There is a particular species of fatigue that Georges Simenon made his own, and that is the spiritual calcification of the French bourgeois male. It is a condition defined by the accumulation of heavy furniture, lukewarm soup and the tyranny of the expected. In Monsieur Monde Vanishes (originally published in 1945 as La Fuite de Monsieur Monde), Simenon presents us with a protagonist who attempts to cure this malaise through a radical subtraction.

Monsiuer Monde wakes up, collects three hundred thousand francs from the family firm, and steps out of his life on the Rue Ballu with the terrifying placidity of a sleepwalker. Without leaving behind neither a note nor manifesto he boards a train to Marseille to go somewhere, to misplace himself, one suspects.

Our reflex is to find a name for Monsieur Monde’s flight because we crave reasons and are disturbed by the possibility that an action might well be utterly motiveless. We must explain it, call it a midlife crisis or rather an existential meltdown, or anything that might cling to the logic of cause and effect. Simenon, however, pokes fun at this bourgeois impulse. A midlife crisis implies a search for vitality, usually involving a sports car or a younger mistress. We have no hint of that here. Monde’s impulse is closer to a fugue state or perhaps a philosophical experiment conducted by a man who has realised, at forty-eight, that his existence is largely a clerical error.

Simenon is scrupulously attentive to the texture of the trap before he springs it. Monsieur Monde moves through a house that seems utterly suffocating. A gas lamp lit by a man in a greenish overcoat. ‘Greenish’. The shade is so jaundiced it seems to radiate stagnation. The house is full of books and leather chairs and all the sanctum of bourgeois order. A daughter coughs somewhere in the distance, but it is met with a paternal detachment. The baby might be vomiting, but only might be. To Monde it is now merely another boring sound in the house.

The brilliance of the novel, and Simenon is nothing if not a technician of the damp soul, is in its refusal to romanticise the escape. When Monde arrives in the Midi, shedding the “calcified comforts” of Paris, he does not immediately transform into a Rimbaud of the Riviera. Instead, he is beset with awkwardness and the clumsy paranoia of the novice robber who is not yet able to master his craft.

There is a dry comedy in his incompetence. We watch Monde in a modest Paris hotel, fussing over a ball of string to wrap his stolen cash, behaving with the conspicuous guilt of a man who has never before broken a rule. He splashes toilet water on his trousers, he forgets his coffee, he glances over his shoulder at a public that remains obstinately uninterested in his fate. This is Simenon’s famous ‘roman dur’ as social anthropology. Simenon understands that a bourgeois man stripped of his rituals is not a liberated savage but an embarrasingly confused child. On the streets near the Rue de Buci, Monde wanders among housewives haggling over produce, women rooted in the exuberant solidity of the real, while he drifts about and his pockets heavy with currency he has forgotten how to spend.

Monde has spent a lifetime calibrating himself to the expectations of others, and he cannot simply switch off the mechanism. Even in flight, he polices his own visibility, terrified of committing a faux pas against a code of conduct he has ostensibly abandoned. Monde is no longer a paterfamilias yet not quite a derelict. The bourgeois psyche, Simenon implies, possesses a stubborn immune response to exile, a compulsion to manage, to systematise, even as the world dissolves into entropy.

When he purchases a secondhand suit, a garment of “ugly brown fabric” the sort of thing that achieves invisibility through sheer aesthetic depression, he tells himself he will pass as an inconspicuous clerk, the bourgeois ideal of ‘the average man’. And so, in the third-class compartment of a southbound train, Monde finds himself heading to Marseille, moving by a kind of narrative gravity:

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 Monde’s 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 is a somewhat terrifying moment when Monde almost steps off the train in Lyon for absolutely no reason, tempted by the sudden, vertiginous allure of a life without a script.

When he finally arrives in Marseille and checks into a hotel, the dam breaks, “zigzagging rivulets”, the final, structural release of a lifetime’s sedimentary weariness. Here is Monde, sudden and “ageless,” trembling with a vulnerability he has spent forty-eight years suppressing. We are reminded of the load he has carried, the decades spent propping up his father’s squandered business, the silent absorption of his two wives’ secrets, the identity forged entirely around duty and forbearance.

