European RC #6

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2019.

French title: Le Bilan Malétras

First published: 1948

Translation: Emily Read, 1984

The Reckoning – Georges Simenon

Jules Malétras was born in poverty in Normandy in the 1890s. The port city of Le Havre was reduced to rubble by more than 100 bombings during WWII, so Malétras became an important and respected citizen of Le Havre by participating in the building boom after the war. Money, property, repute and comfort fail to make him content.

When he was poor, Malétras thought that everybody was like him, engaged in a struggle for the good things in life, a war of all against all. Despite his affluence, he assumed that honesty did not exist and that if people did not take the chance to lie, cheat, chisel, and steal, it was only because they were afraid of facing the music.

In contrast to happy rich bosses like Fezziwig, Malétras succeeded in business not because he had dealt with people, especially his employees, in a humane, respectful way. Becoming a self-made man on the backs of employees, he reduced subordinates to fawning and servility. After bullying people into becoming toadies, lest they lose their livelihood,  he despised them for being toadies.

He wasn’t less cynical and heartless in his family life, driving his first wife drink and becoming estranged from his daughter. He’s still in grief, though he himself does not recognize it as grieving, for the loss of a nineteen-year-old son of TB.

By 60 years of age, however, he had developed a bellyful of disgust at being placated and mollified so he sold the company and played the part of a local potentate. You’d think he’d be pleased in retirement with a new wife who has a touch of class and rank. He lives in a fancy new house and his time is totally his own.

But retirement is a desert for a man whose only activity in life was work, whose only connection with people was as a supervisor and boss and owner. He buys into a fish mongering business and works a couple hours as its clerk. He makes sure his partners quiver with obsequiousness. He watches old cronies playing cards, never even playing himself. He’s so bored in fact that he takes up with one of the two pitfalls for middle-aged men. No, not the bottle.

The nineteen-year-old. Dumb, disagreeable, demanding besides being a lousy dresser, scrawny Lulu laughs at his valuable gifts and wonders why Malétras has so little sexual interest in her. In reality, he’s just interested in having company, listens to her prattle and even plays cards with her and Joseph, who poses as her brother but is in fact her lover. 

Poor Lulu becomes grasping of better gifts and makes Malétras jealous by loose behavior with Malétras’ own son-in-law. In a fit of rage that his “innocent” dalliance has become sullied with avarice and cheating, he strangles Lulu after she repulses his demands.  Simenon deploys his usual irony, because Malétras is mostly completely uninterested in these games. Malétras is so detached during the act that Lulu worriedly asks him if she’s doing it wrong.

Having killed somebody pushes Malétras into the unfamiliar activity of introspection - change and its resulting realization that life is never going to be the same do that to middle-aged Simenonian males. Never before had Malétras questioned his own actions, motives, decisions, assumptions or preferences. He never gave a thought to his relationships with other people or their relationships with each other. Indeed, after an attack of angina pectoris, he finds that he does not have any fond memories to latch onto because he never savored the good things life when they happened to him. Indeed, the unexamined life, one devoid of gratitude or benevolence or respect or responsibility, isn’t worth living.