Free When I Was Old by Georges Simenon Page B

Venice. We’re leaving Saturday morning, and I will go back to my usual thoughts again in my study.)
    The first man who declared himself king by divine right was no doubt neither a swindler nor even a man of ambition in the usual sense of the word. He believed himself king by divine right. Many around him believed that he was, some, most probably, pretended to believe it out of self-interest. And they then discovered that it was their duty to continue to pretend. Their duty to serve.
    Jesus must also have believed that he was the son of God. But he did come to doubt it.
    Perhaps this is the real tragedy. They all came to doubt. Their followers, their ‘faithful’, prevented them from reversing their stand.
    After that, many men believed themselves kings, emperors, or gods. Most of them were shut up in psychiatric hospitals. They came too late. They were imitators.
    The use the Russians have made of Pavlov’s theory is much discussed, including its use in surgery, in which they use conditioned reflexes to replace anaesthesia.
    For centuries the Catholic Church, and before it other religions (less systematically, less well), used the same principle.
    If you don’t believe, or if you doubt, pray. Recite sentences to a prescribed rhythm. Music. On your knees. Stand. On your knees. Bow your head …
    People talk about their brainwashing, too.
    In religion, it begins with baptism, catechism, first
communion, etc. On waking, at table, before and after meals, at noon, at night …
    ‘I am guilty.’
    By my birth as a human being, I am guilty, each day, at each hour. According to the day, the Gospel, the time of the year, I am torn between hope and despair, between paradise and hell, between evil and good.
    The child, the young man, the young woman, the father, the mother, the old man, the dying, all are guilty, and ceremonies absolve them, stage by stage.
    Bear children in pain … Earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow … The eternal flames of hell after suffering the death throes …
    A mechanism admirably designed to leave the faithful no time for recollection and barely time to live.
    Whatever you do, you’re guilty, and you must confess.
    If this mechanism had been set in motion cynically by a man or a group of men to ensure profit and power, it would show admirable intelligence and, as we say today, efficiency.
    But no! I don’t think so. That posits supermen.
    At each stage someone really believed it … And the edifice was erected little by little.
    The same goes for kingship, and also for the economic system.
    The day when de Gaulle no longer believes he is de Gaulle, he will be locked up.
    Napoleon at Saint Helena continued to believe he was Napoleon. He pestered his guards with ridiculous
demands, subjected his entourage to idiotic protocol, dictated a Memorial which defied good sense. As a result the English consider him one of the greatest men in History, and in Paris he occupies the insane mausoleum which he prepared for himself while still living.
    What would have happened if he had had second thoughts, or rather if he had allowed his doubt to show?
    He would have shared Hitler’s fate, no doubt. And I’m not sure that Hitler will not one day be apotheosized.
Same day
    It was Clérambault, I believe (I read Romain Rolland’s book thirty years ago), who, when war was declared in 1914, read the mobilization posters without emotional reaction. He was ‘against’. Then a military band went by and he noticed that he was falling in step with the soldiers.
    I’ve often had to resist. It’s the easy solution. There are moments when non-commitment passes for treason and when all the world is against one.
    Every ‘ideal’ ends in a more or less fierce struggle against those who do not share it. Even religions have inspired massacres.
    I feel myself nearer to the Cro-Magnon man than the man of the Renaissance, for whom life (the life of others, of course) counted so little. And even the Cro-Magnon man is