The Night at the Crossroads

When Wilfrid Sheed succeeded Dwight Macdonald as film critic for Esquire in 1967 (try and let that marinate for a moment), he saw Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning at a revival house and complained that the print being exhibited was so encrusted with what he called “period fuzz” that it impaired his ability to fully appreciate its qualities. What Sheed meant by “period fuzz” is easy to figure out: it was the unrestored condition of film prints that had been banging around too long, enduring damage from the elements, from wear and tear, and from its copyright owners’ determination to squeeze every last penny out of it. 

If Sheed had seen the film that Renoir made the year before Boudu, called La Nuit du carrefour (The Night at the Crossroads), he would’ve run, screaming, from the theater. This film has, over the 89 years since its release, taken on a somewhat legendary status. It was evidently unavailable for viewing when André Bazin was writing his splendid monograph of Renoir, which he left unfinished at his death in 1958. (The book, which Bazin’s protegé François Truffaut called “the best book on the cinema, written by the best critic, about the best director,” contains an essay on Le Crime de Monsieur l’Ange that was written by Bazin the day before he died.) To make matters worse, Jean-Luc Godard, always a very emotional critic, hung this albatross around the film’s neck: 

The shots which ring out in the night, the roar of a Bugatti racing after the smugglers (a brilliant sequence speeding through the streets of the slumbering village), the dazed or shady looks of the inhabitants of the godforsaken hamlet. Winna Winfried's English accent and her old-fashioned eroticism. Pierre Renoir's drooping falcon's eye, the smell of the rain and the fields soaked by the mist, every detail, every second of every shot, makes La Nuit du Carrefour the only great French detective movie – in fact, the greatest of all adventure movies. 

Fortunately, this almost nonsensical notice was placed as a kind of afterthought in an appendix of Bazin’s book. The word for Night at the Crossroads is murky: murky in atmosphere, with which it practically drips, murky in its characterizations, with everyone – except the film’s hero – always trying to deceive one another. The film is also supposed to have suffered a loss of some of its finished scenes or else Renoir simply ran out of money, didn’t shoot all the scenes that are supposed to be missing and cobbled together as coherent a film narrative as he could. This might explain the film’s brevity, but not quite. 

The Simenon novel was published in 1931 and was the seventh novel to feature the lead character Inspector Maigret. It is distinguished by its establishment of atmosphere and its vividly-drawn characters. Renoir adapted the novel, not too faithfully, a year after its publication. 

At a benighted country crossroads, where a garage and two houses face one another rather precariously, a Jewish diamond dealer is found dead at the wheel of a car parked in the wrong garage. The owner of the garage, a Dane, Carl Andersen, with a black monocle in place of a left eye, is brought to Paris for a lengthy interrogation by Inspector Jules Maigret. Satisfied that Andersen isn’t withholding anything from him, Maigret decides to secure the scene of the crime and do his detecting at the crossroads itself.

Andersen’s interrogation lasted seventeen hours in the novel. Renoir marks the passage of time with shots of the street outside, of a newspaper kiosk where people ask first for the morning paper and later the evening paper. Georges Koudria’s thick accent as Carl is offset by Winna Winfried’s funny accent as his "sister" Else (an accent misidentified by Godard as “English” – the actress was born in Copenhagen). Simenon calls her a “cinema vamp,” and “She was the typical tart, ordinary and vulgar, healthy and cunning.” Maigret clearly finds her alluring, but only because he knows that nothing is what it seems. Michonnet and his fake respectability and his foolish wife. Oscar’s garage, to which Renoir returns time and again to show us merely the routine goings-on of every other garage, turns out to be a beehive of criminal activity. As Maigret discovers, it is nothing but a front for an elaborate fencing operation. 

