Back the Classics #6

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic in Translation. The French title of this short novel is La fenêtre des Rouet. It was first published 1945, just after the horror of Occupied France, a time when people could understandably connect with a story of a life unlived. This novelette was Englished in 1992 by John Petrie.

Across the Street – Georges Simenon

In the cramped accommodation of an apartment house that belongs to her family, Dominique Salès lives a narrowed and insipid existence. She has had to rent out a room in her Paris apartment to a young couple, the Cailles, whose nighttime frolics disturb the 40-year-old virgin. Across the street is the apartment of the Rouets, who made millions in the wire business, with the father and mother on the third floor, the son and daughter-in-law on the second.

Watching for the smallest changes in her neighborhood, Dominique Salès spies on the Cailles and the Rouets, thus making a kind of a proxy life. One day, she observes that Antoinette Rouet, returning home, finds her invalid husband dying. Instead of getting help, she pours the drops of his medicine into the pot of one of the plants in the apartment. He dies.

Dominique is shocked enough to send Antoinette poison pen letters. She plugs along until the Cailles tell her they have to leave, taking their exuberant, vital happiness out of the apartment. So Dominique Salès makes a big decision.

Simenon candidly presents this story as one of existential failure. Dominique, in a sense, did not have a chance, being raised to be lady by her mother and browbeaten while taking care of her mean useless father until his death. But she choose to say "No, thanks" to life. She didn’t have to waste her time with sewing and little errands. She could have connected with other people if she had remembered what we all know but tend to forget because it’s more convenient to be irresponsible – that everybody is living a life as vivid and real to them as ours is to us; that we need to be kind to others because we need others to be kind to us; and that as Aldous Huxley had a character once say, “the only visible reason why we exist in the world is to love and be loved.”