When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  ‘I’m fed up with myself.’

  That didn’t surprise Johnny, who admitted to me that this happens to him too, but that it would be hard to make his mother understand.

  As if women didn’t have their bad times too!

  Their advantage is that it happens on a fixed date so that it’s anticipated. Each month they have this safety valve!

  4 October

  Returned to the somewhat withdrawn but soft and almost voluptuous life in my study where everything will be perfect when it is time to light the fires. Attempt to get to the end of the Goncourt Journals. Have finished only the first volume and am as nauseated as when I read the first version twenty or thirty years ago.

  It is one of the most depressing works I know, and in spite of that, once into it one goes on with simultaneous guilty conscience and pleasure. These malicious bits of gossip about personalities of the period, famous or not, remind one of today’s reporting, and paradoxically, Goncourt was already complaining of this sort of low journalism, as he calls it.

  He reports, probably with exactitude, sentences picked up at dinner tables, and pretends this is the way to depict a man. Other people’s mediocrity, ill health, decline are what attract him.

  Yes, everything is paradoxical, the ridiculous pretension to aristocracy, to artistic writing, to sophisticated taste in painting … not to mention the knick-knacks, all that chinoiserie he delights in … He thought he was creating a movement and he was only following the fashions of his times. He knew Manet, Degas, etc. But his gods in painting were the worst painters of the period. He denied the talent of Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, etc. He saw nothing at all in Impressionism, which was emerging around him. Only Savarin is great! … Maupassant is nothing but a little monster and a charlatan … One could add examples ad infinitum.

  Still, one reads on with curiosity because we learn of certain eccentricities, certain bedside secrets of great men of the period as today we learn about ours in the weeklies.

  Two passages struck me, Berthelot announcing, around 1865, that within a century science would unriddle the atom. Claude Bernard making the same prediction about the living cell. They weren’t far wrong.

  Would like to get this over with. It’s somewhat like an enema and may help my health.

  Next week Liège. What I look forward to most is to show D. the chapel in the Bavière hospital where I served at mass. Provided I won’t feel disappointed.

  No golf these days. No desire for physical life.

  Sunday, 8 October

  Bad cold or slight grippe which I’m trying to get rid of before the trip to Liège and Germany, Wednesday. Living in my study and still immersed in the four fat volumes of the Goncourt Journals, which irritate me and which I want to be done with.

  I’m in the middle of the third volume. More than a volume and a half to go, but it becomes more and more unpleasant. At sixty-five, with his friends old, sick, or dying, he no longer talks about anything but decrepitude and death.

  At times I wonder if I’m the one who is abnormal. For after all, his portrait of literary society is pretty much the same as today’s. My author or playwright friends meet each other at all the gatherings, the suppers, the receptions. I only see them by chance every other year or so, and have less and less desire to talk things over.

  There was a time when I had an overwhelming need to be in contact with people, to go out, to talk, but I’ve always preferred people of other professions or even the man in the street. More and more I get a feeling of laziness at the thought of what is called conversation, perhaps because I know in advance what is going to be said to me, and that I am going to repeat myself with more or less smugness and be ashamed of it afterwards.

  What’s the use? It isn’t a question of age, or else I was old at forty. I prefer to live with my own family, and a few contacts at long intervals are amply sufficient for me.

  Is that good? Is it bad? I don’t know. In any case, I can’t seem to understand how people could meet for years – intelligent people, some truly superior – every week in the same setting to exchange the words one finds precisely noted in the Journals and which were selected as most interesting.

  My God, what were the rest like? Last year, the year before, I lived a week in Paris in this milieu. Every day, lunch, dinner, or supper with people the papers talk about. How much a stranger, how ill at ease I felt! I learn more about men observing my children for an hour than in listening to those people for three or four evenings. And how much better I feel spending my evenings with D., even when we say nothing! Or when we go for our ride in the car in the afternoon!

  Why did a Flaubert, a Zola, a Daudet, loaded with work – and, in Daudet’s case, happy with his family – feel the need to rush together at each other’s houses, or at the house of some princess, banker, whoever, as if they needed to reassure themselves of their importance or fame?

  In 1885 they were already talking about – not the Nouveau Roman, as today, but, in the same sense, the Roman Nouveau. Rosny discussed concrete and abstract art (in literature, not painting).

  Then, in 1889, Goncourt, having stopped writing himself, announced that the novel was dead, that the form was definitely exhausted, that something else must be found! How difficult it is to grow old!

  Remarks made in 1890 that could no doubt be heard in 1820, 1760, etc., etc.:

  ‘Respectable women today look like …’

  or: ‘behave like …’

  ‘Youth no longer knows how to laugh …’ ‘… no longer respects anything …’ ‘… youth today is made up of old men …’

  ‘The decadence of the press, the vulgarity, the dishonesties of journalists …’ (in the seventeenth century, of gazetteers).

  ‘The noise, the hurry, the hectic atmosphere of Paris …’ ‘the exhausting pace of modern life …’

  We go on repeating! And our sons and grandsons will go on repeating!

