protests that he is indifferent to his crime, but he is damaged, he is guilt-ridden, he is possessed, and when Tati begs him to stay and love her, he is helpless to do anything but smash her skull. âIt had been foreordained!â
In describing this lost soul and his desperate act, Simenon was reflecting the fatalism of his time. He wrote the book in a dark period, on the French coastâthe name âNieul sur Merâ is given at the end as its place of composition, a place near La Rochelle. France was at war, German occupation not far off, and doomsday seemed imminent. In this uncertain war, only violence or an act of passion gave meaning to the passage of time. Like Meursault, Jean is headed to certain executionâthe notion of it occurs to him throughout the last third of the novelâand he is the author of his fate. He had stumbled into an idyllic setting without at first realizing that it was not idyllic at all but an Eden that has become a snake pit of corruption matching his own loss of innocence.
Rereading the novel, one realizes that (as with most Simenons), Jean had been doomed from the first paragraph, when he walked through the shadows. And we can easily see why Simenon was so angry that Camus won the Swedish lotteryâbecause in novel after novel, Simenon dramatized the same sort of dilemma, the life with narrowing options (but always with subtle differences of plot, tone, location, and effects), the risk-taking of the man with nothing to lose, his vanity, his presumption, his willful self-destruction. Earlier, Jean yearns for commitment and for fate to intervene, but when he meditates on it (and ultimately gets his wish): âHe wanted something definite and final, something that offered no prospect of retreat.â Simenon seems to be talking to himself, sending another of his characters to his death in a world without happy endings.
âP AUL T HEROUX
THE WIDOW
1
A MAN WALKING . One man, on a stretch of road three miles long cut slantwise every ten yards by the shadow of a tree trunk, striding unhurriedly from one shadow to the next. As it was almost noon, with the sun nearly at its highest point, a short, ridiculously squat shadowâhis ownâslid in front of him.
The dead-straight road climbed to the top of a long slope, where it seemed to stop short. To the left there were crackling sounds in the wood. To the right, in the fields swelling like breasts, there was nothing but a horse a long way off, a horse drawing a cask mounted on wheels; and in the same field a scarecrow which might perhaps be a man.
At that moment the red bus was leaving St. Amand, where it was market day, forcing its way with blasts of the horn. At last it left the endless street of white houses and started along the two rows of roadside elms. It picked up one more woman, waiting with her umbrella up because of the sun. There was no room to sit. The woman did not think of setting down her baskets, but stood swaying between the seats, and staring like a sick hen.
âIt was Jeanineâshe was in the next boxâwho told me, and she even was disgusted ⦠And when Jeanineâs disgusted! â¦â
The driver sat impassively, wearing his official cap and his mauve tie rather askew, looking straight ahead at the dark lines striped across the road. No smoking. The sign was up. The cigarette stuck to his lip was out.
âI knowâ¦.â he uttered in the tone of one who knows what he is talking about.
And the big girl who, fifteen minutes before the bus was to leave had settled herself in the seat next to the driver, went on, punctuating her whispered story with giggles, âThere was Léon, the hairdresserâ¦. And Lolotte ⦠And a boy from Montluçon who works at the airplane factoryâ¦. Then there was Roseâ¦.â
âWhich Rose?â
âYou must know her. You meet her every day on the road, on a bicycle. Sheâs the daughter of the butcher at