The Blue Room by Georges Simenon

First published:La Chambre bleue, 1964 (English translation, 1964)

Type of work: Mystery

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Locale: Poitiers and a nearby small town and village in France

Principal Characters:

• Antonio (Tony) Falcone, a seller of agricultural machinery who is having an affair with Andree Despierre
• Gisele Falcone, his wife
• Andree Despierre, the mistress of Tony Falcone
• Nicholas Despierre, her husband, the owner of the store at Saint Justin-du-Loup
• Madame Despierre, his mother

The Novel

The book opens with a conversation in the blue room between Tony Falcone and Andree Despierre, who have just made love. Andree asks Tony if he loves her: “Could you spend the rest of your life with me?” Tony answers Andree lazily, mechanically, “Of course”; then he sees Nicholas, Andree’s husband, crossing the square toward the hotel. Terrified of discovery, Tony escapes through a skylight, leaving his mistress to pacify her husband. The reader quickly discovers that this scene, from which the plot springs, is not taking place in the present; Tony is re-creating the memory in response to interrogation. Flashbacks from his past are interspersed with the comments and questions of his interrogators. On that particular August 2, Tony returned to his home in Saint Justin-du-Loup and arranged to take his wife, Gisele, and his six-year-old daughter, Marianne, to the seaside for a three-week holiday.

In the next section of the book, Judge Diem, who also has a wife and a baby—but who cannot understand Tony, though they are much of an age—gets him to re-create the events prior to August 2. Tony and his brother, Vincente Falcone, the owner of the Hotel des Voyageurs, are sons of an immigrant Italian bricklayer. They went to school with Nicholas Despierre (then a fat, pasty, epileptic child, the only son of the richest family in the village) and Andree Formier, “the great, tall girl from the Chateau.” Andree’s father, the doctor, had died heroically in a concentration camp; the Chateau was dilapidated and Andree and her mother were poor and hungry. By the time that Tony returns to the area with his wife to set up a business in the village, Andree has married Nicholas and successfully banished her mother-in-law, Madame Despierre, from the shop to her bungalow at the bottom of the garden. The liaison with Tony begins when he stops to help start the Despierres’ Citroen, which has had a flat tire on the way to Triant. Andree seduces him—not a difficult task as he is a handsome man and a casually unfaithful husband. Andree announces that she has always longed for Tony, and they meet once a month in the blue room at Vincente’s hotel. Vincente and his wife, Lucia, are disapproving but loyal and silent, and the assignations continue until the Thursday afternoon when Andree’s husband appears, the August 2 which was re-created in the first part of the book.

After his narrow escape from discovery, Tony avoids the village store, ignores Andree, and hopes that nothing will disrupt the routine of family and work which give meaning to his life. Nevertheless, he feels threatened. Then one day, the Postmaster hands him local, anonymous letters: “I haven’t forgotten. I love you.” “Soon. I love you.”

The letters are only the beginning. Nicholas dies suddenly, and an anonymous letter spurs the police into exhuming the body. They discover that he was poisoned with strychnine.

In December, Tony receives another letter: “Happy Our Year.” Little Marianne Falcone comes home from school one day to find her mother dying in agony. Strychnine is discovered in the half-eaten pot of plum jelly. For Judge Diem, Tony re-creates that day, though he persists in denying the existence of the letters: Before going to work Tony took Marianne to school, then joined the customers at the village shop. He was served first, and Andree gave to him a pot of jam which she said that Gisele had ordered. Tony left it in the kitchen for his wife and returned that evening to find her dead.

After a long imprisonment, several court appearances, and the elaborate reconstruction which largely forms the novel, the lovers are tried. Tony discovers that the village has always known about his affair with Andree and sympathized with Gisele. Piece by piece, the evidence that they give places him in jeopardy. There was strychnine in his shed but also there was some in the Despierres’ storeroom; the Postmaster remembers giving Tony the letters, and Andree has admitted to writing them. Madame Despierre’s evidence is crucial; to ensure that both lovers pay for her son’s death, she lies. When Andree took over the store on the morning of Gisele’s death, according to Madame Despierre, customers were already waiting and the new consignment of jam was still in its package. Thus Tony took home an untouched jar of jam; Andree, if one accepts her mother-in-law’s evidence, would have had to open the package and add strychnine to the jelly while customers waited in the shop. Andree is therefore found guilty only of her husband’s death; Tony is found guilty of murdering Gisele. Both are sentenced to life imprisonment. The novel ends, as it began, with Andree speaking: “You see, Tony, we’ll never be parted now!”