He does not explode with the righteous rage of the wronged patriarch. Simenon grants him not even the catharsis of resentment, only a tired question muttered into the void: “Why have you treated me so harshly?” The “you” is addressed to no one in particular—to God, perhaps, or merely to the ceiling. It does not really matter. The novel is pitiless in its refusal to moralise. Monde married first for procreative duty (which ended in betrayal) and second for the sake of normalcy (which ended in boredom), but here in the salt air of Marseille, he stops trying to justify the narrative. In Simenon’s universe, to stop explaining oneself is to start living, and the most radical move of all.

When the woman in the adjacent room, a stranger named Julie, collapses after a lovers’ row, swallowing pills and cradling her breasts in despair, Monde intervenes with the clumsy reflexes of an anti-hero who has never quite learned how not to be of service. He has fled the stifling obligations of the patriarch only to immediately assume them again in a damp hotel room. He is the escaped prisoner who, finding a mess in the street, immediately stops to sweep it up.

There is a frantic, undignified quality to his mercy. He scurries to the hotel clerk to fetch a gas connection, enduring the suspicion native to this shadowy demimonde. When he asks about Julie’s absent lover—”Is he young?”—the query rings with the hollow thud of self-interrogation. Am I still capable of such ruinous abandon? is perhaps what he was wondering. He wonders too, with a flash of the old resentment, why the burden of restoration always falls to him, the provider, the cuckold, the steady hand. But Simenon dissociates from any sentimental education so that when Monde returns, Julie does not thank him. She does not transform nor fall for the old trope of the fallen woman redeemed by a stranger’s kindness.

In the morning, they step out together with a weary politeness, perhaps mistaking proximity for some kind of alliance. She asks his name and he blurts our ‘Désiré Clouet’, something he plucked at random from a cobbler’s sign. What follows is one of those scenes of dining-room sociability that Simenon treats as class anthropology. Julie, a dancer by trade, navigates the city’s margins with a proficiency that leaves ‘Désiré’, the fugitive bourgeois, blinking in the light. The waiter performs the requisite pantomime for the gentleman client, proclaiming the andouillette to be “excellent” because that is what waiters must say to men in suits. In bourgeois spaces, the menu is a contract of mutual deception, so the andouillette is always ‘good’. But with Julie, the waiter drops the mask. There is an easy camaraderie between them, the covert signal of class solidarity that acknowledges they are both in the business of fleecing the gullible. They remain together in the way debris collects in a gutter, that is, not by design, but by the absence of a current strong enough to separate them.

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 enough they are on a train to Nice, the sun-bleached waiting room for the idle, where they trudge through the station’s apéritif-hour crowds looking, with grim irony, “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, while he drifts in and out of cinemas, transfixed more by the anonymity of the dark than by any this or that 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 the glamour is barely hiding the usual squalor. His station is a pantry that reeks of tinned foie gras and greasy crockery, a purgatory of soiled linen from which he surveys the staff through a spy-hole. The Monico operates in a carefully curated temporal void, where clocks are banished, and the music is purposefully sporadic, designed only to drown out the thought of the morning train. A fitting microcosm for the existential limbo Désiré now inhabits. From his vantage point, he watches the clientele, all rosy-cheeked, heavy-walleted men who are, effectively, ghosts of his former self, submitting to a capital predation with bovine willingness.

The system is rigged, of course, though with a certain vulgar sophistication. The ‘foreigners’ and ‘suckers’ are lured into games where financial loss is a statistical certainty, while the hostesses, Julie among them, are contractually bound to an asymptotic seduction. Their role is to murmur ‘Not right now’ or ‘The boss won’t let me go,’ ensuring the champagne flows while the possibility of consummation remains perpetually just out of reach. The men are permitted their alibis, fresh lies for wives who perhaps find ignorance the more comfortable state, and leave exhausted and drained, while the women count their tips, their labour reduced to the pure mechanics of extraction. One is reminded by the grinding dance marathons in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, though at the Monico the exhaustion is disguised by rouge and the desperation decanted into crystal flutes. Désiré, possessing the exile’s X-ray vision, sees the codes and the cons, but having fled the hypocrisies of bourgeois life, he finds he has merely exchanged one rigged system for another, this one lacking even the language to participate.