The truly droll aspect of the story is that Carl Andersen, who was the first suspect in the murder of Goldberg, is actually the only innocent person at the crossroads. (He is really Else's husband.) Everyone else, Oscar, his wife and mechanics, the Michonnets, and, above all, Else, is culpable. Renoir succeeds in capturing the peculiar atmosphere of Simenon’s novel, an atmosphere of violence meted out from speeding cars and in sudden flashes in the dark. He gives us clues about the suspicious activities in the garage (stolen goods are being transported inside tires) that Simenon withholds. Thanks to Renoir, Maigret doesn’t have to solve the mystery of who killed Goldberg (and Goldberg’s wife) in the climactic scene. In fact, Renoir ensures that there is no mystery by showing us the man with the rifle who shoots Madame Goldberg on the darkened road. He shows us Michonnet putting the bottles of poisoned beer through the broken kitchen window. 

Godard’s superlatives aside, the best that Renoir could have hoped to achieve with Night at the Crossroads was a superior whodunnit, except Renoir keeps us way ahead of Simenon’s master detective. If you compare it to Marcel l’Herbier’s bigger-budgeted The Mystery of the Yellow Room (starring Roland Toutain, who would attain immortality as André Jurieu in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game nine years later), Renoir’s film is much less diffuse and more effective. Whatever the reasons for the film coming up short at only 71 minutes (in the version that I saw anyway), it is succinct and purposeful from beginning to end – even if the purpose is only to do Simenon justice. Winna Winfried is perhaps the only mystery in the film - a sphynx without riddles. (Renoir had a weakness for beautiful bad actresses.) Jean's brother Pierre Renoir was the first actor to play Maigret, and while he isn’t quite up to the standard set by Jean Gabin, he is the more fascinating for getting there first.

Casque d'Or

With Valentine’s Day safely behind me, I turn to a love story: not a romance by any means, but tough, grown-up love between two hardened people who never expected it. Someone, I think it was Stanley Kauffmann, once observed that in the films of François Truffaut love affairs never seem to work out. Jacques Becker made five films that are classifiable as love stories. The greatest – and the most brutal – is Casque d'Or (1952). 

 

Enjoying an enviable apprenticeship as assistant to Jean Renoir from 1932 to 1938, Jacques Becker made thirteen feature films (as many, significantly, as Robert Bresson) and they represent a challenge to critics too attached to the idea that filmmakers are in total control of their material. His career lasted less than two decades. He was just 53 when he died during post-production of his last, great, film, Le Trou in 1960. 

Casque d’Or opens on a sunny day. A group of men and women are approaching in boats rowing to the riverbank, singing cheerily. The men are members of a criminal gang and the women are prostitutes. The period is late 19th/early 20th century, also known as La Belle Époque, but Becker is showing us the demimonde. All but one of the boats is rowed by a man. That one is rowed by Marie (Simone Signoret), who alone wears, instead of a hat, her abundant blonde hair piled up on her head in a style called “casque d’or,” or golden helmet. 

They disembark and make their way to an establishment called A L’ANGE GABRIEL, one of the principal attractions of Joinville (Renoir Père often painted in such an establishment). The clientèle is various: some bourgeois customers (who complain about the entrance of the hookers and crooks) and a military officer who asks for the music to commence. A pair of carpenters is working inside the dance hall, the youngest of whom is Georges Manda (Serge Reggiani), an ex-con and friend of Raymond, one of the gang of men who just arrived. Raymond recognizes Manda, who used to be called Jo when they were in prison together. 

Marie’s boyfriend is Roland, a dandy, whom she treats with obvious disdain. She refuses to dance when he snaps his fingers, until everyone in the group insists that she does. Watching them dance to a waltz, Raymond yells to her “Attagirl, Marie!” She looks over at Raymond and notices Manda beside him. Manda notices back. The electrical connection is made and they can’t take their eyes off each other. That little drama of interlocked eyes, back and forth, is all the more noticeable because Becker makes no effort to linger over it. It simply happens and, from that moment forward, our attention is held by Marie and Manda. 

Marie has also attracted the attention of Felix Leca, the gang leader (played with glutinous charm by Claude Dauphin). He hears about a fight between Manda and Roland at A L’Ange Gabriel and decides to use it to his advantage by eliminating Roland. Leca makes a great mistake, however, when he tries to frame Raymond for the killing of Roland, and he rouses Manda’s loyalty to his friend. When Raymond is killed after he escapes from jail with Manda, Leca runs until Manda corners him at the police station and, borrowing a gendarme's pistol, he fires every shot in the cylinder into Leca's body. 

