Classic Adaptation.
Based on the 1942 novel by Georges Simenon, La Vérité sur Bébé Donge was made into a 1952 movie starring two stars
of the French screen Danielle Darrieux and Jean Gabin. Noir to the core, the
movie is harsher and more cynical about marriage than a Hollywood movie of the
Fifties would’ve dared to be but it's still a movie and thus the novel’s nuances don't survive the script writers. Reviewers say that the husband’s character is made more detestable, the wife’s
character is made more victimized so the transformations to sympathetic and
desperate respectively are thrown into sharp relief for a mass audience that
wouldn’t get it otherwise. Such transformations are believable to us hardcore
readers only if the performers are credible so I wouldn't be surprised if Mlle Darrieux’ doe-eyed despair is wrenching and Gabin, whom I've seen but can't remember in what, convincingly pulls
off his realization he’s been clueless.
The Truth About
Bebe Donge – George Simenon (1942)
Just an ordinary Sunday in August, in their country house
in La Châtaigneraie, when Mrs. Donge, Eugenie called Bebe (Baby), uses arsenic to
poison Mr. Donge, François.
Nothing like attempted murder to force a would-be victim
into unwonted introspection. In the classic liminal space of the hospital, François
concludes that his consummate selfishness in the guise of devotion to work
caused him to ignore his wife and son. He also concludes that Bebe’s lack of response
to his many extra-marital adventures may have looked like indifference but
really her silence was out of pain and shame that her sexual coldness drove him away. François
thinks he may have been mistaken to believe she was what she seemed to be:
vain, distant, secretive, and possibly in a Sapphic relationship with a
neighbor everybody called The Old Mare, because of her horsey frame.
François wonders whether he may never have really loved
his wife. An idealized but deeply wounded love for him that she apparently lost
is the only explanation he can come up with for her motive. He ends up imagining that
she felt he was inflicting “mental cruelty,” a grounds for divorce her lawyer
says works in the US but not in France. Bebe telegraphically tells the police interrogators
“It was him or me ... .”
So about a third of the book is François’ going over
flashbacks and mulling over the big issues of his marriage. We readers have to
be wary about accepting François‘ self-recriminations since they may not be
based on a clear view of the situation. We have to wonder about Bebe, who is
reticent.
Her family was worldly: she and her sister Jeanne grew up
in Constantinople where her weak and submissive father worked in transportation
and her flashy brilliant mother was the informal hostess of the French embassy.
But her family was under stress: her father was a serial cheat and kept her
mother in the dark about everything; when her mother returned to France, she
became just an ordinary woman rather than a big fish in a small fishbowl, a
common ex-expatriate experience (trust me, I know).
Bebe is nostalgic for a childhood that she never had,
ideally protected from the inevitable adversity of the real world, from fathers
that lie and skulk and mothers that are not available. Bebe also has a teenager’s lofty conception of truth. Early in the marriage, she exacts a promise from François
that he will never keep anything from her. Any married person will tell you a
steady diet of the unvarnished truth from a partner is, shall we say, not
sustainable.
As for the frigidity, one doubts if in 1942 French women
had any options for treatment at all. So much unhappiness over sexual
incompatibility, especially when people had no clue how treat such issues. With
no intimacy with her husband, Bebe lives a hollow life, as if she has no reason
to exist but to dedicate hours to her personal appearance, initiate endless
interior decorating projects, and translate the English poets with The Old
Mare, all of which are activities her husband pays zilch attention.
If in fact François reveals himself incapable of love,
understanding and kindness towards his wife and the life in which she seeks to
exist, hard-headed readers wonder about the passive expectations and the complacent
stupor which characterize Bebe. In hospital when François asks his
sister-in-law Jeanne, in the first conversation about something important he
has with her, about Bebe’s motives, she bluntly tells him Bebe has always been
distant and secretive, nobody really knows her, and Bebe, like everybody else,
is responsible for her own happiness. Very much of this world and its simple
pleasures and pains, Jeanne urges François not to think so much, not unreasonable advice when dealing with unanswerable questions.
Simenon’s examination of the suffering of these two married people is precise and judgment-free. The naturalistic writing, the plain
vocabulary, gives a masterful power to the text. How relatable all this is depends on the reader.
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