The President Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE PRESIDENT

  AND GEORGES SIMENON

  “The author has pulled off the tour de force of presenting, entirely convincingly, the private thoughts of a great public figure.”

  —New York Times

  “The secret vice beneath the outer virtue, the scandalous dream inside the respectable head, the sudden crack in the stucco of propriety—these are the things that interest him to the point of obsession. . . . It is impossible not to admire the accuracy, the unfailing psychological insight, the unfaltering eye for the small but convincing human details that he brings to his stories of men obsessed. He has been called a master of abnormal psychology. But what makes him really remarkable is a grasp of the fact that the step from the normal to the abnormal—the step beyond the limit—can be frighteningly short in an ordinary life.”

  —Life

  “Simenon’s prose rejoices in the virtues of his virtuosity: it is economical, supple, precise. . . . But he writes entertainingly about corruption, cruelty or grief because he jousts at human follies without judging them.”

  —Time

  “An intensive, poignant story remarkable for its insight into human worth and human frailty.”

  —The Book-of-the-Month Club

  “I love to read Simenon. He reminds me of Chekhov.”

  —William Faulkner

  “If I hadn’t read Ticket of Leave (La Veuve Couderc), I couldn’t have written The Stranger.”

  —Albert Camus

  “When they come to me to ask, ‘What should I read of his?’ I reply, ‘Everything.’”

  —Andre Gide

  “He was a writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason. Above all, he inspired the confidence that readers reserve for novelists whom they venerate.”

  —John le Carré

  “Few writers are able to express this everyday, intimate, universal realm of thought and sensation [as you]. It makes me envious . . . It’s what you leave out that makes your books so full of reverberations. You create a real and honest collaboration with your readers.”

  —Henry Miller, in a letter to Simenon

  “Simenon is an all-round master craftsman—ironic, disciplined, highly intelligent, with fine descriptive power. His themes are timeless in their preoccupation with the interrelation of evil, guilt and good; contemporary in their fidelity to the modern context and Gallic in precision, logic and a certain emanation of pain or disquiet. His fluency is of course astonishing.’’

  —Francis Steegmuller

  “There is nothing like winter in the company of a keg of brandy and the complete works of Simenon.”

  —Luis Sepulveda

  THE PRESIDENT

  GEORGES SIMENON (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium, the son of an accountant. His father’s ill health forced him to quit school at 16, and he became a newspaperman, assigned to the crime beat. He published his first book, Au Point des arches, a year later, under his reporter’s pen-name, G. Sim. In 1922 he moved to Paris and began to write novels at a furious pace, using at least a dozen pen-names, although he created his most famous character, Commissaire Maigret of the Paris Police, under his own name. Maigret would eventually star in 75 novels. His non-Maigret novels—referred to as his roman durs (literally, “hard novels”)—were even more critically acclaimed, leading to speculation he would eventually win the Nobel. In the early thirties Simenon took up travel, living on a houseboat cruising the Belgian canal system, touring Africa and the Soviet Union, and living throughout the US and Canada. During the war years he moved to the French countryside, but was harassed by the Nazis who suspected his last name was Jewish. Nonetheless, after the war he was banned from publishing for five years for having sold film rights to German filmmakers. Married and divorced twice, Simenon was the father of four children, one of whom, his daughter Mari-Jo, committed suicide at age 25. (She would be the subject of his novel, The Disappearance of Odile.) It would darken Simenon’s later years, but he never stopped writing. Estimates are that he wrote as many as 500 books by the time of his death of natural causes at age 86.

  DAPHNE WOODWARD was also known for her translations from the French of eight novels in Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series, as well as the work of Nobel Prize-winner J. M. G. Le Clezio.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  THE PRESIDENT

  GEORGES SIMENON

  TRANSLATED BY DAPHNE WOODWARD

  MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  The President

  Originally published in French as Le President

  The President © 1958 Georges Simenon Limited, a Chorion company.

  All rights reserved

  Translated by Daphne Woodward

  Translation © Penguin Books, Ltd.

  Design by Christopher King

  First Melville House printing: September 2011

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-005-1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Simenon, Georges, 1903-1989.

  [Président. English]

  The president / Georges Simenon.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-935554-62-2

  I. Title.

  PQ2637.I53P7313 2011

  843’.912--dc23

  2011026233

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for The President and Georges Simenon

  About the authors

  The Neversink Library

  Title page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Other titles in this series

  CHAPTER 1

  FOR MORE THAN AN HOUR HE HAD BEEN SITTING motionless in the old Louis-Philippe armchair, with its almost upright back and shabby black leather upholstery, that he had lugged around with him from one Ministry to another for forty years, till it had become a legend.

