Act of Passion

by Georges Simenon

  Just think! For forty years, like you, like everybody else, I was a free man. Nobody dreamed that I should one day become what is called a criminal. In other words I am, in a way, only a criminal by accident.

  And yet, when, in your corridor, I watched the witnesses (sometimes people I knew, since they were witnesses in my case), our glances were just about the same as those a man might exchange with a fish.

  On the other hand, between those with handcuffs and myself a sort of bond of sympathy was automatically established.

  Please don’t misunderstand me. I shall probably have to come back to this later on. I have no sympathy for crime, or for murderers. But the others are really too stupid.

  Forgive me. That is not exactly what I mean, either.

  You came in, and only a short time before, during the recess, after the reading of the interminable indictment — how can a man of good faith collect so many inaccuracies about one of his fellows? — I had heard you discussed.

  Indirectly. You know the little room in which the accused wait before the session opens and during the recesses. It is like being backstage at a theatre. But, for me, it brought back memories of the hospital, relatives waiting the outcome of an operation. One passes in front of them — we pass in front of them — talking shop probably, pulling on our rubber gloves after putting out our cigarettes.

  ‘So-and-so? Oh, he’s been appointed to Angers …’

  ‘Didn’t he get his degree at Montpellier at the same time as … ?’

  I was sitting there on a shiny bench, like the relatives. Lawyers passed by me, finished their cigarettes, looked at me vaguely without seeing me, as we look at the husband of a patient.

  ‘He’s a first-rate fellow, from all accounts. His father was justice of the peace at Caen. He must have married one of the Blanchon girls …’

  That is the way they were talking about you, as I might have talked a few months before, when we belonged to the same world. At that time, if we had lived in the same city, we would have met a couple of times a week at bridge tables. I would have called you ‘My dear Judge’ and you would have called me ‘My dear Doctor’. Later, as time went on, it would have been:

  ‘Coméliau, old boy.’

  ‘Alavoine, my dear fellow.’

  Would we really have become friends? Hearing them talk about you made me ask myself that.

  ‘No, no,’ the second lawyer replied. ‘You are getting him mixed up with another Coméliau, Jules, his cousin, who was disbarred in Rouen two years ago, and who did marry a Blanchon … Our Coméliau married the daughter of a doctor, whose name escapes me …’

  Another little bond between us.

  At La Roche-sur-Yon I count a few magistrates among my friends. I never thought before of asking them whether it is the same with their clients as with our patients.

  We lived almost six weeks together, if I can put it that way. I know, of course, that during that time you had other problems, other clients, other duties, and that your private life continued. But, just the same, I represented for you, as certain of our patients do for us, the interesting case.

  You were trying to understand, I noticed that. Not only with all your professional honesty, but also as a man.

  One little detail among others. We were never alone during our interviews, since your stenographer and one of my lawyers, almost always Maître Gabriel, were present. You know your office better than I do, the lofty window with its view of the Seine and the Samaritaine’s rooftops like painted scenery, and the door of a closet, almost always ajar, exposing a wash-basin and towels. (I had one just like it in my office where I used to wash my hands between patients.)

  Well, in spite of Maître Gabriel’s efforts to take first place in everything and everywhere, there were often moments when I had the impression that we were alone and that, by common consent, we had decided that the other two did not count.

  Nor was it necessary for us to exchange glances, either. To forget them was enough.

  And then those telephone calls! … Forgive me for mentioning them. It is none of my business, I know. But, after all, didn’t you inquire into all the most intimate details of my life, and how can I help being tempted to do the same? Five or six times, almost always at the same hour towards the end of the questioning, you received calls which upset you and made you uncomfortable. As often as you could you answered in monosyllables. You would look at your watch, assuming an air of detachment.

  ‘No … Not before one o’clock … It’s impossible … Yes … No … Not now …’

  Once, inadvertently, you let slip:

  ‘No child …’

  And you blushed. Then you glanced at me as though I were the only one who counted. To the other two, or rather to Maître Gabriel, you made a commonplace apology.

  ‘Excuse the interruption, Maître … Where were we …’

  There are so many things that I understood and that you knew I understood! Because, don’t you see, I have an enormous advantage over you, no matter what you do, for I have killed.

  Let me thank you for having, in your report, summed up the investigation with so much simplicity, with such a total lack of sentimentality that it annoyed the prosecutor until he blurted out that the whole affair, as related by you, sounded more like a simple news item.

  You see, I am well informed. I even know that one day when, among magistrates, you were discussing me, they asked you:

  ‘Tell us, since you have had many opportunities of studying Alavoine, what is your opinion — did he act with premeditation or was the crime committed in a moment of uncontrollable passion?’

  With what anxiety I would have waited for your answer, had I been there! I would have been on pins and needles wanting to prompt you. It seems that you hesitated, coughed two or three times.

  ‘On my soul and honour, I firmly believe that no matter what Alavoine insists, no matter what he thinks, he acted in a moment when he was not fully responsible, and that his act was not premeditated.’

