Who, in the quiet hush before dawn, has not imagined simply stepping away from one’s life, leaving behind every duty, every hobby, every lukewarm routine that once seemed so unassailable? No slammed doors, no scrawled confessions, no burning letters or manifestos. Just a sudden teenage escape from home. That is what happens to Monsieur Monde, the middle-aged Frenchman at the centre of Georges Simenon’s Monsieur Monde Vanishes, who wakes at forty-eight, collects 300,000 francs from his bank, and walks out of his bourgeois life, leaving his family and thriving business behind, without so much as a crash or a crack. He boards a train to Marseille and steps into the luminous indifference of the Midi, leaving behind the calcified comforts of Paris, all with the existential shrug of a man who’d rather be no one than continue playing someone.

Our reflex, of course, is to find a name for Monsieur Monde’s flight—to call it a midlife crisis, or an existential meltdown, or anything that might cling to the logic of cause and effect. Simenon, however, pokes fun at this bourgeois impulse. We crave reasons. Demand them. We are disturbed by the possibility that an action might well be utterly motiveless.

In the day before his disappearance, we glimpse Monde’s life on Rue Ballu through a series of stifling vignettes: a gas lamp lit by a man in a greenish overcoat (a shade so jaundiced it seems to radiate stagnation), a daughter’s cough met with paternal detachment, a study filled with papers that now feel like relics of a defunct religion. . The baby might be vomiting—might be—but the uncertainty is the point. Monde is not exactly indifferent about his babys’ potential danger, he simply fails to connect with her. He goes downstairs “for no apparent reason” and finds his study, the sanctum of bourgeois order, ledgers and leather chairs, and he stands “motionless… as though dazed”, not “as if”, as though, because we cannot be entirely sure whether it is a simile or an actual dissociation. Monde is erased by the sheer weight of the ordinary, until the only act of agency left, it seems, is to vanish into the anonymity of the streets, where even terror feels more alive than the death-in-life he’s fled. By the time he mutters “Tomorrow!”, we realise his escape began long before he physically left the house. The bourgeois mantra, tomorrow we’ll balance the books, tomorrow we’ll mend what’s broken, here had become a noose around his neck.

When he does finally depart, his escape is a series of half-measures. He lands first in a modest Paris hotel, still puzzling at his own behaviour like a man newly aware of his limbs. He behaves like a novice criminal, his fingers trembling over banknotes, fretting over the absurdity of buying a whole ball of string to wrap his cash, glancing over his shoulder at strangers who don’t really care, he really is far from home. He is a man performing an impersonation of a stranger, but the costume (ill-fitting, reeking of bourgeois anxiety) keeps slipping. In these scenes, Simenon reduces the grand existential gesture (that of vanishing!) to the bathetic: a man splashing toilet water on his trousers, forgetting his coffee, glancing over his shoulder for a judgment that no longer matters. On the streets near the Rue de Buci market, housewives haggle over produce with the exuberance of people deeply embedded in daily life, while Monde roams among them half-awake, pockets stuffed with 300,000 francs he scarcely knows how to carry.

He spent a lifetime calibrating himself to the expectations of others. Even in flight, he polices his own visibility, terrified of causing a faux pas. No longer a bourgeois paterfamilias, not yet a true derelict. His self-consciousness is the itch of the chrysalis. The bourgeois psyche’s has an immune response to exile: the compulsion to manage, to systematise, even as the world dissolves into entropy. When he goes to buy a secondhand suit—ugly brown fabric, the sort no one covets—he tells himself he’ll pass as an inconspicuous clerk, the bourgeois idea of ‘the average man’. He might as well be wearing a sign that says “pretending to vanish,” still lugging his brand-new fibre suitcase with that stiff, anxious self-consciousness that distinguishes a man who wants to blend in from one who genuinely lives on the margins.

And so, in the third-class compartment of a southbound train, Monsieur Monde finds himself heading to Marseille, as if in a trance:

Why did he go unhesitatingly to wait for a bus, at the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel, that would take him to the Gare de Lyon? He had not thought about it beforehand; he had not said to himself that he would do this or that. Once again, he was following a preordained plan, for which he was not responsible. Nor had he made any decision the day before. It all came from much further back, from the beginning of things.

The more we watch him drifting the clearer it becomes that his behaviour, for all its shapelessness, flows from a deeper place than reason. “Beyond reason,” one might say, rather than “without” it. He eats, not because he’s hungry, but because “everyone was eating”, pure mimesis. This is Simenon’s autopsy of agency: the notion that sometimes one’s decisions are shaped by some intangible hum, a primal inertia, an unspoken permission to follow the pull of pure contingency. There’s a moment when Monsieur Monde almost steps off the train in Lyon for absolutely no reason whatsoever, save the sudden allure of acting without a plan.