The film is crowded with so many living details that seem to be incidental, but are part of a larger design, like the old woman making idle conversation while emptying her waste buckets into the gutter in Belleville or another woman feeding her little pigs on the morning when Manda meets Marie by the river in Joinville. La Signoret’s closeups are always diffused, but that was to be expected. She was 31 when the film was released and was never more radiant than she is here. The moment when Manda awakes and looks at her beside him in bed is the first time in the film that we see her with her hair down. 

But what, above all, Casque d’Or exudes is a toughness whose source is nothing less than the truth about human beings. There is a certitude that underpins every action and every word of the principal characters that provokes shocks of recognition in the viewer. Between them, Leca and Marie, there are four scenes in which they are slapped or are slapping someone. Marie gets the brunt, but the two men who slapped her are dead by the film’s end. And the one man whom she slapped – Manda – is executed by guillotine. 

More than one observer has pointed out that the film’s final scene is shocking, and yet its brutality is entirely in keeping with everything that comes before. The demimonde was an underworld, in more than one sense. It operated according to its own codes of inhumanity. Manda is the film’s hero, yet we watch him kill two people. According to the strange logic of the time, the penalty for murder is murder. How could it come as a shock when the ultimate inhumanity – capital punishment – is visited on Manda? 

Once we see the view from the window of the apartment where Marie has come just before dawn – the boulevard outside a prison where a guillotine has been erected – the end is followed through with haste, as all such executions were. It is purposely shocking because we, like Manda, are given very little time to prepare ourselves for this final blow. 

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know. Now I had to admit it seemed a very simple process, getting guillotined; the machine is on the same level as the man, and he walks toward it as he steps forward to meet somebody he knows. In a sense, that, too, was disappointing. The business of climbing a scaffold, leaving the world below, so to speak, gave something for a man’s imagination to get hold of. But, as it was, the machine dominated everything; they killed you discreetly, with a hint of shame and much efficiency.  (1)

But Becker can’t let go of Manda and Marie’s story cleanly. When Marie lowers her head from the spectacle below, Becker gives us a gift that is perhaps superfluous, but nonetheless heartbreaking: the two of them, now all alone on the dancefloor in Joinville, waltzing, the sun shining down through the overhead trellis onto the floor as they turn in their dream dance.

(1) Albert Camus, The Stranger, Part Two, Chapter V (Stuart Gilbert translation). 

The Wolf

The acquittal of former president Donald J. Trump by a 43% minority in his Senate trial for incitement of insurrection bodes ill for the Republican Party. I find its condition to have been foreshadowed by Thomas Jefferson in a 200 year old letter. According to the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center's website,

President Jefferson’s letter reveals his fear that the extension of slavery into the West would destroy the Union. John Holmes became one of the first senators to serve from Maine, when the state was admitted to the Union as part of the Missouri Compromise. 

While the antics of the 43 Republican Senators who voted to acquit the former president may not represent a threat to the Union as grave as that addressed by Jefferson in his letter, the fracturing and considerable weakening of a legitimate Conservative movement in American politics is not a spectacle that affords me much comfort. Jefferson uses a metaphor in this letter (“the wolf by the ear”) that powerfully summed up the predicament of the United States prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. It's unnecessary for me to identify who the wolf is in the GOP's predicament. (Italics are mine.) 

Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes 

Monticello Apr. 22. 20. 

I thank you, Dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter to your constituents on the Missouri question. it is a perfect justification to them. I had for a long time ceased to read the newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen on a greater number of co-adjutors. an abstinence too from this act of power would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress, to regulate the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a state. this certainly is the exclusive right of every state, which nothing in the constitution has taken from them and given to the general government. could congress, for example say that the Non-freemen of Connecticut, shall be freemen, or that they shall not emigrate into any other state? 