  Well, your Honour, that hurt me. I thought of it again when I saw you among the young law students. There must have been reproach in my eyes, for a little later, when you started to leave, you turned and faced me for several seconds. You raised your eyes. Perhaps I imagined it, but you seemed to be asking pardon.

  If I am not mistaken, the sense of that message was: ‘I have done my honest best to understand. Henceforth, it is for others to judge you.’

  It was the last time we were to see each other. We shall probably never see each other again. Every day new prisoners are brought before you by the gendarmes, fresh witnesses, more or less intelligent or impassioned.

  Although I am thankful that it is all over, I must admit that I envy them because they still have a chance to explain, while all I can count on now is this letter, which you will perhaps file away under the heading ‘Twaddle’, without even reading it.

  That, your Honour, would be too bad. I say it without vanity. Not only too bad for me, but too bad for you, because I am going to reveal something which you suspect, something which you don’t want to admit and which torments you in secret, something which I know is true, for, since I passed over to the other side, I am more experienced than you: you are afraid.

  You are afraid, to be precise, of what has happened to me. 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.

  Well then, since I had the courage to go to the bitter end, why not, in turn, have the courage to try to understand me?

  As I write, I can see the three lights with green shades hanging over the judges’ bench, another over that of the prosecutor and, at the press table, a rather pretty girl-reporter whom a young male colleague, without losing any time, presented with a box of sweets at the second session. She very generously passed it to everyone around her, to the lawyers, to me.

&nb
sp; I had one of those sweets in my mouth when you looked in on the trial.

  Are you in the habit of looking in at the trials for which you have conducted the investigation? I doubt it. The corridor outside your office is never empty. One prisoner automatically takes the place of another.

  And yet twice you came back. You were there when the verdict was read and it is perhaps because of you that I did not fly into a rage.

  ‘What did I tell you!’ Maître Gabriel, very proud of himself, exclaimed to his colleagues when they came to congratulate him. ‘If my client had been a little more tractable, I’d have won an acquittal …’

  The imbecile! The smug, cheerful imbecile.

  Listen to this. If you want to be amused, here is something to make you laugh. An old lawyer with a beard was bold enough to parry: ‘One moment, my dear colleague. With a revolver, yes. Even, at a pinch, with a knife. But with the bare hands, never! An acquittal under such circumstances has never been heard of in the annals of the law.’

  With the bare hands! Isn’t that magnificent? Isn’t that enough to make you want to go over to the other side?

  My cell-mate is watching me as I write, without concealing an admiration tinged with annoyance. He is a great strapping boy of twenty-one, a kind of young bull, with a ruddy complexion and candid eyes. He hasn’t been in my cell more than a week. Before him there was a poor melancholic fellow who spent all day cracking his finger joints.

  My young bull killed an old woman in her little wine shop, hitting her over the head with a bottle, having gone in, as he artlessly put it, to clean up the place.

  The judge, it seems, was indignant.

  ‘With a bottle! … Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’

  And he: ‘How could I know she’d be dumb enough to yell? I had to make her stop, and there was the bottle on the counter. I didn’t even know if it was full or empty.’

  Now he is convinced that I am preparing my appeal, or soliciting some special favour.

  What he can’t understand, although he too has killed, but accidentally (he’s almost right — it was, in a way, the old woman’s fault) — what he can’t understand is that I myself should insist on proving that I acted with pre-meditation, in full consciousness of my act.

  Do you understand, your Honour? With premeditation. Until someone has admitted that, I shall be alone in the world.

  In full consciousness of my act!

  And, in the end, I’m sure you’ll understand, unless, like certain of my colleagues who feel humiliated at seeing a doctor in the prisoner’s dock at a murder trial, you prefer to pretend that I am mad, altogether mad, or a little mad — in any case irresponsible or not fully responsible.

  They got nothing for their pains, thank God. But even today, when one might suppose that everything had been done, that everything was over, they are still hammering away at it, egged on, I suspect, by my friends, my colleagues, my wife, and my mother.

  However that may be, after a month I have not yet been sent to Fontevrault, where I should, theoretically, serve my sentence. They are watching me, I am always being taken to the hospital. They ask a lot of obvious questions that make me smile with pity. The director himself has come several times, spying on me through the peep-hole, and I wonder if they didn’t put the young bull in my cell in place of my former melancholy cell-mate to keep me from committing suicide.

  It is my calmness that worries them, what the papers called my want of conscience, my cynicism.

  I am calm, that’s a fact, and this letter should convince you of it. Although I am only a simple family doctor, I have studied enough psychiatry to recognize the letter of a madman.

  Too bad, your Honour, if you think the contrary. It would be a great disillusionment to me.

  For I still enjoy the illusion of possessing one friend, and that friend, strange as it may seem, is you.

  What a lot of things I have to tell you now that I cannot be accused of trying to save my neck and that Maître Gabriel is not there any longer to step on my toes every time I express a truth too simple for him to understand!

