Continuing to have difficulty with getting a proper hold on the huge oeuvre, I asked Bing to have another go this morning. He turned up lots of stuff, but for the moment I have settled on the offering from Liège, his home town, at reference 5. The indications there are that these two stories were indeed the last he wrote, although there were still a couple of Maigrets and a raft of autobiographical material to come. See the «Mes dictées» bit of the Presses de la Cité section, towards the end of the oeuvres tab.
Advice to readers: skip the rest of this post if you are ever likely to read these two stories for yourself.
The first of this pair is a story about a chap who never really fitted into the social world, although he was an intelligent man who made a good living as a proof reader for a modest commercial printer, spending nearly the whole of his working day in a glass box overlooking the print room, not needing to interact with anybody. As it happens, Simenon once thought of writing a novel while shut up in a glass box, taking suggestions from the audience the while and although he bottled the stunt itself, it remained the subject of stories for long afterwards. Our chap finds himself a plain wife, who is not going to be too put off by his odd ways, who is unlikely ever to be the target of anyone else's attentions, and who goes on to make a living as a home-working translator. She is not that keen on the social world either. Or on sex, which, such as it was, stopped soon after marriage. A twin bed couple. They lived in a very quiet way for twenty years or more, when his equilibrium was disturbed by the suicide of his brother in law (because he had been dumped by his mistress) and the arrival across the landing of a pretty, silly and flirtatious young wife whose husband was mostly away during the week. Nothing much happens, but all of a sudden, without any obvious motive, he strangles her. Goes back across the landing, settles down in his armchair and waits for his wife to come back from her visit to her publisher. End of story. Although without any obvious motive is not quite right, as a dreadful sense of doom hangs over the whole story. Something awful was going to happen.
The second is another chap who lives for his work, this time as a star jeweller, mostly making flashy gold settings for big, flashy jewels. He gets himself a wife who insists on keeping up her work as a council care worker, looking after older solitaries in their homes. This despite getting two children along the way. She gets run down in a banal traffic accident in a district a long way from her own. Sense of doom again. It eventually turns out that she has been conducting an affair with his business partner, a rather flashy chap who attends to the commercial and sales side of their business, for nearly twenty years, for nearly the whole of her married life. She had married the wrong man but drew back from divorce, despite the misery caused by the falseness of her position. Is our chap going to murder his partner? Or commit suicide? Or turn to drink, like his father before him? But the twist is, rather than murder, the business partner makes over his share of the business to our chap and I was left with the feeling that he was going to be OK in the end. He would pick up his work and his business. He would keep his children, nearly adults and about to leave the nest, despite not ever being able to know whose children they were biologically. Helped through all this by a devoted live-in maid, an older woman, a aristocratic refugee from the Russian revolution.
Two more stories which I felt were littered with autobiographical material, very likely the result of growing old and getting towards the end of his fictional life. Very good stories they were too.
Along the way, I was puzzled by the small printer having a Linotype machine, which I had thought, in part because of it being mixed up with molten lead, was not the sort of thing a small printer would have. But consulting Wikipedia, I find that he might well have had. See reference 7, from which the snap above has been taken - a snap which does not include the pressure cooker like contraption the molten lead was kept in.
While the second story closed with a final meeting of the two partners in a quiet café in the Place des Vosges, now uber-trendy, a place where Simenon lived for a while and a place where Maigret lived while his flat in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir was being redecorated. The jeweller, who used to bring his children to play there, watches a small boy playing with his hoop, 'cerceau' or circle in French, a word they also use for the hoop of a barrel, with the original children's hoops presumably having been barrel hoops, then common. While we have gone for the north European, Germanic word for hoops of all sorts, not making the connection with circles. Seemingly, a rather old fashioned thing for a boy to be playing with at the time of writing, presumably not that far off the time of setting.
Reference 1: La Cage de Verre - Simenon - 1971. Vol.44 of the collected works.
Reference 2: Les Innocents - Simenon - 1971. Vol.44 of the collected works.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/when-i-was-old.html.
Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-end-of-beginning.html.
Reference 5: https://app.lib.uliege.be/simenon/.
Reference 6: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Dictées. 'Les Dictées sont un recueil de 21 dictées autobiographiques de Georges Simenon. En renonçant à écrire des romans, Simenon décide de ne plus « se mettre instinctivement dans la peau des autres, mais dans la sienne, peut-être pour la première fois depuis cinquante ans »'.
Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine.
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