Act of Passion Read online

  GEORGES SIMENON (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. He went to work as a reporter at the age of fifteen and in 1923 moved to Paris, where under various pseudonyms he became a highly successful and prolific author of pulp fiction while leading a dazzling social life. In the early 1930s, Simenon emerged as a writer under his own name, gaining renown for his detective stories featuring Inspector Maigret. He also began to write his psychological novels, or romans durs—books in which he displays a sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life. Having written nearly two hundred books under his own name and become the best-selling author in the world, Simenon retired as a novelist in 1973, devoting himself instead to dictating several volumes of memoirs.

  LOUISE VARÈSE (1891–1989) was an American writer and translator. In 1969 she was designated a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France in recognition of her translations of Baudelaire, Sartre, Proust, Michaux, and Bernanos, among other writers. She and her husband, the composer Edgard Varèse, were close friends of Georges Simenon during his years in the United States, and she translated some fifteen of his novels.

  ROGER EBERT has been the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. From 1976 through 2006 he co-hosted a weekly film-review program on American television. He is the author of many books, including the 2011 memoir, Life Itself.

  OTHER BOOKS BY GEORGES SIMENON

  PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  Dirty Snow

  Introduction by William T. Vollmann

  The Engagement

  Introduction by John Gray

  The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

  Introduction by Luc Sante

  Monsieur Monde Vanishes

  Introduction by Larry McMurtry

  Pedigree

  Introduction by Luc Sante

  Red Lights

  Introduction by Anita Brookner

  The Strangers in the House

  Introduction by P.D. James

  Three Bedrooms in Manhattan

  Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tropic Moon

  Introduction by Norman Rush

  The Widow

  Introduction by Paul Theroux

  ACT OF PASSION

  GEORGES SIMENON

  Translated from the French by

  LOUISE VARÈSE

  Introduction by

  ROGER EBERT

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Other Books by Georges Simenon Published by NYRB Classics

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Act of Passion

  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  I’VE READ more words by Georges Simenon than by any other novelist of the past century. I didn’t set out to do that. It wasn’t like reading through most of Dickens or Henry James. The books simply accumulated over the decades, and now I have fifty or sixty on my shelf, including all the old Penguin omnibuses. That doesn’t include the ones I gave away, lost in hotel rooms, or left behind on airplanes. Before setting out on any significant journey, I always include one Simenon in addition to whatever I am “really reading.” I’ve never started one of his books I didn’t finish. I’ve never been disappointed in one. Some of them (The Cat, Sunday, Dirty Snow, Tropic Moon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By) are among my favorite novels, and in them I can see why Paul Theroux has compared Simenon favorably with Camus.

  Even the lesser Simenon of the Maigret novels is impressive. Those books are based on a formula—Maigret is confronted by a crime and along with it the particular social milieu in which it has taken place—and essentially they tell the same story over and over again, leading to a sad discovery about some hidden side of human nature. But the sameness of the Maigret stories is nothing like the sameness of the Sherlock Holmes or Travis McGee stories. Simenon isn’t concerned with telling stories of those sorts, and his hardly even have plots in the traditional detective-story sense. The conclusion of a Maigret case is more often than not perfunctory, and Maigret mostly resolves his investigations through instinct and intuition, not the police work of his tireless subordinates. He is less like a detective than one of the sad angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, who observe what humans do from a curious and baffled distance of their own.

  Simenon’s prose style is as pure as running water. I read him in translation, but every translator is clearly responding to the same writer, a writer who seems wary of appearing to write at all. When he found he had written a sentence that called attention to itself, Simenon said, he cut it. The effect is far from artless; the words proceed so calmly and implacably that they seem inevitable, as if they were the fewest needed to make things clear. Simenon’s characters speak plainly and directly instead of distinctively. They don’t advertise their personalities, and yet the directness gives voice to the complexities that their words seek to suppress and control. A Simenon novel may appear to be all surface, but the depths are always there.

  Why is the result so often so moving? Why is there a melan-cholia in all the books, leavened to a small degree in the Maigret stories by comforting domesticity? Why are there no comedies? No “thrillers”? The same motives over and again: greed, lust, pride, shame? Why is there no sense at the end that justice has been done, or any faith that it can be done? And why, for that matter, are there so many questions, driving the story along? Simenon’s questions reflect his own writing process, I believe, as he examines the behavior of the characters under his command. They are questions for which there are no answers. Act of Passion is essentially a question posing as an answer. As Charles Alavoine writes his long letter to an examining magistrate, he implies that if the judge could understand him and knew the conditions of his life, it would become clear why he committed murder—why anyone would have. The novel expresses the faith of the narrator that to understand him would be to forgive him. Not to exonerate him—he accepts his guilt—but to understand why he did what he did, and to accept that we might have done the same thing. “You are afraid, to be precise, of what has happened to me,” he writes to the magistrate.

