

  This is not what horrifies me most. It is the man himself, his attitude, his insolent pride, his contempt for man and man’s efforts, for everything that man has done over the centuries that he isn’t ashamed of or that makes him think there may be some hope for the future of the species.

  The Grandeur which he talks about so much is the narrowest nationalism, the most inflated and the most aggressive, it is the pomp, the costumes, the uniforms, the parades, the stage sets, and a protocol that totally amazes me: unknown in the most royalist countries, it should make the world laugh.

  He backs and fills. He makes the country wait until the day when he solemnly decides to pronounce an oracle. And the words change meaning each time.

  Deep contempt for all men, including those who surround him. It is true that he chooses these from among the least interesting.

  Yet he is held up as an example. A whole generation hears of his glory, his intelligence, his force of character, his historic consciousness.

  He has done none of what he said he would. He has disappointed all expectations and no one calls him to account for it.

  There he is, a living anachronism, pretending to know everything and manage everything himself, according to his own lights.

  He refuses to receive professors, unions, but he surrounds himself with bank presidents and presidents of big companies, who have never had it so good.

  He speaks ‘to the French’ but the French he speaks to are not the people, whom he looks down on from a great height: they are the representatives of great private interests, the religious orders, the young people who have been behind every thrust of extreme nationalism from the days of Balzac and ever since … why not say for ever?

  La Frrrance … which the world needs, which, with its forty million inhabitants, is once more going to restore order to a mad world …

  La Frrrance … which is to say de Gaulle, who tosses off advice to other nations, and sometimes deigns to receive heads of states with two or three hundred million souls from the top of the staircase of the Elysée Palace.

  He lies, he contradicts himself, he beats about the bush, he glowers or blesses with the face of a sad clown, and there is no one who dares burst out laughing or write a J’accuse.

  How long will this go on? I don’t know. I think of the real men, the ones who work in silence and who do not believe themselves infallible, who doubt, who go forward one step at a time and help mankind advance in every area of knowledge.

  His presence is an insult to them.

  Surely I am not the only one who thinks so. I wonder if, in the light of recent events, of which we are given only a distorted and rather mysterious version, we shall not see popular uprisings as they have happened time and again in the course of History.

  I am not hoping for trouble. I am a man of peace. For the sake of man’s dignity, however, I would welcome a popular movement that would put both this madman with his arms raised in a V and the little band of ambitious idiots who surround him and are trying to drag us back a century, back in their proper places.

  Smile if you like, children. You will see that in every man there is an ancient spring of idealism – even political idealism – which sometimes breaks through his calm.

  But I am a man of serenity. And I have rarely felt so much a man of the people as I do today.

  5 o’clock in the afternoon

  Henry Miller spent the day at my house. He’s in Lausanne looking for a home, a ‘place to live’. He vacillated between Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, the Bahamas, etc. He had to take into account, as I do, schools for his children and those of his companion. That reminds me of when D. and I were undecided in the same way.

  Miller is seventy years old. I hope that when I’m his age I’ll still want to move, with the same problems and the same pleasure as ever.

  Sent Je me souviens off to the publisher. Tomorrow, photographer. Some other obligations in the next few days, then go somewhere, doesn’t matter where, with D. Maybe to Berne?

  We needn’t go far. On occasion we’ve quite happily gone to spend no more than forty-eight hours alone together … in Lausanne.

  The sun is shining. The grass in the garden is being cut; the last rains have made it as tufted as Johnny’s mop, which I love to tousle. Pierre is learning new words every day. He juggles with life. He tries everything. Why do we lose this faculty? When there is always something new to learn, to feel? There must be a reason, which isn’t ageing, and which we haven’t yet found.

  28 April 1961

  A rather intriguing idea of Teilhard de Chardin’s, which I condense and simplify: humanity is only just beginning its youth.

  Ageing is slowing of the rhythm of life, of activity, shrinking …

  But humanity is multiplying at an accelerated rhythm, same for discoveries. So humanity is still emerging from childhood.

  Even stranger that, though man grows old and dies, humanity should follow the opposite course.

  I think I understand, however, another idea of Teilhard de Chardin’s which attracts me less: the real function of man is not to be an individual, but little by little to become integrated into a new field of action, a great body into which each would melt and which would itself have its own personality.

  What astonishes me is that today one r
eads discussions of this kind not just in specialized reviews, but in the big-circulation weeklies, the same ones that now deal mainly with literature, painting, music, or avant-garde cinema, as if there were no general public any more, only intellectuals.

  In my youth I had a certain number of friends who became ‘intellectualized’ this way. Without exception, all of them were failures later. As if this ‘intellectualization’ were an incapacity to adapt to life.

  They thought about life instead of living it.

  Among stripteasers there are a fair number, not only of women with bachelor’s degrees, but of women who have gone on to postgraduate study. Are they most themselves at their studies (for their pleasure, so called) or when they undress in public?

  Many books are published currently, especially in Italy, which consist largely of photographs. The Bible in particular. The fashion began in France. But it was one of my books, published about 1931, that was used for the first experiment. The idea wasn’t mine but that of a young man named Jacques Haumont who, I think, invested his inheritance in the venture.

  The series was called Phototext. The first and only volume was a long novella of mine, La Folle d’Itteville, and the photographs by Germaine Krull were as important as my words.

  I wrote four or five others at Morsang on board the Ostrogoth after I came back from Holland, while waiting for the publication of the first Maigrets. In one morning, I wrote the forty-five typed pages. Haumont came to lunch at noon. I read him the novella as I corrected it. No other revision.

  Haumont went into bankruptcy and, with my consent, gave the unpublished novellas to Gallimard, who published them in a collection edited by Paul Morand, Les Chefs-d’Oeuvre de la Nouvelle.

  No one gives credit to Haumont, who invented too soon a form that is flourishing today. As Balzac initiated the formula of La Pléiade and broke his back doing it.