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 and quiet 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. There are no manifestos pinned to the mantelpiece. 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. 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. 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 of subtle suffocation. A gas lamp lit by a man in a greenish overcoat, a shade so jaundiced it seems to radiate stagnation. Books and leather chairs and the sanctum of bourgeois order. A daughter’s cough met with paternal detachment. The baby might be vomiting, but only might be. To Monde it is now merely another 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 by the clumsy paranoia of the novice fugitive. He is a man performing an impersonation of a stranger and the costume IS continuously itchy.

There is a dry, quiet comedy in his incompetence. We watch him 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 the ‘roman dur’ as social anthropology. Simenon understands that a bourgeois man stripped of his rituals is not a liberated savage but a 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 like a shade, his pockets heavy with currency he has forgotten how to spend.

He has spent a lifetime calibrating himself to the expectations of others, and he cannot simply switch off the mechanism. Even in flight, Monde polices his own visibility, terrified of committing a faux pas against a code of conduct he has ostensibly abandoned. He 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.

AnWhen 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 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 is a 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. 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 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’ which 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; 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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