I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of '76. to acquire self government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it. if they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves and of treason against the hopes of the world. to yourself as the faithful advocate of union I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect. Th. Jefferson

The Clockmaker

Bertrand Tavernier's first feature-length film, l’Horloger de Saint Paul (The Watchmaker of Saint Paul, known as The Clockmaker for English audiences) was released when he was 32 years old. It was based on a novel by Georges Simenon titled l’Horloger d’Everton, written in 1954 when Simenon was living in the U.S. The novel was set in New York state and in Indiana, but Tavernier and his two co-writers, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, changed the novel's locale to the French city of Lyon. Michel Descombes is a watchmaker who lives with his young son Bernard above his shop. Coming home late one night, he finds that his son isn’t home and his van is missing. Opening his shop in the morning, two policemen approach Michel and tell him that they located his van. They take him there where a police inspector informs him that his son killed a man. 

The political divisions in France at the time of filming were extreme. Calling someone a “leftist” was considered an insult. Since the murdered man, Razon, was a gun advocate, a right-wing cause, Bernard’s crime is labelled “leftist” by the media. When Bernard is captured with his girlfriend, who perhaps provoked him to murder Razon, he refuses to cooperate with the defense that it was a crime of passion, and his father agrees to do the same. He murdered a man but he refuses to have it explained or dismissed as unpremeditated or unprovoked. Even when he is sentenced to twenty years.  

Philippe Noiret is marvelous in the role of Michel. He is one of those actors who make up in intelligence what he lacks in looks. For some reason, Jean Rochefort, who plays the police inspector, was dubbed with another actor’s voice, and it is a distraction since his performance is otherwise excellent. Michel and this cop develop a kind of friendship – until Michel refuses to cooperate with the Inspector’s attempt to pigeonhole his son’s crime, to force it into a mold in which it doesn’t fit. 

There is a great deal of eating in the film, simply because it is another aspect of life that Tavernier loves. There is a funny moment when a cop asks the Inspector: “Did you see La Grande Bouffe? Usually, there’s nothing more innocent than food. In this film, the food is disgusting and overly obscene. It should be banned. Especially in Lyon.” Philippe Noiret had appeared in La Grande Bouffe, an Italian film made by Marco Ferreri, in which a group of wealthy men gather to commit suicide – by gluttony, by eating themselves to death. Was it Tavernier’s joke on Noiret or his criticism of the film? 

In his first appearance on the film scene, one that had been dominated since 1959 by members of the Nouvelle Vague, Tavernier set himself apart by addressing the concerns of an older generation. He doesn’t follow the more dramatic flight of young lovers from the law. We learn of their whereabouts from what the inspector tells Michel or from an old housekeeper to whom Bernard was close. Though we, like Michel, very much want to know the motive for the murder (it had something to do with Razon’s coercion of Liliane, Bernard’s girlfriend, when he caught her stealing transistors), Tavernier never leaves Michel as he wanders across Lyon trying to understand where he went wrong as a father. 

Tavernier also deliberately snubbed the auteurs of the French New Wave, who had sought to wreck the careers of members of the older generation “cinema du papa,” by getting the screenwriting team of Aurenche-Bost to co-write his script. Eager to establish their dogma that it was directors who were the autueurs of their films and not the script-writers (of which French cinema had many great ones), the Truffaut-Godard-Chabrol cabal had singled out Aurenche and Bost as a contradiction of their dogma. Pierre Bost died during the long production of The Clockmaker, but Jean Aurenche continued to work with Tavernier on his early films. As a tribute to Bost, Tavernier later adapted a novel of his for the beautiful film A Sunday in the Country. 

Early in The Clockmaker, as Noiret is climbing the stairs to his flat, we overhear a song being sung in a neighbor’s flat – a song that was also sung in Jean Renoir’s La Regle du Jeu. It is another reference to the rich past of French cinema, to which Tavernier wanted to create a continuity. The last credit of the film is a dedication to Jacques Prévert, poet and perhaps the greatest script-writer who ever lived. 