He arrives in Marseille, checks into a hotel, and at last the dam bursts in a flood of tears. Simenon describes them as zigzagging rivulets, an almost geological phenomenon, the final release of a lifetime’s locked-up weariness. Here is Monsieur Monde, “ageless,” trembling with a childlike vulnerability he can’t control. For decades, he has propped up his father’s squandered business and absorbed the secrets of his two wives, forging an identity around duty or perhaps forbearance. He never explodes with rage or self-righteousness; he simply collapses inward. Simenon offers him not even the release of resentment, just a tired question: “Why have you treated me so harshly?”—though it’s directed at no one in particular. The novel is pitiless in its refusal to moralise or justify Monde’s plight. He was married for the sake of a procreative duty that ended in betrayal and re-married for the sake of normalcy, but here in Marseille, he stops trying. That, in Simenon’s universe, is a radical move.

When the woman in the next room—a stranger named Julie—collapses after a lover’s row, swallowing pills and cradling her breasts in despair, Monde intervenes with the clumsy reflexes of an anti-hero who has never quite known how not to help. For him, fatherhood and rescue missions are second nature, though they’re precisely the roles he thought he’d left behind. He scurries off to fetch a gas connection from the hotel clerk, who regards him with the suspicion typical of this shadowy demimonde. He asks the clerk, “Is he young?” (of her absent lover), though a clear self-interrogation: Am I still capable of such abandon? Monsieur Monde thinks to himself, why is it always he, the bourgeois father, the provider, the cuckolded husband, that must help others? When Monde comes back, Julie doesn’t thank him, doesn’t transform, the trope of the fallen woman redeemed by a stranger’s kindness is completely subverted.

In the morning, they step out together with a weary politeness, perhaps mistaking proximity for some kind of alliance. She asks his name he blurts our ‘Désiré Clouet’ which he plucked at random from a cobbler’s sign. Julie, a dancer by profession, navigates the city’s margins with a proficiency, Désiré, the fugitive bourgeois, can only watch. Their breakfast at a local restaurant becomes a wry study in class anthropology. The waiter drones the usual pleasantries to Désiré, proclaiming the andouillette to be “excellent” because that is what a waiter must say, though the honesty is itself a performance, but with Julie, there’s an easy camaraderie that belongs to the underclass, a co-conspirator and kin in grift vis-a-vis the fleecing gullible patrons. In bourgeois spaces, the andouillette is always ‘good’, a lie as ritualised as a handshake, as the waiter nudges a wink to Julie that they’re fleecing a rube on Désiré. She orders crayfish sans mayo and demands gherkins, a vulgar choice that confirms to the waiter her class. Watching them, one sees the asymmetry: he is drifting; she is calculating. They remain together partly because neither has anywhere better to go.

When she asks why he fled Paris, Désiré can only mutter, “For no reason”. There is no comforts of narrative logic for his interlocutors just as Simenon strips away the bourgeois obsession with why, leaving only the raw fact of Désirés’ flight. Soon they’re on a train to Nice, that classic coastline of escapist dreams, trudging through the station’s apéritif-hour crowds “like a real married couple”.

In Nice, they settle into a facsimile of domestic life at another hotel. Her days are spent wrangling auditions and cursing out potential employers; he drifts in and out of cinemas, transfixed more by the anonymity of the dark than by any film. Eventually, they have a joyless sexual encounter—perhaps inevitable, given the inertia of shared dislocation—and then, still enveloped in that grey vacuum of purpose, they resume their halting routines. When Désiré secret stash of 300,000 francs is stolen by the hotel maid, he greets the loss only with apathy, even greeting the hostile gaze of the thieving maid with exaggerated courtesy. He now embraces dispossession as a form of existential asceticism.

Désiré takes a job as a steward at the Monico, a nightclub where glamour masks squalor. His role is surveilling staff through a spy-hole in a pantry reeking of greasy plates and tinned foie gras, a purgatory of champagne bottles and soiled linen. The Monico operates on a temporal void, no clocks, sporadic live music to entice the guests to forget the time, a microcosm of the existential limbo Désiré now inhabits. Here, he watches men like his former self—rosy-cheeked, well-heeled, burdened with responsibilities—succumb to rigged games and hostesses paid to feign desire. The gamblers, the "foreigners" and "suckers", lured into these games are deceived into believing they have a chance, but the rigged system guarantees their financial loss. These men lie to their wives with fresh alibis every evening, wives who might themselves prefer not to know too much. Men are led to believe they might leave with the women, but the system ensures they are too drunk or exhausted to follow through. The women, Julie among them, are contractually obligated to murmur, “Not right now… The boss wouldn’t let me leave yet,” as they peddle overpriced champagne. Their role is to prolong engagement, encouraging men to buy endless champagne, chocolates, and flowers. It is a theatre of predation: the men leave drunk, wallets drained; the women count tips, their labor a commodity to extract maximum spending from patrons. Bourgeois society is rigged from top to bottom and Désirés’ attempt to vanish from his old life only lands him in another rigged system. His new X-ray vision makes him see the codes, the cons, the “stimulating vulgarity”, but no language to participate.