Into this stasis stumbles Thérèse, his ex-wife who has devolved into a spectral figure, addicted to morphine and homeless, her appearance triggering in him a kind of dazed paternal panic. Their reunion is a clumsy philological exercise where they first retreat to the polite vous before slipping into the intimate tu, as if neither pronoun can quite bear the weight of the sorrow standing between them. The old drama of betrayal replays itself, though stripped of any cathartic climax. He hands over money, the reflex of the provider outliving the death of the role, and despises himself for the charity. Thérèse, meanwhile, powders her face in front of him, poised somewhere between the battered victim and the cunning survivor weaponising his guilt. When she eventually tracks him to the club, haggard and clawing at the pavement, the real horror he faces is his recidivism. He becomes her reluctant keeper, procuring ampules to manage her spasms, bound once again to a woman for whom morphine offers an escape just as fleeting, and perhaps just as necessary, as his own illusions of flight.

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 is suggesting here that identity is essentially performative, a matter of ‘flesh and outward appearance’ stretched tight over an existential void. Beneath the interchangeable masks of Monde and Désiré, there is only a raw, childlike confusion that has aged in lockstep with the body. When Julie sweetly offers him coffee, she cannot fathom the abyss gaping behind his eyes; language has failed him, or rather, he has seen through language. He views his former household—the wife, the children, the petty scuffles of the Rue Ballu, the business—through a lens of dispassionate clarity, stripped of the softening filters of pity or indignation. The ‘fairy tale’ of familial love and duty is revealed as a construct, and Simenon implies that the larger the stage, the more cunning the illusions required to sustain it.

At last, he returns to Paris, dragging Thérèse along as an encumbrance to be deposited in the hands of Doctor Boucard, as though one might dispose of cigarette. We are immediately jolted back into a funeral of spontaneity, a quiet sequence of phone calls, a muffled greeting at the station, a handful of practicalities. By the time (now) 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 and his son faints at the sight of him. He handles this domestic melodrama with an eerie calmness. When Boucard suggests he visit Thérèse, who lingers under the delusion that he has gone to Nice to wait for her, he simply declines. ‘What’s the use?’ he mutters. The correspondence he returns to Julie is equally detached.

There are no grand confessions, nor is there any triumph. Norbert—or is it Désiré? or simply Monde again?—appears as a man who has stared into the abyss only to resume the motions of his previous life, with the sole difference that he now recognizes them for what they are. The illusions persist, certainly, but he has surrendered the energy required to fight them, settling instead into a quiet assurance that every structure, domestic or commercial, is merely a shell.

Simenon, characteristically, offers no elaborate expositions of interior life, no reflective monologues or psychoanalytic probes. Instead, we witness a man in flight, drifting from his bourgeois moorings into a murkier realm of half-seen shadows and uncertain desires, guided by impulses that seem to well up from some obscure, somatic reservoir. 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, contiguous ‘self’.

We expect, indeed 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 tracks him with the detachment of a camera that can pan and zoom but is optically incapable of entering the skull. The half-articulated pains that presumably drove him to vanish remain strictly half-articulated, unnoticed even by those closest to him. One day he is a family man with accounts to balance and the next he is an opaque figure on a platform, waiting on the whim of a timetable that seems to possess more direction than he does.

Simenon’s genius here is that he does not sermonise about it. He declines to take a moral stance on Monde’s flight, just as he declines to retrofit the narrative with a secret trauma or a convenient Oedipal mechanism that might force the chaos 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. We are all just one unexpected gust of experience away from changing course entirely.

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