  We both of us belong to what is called, at home, the liberal professions and what, in certain less advanced milieus, is designated more pretentiously by the term intelligentsia. Doesn’t the word make you want to laugh? No matter. We belong then to a good middle class, more or less cultivated, the class which furnishes the country with officials, doctors, lawyers, magistrates, quite a few deputies, senators and ministers.

  However, from what I have gathered, you are a generation ahead of me. Your father was already a magistrate while mine was still tilling the soil.

  Don’t tell me that it is of no importance. You would be wrong. You would make me think of the rich who are always saying that money doesn’t count in life.

  Naturally! Because they have it. But if you don’t have any, what then? Have you too ever suffered from the lack of it?

  Now take my ‘toad’s head,’ as the witty reporter said. Supposing you had been in my place in the prisoner’s dock, he wouldn’t have mentioned toads’ heads.

  One generation more or less makes a difference. You yourself are the proof. Already your face is longer, your skin does not shine, you have the easy manners which my daughters are only now acquiring. Even your glasses, your myopia … Even your calm, precise way of wiping the lenses with your little chamois skin …

  If you had been named magistrate at La Roche-sur-Yon instead of obtaining an appointment in Paris, we should in all probability have become, if not friends, at least friendly acquaintances, as I said before. By the force of circumstances. You would have, I am sure, in all sincerity considered me an equal, but I, deep down, would always have been a little envious of you.

  Don’t deny it. You have only to look around you. Think of those of your friends who, like me, belong to the first rising generation.

  Rising where, I wonder. But let that pass.

  You were born at Caen and I was born at Bourgneuf-en-Vendée, a village several miles from a little town called La Chataigneraie.

  Of Caen I shall have more to say later, for it holds a memory which only recently — since my crime, to use that word — I consider one of the most important of my life.

  Why not tell you right away, since it takes us to surroundings you know so well?

  I have gone to Caen a dozen times or more, for I have an aunt there, a sister of my father’s, who married a man in the china business. You must certainly know his shop on the Rue Saint-Jean, a hundred yards from the Hôtel de France, just where the tram runs so close to the pavement that the pedestrians have to glue themselves against the houses.

  Every time I went to Caen it rained. And I liked the rain of your city. I like it for being fine, gentle and silent; I like it for the halo it throws around the landscape, for the mystery with which, in the twilight, it surrounds everybody you meet, especially the women.

  Now that I think of it, I remember it was on my first visit to my aunt’s. It had just grown dark and everything was shining in the rain. I must have been a little over sixteen. At the corner of the Rue Saint-Jean and another street whose name I’ve forgotten and which, not having any shops, was completely dark, a girl in a beige raincoat stood waiting, and there were raindrops on the fair hair escaping from under her black beret.

  The tram passed, its great yellow eye streaming with water and rows of heads behind the clouded windows. A man, a young man, who was standing on the step, jumped off just in front of the shop with fishing tackle in the window.

  After that it was like a dream. At the precise moment he landed on the pavement, the girl’s hand caught his arm. And both of them, in a single movement, walked together towards the dark street with such ease that it made one think of the figure of a ballet, and suddenly without a word, on the first doorstep, they glued their bodies together with their wet clothes and their wet skin — and I, too, watching them from a distance, had the taste of a strange saliva in my mouth.

  Perhaps because of this me
mory, three or four years later, when I was already a medical student, I wanted to do exactly the same thing, and in Caen too. As exactly as possible, in any case. But there was no tram and no one was waiting for me.

  Naturally, you know the Brasserie Chandivert. For me it’s the finest beer-restaurant in France, along with one other in Épinal, where I used to go when I was doing my military service.

  There is the illuminated entrance of the cinema to the left. Then the enormous room divided into different parts, the part where you eat, with white tablecloths and silver on the tables, the part where you drink and play cards, and then, at the back, the bottle-green billiard tables under their reflectors, and the almost hieratic poses of the players.

  There is also, on the platform, the orchestra, with the musicians in shabby dinner jackets, with long hair and pale faces.

  There is the warm light inside and the rain trickling down the window-panes, people who come in shaking their wet clothes, cars stopping outside whose headlights can be seen for an instant.

  There are the families dressed in their Sunday best for the occasion, and the habitués, with blotchy red faces, having their game of dominoes or cards, always at the same table, and calling the waiter by his first name.

  It is a world, you understand, an almost complete world, a world sufficient to itself, a world into which I plunged with delight and dreamed of never leaving.

  You see how far away I was, at twenty, from any criminal court.

  I remember that I smoked an enormous pipe which gave me the illusion of being a man and that I looked at all the women with equal avidity.

  And then, one evening, what I had always hoped for, without daring to believe it possible, happened. Alone at a table opposite me was a girl, or perhaps a woman, who was wearing a blue tailored suit and a little red hat.

  If I knew how to draw I could still make a sketch of her face, her figure. She had a few freckles across her nose and her nose wrinkled when she smiled. And she smiled at me. A sweet friendly smile. Not at all one of those provocative smiles I was more accustomed to.