Read Online When I Was Old by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online Page B

interested in men!’
    ‘In man. And if one looks at his history not just in terms of a few centuries, but since the beginning of time …’
    I improvise. I’m not entirely serious. He sinks deeper into depression.
    ‘A history that will end in an atomic cataclysm.’
    ‘You think so?’
    Suddenly I tell him a story, very intense.
    ‘Take staphylococci aurei instead. They lived in peace and prospered, because we hadn’t found a defence against them. You see! Suddenly a gentleman invents penicillin and generations of staphylococci are exterminated … Those that escape mutate, God knows how, and penicillin no longer destroys them …’
    Next a new antibiotic, streptomycin or the like. A new extermination. A new mutation.
    Aureomycin … I go on …
    ‘Twenty times … twenty-eight times, I think … And
now these devils of staphylococci aurei anticipate future attacks, prepare for them so well that the new strains are often impervious to the new antibiotics. They confound science!
    ‘And with all this,’ I say, ‘do you despair of man, who is so much further evolved than the staphylococcus aureus?’
    He left deeply disturbed, I’d swear. Because of noise too.
    This ‘modern plague’ of noise, this bustle that no longer allows man …
    I remind him that in seventeenth-century memoirs, for instance, Parisians were already complaining of the noise, of the traffic, of the vehicles that scraped against the walls, of the cracking of whips, the cries of street vendors, etc.
    Imagine a post station relay …
    I know. Parisian doctors have just demanded larger apartments in public housing, attributing a great number of nervous ailments to lack of privacy. Three rooms for a household with two or three children …
    The peasants of earlier times had one room for themselves and their nineteen or twenty children. And often it opened on the stable! I cite the narrow streets of Naples, of Rome, even of Venice, the houses there where there was a whole family to a room, too.
    The truth is that in those times one didn’t worry about the common people.
    And Versailles? What a beehive! Every cell was occupied and there wasn’t a square yard of free space, so to speak.
    Papers only print ready-made ideas. Psychologists,
sociologists, seem never to have read any history outside their manuals.
    What will this journalist’s article be like? It probably won’t contain a word of what I’ve said. Perhaps, in our three-language dialogue, neither of us has understood the thoughts of the other.
    I’m waiting for the fourth, who will be here for two weeks; he has already interviewed me once in Cannes. A first-rate man. We met on the beach where he was with his children, I with mine, and we postponed a serious interview until later.
    Serious? About what? Why? I have nothing to tell him he doesn’t already know.
    But he is a journalist, I am a novelist. So, an interview.
    He must wonder, as he stares at the sea, what new question to ask me.
    What happens to all my words that people print?
    Previously I used to answer:
    ‘Nothing.’
    And I would say whatever came into my mind.
    Later I saw that all those words thrown out like confetti did not disappear. They finally were formed into a whole that became a legend, and this legend in turn took on a character of its own.
    Hitler must have spoken of the Jews as I spoke Tuesday of the staphylococci aurei because someone asked him to speak and this appeared to him as a good subject. I’m beginning to believe that he didn’t know that he would be forced to return to it and finally to kill I don’t know how many millions of Israelites.
    De Gaulle spoke of the greatness of France because the Frenchman loves to hear his greatness talked about. Where will this lead him? He doesn’t know himself. Now it is his legend that takes over and rules him.
    I’m not interested in politics. But still I’m intrigued by a problem posed by politics: that of sincerity and insincerity.
    That of politicians