The Characters

In itself, calling Andree and Tony lovers begs one of the major questions raised by The Blue Room. Tony finds Andree sexually exciting, but he does not love her; she is obsessed by him. Georges Simenon carefully and unobtrusively puts in the details which help the reader to comprehend Andree: the poverty; the gangling adolescent who watches the handsome boy choose other partners; the prudent marriage to the rich, sickly Nicholas; the possessive mother-in-law and her festering resentment. All the pieces are there. The reader, like Simenon’s most famous creation, Inspector Maigret, can understand the growth of a personality capable of these crimes.

Tony is a picture of incomprehension. The interrogations clarify events for him as well as for the reader. He is largely incapable of analysis and his self-awareness is neither intellectual nor verbal. “Were there really people whose lives were devoted to self-examination, to gazing at themselves in a mirror, as it were?” he asks himself. What Tony actually says, therefore, is not as meaningful as what is left unsaid. “The words were without substance.” Andree, who hears what he says at the hotel, but only interprets it according to what she wants to hear, acts upon his words and destroys everything he values. “You know very well you said yourself....” she argues.

Tony’s wife, Gisele, is a silent, pathetic figure, afraid to complain of her husband’s philandering, terrified of losing him, isolated in the village to which she does not belong. Her husband no longer finds her attractive, but he loves his home and his daughter, and therefore also his wife. He loves the routine which Gisele, a true housewife, carefully maintains. Yet Tony and Gisele can only guess—wrongly—at each others’ thoughts and feelings because the relationship has no words. Both afraid, each endures alone.

Because Tony is himself so limited, Simenon is able to surprise the reader with the importance of minor characters who lie outside Tony’s awareness. Madame Despierre, for example, is the author of the letter which produces the police investigation. Her perjury convicts an innocent man.

The fact that Tony is himself finding out the truth as his questioners ask him things that he has never asked himself makes for both interest and limitation: interest in the discovery, limitation because he is passive and cannot offer information for which he has not been asked. Much of the technical interest of the book lies in Simenon’s ability to draw a picture in words of a man who cannot verbalize his thoughts, who can, in fact, hardly think.

Critical Context

The Blue Room appeared in the last decade of Simenon’s career as a fiction writer. Between 1922, when he published his first novel, and 1972, when he announced that he would write no more fiction, Simenon authored more than 280 books. The Blue Room belongs in the category which he describes as “tragedy-novels.” Usually these novels begin in a crisis, unravel its causes through a psychological investigation of the people involved, and proceed to a conclusion which is a logical but not necessary consequence of the events which have gone before. In his mature novels of this kind, Simenon uses a double plot: The truth unravels slowly, the suspense builds, because the knowledge may not be available in time to prevent a tragedy.

Like his famous inspector, often regarded as an incarnation of the author’s creative process, Simenon thinks himself into the skins of ordinary, limited people who happen to commit criminal, violent, or irrational acts. When Georges Simenon, or Inspector Maigret, has finished, the event is seen to be not merely an accident but more the product of character, past events, environment, and opportunity, all fatefully conjoined. Like the Greeks, Simenon does not believe in free will. Also like them, he presents the harsh doctrine of necessity in many guises, using a short space of time, a limited cast, and a stark outline.

Nevertheless, Simenon’s plate-glass style gives the reader a window on the world of mean urban streets, stuffy bourgeois interiors, small villages, and petty towns. His people are unprepossessing, ordinary, lonely, often incompetent, leading lives of routine desperation. The moment of action breaks the pattern, but the result is never fortunate.

Though the tragic pattern creates similarities of structure, each novel is particularized: The main characters and their settings are carefully dovetailed. The Blue Room is an excellent example of Simenon’s technical brilliance and of his tragedy-novels.

Bibliography

Becker, Lucille F. Georges Simenon, 1977.

Bresler, Fenton S. The Mystery of Georges Simenon: A Biography, 1983.

Mauriac, Claude. “Georges Simenon,” in The New Literature, 1959.

Narcejac, Thomas. The Art of Simenon, 1952.

Raymond, John. Simenon in Court, 1968.