When I Was Old (Penguin Modern Classics) by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

Tuesday, 3 January 1961

11 o’clock in the morning

It’s raining. The children are making music in the playroom. D. is in her boudoir. The secretaries are back in the office. Life has resumed its normal course after the holidays.

My last paragraph yesterday made me go back to the past. When Marc was born, in 1939, I was living in Nieul-sur-Mer, five or six kilometres from La Rochelle, one kilometre across the fields from La Richardière, where I had lived from 1932 to 1935, if I’m not mistaken.

As always, the truth is more complex. I had been living nearly six months of the year, sometimes more, in Porquerolles, in a small house oddly flanked by a minaret, and it was in that minaret overlooking the port that I had arranged my study. I had a fishing boat, with a pointed bow, which I had had built in Cagnes-sur-Mer, as many nets as a fisherman, and a sailor who spoke pirate’s slang (of Neapolitan origin) named Tado.

In 1935, returning from a trip around the world (or 1936?), I rented and furnished, according to the taste of the decorators of the period, a conventional modern apartment in Neuilly at 3 Boulevard Richard-Wallace opposite the park of Bagatelle.

I had also rented the Château de la Cour-Dieu, in the forest of Orléans, near Ingrannes. Actually, it was the priory of a ruined Cistercian abbey. I had taken my horses, sulky, buggy, etc., there.

I had bought a clearing, a few kilometres away in the middle of the forest, with a dilapidated farm in it, with the idea of building the house of my dreams there, a huge one-storey house with a large interior court, stables, kennels, etc. I had even rented a hunting preserve and I was organizing beats twice a week.

Having wounded a young deer at the first beat and being forced to finish it off, I gave up shooting. But I was obliged, by contract, to hold two beats every week.

What else was I doing at the same time? Today I am flabbergasted by that dispersion which left me nothing but confused memories. Ah yes, I was dressing in English style, was buying my hats in London, wearing a bowler in the afternoon, going to Le Fouquet’s and, in winter, in Paris, I did not miss any chance to dress in tails and high hat. I was a member of the Yacht Motor Club of France, the Escholiers, the Sporting Club …

I don’t recognize myself very well in this picture. I was even wearing a pearl in my necktie!

One day, disgusted, unable to work in Paris, I left in a car for the North of Holland to find a simple house somewhere along the seashore where I could live like a peasant. I used to say, I remember: the house one would have liked to be one’s grandmother’s.

Travelled south, in short stages along the North Sea, then the Channel. After Normandy, Brittany, the Vendée, finally the outskirts of La Rochelle, which I had left five years earlier.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.