Free Act of Passion by Georges Simenon Page A

ordered it...'
    Later on I began to wonder if she didn't have an ulterior motive in insinuating herself into our house with the excuse of nursing Anne-Marie. It's stupid, I admit.
    Over and over again I have reviewed these questions with myself. True, from the purely material point of view, she had spent her mother's inheritance nursing her first husband, and she was now entirely dependent on her father. But the latter enjoyed a very handsome fortune which, at his death, even after being divided among five children, would represent an appreciable amount for each of them.
    I also told myself that the old man was erratic, and an autocrat, that people called him 'original' which, with us, means all sorts of thing. She would certainly have wasted her time trying to exercise her power over him and I am convinced that, in the house on the Place Boildieu, she was obliged to play second fiddle.
    Is that the key to the problem? I was not wealthy. My profession, as exercised by a man conscious of his limitations like myself, is not one which allows him to pile up a fortune or to live luxuriously.
    I am not handsome, your Honour. I went so far as to envisage more audacious hypotheses. My big peasant body, my big face glowing with health, even my ungainliness ... of course you know that certain women especially among the more emancipated ...
    But it wasn't that either! I know it now. Armande is normally sexed, or rather below normal.
    There remains only one explanation. She was living at her father's as she would have lived at a hotel. It was no longer her home.
    She entered our house by chance, by accident. And yet ... Let me explain. I want to get to the bottom of this question, even if it makes you shrug your shoulders. I have told you about her first visit, on the occasion of our first bridge party. I have told you that she saw everything, that she looked at everything with a little smile on her lips.
    One tiny incident recurs to me. My mother, showing her the empty drawing-room, said:
    'We will probably buy the drawing-room set which was shown last week in Durand-Weil's window.'
    Because I had vaguely mentioned it. A drawing-room set done in imitation Beauvais, chairs and settees with gilded legs.
    And although we barely knew her, although she had only just entered our house, I saw her nostrils quiver ever so slightly.
    I am sorry if I am idiotic, your Honour. But I tell you this: At that moment Armande knew very well that we would never buy that drawing-room set at Durand- Weil' s. I don't pretend there was any conspiracy. I don't affirm that she knew that she would marry me. I say know and I insist upon that word.
    Like all peasants I am used to animals. We have had dogs and cats all our life, so intimately mingled with it that when my mother wants to place some recollection, she says for example:
    'It was the year we lost our poor Brutus .. .'
    Or else:
    'It was the time the black cat had kittens under the wardrobe ...'
    And it often happens in the country that an animal starts following you, follows you and no one else, goes into the house with you, and then deliberately and with almost absolute assurance, decides that this house shall, henceforth, be his. In this way, for three years at Bourgneuf, we kept an old yellow half-blind cur, and my father's dogs were forced to put up with him.
    He was filthy besides, and I have often heard my father say:
    'It would be better to put a bullet through his head .. .'
    He never did. The animal, whom he had named Jaundice, died peacefully of old age — or, rather, horribly, since it took him three days to die, during which time my mother never stopped applying hot compresses to his belly.
    I, too, later on, sometimes thought:
    'It would be better to put a bullet through her head.'
    And I never did. It was someone else I...
    What I am trying to make you understand, your Honour, is that she came into our house in the most natural way in the world and that, also in the most natural way in the