When Désirés’ ex-wife Thérèse reappears, he views her in a kind of dazed paternal panic. She, addicted to morphine, homeless, has devolved into a spectral figure, with her flaking skin and tearful “Have you been very unhappy?”, which collided with his bland “I didn’t understand.” They use the polite vous, then slip into the more intimate tu, as though both registers fail to convey the sorrow that stands between them, Thérèse’s self-pity, Désiré’s half-hearted offers of help. The old drama of blame and betrayal replays itself without climax or closure. He gives her money, like the reflex-bound provider he always was, but hates himself for doing it. She powders her face in front of him, poised halfway between the battered ex-wife and the cunning survivor who might manipulate his guilt. When Thérèse shows up again at the club, haggard, furious, unwelcome, clawing at pavements for a fix, she hisses accusations at Désiré, who stands caught between reflexive compassion and the horror of being reeled back into old roles. Morphine, for her, is a form of escape, at least as fleeting as his illusions of flight, and she is only calmed my Désiré’s promise to attend to her fix. He becomes her reluctant keeper, procuring ampules, enduring her spasms of gratitude and spite.

Back in the claustrophobic darkness of his hotel room, where his ex-wife Thérèse lies in a morphine-induced stupor, Désirés’ suddenly has an epiphany that the idea of identity as a meaningful concept is a chimera, but this realisation offers no solace, only alienation:

He was certainly not a disembodied spirit. He was still Monsieur Monde, or Désiré, more likely Désiré.… No! It didn’t matter.… He was a man who, for a long time, had endured the human condition without being conscious of it, as others endure an illness of which they are unaware. He had always been a man living among other men and like them he had struggled, jostling amid the crowd, now feebly and now resolutely, without knowing whither he was going. And now, in the moonlight, he suddenly saw life differently, as though with the aid of some miraculous X-ray.

Simenon suggests that identity is performative, a “flesh and outward appearance” masking an existential void, that beneath Désirés‘ or Mones’ interchangeable masks, there’s only a raw, childlike confusion that has aged along with his body. Julie, sweetly asking if he wants coffee, can’t begin to fathom the void lurking behind his eyes. Language fails him. He sees his old household—his wife, his children, the ordinary scuffles of Rue Ballu, his business—through a lens of dispassionate clarity instead of pity and indignation. The "fairy tale" of familial love and duty is laid bare as a construct, and the bigger the stage, the more cunning the illusions.

At last, he returns to Paris, dragging Thérèse along to deposit her in the hands of Doctor Boucard, as though methodically disposing of the last loose thread. A quiet sequence of phone calls, a muffled greeting at the station, a handful of practicalities—Simenon stages it like a funeral for spontaneity. By the time Monsieur Monde re-enters Rue Ballu, there is a dreadful calm about him. He reclaims his bourgeois suit, attends to the dusty accounts, reclaims his study, his pipes, his role as patriarch, and meets his family’s confusion with polite monotony. His wife sniffles theatrically; his son faints at the sight of him. He handles it all with eerie calm, as though observing his life through glass. When Boucard requests he visits Thérèse, who had still believed he had left for Nice to see her, he simply declines. “What’s the use?” he mutters. His returned correspondences to Julie are equally detached

No grand confessions. No triumph, either. Norbert (or Desire or Monsieur Monde?) appears as a man who has stared into the abyss and returned only to resume the motions, with the difference that he now recognises them for what they are. The illusions persist, but he has surrendered any fight against them, neither condoning nor protesting, merely settling in with the quiet assurance that every structure is a shell.

Simenon offers no elaborate expositions of interior life, no reflective monologues or psychoanalytic probes; instead, we witness a man in flight, drifting away from his bourgeois moorings into a murkier realm of half-seen shadows and uncertain desires, guided only by impressions that seem to well up from some obscure reservoir within him. We do not see Monsieur Monde brooding over the whys and wherefores of his decision or grappling with the existential weight of his sudden exodus. We only watch him operate in a series of vivid, concrete settings—Paris streets by lamplight, the shabby bustle of a railway station, the sultry ennui of a rundown hotel, and we observe his strange, subdued responses to them. He is a man defined more by the colour and temperature of the rooms he enters than by anything resembling a fixed self.

We expect—almost demand—that a novelist of Simenon’s caliber will let us hear the gears turning inside such a character, to show us the moral or emotional turbulence that might drive a respectable man to abandon family, career, identity. Instead, Monsieur Monde Vanishes follows him as though with a camera that can pan and zoom but never get inside his head. The half-articulated pains and yearnings that have presumably driven him to vanish remain unspoken, even unnoticed by those around him. One day, he is a family man with accounts to balance; the next, he is an obscure figure in a train station, waiting on the whim of a timetable that seems to have more direction than he does.

Simenon’s stroke of genius here is that he does not sermonise about it. He takes no moral stance on Monsieur Monde’s flight, nor does he retroactively assign him a secret trauma or an Oedipal twist that would make everything cohere into a tidy explanation. All we learn is that that people might act out of impressions—sensory triggers, glimpses of possibility—and that these fleeting impressions might carry more force than the intangible, carefully nurtured sense of self we so often parade as our core identity, that perhaps we are all just one unexpected gust of experience away from changing course entirely.

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