Just before the film’s last scene, Michel is sitting alone inside an old church watching a medieval clock chime the hour. Michel also repairs old clocks in Lyon, and it is a beautiful moment. After his sentencing, Michel visits Bernard in prison. Their conversation is constrained by the shouting of others during the visiting period. Bernard smilingly tells Michel, “Don’t shout. Enunciate!” They have a touching, friendly reconnection. Bernard’s time is up and he is led away, looking back at his father repeatedly. Outside the prison gate, Michel looks up at its imposing exterior, and as he walks along its impregnable walls, he touches its old masonry with his hand and a strange smile appears on his face as he looks forward to the years of visits with his son that are to come. 

As in so many of Simenon’s novels, the crime committed is eclipsed by a study of character. Michel and Bernard, who never seemed to understand each other, are thrown together by an impulsive, violent act. The murder is never trivialized – Bernard must sacrifice twenty years of his young life. Justice is satisfied. Another aspect of the story that Simenon must have found ironic when he set it in America is its attitude toward murder. The killing of one man by another was and is a commonplace and unedifying event in America. To Simenon, it is so much more than the dramatic catalyst of a story. The death penalty remains stubbornly present in American life. In 1954, it was largely unquestioned. In September 1981, France outlawed capital punishment. The last execution by guillotine was in 1977. In France, as in other European countries, the taking of life is taken far more seriously than it is in America. 

In an unemphatic, eminently humane way, The Clockmaker is a noble and an ennobling film. Tavernier, abetted by two marvelous veteran script-writers, illuminates and discovers the truth in a single human life. The last moments, accompanied, like a coda, by Philippe Sarde’s beautifully sad music, let us linger over what we have seen – Michel Descombes’s discovery of what has been right under his nose, the son that he almost lost, whose soul is stubbornly intact.

Two Novels

It’s an old legal trick: if you’re defending a client and the prosecution puts a witness on the stand who attests to your client’s guilt, you attack the credibility of the witness. In 1942 two novels were published in France around the same time that have had the misfortune of being associated ever since. One, called L'Étranger, was written by Albert Camus, a novice novelist who had been born in Algeria. The other, La veuve Couderc, was written by Georges Simenon, a world famous novelist born in Belgium. I first read the Camus novel 40 years ago, and having just finished reading Simenon’s novel, under the title The Widow, I think it is highly imaginative for a critic to draw any similarities whatever between them. I am confident that if they had been published years apart there would never have been comparisons. 

Paul Theroux’s 2008 introduction to a new edition of The Widow belabors the comparison to such an extent that he manages to make Simenon look bad and himself look ridiculous:

Two startlingly similar short novels appeared in France in 1942, at the center of each narrative, a conscienceless and slightly creepy young man, unattached and adrift, perpetrator of a meaningless murder. 

The very odd thing about Theroux’s introduction isn’t what he has to say about Simenon (though he is quite incorrect about Simenon’s neglect by serious critics) but what he says about Camus, with which I don’t think anyone would agree: 

Camus’ [sic] novel rose to become part of the literary firmament, and is still glittering, intensely studied, and praised—to my mind, overpraised. 

I feel as if there should be a headline that reads: Paul Theroux says Camus’s L'Étranger is ‘overpraised’. Although he has written novels, Theroux is best known as a writer of non-fiction travel books. The last thing I read by him was Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a scathing account of his long friendship with V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul was, by most accounts, an exceptionally nasty person – who happened to write some of the finest English prose of the 20th century. Theroux has it in, it seems, for great writers. 

No two novels could hardly be more dissimilar. Jean Passerat-Monnoyeur, Simenon’s young man, is a murderer who has been released from prison and is taken on as a hired hand by a domineering older woman on a country farm. Meursault, Camus’s young man, works in an office in Algiers. His mother has just died in a nursing home and he travels by bus to take part in her vigil and burial. Jean’s story is told in featureless prose in a limited third person. We are allowed into Jean’s thoughts, which doesn’t help us to understand his actions. Meursault’s story is told in uninflected language by himself. He is a much more reliable narrator, and I felt much closer to Meursault at the end of the novel than I did to Jean. 

The posterity of Camus’s novel has been considerable. It ushered in a new philosophy, one that Camus artfully elaborated in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. On the strength of L'Étranger and two other novels, a few plays and books of essays, Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Simenon’s novel, one of four novels he published in 1942, simply fell in line with all his other dashed-off romans dur. 

