If ever a novelist drew on real life to fire his imagination, step forward Belgian author and inveterate bed-hopper Georges Simenon. His particularly tangled sexual escapades provided autobiographical elements in this particular tale of love, jealousy, betrayal, human frailty and ménages à trois – culminating in murder and one final fatal act.
Simenon chased women determindly all his life (born Liège, Belgium, 1903, died Lausanne, Switzerland, 1989), claiming many thousands of encounters, a number boosted considerably by his paid relief with prostitutes. He married twice and each time brought employees into the family home whom he bedded.
Régine Renchon, a Liège art student then painter, was his first wife from 1923 to 1950, and in 1925 in Normandy they met and hired Henriette Liberge, 17, a fisherman’s daughter, as a live-in housemaid. Simenon named her “Boule” and it was not until 1944, apparently, that Régine found out about their affair and he confessed to numerous others, including, for instance, with the American-French negress entertainer Josephine Baker in 1926-27.
Fenton Bresler tells in his Simenon biography how the author, while affianced to Renchon, was staying in a Paris hotel, heard a chambermaid cleaning shoes in the corridor, and, feeling lustful, promptly went out, lifted her skirt and did the deed – while she continued brushing away – to which she merely said, “Oh, Monsieur!”
Apocryphal? Perhaps not, because a similar wham-bam happens with his housemaid Lucile in “Letter to My Judge”. The protagonist, a Doctor Charles Alavoine, in a fairly typical Simenon scene, pushes Lucile back onto a corner of the kitchen table early one morning. The compliant girl “never derived any pleasure from it. She was simply content to give me the thrill I wanted”. Alavoine sometimes made love to her “before she even had time to put down a shoe she was polishing and which she kept comically in her hand”. Casual sex was easily attained in the Simenon canon, and, according to his tally, in real life.
Georges and Régine agreed to stay married for the sake of their son. Then in New York in 1945 he met Denyse Ouimet, a 25-year-old French-Canadian, and they coupled the same day. Simenon hired her as a secretary and she was installed in a log cabin in the grounds of the Simenon home, these days a chalet in a Canadian ski resort
By all accounts, Renchon had learned to curb her jealousy and was content to let the whole thing work its way through. But she was asked for a divorce after Ouimet became pregnant in 1949. He and Ouimet married in 1950 and had three children but his passion cooled. Then, in Switzerland, Ouimet hired Teresa Sburelin as a personal maid but Simenon seduced her too.
Sburelin took Ouimet’s place in all but name as his wife and mistress of the home. He and Ouimet split permanently in 1964 but never divorced, and she lived in a psychiatric clinic.
Simenon fictionalised the goings-on, especially with Ouimet, in the novels “Trois chambres à Manhattan” (“Three Bedrooms in Manhattan”) and “Lettre à mon juge” (“Letter to My Judge”), both 1947. “Letter to My Judge” in particular follows the path, with Alavoine, married to Armande, bringing his lover Martine into the home as housekeeper.
Earlier, after earning his diploma, the doctor had taken up a practice in the little town of Ormois, where he married Jeanne Marchandeau, the sweet, respectable daughter of a widowed doctor. She was ill for at least three months after their first daughter was born and died two hours after a second birth, another girl. They had been together for four years, during which time and afterwards Alavoine was seeing the mayor’s maid, Laurette.
It was following Jeanne’s death that Alavoine’s mother hired Lucile. After two years as a widower and an “incident” with a teasing woman patient in the surgery, mother shifted her son to a practice in the town La-Roche-sur-Yon. Here he met Armande, the rather imperious daughter of a squire, Hilaire de Lanusse. She was a widow and moved in to the doctor’s home at her initiative as an unpaid nurse to care for his sick daughter.
The inevitable happened. And so, Alavoine was now living seemingly contentedly with his own medical practice, his doting mother. two nice daughters from his first marriage and his second wife Armande The house was gradually becoming more comfortable and elegant, his patient list was growing, he’d learned to play bridge decently, they’ve bought a car and played tennis; little joys, banal satisfactions.
But after five or six years, “There came a moment, quite simply, when I started to look around me with new eyes and see a town that looked foreign to me, a pretty town, very neat, very light, very clean, where everyone greeted me affably. So why did I have a feeling of emptiness?” What was he doing there? Who were they, his wife, his daughters?
Then after 10 years with Armande he went to in Nantes to see a patient for an urgent operation and met Martine, a secretary. They danced, drank and made love the first night, so he put her in a La-Roche-sur-Yon hotel, brought her home to lunch with his family, gave her the guest bedroom until he found her an apartment, then made her his untrained assistant.
Alavoine never really loved his two wives but it was different with Martine. He became breathless with anxiety lest she met someone else, feverish, heart pounding, needing her like the air he breathed. He needed to find out everything about her, becoming tormented by her previous lovers, her ghosts. He couldn’t accept this other earlier Martine, and started beating and insulting her in brutish fits of rage. She understood, she loved him and she accepted it.
He left Armande and took a practice with Martine in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a working-class suburb of Paris. And now, in a prison cell for life, he wants to explain in a long letter to examining magistrate Monsieur Ernest Coméliau, why he had to strangle her.
Alavoine opens his letter, “My dear Judge, I would like one man, just one, to understand me, and I really hope that man can be you”. Alavoine says he and Comélieu have things in common: “Basically, we belong to a more or less cultivated middle class that supplies the country with civil servants, doctors, lawyers, magistrates and often with deputies, senators and ministers.” “We are almost the same, you and I”. They could have become friends.
When he strangled her, “I saw her eyes open, I saw the first look she gave me, which was a look of terror, then immediately another, a look of resignation and release, a look of love… Don’t you understand that I released her? It wasn’t her I killed. It was the other one.” He was neither mad nor sick. Did they aim too high for a love forbidden to human beings?
“The only reason I have written you this long letter is so that the day I finally let go, someone may gather our heritage, so that my Martine and her love do not die completely. We went as far as possible. We did all we possibly could. We wanted the totality of love. Goodbye, Judge.” His act was premeditated, he won’t appeal against his life sentence.
Here is a new translation of “Lettre à mon juge”. It is Simenon at his most intense, a dark psychological account of a man overcome by buried passions, the pace gathering as the reader is almost rushed along to the tragic fates of both Martine and her possessed lover.