  You are afraid of yourself, of a certain frenzy which might take possession of you, afraid of the disgust that you feel growing in you with the slow and inexorable growth of a disease.

  We are almost identical men, your Honour.

  This is not true. Few people are capable of the crimes committed in any Simenon novel, nor does Simenon believe they are. He may have believed he was. He was a man who permitted himself a sexual freedom which would go so far as to what would today be considered rape. If Simenon’s characters are capable of theft, adultery, perjury, or murder, did Simenon see himself doing the same kind of thing under similar circumstances? Isn’t that question implicit in the work of a man who wrote more than two hundred novels all centered upon transgression?

  When Alavoine tells the examining magistrate they are the same man, it raises the question of who the magistrate is. We have only one witness, Alavoine. He portrays the magistrate as a bourgeois professional, like the friends Alavoine used to invite home for an evening of cards. Alavoine in turn depicts himself as an ordinary doctor, a man of fixed routines, a man who submits to the supervision and scrutiny of a mother and a second wife who is like a mother, a man to whom no one could object, and in whom few could take an interest. Alavoine tells us that he is someone “who, for so long, had been only a man without a shadow.”

  He is a man who has reached middle age having only once done anything which gave him a sh
arp sense of self. That was the night he spent with a young woman, never named, in Caen: “For the first time I was hungry for a life other than my own.” Later he writes: “She was perhaps the first woman I ever loved. For a few hours she gave me the sensation of infinity.” Is it possible to love a woman with whom you spend a single night, apparently without learning her name? Alavoine reveals himself as a man who is completely encased within himself, incapable of empathy. If he feels “love” for the girl in Caen, and, as the story develops, for Martine, notice the details he fixes on: the women’s shabby cheap possessions, their shared demeanor, their lack of demands, their embodiment of the ordinary. Perhaps what they make him feel most of all is pity for himself: by despising Martine’s undemanding capitulation to his desires he is also despising his own docile timidity in his house. What accounts for his insane jealousy of all her lovers past or future? Isn’t it rage at their ruling her as easily as he himself has been ruled?

  To Alavoine the murder he has committed was inevitable. (It is left to us to wonder if it was, in a sense, suicide.) He expects the judge to find it inevitable too, and perhaps even reasonable. The criminals in Simenon’s novels frequently look at their crimes that way. That’s what puzzles Maigret in all of his cases, just as it does Simenon. Why are people like that? What shapes them and drives them? How do they lose their moral bearings? In many cases, they are acting because of old wounds and deep hurts. In some, they are helpless in the face of their compulsions. Alavoine, for example, is a fetishist, and like all fetishists he forgives himself his fetish because it seems inescapable. I believe sexual fetishes are formed before the age of conscious choice. I suspect Simenon might agree. The compulsions have been hardwired in early childhood. Most people are lucky to lack fetishes, or to possess socially acceptable ones. Those who do not are out of luck, and those who cannot control them are doomed to transgressive behavior. That this behavior seems profoundly understandable to them, that they accept their desires and forgive themselves for acting on them, is something Simenon confronts us with again and again. People are like that, he says, but why?

  Alavoine is obsessed with Martine, the young woman he meets by chance while he is away on a trip and briefly free from his hated home life. Her unremarkable appearance must certainly remind him of his first “love.” He describes her slightingly. She has no particular personality. For him she is an object. But he returns again and again to specific details: the way she smokes, the way she sits in a bar, her threadbare appearance, her naïveté and neediness. Martine is so ordinary to Alavoine she is extraordinary. It is possible that if he’d never met her he would never have become a murderer. When he dwells on her, it isn’t on her appearance or personality. He is excited by the strength of his own passion. Only once before has he felt so strongly; he didn’t know that he still could: he insists on that to the examining magistrate.

  I can’t remember another novel by Simenon in the first person. Alavoine speaks in the voice that we hear throughout Simenon’s work: direct, detached, factual. He doesn’t signal his meanings, and it is through his descriptions of places and events that we come to know him. He burdens the magistrate with a great deal of information that has no relevance to his actions, and his eye for specifics is that of a fetishist: he remembers a street, a café, a room, a train, how the light fell—and always the lonely Alavoine is at the center. The accretion of details suggests the mind of a masturbator re-creating scenes of past erotic intensity. It is possible to imagine Alavoine reading over his own pages and feeling aroused. Writing to the magistrate may be his only occasion for a letter that has a more personal purpose.

