When I Was Old by Georges Simenon

too close. The cave paintings show us that man was already proud of killing – animals, to be sure, but still killing. One must go even further back.
    A family of gorillas in a film gave me the deepest thrill, and I was not thinking of Darwin, I was struck by a sort of grave nobility.
    No animal called wild has yet gone hunting in order to line up a large number of ‘trophies’
for pleasure.
    Does one see a lion proudly aligning thirty or forty antelopes which it will not eat?
    I know all this is trite, confused. The basic truths have been formulated time and again, and excellently. So well, indeed, that I mistrust them. All proverbs contradict each other. So do the Gospels, and the Church is so well aware of it that voluminous tomes try to prove that these contradictions aren’t contradictions.
    La Bruyère’s
Les Caractères
, which are so admired, seem to me false because they try to condense the truth.
    Intelligence explains all. Falsely. As if it were arithmetic.
    I prefer to grope around a little idea until I
feel
some answer. But, if that more or less succeeds in my novels, I have the feeling here that I’m getting nowhere. More serious, I continue to seek for something without ever feeling satisfied.
    No doubt I was wrong to begin this notebook, which risks infecting me with a passion for reflection. This would be catastrophic. It reassured me a bit that these pages are without importance and that I have the option of burning them.
    It amuses me, though, to blacken them and to see them accumulate.
Echandens, Sunday, 7 August
    In my study again. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve stayed in my study (I should say the first study where …) outside working hours. Is it age? Is it the study itself that seems really ‘mine’?
    Yesterday, by train, Venice–Lausanne, with my wife, Johnny, Marie-Jo, and a young neighbour who has been nurse for the two children during our vacation. Five people. I had reserved the six seats of a first-class compartment. But the train was jammed as the ones in cartoons, and as only Italian trains are. The corridors filled with travellers and luggage, trunks, bags, parcels of all kinds, with old men, with children. There seemed to be several layers, and it was impossible to get to the washrooms, which were blocked off by passengers and full of luggage besides.
    There was an empty seat in our compartment. Children were standing in the corridor. I knew that Marie-Jo would be train-sick during the trip and would have to lie down. But, even without that, we still wouldn’t have offered the seat to anyone. All the time I had a bad conscience. At the same time I was furious that I was forced to travel under such bad conditions.
    I’m no longer able to stay in a hotel where I haven’t a private bath and perfect service; I can’t even eat in a bistro.
    Why? As a child, I didn’t have running water in my room, or any toilet except down in the courtyard. I suffered from the odour of chamber pots and pails. We
washed ‘down there’ only once a week, on Saturday, in the kitchen, in a washtub. A shirt and pair of socks a week.
    In those days, miners left work without having taken a shower, with black faces and white eyes. They called themselves Black Mugs.
    Today they have showers, and often own their own homes.
    An English MP said recently on television:
    ‘What weakens the Labour Party is the worker’s acquisition of property. He has no more wants and he becomes conservative …’
    Not only have the people become conservative, but they have adopted bourgeois morals and taboos.
    At one time, it seems to me, the two extremes of society, the little man and the great landowners or the aristocrats, more or less escaped the narrow morality of the middle classes. Then the lower rose, the higher descended. The middle class expanded on both sides and, with it, bourgeois taboos.
    Everyone owns something, a bank account, a house, a car … So everyone has something to defend.
    Against