The Widow Read Free

behind. The girl told Madame Simenon, who laughed it off as being typically Georges. Witnessing this drollery, another serving girl wondered aloud, “ On passe toutes a la casserole? ” (“So everyone has a go at this pot?”)
    In great contrast to the apparent coherence, the fatness, of his own life are the insufficiencies in the lives of his characters, who are usually strong enough to kill but seldom resourceful enough to survive. And it must be said that having spent many decades vigorously writing and living in style, his last years, twenty-three of them—after the suicide of his beloved daughter—were spent in a kind of solitary confinement and protracted depression in a poky house with his housekeeper, sitting in plastic chairs because, among his phobias, he held the belief that wooden furniture harbored insects.
    A number of Simenon’s novels, among them The Venice Train, Belle, Sunday , and The Negro , can be grouped around the general theme malentendu or cross-purposes—the title of the Camus play that is Simenonesque in its cruelty. The Widow is firmly in this category, though its descriptions of violence and sexuality are unusually graphic for Simenon; and it is one of the few Simenons with a strong woman character in it. The woman in Betty and the woman narrator of November are similarly strong. But his women tend to be one-dimensional, guileful, opportunistic, coldly practical, unsentimental, or else easy prey. Tati the widow is a peasant who knows her own mind and possesses an ability to size up strangers.
    The action takes place in the Bourbonnais, the dead center of France, in a hamlet by the canal that joins St. Amande with Montluçon—apart from omitting the “e” from Amande, Simenon is very specific in his provincial geography.
    An odd solecism occurs in the first paragraph of the novel. A man is walking down a road that is “cut slantwise every ten yards by the shadow of a tree trunk”—Simenon at his most economical in precise description. It is noontime, at the end of May. The man strides across these shadows. Then his own shadow is described: “a short, ridiculously squat shadow—his own—slid in front of him.” The sun seems to be shining from different angles in the space of two sentences, creating two sorts of shadow. It is perhaps not a riddle. Simenon hated to rewrite.
    The young man boards the bus outside St. Amande, bound for Montluçon. He has nothing on him, no impedimenta, no obvious identity. “No luggage, no packages, no walking stick, not even a switch cut from the hedge. His arms swung freely.” Among the women returning from the market he is a stranger, though for the reader of Simenon he is so familiar as to be an old friend: the naked man, someone at a crossroads, a bit lost, a bit guilty, on the verge of making a fatal decision.
    The widow Couderc sizes him up, seeing something in him no one else sees. Later we understand why: he somewhat resembles her son, a waster and ex-con who is in the Foreign Legion. She sees that this bus passenger is going nowhere, that he has nothing; she understands him and she wants him.
    In this beautifully constructed first chapter, with a subtle building of effects, the young man notices the woman, too, and in the midst of the nosy chattering market women, the two “recognized each other.” He also needs her.
    The woman, Tati, gets off the bus, and soon afterward the young man, Jean, does the same. Jean asks if he can give her a hand with her bundles, a gesture she had been expecting ever since their eyes met. He moves in with her. A few days later, on a Sunday, after she returns from church—a nice touch—she pours him a few drinks and they end up in bed.
    She is not beautiful, but she is tough, even fearless, the sort of indestructible peasant who would feel at home at the table in van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters . Unloved and frumpy, even slatternly,