  19 October 1961

  Came back evening before last two days ahead of schedule. Do I get tired of travelling? I was happy to be home again, especially to be with the children. Now I’m anxious to write, in a couple of weeks probably, the novel that came to me in the car between Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne.

  In Liège, at night, a curious feeling seeing the same windows I used to look at at fifteen or sixteen, with their faintly lit shades permitting one to guess at the intimacy of family life within – and which used to fill me with a panicky urge to escape.

  Finding them again, unchanged, I was almost afraid of becoming caught in a trap. Why there and not somewhere else? Then, however, Liège gratified all my wishes. One might say I’ve always run away from my youth. This time I went on purpose, to find it again at the chapel of the Bavière hospital where I served at mass, in the Ursuline convent where we used to go Sundays to visit an aunt who was a nun, in certain streets where I used to walk, dreaming ambitiously of the future. But this pilgrimage was less for myself than to give D. a sense of my childhood.

  Sunday, 5 November

  My novel is coming closer. These last weeks no wish to write in this journal (?), which suddenly seems vain and pretentious to me. Yesterday, sixteenth anniversary of our meeting, of our life together, D.’s and mine. That is so much more important! Delighted that the children took part in this celebration, that they understand the importance of it for our little human group – and that for two or three years now we have replaced our individual birthdays with this anniversary as a couple.

  Odd that I, furious individualist that I am, have not only accepted but passionately desired this cell, further enlarged by children – so long as these children need us; oughtn’t I to understand, by this fact, that others accept – need – those larger cells that have always horrified me: the village, the province, the country, or a religion or party?

  I realize quite well that I am stubborn on this point, that I will be to the end a man for the couple, the male and female in the jungle.

  Saturday, 18 November 1961


  One more! Finished a new novel on Friday, Les Autres, which I haven’t had the courage to type each morning as I usually do. Two sessions a day, writing by hand. D. is going to type it.

  Sunday, 17 December 1961

  I would like to note – as on a calendar – next to the past days:

  nothing

  nothing

  nothing

  nothing

  nothing

  Isn’t this a good sign? I think so. No desire to write. Everyday life. D. and I spent a few days in Milan, so as to sleep in peace. Now she is typing my novel. I will revise it between holidays. Christmas soon. Spent much time agreeably, getting ready for it. A little room downstairs is full of packages.

  The publication of Betty, coincidental with the end-of-the-year prizes, passed unnoticed. That hurts me a little, not for me but, I was about to write, for her.

  It’s a little as if she had not been given the chance to begin her independent existence. I don’t attach too much importance to it. A twinge only because this novel marked a convalescence that was both physical and to some extent moral (end of discouragement, anxiety).

  What was the point of all that?

  December 17th: nothing.

  It’s simpler. And it means, all in all, happy days without history.

  (Does that mean that I was less happy or more tormented or … etc., etc., when I wrote in these notebooks almost every day? I don’t think so.)

  Monday, 22 January 1962

  These past few days I’ve come very near to destroying these notebooks. I’m a bit ashamed of them. I wonder what forced me to write them.

  Did it correspond to a period of rather poor health? The fact is that for almost two years I haven’t felt at home in my skin, to use an expression I’ve often applied to my characters, with frequent dizzy spells at certain times of the day. If I haven’t entirely got rid of them, I feel better, no longer worried. Have I simply passed through a sort of change of life?

  Whatever it was, I think with a certain embarrassment of these notebooks whose pages I’ve been pleased to blacken. What have I really said? I don’t know and I don’t want to know.

  What would humiliate me most would be to have unconsciously wound up taking myself seriously. Is this the case? Have I fallen into the trap of so many of my colleagues whom I see pontificating on television and in the columns of the newspapers, on literary juries, and elsewhere?

  If so, I hope it’s over and over for good now that I’ve regained my balance.

  As for not destroying these pages … I’m certain it’s not because I attach importance to whatever comes from my pen.

  But primarily, some day this may show my children that I’ve had my weaknesses like everybody else; then who knows if, tempted to fall into the same pit again, it won’t be enough to cast my eyes over a few of these pages to cure myself?

  I’m not sure of anything, but if I had to make a quasi-medical diagnosis I would say that for about a year and a half I haven’t been altogether myself, that I allowed myself to be troubled by various questions – ageing, for example – to which there is no answer, and that finally, instead of keeping to my profession of novelist, I have not always avoided the temptation to philosophize.

  This love for the four walls of my study, for long solitudes with my books, is not like me, and I am almost certain that it had a basis of anxiety.

  Grippe – a very slight grippe, almost a voluptuous one – has kept me from writing my first novel of the year in January. In contrast to what happened last year, or what might have happened, this didn’t bother me. I’ll begin at the end of the month.

  To give each thing its due importance. Have I, at long last, got there? I hope so, and if I don’t write ‘The End’ here it’s more because of superstition, because I believe I really am cured.

  Living without notebooks and without mirrors, except for shaving!

