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Yet Monsieur Norbert
Monde is anything but irresponsible, even if his initial actions suggest it.
First night in his dingy hotel he overhears an ugly row between a pair of young
lovers in the adjacent room. The man punches and kicks the woman, who grovels
at his feet, protests innocence, begs him to stay. The scene is raw and
electric, like something Monde himself might've participated in with his first
wife but never did. When the man leaves, Monde checks to see if the young woman
is alright; thus starts the strange relationship between Monde, the bourgeois
runaway, and Julie, the nightclub dancer... and runaway.
Beautifully written in
that slightly dysfunctional Georges Simenon way, with a subtle modal shifting
between exterior and interior narrative, present and past, that gives the
action a dreamy feel, whether Monde is in bed with Julie or sitting on a bench
on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, where this strange couple end up. There's
a sense of déjà vu within the action, as if Monde is reenacting a
past he has forgotten, or is now acting out a future that his past has fated.
Julie gets them both employment at a gambling club, the Monico -- she as a
dance hostess and sex bait, he as a hidden book-keeper and spy on both the
customers and workers (there's a similarity here to Little Frank's brothel
voyeurism in Simenon's roman noir Dirty
Snow). Monde is over-qualified for his job, but here, in the gray
borderland where crime and respectability can be one of a kind, no one asks
questions. Because Monde saved Julie's life, she repays him by enabling him to
find his true self.
Both are sympathetic
characters, and bond despite the disparity in age and class. Both are victims
-- Julie of a childish petty thief, and Monde of two marriages and two selfish
wives. Somehow they make it easy for one another to move on from the past, yet
the past isn't done with Monsieur Monde or the dopplegänger he assumes,
Monsieur Désiré. Strangely, when the police do come looking, it
isn't for Monde/Désiré, but rather for his first wife
Thérèse who is a habitué of the Monico as the companion of
a wealthy bloated American known as The Empress. Tragedy strikes when The
Empress ODs and Monde/Désiré has to rescue his former wife, now
an impoverished drug addict without a patron. No one would expect him to, yet
he bears no ill will towards her (or wife 2 back in Paris) despite the fact
that she walked out on him and the kids all those years ago to satisfy her
pornographic fantasies.
In a clever analogue
to Julie's debasement with her lover, Thérèse ends up on the
street grovelling at Monde's feet, begging him to get her another fix. Monde
helps her out, and what thanks does he receive? A bite on the hand.
'They had hardly
been together a quarter of an hour, a half hour at most, and she had already
degraded everything to the level of her own feminine mind.'
However, Monde becomes
a leader, takes care of business.
'He was a man who,
for a long time, had endured the human condition without being conscious of it,
as others endure an illness of which they are unaware.'
So, like a spell in
the Foreign Legion, his holiday in the gutter shakes him free of his cultural
and psychological somnabulism. But how does it all end? Better read this novel
and find out. Great characters, settings, scenes... and some powerful humanism
despite the selfishness and venality. Hard fiction with a heart, and as
relevant today as it was in 1945.
© LR
2015
Monsieur Monde
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