Free When I Was Old by Georges Simenon Page A

other hand, of benefiting from their advice.
    But now I’m sure of one thing: towards the age of twenty, when I was beginning to write popular novels and stories to earn a living, writing in the evening, for myself, pages that remained unpublished, it occurred to me to want to work in peace, without material ambition. I would have liked to be given so much a month for life, regulating my time, taking care of my health, etc., and I would have written with no worry. I would have been ready, at that period, to give up my literary rights for such an arrangement. And I wouldn’t have asked for luxury. A decent life with a modicum of comfort in a modest neighbourhood. So I wasn’t materially ambitious. Did I become so later on? I suspect so. A house mouse and a field mouse at the same time.
Same day, afternoon
    Still on the subject of cynicism. I think that a king believes, or rather used to believe, he was king by divine right, used to believe in his mission; in the necessity, in the name of his country or dynasty, to fight his enemies, indeed even members of his family. The Pope ends by believing himself Pope. The general believes in the necessity of sacrificing a hundred thousand men in a
battle. Truman believed in his right to drop an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
    I once knew a gentleman farmer, a young thirty-year-old count, who owned a huge manor and several farms. He had just married a girl who was not an aristocrat but who brought him twenty-five or twenty-eight farms as dowry. He bought his clothes at bargain stores and they lived penuriously in a château crammed with treasures. I remember some details. Next to a telephone which might be used by the rare guests, there was a saucer and a sign: ‘Please deposit X francs for each call.’ This was during the war. One could not make long-distance calls. So a call was very cheap.
    One day we were talking about marrying for love, and he expressed himself frankly.
    ‘This is something forbidden to us. We have received a heritage from our ancestors. We are only trustees during our lifetime. We must pass it on intact, and if possible increased, to our heirs.’
    He was sincere; he ate little even when he was hungry. Though he was a young man, and this was not in the last century, but in 1942.
    He did the marketing himself; after having ordered fish for his wife and himself, he asked for fish that was less fresh for the servants.
    He saw no harm in it.
    We speak of conscience which alerts us to distinguish between good and evil. How can it vary from place to place and period to period?
    My count had an easy conscience. So did Truman.
Also the cannibals whom I’ve met in equatorial forests. It’s only the sense of sin that creates the sin, the taboos of the place and the period.
    Once written down that way, it looks idiotic. Nevertheless my idea, confused enough, it’s true, is that in the last analysis each one believes in the necessity of what he does, or in its usefulness …
    One kills one’s enemies in war. The Pope blesses cannons and armies. But if an individual murderer, let us say, is a schizophrenic, aren’t all men his enemies?
    This has been said so much better, so often!
    Why does one persist in living and in thinking, in teaching others to think ‘as if’?
    But who is ‘one’, since those who invent morals, who teach them, who define them or impose them, believe or end by believing in them?
    Nixon really believes himself the champion of the United States, de Gaulle the rebuilder of France. Nobody locks them up. If they were not their own dupes at the beginning, I would swear they have become so.
    Like my count, with his collection plate by the telephone and his spoiled fish for the servants.
    In short, no tyrant and no victim. Only victims. This is almost what I wanted to say. Only almost.
Thursday, 4 August
    (The rest, and, I hope, the end of this subject, which is beginning to sound more and more like vacation
homework. In fact it is, since we’re still in