French title: Le
Riche Homme
First published: 1970
Englished: Jean Stewart, 1971
The Rich Man –
Georges Simenon
Neighborhood potentate Victor Lecoin is 45, the dangerous
age for Simenonian protagonists, liable to losing their heads when change
knocks on the door – or kicks the door in. Born poor, Victor has become the “rich
man” of the locality through sheer hard work and the determination to lead his
life as he sees fit. “You’re big, strong, and rich,” the madam of a homey
brothel tells him, “What more do you want?”
A lot more, though he is so estranged from himself that
he doesn’t realize it. Victor has the existential blues pretty bad and that’s
not good. Losing his mother at age 6, he has grown up without any affection. He
can’t talk to his father because born in about 1890 his father is of a
generation that endures rather than speaks. He can’t talk to his brother
because they are like oil and water, introvert and extrovert. He doesn’t make
any effort to talk to the local guys so they don’t make any effort to talk to
him. He married the local schoolmarm, but feels inferior to her because of his
own lack of education. For a long time, he and his wife have been mere “associates”
because they are never intimate. To appease his senses, so to speak, he goes on
sprees of drinking and frequenting with professionals and easy-going amateurs.
Victor doesn’t realize how lonely he is until one day a
new maid enters the house. Raised in an orphanage run by nuns, Alice is sixteen,
a shy country girl and already the victim of sexual abuse by her previous
employer. The local rubes, especially the female misogynists, blame her for “letting”
her victimizer grope her. Victor - staring into a void that money, prosperity, land,
health, and reputation can’t fill – loses his head, feeling strange feelings
like the desire to become one, to fuse with her. Is this love? Or just
confusion?
As in the other non-Maigret psychological whydunnits, the
drama is tight: all the action is limited to two or three settings, to a few
characters. I use the word “action” loosely since the plot does not advance at
the whim of incidents or twists but by progressive slippage, almost insensible.
We readers see the milieu, Victor’s narrow background, the cultural background
of blaming and shaming and hurting women for their own victimization. Victor is
thinking about getting his wife out of the way, but would he really do it? Little
by little, we feel that all this will end badly and it only remains to be seen
in what way, exactly, the bubble will pop ... and when it finally bursts,
Simenon, as is his way, still manages to surprise us. The characters are
utterly ordinary, their dreams trivial, their sins predictable, their cruelty
banal, but their tragedy existential.
Simenon lived for many years in La Rochelle, a coastal
city famous for fishing and mussels, and greatly appreciated the Vendée, in
western France and known for its long coastline and sandy beaches. It is hardly
surprising that he has set many of his novels in this beautiful region. This
novel, written in Epalinges, Switzerland, dates from 1970, making it one of the
last novels he wrote, before he decided to give up fiction for autobiography.