  They always thought he was asleep when he sat like that with eyelids lowered, raising just one of them from time to time, to reveal a slit of gleaming eyeball. Not only was he not asleep, but he knew exactly what he looked like, his body rather stiff in a black coat that hung loosely on him, something like a frock coat, and his chin resting on the tall, stiff collar that was seen in all his photographs and which he wore like a uniform from the moment he emerged from his bedroom in the morning.

  As the years went by his skin had grown thinner and smoother, with white blotches that gave it the appearance of marble, and by now it clung to the pro
minent cheekbones and sheathed his skeleton so closely that his features, as they became more strongly marked, seemed to be gradually fining down. In the village once he had heard one little boy call out to another:

  “Look at that old death’s-head!”

  He sat without stirring, scarcely a yard away from the log fire, whose flames crackled now and then in a sudden downdraft, his hands folded on his stomach in the position in which they would be placed when his dead body was laid out. Would anybody have the nerve, then, to slip a rosary between his fingers, as someone had done to one of his colleagues, who’d also been several times Premier and a leading Freemason?

  He had got more and more into the habit of withdrawing like this into immobility and silence, at all times of day, but most often at dusk, when Mademoiselle Milleran, his secretary, had come in noiselessly, without stirring the air, to switch on his parchment-shaded desk lamp, and gone away again into the next room; and it was as though he’d erected a wall around himself, or rather as though he had huddled up tightly into a blanket, retiring from everything except the sense of his individual existence.

  Did he sometimes fall into a doze? If so he wouldn’t admit it, convinced that his mind was ceaselessly alert; and to prove this to himself and to those around him, he would sometimes amuse himself by describing their comings and goings.

  This afternoon, for instance, Mademoiselle Milleran—her name was the same, but for one letter, as that of a former colleague who had been President of the Republic, though not, it was true, for long—this afternoon, Mademoiselle Milleran had come in twice on tiptoe and the second time, after making sure that he wasn’t dead, that his chest was still rising and falling as he breathed, she had pushed back a log that threaten, to roll out onto the carpet.

  He had chosen for himself, as his own corner, the room nearest to his bedroom, and the massive, unstained, unpolished wooden table was as plain as a butcher’s chopping block.

  This was his famous study, so often photographed that it, too, now belonged to the legend, like every nook and corner of Les Ebergues. The whole world knew that his bedroom was like a monk’s cell, that the walls were whitewashed, and that the Premier slept on an iron bedstead.

  The public was familiar with every angle of the four low-ceilinged rooms, converted stables or cowsheds, whose interior doors had been removed and whose walls were entirely lined with pitch-pine shelves packed with books.

  What was Milleran doing, while he kept his eyes shut? He hadn’t dictated anything to her. She had no letters to answer. She didn’t knit, didn’t sew. And the morning was her time for looking through the newspapers and marking with red pencil any articles that might interest him.

  He was convinced that she made notes, rather in the way certain animals heap up in their lair anything and everything they come across, and that once he was dead she’d write her memoirs. He had often tried to catch her at it, but never succeeded. He’d been no more successful when he tried to tease an admission out of her.

  One would have sworn that in the next room she was keeping as still as he and that they were spying on each other.

  Would she remember the five o’clock news?

  Ever since morning a gale had been blowing, threatening to carry away the slates on the roof and the west wall, rattling the windows so that you would have thought someone was continually knocking on them. The Newhaven-Dieppe steamer, after a difficult crossing that had been mentioned on the radio, had had to make three shots at getting into Dieppe harbor, after being almost forced to turn back.

  The Premier had insisted on going out, all the same, about eleven o’clock, muffled in his ancient astrakhan coat that had been through so many international conferences, from London to Warsaw, from the Kremlin to Ottawa.

  “You surely don’t mean to go out?” Madame Blanche, his nurse, had protested on finding him dressed up like that.

  She knew that if he wanted to she wouldn’t be able to stop him, but she put up a fight in the forlorn hope.

  “Dr. Gaffé told you again only yesterday evening . . . ”

  “Is it the doctor’s life or mine that’s involved here?”

  “Listen, sir . . . At least let me call up the doctor and ask him . . . ”

  He had merely looked at her with his light-gray eyes, his steely eyes as the newspapers called them. She always began by trying to stare him out, and at such moments anybody would have felt certain they hated each other.

  Perhaps, after putting up with her for twelve years, he really had come to hate her? He’d sometimes asked himself. He wasn’t sure of the answer. Wasn’t she, perhaps, the only person who wasn’t awed by his fame? Or who pretended not to be?

