Spain. Sovereign (1700-1746 : Philip V) - The King of Spains protest, relating to the South-Sea Company, not printed with the Convention Treaty

Marnham, Patrick, 1943

This book was produced in EPUB format by the Internet Archive.

The book pages were scanned and converted to EPUB format automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and is somewhat susceptible to errors. The book may not offer the correct reading sequence, and there may be weird characters, non-words, and incorrect guesses at structure. Some page numbers and headers or footers may remain from the scanned page. The process which identifies images might have found stray marks on the page which are not actually images from the book. The hidden page numbering which may be available to your ereader corresponds to the numbered pages in the print edition, but is not an exact match; page numbers will increment at the same rate as the corresponding print edition, but we may have started numbering before the print book's visible page numbers. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this book will be useful to you.

The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library and to promote universal access to all knowledge. The Archive's purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. The Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages, and provides specialized services for information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Created with abbyy2epub (v.1.7.6)

mm

V

fx

" .-) ^ v '

Georges Simenon, author of the Maigret stories, was the best-selling writer in the world. He wrote 193 novels and his work was praised by Celine, T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Fellini and Henry Miller. Andre Gide described him as the greatest novelist we have had this century.

But Simenon was a man haunted by sexual jealousy and by phantoms which he could only exorcise in his writing. In his youth he was tempted by a life of crime. After an impoverished childhood in Liege he left school at the age of fifteen during the German occupation and started dealing in the black market, distilling poisonous, homemade chartreuseand consorting with prostitutes. Two of his friends were convicted of murder and a third died in mysterious circumstances. Chance saved Simenon from a similar fate. He moved to Paris where, under the patronage of Colette, he was launched on his career as a popular writer in the Montparnasse of the 1920s. Then he started work on the long sequence of psychological or dark novels which were to make his literary reputation.

Simenon was a man of great generosity and charm and a devoted father to his four children, though his own life was overshadowed by his mothers treatment of him as a child. He was also an occasional alcoholic and a lifelong philanderer who, during two marriages, seduced women on a heroic scale, among them Josephine Baker. Fearing he might be suspected of collaboration during the Second World War he emigrated to the United States where he began a tumultuous relationship with his second wife. For a time he lived in a menage-a-quatre in Arizona. On his return to Europe his life took a tragic turn, the end of his marriage being followed by the suicide of his only daughter. He spent his last years in seclusion in Lausanne writing outrageously unreliable memoirs.

Patrick Marnham, in the first portrait since Simenons death, sets out to explain the connection between the writers childhood, his lifelong fascination with crime and the tormented fiction he wrote. He has followed the story from Liege and Paris to Switzerland, talking to those who shared Simenons life and drawing on his letters, papers and writing to produce this shrewd, witty and thoroughly captivating biography.

THE MAN WHO WASNT MAIGRET

ROAD TO KATMANDU

FANTASTIC INVASION: DISPATCHES FROM AFRICA LOURDES, A MODERN PILGRIMAGE THE PRIVATE EYE STORY

SO FAR FROM GOD: A JOURNEY TO CENTRAL AMERICA TRAIL OF HAVOC: IN THE STEPS OF LORD LUCAN

NOMADS OF THE SAHEL (Minority Rights Group) NIGHT THOUGHTS (from The Spectator) ed.

A PORTRAIT OF GEORGES SIMENON

Patrick Marnham

BLOOMSBURY

First published 1992

Copyright 1992 by Patrick Marnham The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd, 2 Soho Square, London W1V 5DE

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0 7475 08844

10 98765432 1

Typeset by Florencetype Ltd, Kewstoke, Avon Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

Illustrations vii

Authors Note ix

Chronology xi

Prelude - Lausanne 1989: Death of a man with no profession 1

PART I The Scene of the Crime 7

1 Liege 1903: Preliminaries to the death of

a man with no profession 9

2 The death of a childhood 38

3 The boy columnist 55

4 The death of a journalist 74

5 The death of Kleine 93

PART II The Idiot Genius 105

6 Manger etfaire Vamour 107

7 A certain idea of France 128

8 Death of a playboy 148

9 The commissioner for refugees 182

10 Muddle, fear, treachery and deceit 202

PART III A Sickness and a Curse 227

11 The trap shuts 229

12 Shadow Rock Farm 252

13 The act of hate 272

14 The man in the glass cage 295

Appendix 323

Bibliography 325

Notes on sources 325

Selected works of Georges Simenon 326

The Maigret series 326

The novels 329

Autobiographical writings 333

Additional fiction and non-fiction sources 334

Selected secondary sources 334

Index 337

Following page 76

1. Grandfather Simenon

2. The Simenons of Outremeuse

3. Wilhelm Briill

4. Maria Brull

5. Desire and Henriette with Georges and Christian

6. Georges Simenon with his class

7. Liege street scene

8. Georges Simenon and two other altar boys

9. Lola Resnick

10. Frida Stavitskai'a

11. 53 rue de la Loi

12. Simenon aged 15

13. Joseph Demarteau III