The Camus comparison is not gratuitous—Simenon often made it himself, and André Gide brought the same subject up a few years after L'Étranger appeared, favoring Simenon’s work, especially this novel. 

Born in 1869, Gide was a friend of Simenon’s and, by then in his 70s, one of the arrière-garde of French literature – hardly a trustworthy critic of Camus. In his review of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Camus had thrown down a gauntlet by claiming that “a novel is nothing but a philosophy couched in images.” I don’t believe he would have made such a claim for a Simenon novel. 

Simenon deeply resented that Camus’s novel got so much more attention than his did. And, evidently, Simenon couldn’t let it go. His wife reported that when Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, he angrily remarked, “Can you believe that asshole got it and not me?” I doubt if Simenon saw it that way, but didn’t Camus die like one of the protagonists of his novels – in a car crash with a return rail ticket in his pocket? 

It hardly seems necessary for me to admit that I am not a Simenon detractor. Crime novels hold no special interest for me, so I pass by his Maigret novels without a second thought. But Simenon himself saw the difference between the books that sold and the ones that satisfied in him something more personal and essential. He had the luxury of writing whatever he pleased, so why not turn out a serious novel every now and then? Clearly he was a compulsive writer, and he believed he was a second Balzac and that the sheer bulk of his work represented some kind of organic whole that was impressive in itself. 

Camus’s L’Etranger is in the form of a testament. Meursault, condemned to death in the last pages of the book, is telling us everything we need to know about what led up to the murder of an Arab man he encountered on a beach, as well as everything that came after. It isn’t so much for his having committed murder that he is condemned, but that he is unapologetic and – more tellingly – utterly truthful about his own character. He is deemed to be a monster for not crying at his mother’s funeral, for taking a mistress the day after, and for saying in his defense, “It was the sun” that made him kill. He is merely telling the truth and refusing to submit to lies. That is what sets him apart from everyone else in the story: he refuses to go along with the Big Lie. 

Simenon’s Jean is, in contrast, almost a cipher – a doomed man, doomed as much by his release from prison as by his imprisonment. Honestly, Simenon lost me when, in chapter 4, he muses, “His day had been spoiled, and perhaps far more than his day; his sky had been smirched; he did not feel like whistling any more; he was not hungry; he did not sniff, as on other days, at the already familiar smell of the kitchen.” What had happened was innocent enough, Jean approached a girl he was attracted to in her yard and the girl had responded by spitting at him and calling him a dirty dog. The way he responded to this scene made me wonder if he had murdered her. From that moment, he began to repeat to himself parts of the penal code: “Every person condemned to death shall be decapitated.” Is this Simenon’s fatalism? Camus never insisted that Meursault shooting the Arab on the beach was in any way inevitable. In fact, the way the crime is committed, with Meursault encountering his victim alone and being threatened by him with a knife, makes his crime seem justified. Camus wasn’t making any special argument against the French penal code (although he later opposed the death penalty in a powerful polemic, “Reflections on the Guillotine”). 

Camus’s narrative is what became known as “cool” – detached, emotionally uninvolved, dispassionate. It carries within it a dimension that Simenon could not even glimpse. Meursault’s life is cut short because of circumstances beyond everyone’s control – even Camus’s. It isn’t destiny but happenstance. Over the years since I first read it, it has stayed with me as very few other novels have – because Camus’s encounters with the universe reflected my own. Everything he wrote affected me with lesser and greater degrees of recognition. In contrast, Simenon’s view of life seems deterministic, streaked with inevitability, a kind of fate with which I cannot agree. 

Two fine novels were published in France at about the same time. You may prefer, based on your taste, one or the other. But I believe there is a reason why one of the novels has been exalted far above the other, and that reason rises above the literary qualities of either book. Camus’s novel introduced a way of looking and thinking about life in the world. Compared to which, Simenon’s is a momentary entertainment. 

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with  its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my  heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. 

I wouldn't trade that single sentence by Camus for every word Simenon ever wrote.