  In the old days he’d have settled the question without hesitation, confident of his judgment, but as he grew older he was becoming more cautious.

  In any case, this woman, who was neither young nor attractive, had ended by absorbing more of his attention than he gave to so-called serious problems. Twice, in a moment of anger, he had thrown her out of Les Ebergues and forbidden her to come back. As it was he wouldn’t let her sleep there, although there was a spare room; he made her take lodgings in a house in the village.

  Both times she had turned up next morning, in time for his injection, her hard, commonplace, fifty-year-old face entirely devoid of expression.

  He hadn’t even chosen her. The last time he had been Premier, ten years ago, he’d found her at his side one night when, after speaking for three hours in the Chamber of Deputies in the teeth of relentless opposition, he’d fainted away.

  He could still remember his astonishment at finding himself lying on a dusty floor and seeing the white-overalled woman with a hypodermic syringe in her hand, the only serene, comforting face amid the general anxiety.

  For some time after that she had come every day to give him treatment at the Hôtel Matignon; and later, when the government fell, to his bachelor flat on the Quai Malaquais.

  Les Ebergues had then been still just a country hide-out, bought at haphazard as a place for brief holidays. When he had decided to retire and live there permanently, she had announced, without consulting him:

  “I shall come with you.”

  “And suppose I don’t need a nurse?”

  “They won’t let you go away there without someone to look after you.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Professor Fumet, to begin with.”

  He had been his doctor and friend for more than thirty years.

  “Those gentlemen. . . ”

  He had understood, and the expression had amused him. He still used it to refer to the few dozen people—were there as many as that?—who really ran the country.

  “Those gentlemen” didn’t mean only the Premier and the Cabinet, the Council of State, the Bench, the Bank of France, and a few senior permanent civil servants, but also applied to the Sûreté Générale, in the Rue des Saussaies, which was concerned that no ill should befall the famous statesman.

  Had not two detectives been sent to Bénouville, the village nearest to Les Ebergues, where they had taken up residence at the inn so as to mount guard over him, while a third, who lived at Le Havre with his wife and family, came on his motorcycle at intervals to take his turn of duty?

  At this very moment, despite the squalls and rainbursts that seemed to come from sea and sky at the same time, one of the three would be standing leaning against the wet trunk of the tree by the side gate, with eyes fixed on the lighted window.

  Madame Blanche had come to Bénouville. For a long time he had supposed she was a widow, or that, although a spinster, she, like many old maids in jobs, had herself addressed as “Madame” to enhance her dignity.

  It was three years before he discovered that she had a husband in Paris, a certain Louis Blain, who kept a bookshop near Saint-Sulpice, specializing in religious works. She had never mentioned it to him, she si
mply went up to Paris once a month.

  One day when he was in a bad temper he had growled, while she was attending to him with her usual calm face:

  “You must admit you’re a stiff-necked woman! I might almost say a depraved woman, in one sense of the word. There you are, fresh as if you’d just got up, not a hair out of place, mind and body alert, and you come into the bedroom of an old man who’s gradually rotting away. Incidentally, does my room stink in the morning?”

  “It smells like any other bedroom.”

  “Before I grew old myself I used to be sickened by the smell of old men. But you, you pretend not to notice. You have the satisfaction of saying to yourself:

  “‘The man I see every morning, ugly and naked, half dead already, is the same one whose name is in all the history books, and who any day now will have his statue, or at least his avenue, in most of the towns of France. . . .’ Like Gambetta! . . . Like poor Jaurés, whom I knew so well. . . . ”

  She had merely inquired:

  “Are you keen on your name being given to avenues?”

  Perhaps it was precisely because she saw him naked, a weak old man, that he resented her?

  And yet he didn’t resent Emile, his chauffeur and valet, who was equally familiar with his sordid, unadorned privacy.

  Was that because Emile was a man?

  Anyhow, Madame Blanche and Emile had gone out with him, into the north wind that forced them to bend double, Madame Blanche with her cape, which flapped like a loose sail. Emile in his strict, black uniform with the tight-fitting leather gaiters.

  There were no excursionists to photograph them that morning, and no journalists, nobody except Soulas, the swarthiest of the three detectives, smoking a damp cigarette beneath his tree and beating his arms across his chest now and then to warm himself.

  The house, which had no upper story except for three little attic rooms above the kitchen, consisted of two buildings that had been connected together, and stood all alone, or rather crouched on the cliff-top, about a quarter of a mile from the village of Bénouville, between Etretat and Fécamp.