  So long as I haven’t made my family suffer during this time. And if I’ve upset them, ask their pardon!

  P.S. If some day I add something to these notes, I promise to put it in context, to write at the top: ‘Second Crisis’ – or ‘Relapse’.

  Saturday, 10 February

  Oh no! I’ll write neither ‘Second Crisis’ nor ‘Relapse’. I even wonder if I ought not to write ‘End of Crisis’ or, in case I should go on with these notebooks, ‘Family Chronicle’.

  Events that are important only to us but that are of the first order have just come to a head in the last three days, and I’m not sure if the preceding year wasn’t disturbed for me by unconscious anticipation of them.

  We just decided, suddenly, in a few hours, D. and I, not only to leave Echandens but to build – an idea that has often tempted me in the course of my life. The next day, we had already chosen land, an architect, and we go to the notary on Monday the 12th, the day of my official birthday, my fifty-ninth.

  A new house, from top to bottom, made for us, conceived for us, for our life and our children’s.

  I’m very excited about it, too much so to talk about it now. But, once more, if I had to make a diagnosis, I wouldn’t discard the idea that all the fermentation of the past twelve to eighteen months reflected in these notebooks had this unconscious need for renewal as its deepest source.

  We’ll see if I’ve succeeded.

  Friday, 16 March 1962

  La Belle Époque! That’s an irrelevant aside. No doubt it’s been said a hundred times. I just felt it very strongly, which is not the same thing. Just now, putting Johnny to bed, I was looking at the Canal Saint-Martin by Bernard Buffet in his room.

  Today it gives the impression of a venerable old Paris, sentimental, picturesque. But in fact it is the picture of an iron footbridge across the hard metallic gates of a lock, a canal in straight lines. Six-storey houses. Two with eight storeys. A century ago, this was still countryside. Footbridge, lock, eight-storey buildings must then have passed for the height of modernism, of the ‘life of tomorrow’.

  When I was a child, what was called ‘la Belle Époque’ was the Second Empire. When I was twenty, it was the period of 1900 to 1914. ‘Before the war’ they said, too.

  Now, ‘la Belle Époque’ is the one I lived as a young man, 1925–1930.

  It has even begun to extend to 1939. And young people who say ‘before the war’ mean the Second World War.

  And people talk about the cruelty, the inhumanity, the implacability of ‘the machine’ as once they talked about the first trains, the first cars, the first aeroplanes, which we feel so sentimental about today.

  As the ‘terrible’ skyscrapers in New York will make us sentimental in a few years, will appear as gently, humanly picturesque to us as the iron footbridge and the six- or eight-storey houses on the Canal Saint-Martin.

  This for my children, who will one day smile at our aerolites and the little metal spheres we send into space – which to them will be the suburbs of the earth.

  Odd that officials, chiefs of state, continue to live and to receive one another in the palaces of another era, the Kremlin, Versailles, the Élysée, the White House, Buckingham Palace … as if they wanted to escape into the picturesque, however provisional, preferring the very old which, by virtue of its antiquity, has become ‘noble’.

  There are always people around us who live in ‘la Belle Époque’.

  12 April 1962

  A week of television. Saw part of a Buñuel film, among others. Marvellous images. Thought of Gerelhrode (?), who just died. There are two kinds of artists. Total rebels, the irrational ones, who are against everything without distinction, and others who arrive at a certain acceptance without being duped. Curious that all those in the first category whom I’ve met are psychiatric cases. So? Where does that put acceptance?

  Friday, 15 February 1963

  9.30 in the morning/32nd day

  A whole month, my darling. Thirty-one days we have been apart. And I, from the first heart-rending day, I’ve had the temptation to take this notebook up again and write in it
every morning and night.

  If I haven’t done so, it’s because it would have been too sad, and these sadnesses must leave no traces behind them, no scars. No, later I only want to remember your courage, and also the rediscovery I have made of you, which may fill this emptiness I struggle against.

  Not a true void, since I feel myself nearer to you than ever. It is rather a physical emptiness I strive to fill by occupying myself with the children and, on a more modest scale, with the house, waiting for the time to hurry to Prangins. Now I can tell you – for when you read this short note you will be well again – it has often been difficult for me to keep up a show

  (First interrupted by your telephone call, then by a journalist. I’m beginning again at eleven fifteen.)

  … of good humour. I haven’t even the right to talk to you about your return, for I feel that you exert all your strength not to precipitate it, and I don’t want to make your task even more difficult.

  Actually this note is useless. I am sure you are going through the same trials that I am, that you too, at certain hours, have to make an effort not to weep and that you can’t always keep your voice steady, even on the telephone – and you have to force yourself to smile when we leave each other at five o’clock.

  This separation wasn’t necessary to prove to us that we need to be together. For a month I have lived in a world that seems artificial to me. I know that it’s the end.

  Another few days, a week or ten days, perhaps, if not less. I won’t ask you again if the doctor has been to see you, because you would come to share my impatience and would lose the benefit of the enforced rest.