  In his introduction to Pedigree, Simenon’s longest and most autobiographical novel, Luc Sante refers to Oliver Sacks’s essay about a man who “created an accurate three-dimensional map of his native Tuscan village, unseen for many years, from which he could frame and highlight scenes in order to paint them.” Sante wonders if Simenon left Belgium “in order to preserve it unchangingly in his head.” Certainly Simenon had an inexhaustible memory for places and things, and draws on it effortlessly while never giving the impression of repeating himself. Describing the interior of a brasserie, a shadowy street, someone’s clothes, the routine in Alavoine’s office, a train platform, the position of shops and houses, Simenon seems to be summoning his own memories and assigning them to Alavoine. Sante writes that he “could make a read of any town and find the plot in its geography.” He adds that Pedigree is the only novel by Simenon that was “not composed in a willed trance state”—possibly that was a state in which the characters themselves found the setting they needed for what was to happen to them.

  Although the Maigret novels are considered inferior to the freestanding books that Simenon called romans durs, or hard novels, they contain his method in its pure form. In almost all the books, a crime is committed. In the Maigrets the solution of the mystery is a mystery in its own right, while in the others, the crime reveals itself with a kind of mysterious inevitability. Maigret’s method is to assign his officers to investigations and stake-outs of great difficulty, and then remain in his office, or a café, or at Madame Maigret’s table, or even in a hotel or hospital room, and ask himself what the criminal could have been thinking. In the course of considering that question, he constructs an image of a person who would think like that, which usually points him toward a suspect, however unlikely. Then Maigret, and the reader of the non-Maigret novels, is left with the question of why a person would think in such a way or do such a thing. For that Simenon has no answer. He was an imperfect man, unfaithful, driven by an unusual appetite for sexual frequency, compelled to write more books than any other great writer ever has. Why did he do that? What made him that way?

  —ROGER EBERT

  ACT OF PASSION

  Chapter One

  Monsieur Ernest Coméliau

  Examining Magistrate

  22 bis Rue de Seine

  Paris (VII)

  Your Honour:*

  I should like one man, just one, to understand me. And I would like that man to be you.

  We spent many long hours together during all the weeks of the preliminary investigations. But at that time it was too soon. You were a judge, you were my judge, and I would have seemed to be trying to justify myself. But now you know, don’t you, it has nothing to do with that?

  I have no idea what your impression was when you came into the courtroom — familiar to you, of course. As for me, how well I remember your arrival! I was alone between my two guards. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and the twilight was beginning to gather in clouds, as it were, around the courtroom.

  It was one of the reporters — their table was near the prisoner’s dock — it was a reporter, as I say, first complained to his neighbour that it was getting too dark to see clearly. The neighbour spoke to the journalist next to him, a rather sloppily dressed old man with cynical eyes, probably a habitué of the law courts. I don’t know whether I am mistaken, but I think he was the one who wrote in his paper that I looked like a toad in ambush.

  Perhaps that is why I wonder what impression I made upon you. Our dock — that is, the prisoner’s dock — is so low that only the head can be seen above it. It was therefore perfectly natural to keep my chin resting on my hands. I have a wide face, much too wide, which gets shiny easily. But why a toad? To make his readers laugh? Through pure malice? Because he didn’t like my looks?

  These are minor details, you must excuse me. It is of no importance. The old reporter, whom lawyers and magistrates greet familiarly, gave the Presiding Judge a little sign. The latter leaned over towards the associate judge on his left who, in turn, passed on the message. And thus, finally, the order reached the court attendant who turned on the lights. If I mention this little sideplay, it is because it interested me for quite a while, and reminds me that, when I was a young boy, what fascinated me most at church was to watch the sacristan lighting and extinguishing the candles.

  Well, as I said, it was at t
hat moment, with your briefcase under your arm and your hat in your hand, that you slipped in, with an almost apologetic air, among the young law students blocking the entrance. It seems — one of my lawyers sorrowfully told me so — that during most of the trial I behaved very badly. But then, they uttered such stupidities! And with such solemnity! They tell me that I sometimes shrugged my shoulders and even smiled sarcastically. An evening paper published a photograph of me taken with a smile on my face during, as he points out, the most pathetic moments in the testimony of one of the witnesses.

  ‘The hideous smile of the accused.’

  Some people, it is true, speak of Voltaire’s hideous smile!

  You came in. I had never seen you except behind your desk. You reminded me of the surgeon who comes hurrying into the hospital where his students and assistants are waiting for him.

  You did not look in my direction immediately. And yet, what a mad desire I had to greet you, to establish a human contact with you! Is that so ridiculous? Is it cynicism to use the word that was so often employed with reference to me?

  We had not seen each other for five weeks. During the two months of the preliminary investigation we had talked with each other almost daily. Do you know, even waiting in the corridor outside your office was a pleasure, and I still sometimes find myself thinking of it nostalgically?

  I can still see the line of dark doors to the magistrates’ offices as in a monastery — your own door, the benches between the doors, and the floor of the long corridor disappearing in the distance. I was between my two gendarmes, and on the same bench; on other benches sat free men, witnesses, both men and women, and sometimes handcuffed prisoners.

  We would sit there staring at one another. That, all that, is what I shall have to explain to you, but I realize that it is an almost impossible task. It would be so much easier if you too had killed!