When I Was Old by Georges Simenon Page A

whom?
    I don’t know any more where I was heading. Probably nowhere. It’s unclear. This is connected with everything I’ve written up to now, but the connections are vague.
    For example, a decree is issued (not a law, a decree, because France has gone back to decrees) limiting the freedom of the press. Virtually no newspaper protests.
    The whole world knows that it is a financial cartel,
the Union of Mines, which this very morning stands in the way of peace in the Congo and creates a dangerous situation. The deception is obvious. It has been exposed in the papers, or at least in some of them. The Belgians, when forced to do so, gave freedom to the Congo. But one of their straw men, named Tshombe, declared that Katanga too was free.
    France claims that it is vital for her to keep Algeria.
    However, without Katanga, the Congo isn’t viable.
    It’s been almost a week since everyone agreed on this point and the UN was supposed to enter Katanga yesterday.
    It didn’t.
    You don’t risk a ‘holy war’ with the blacks in Africa.
    What happened? To what propaganda or blackmail do we owe this reversal?
    This also is connected with my Black Mugs from the coal mines of Liège at the beginning of the century, and with my travel experience yesterday.
    ‘It is harder for the rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.’
    I have often thought of that Gospel saying. I am often ashamed, as I was yesterday. I wonder if I don’t act dishonourably by raising my children in what is called luxury.
    If I were alone, wouldn’t I renounce it? I’ve been tempted to; I often still am. I live with my convictions and my instinct at odds. It is possible that this causes me twinges of conscience. Anyway it makes me uneasy. I make peace with my conscience, like the rest of the
world, telling myself that otherwise I couldn’t work, that I’m not harming anyone, that at this stage of the evolution of the world, it’s natural that …
    It isn’t true. And it’s just because others make the same compromises that …
    On the other hand I know that equality does not exist, that a semblance of equality is possible only by levelling inequalities. I recognize the biological necessity of a natural solution which this equality is about to abolish.
    However, this is not enough to set me at ease. I write this in a manor house built for a seventeenth-century family, for an almost all-powerful bailiff, since there are three prisons at the far end of the courtyard. And, for three years now, I have gone to the greatest trouble to make each room perfect, each wall beautiful to the eye, each piece of furniture a little marvel.
    It’s still allowed. By whom?
Afternoon
    Perhaps this too is connected with what goes before. Lying down for a short nap, a flash of the kind of place for which I have most nostalgia came to me. There aren’t many left in the world. Thirty years ago in Equatorial Africa, in the South Seas, it was called a general store. I know they have changed since. One still finds a few, under the name of Trading Posts, in some obscure corners of the United States and Canada.
    There men who live more or less in isolation within a ten to a hundred kilometres’ perimeter come once a
week, once a month, or twice a year to buy whatever is needed in their life. Matches, for example. Gasoline or carbide, storm lamps, soap, fishhooks or cartridges, wool blankets, rough clothing, leather or rubber boots, thread, needles …
    Merchandise is piled up in casks, in barrels, in cases. It hangs from the ceiling. There is liquor to be had there too, of course.
    Necessities. Not things you’re made to buy because someone needs to sell them. Today, a French minister announced that each Frenchman should eat three more kilos of tomatoes this year than in previous years to prevent a slump. (Thirteen kilos instead of ten!)
    Two wars, more precisely two occupations, have taught me the true value of provisions,