Exhibition
Simenon

Starting out as a journalist, Georges Simenon (Liège, 1903 — Lausanne, 1989) forged a career for himself as a novelist, restless traveler, and photographer. He left behind in the public’s imagination a singular image, the silhouette of a pipe-smoking man sporting a trench coat and fedora that melded with commissaire Maigret, the fictional French police detective that made the author a celebrity,. By his own admission, these detective stories taught him how to be a professional writer and, along the way, brought him great success, wealth, and international fame.

Simenon’s literary career started in 1921 with his novel Au pont des Arches (Imprimerie Bénard), which he published under the name Georges Sim. There followed a long list of popular, realist and adventure novels – one hundred and ninety titles between 1924 and 1930 under seventeen different pennames – in most cases brought out by Éditions Ferenczi et fils, until the 1931 publication of Monsieur Gallet, décédé and Le pendu de Saint-Pholien (Arthème Fayard et Cie), which launched the Maigret series. In 1934 he began his association with Gallimard when he published Le locataire (The Lodger), one of what he called his romans durs (“hard novels,” which have been described as psychological thrillers); and later it was his autobiographical text Je me souviens (1945) that sealed his relationship with Les Presses de la Cité.

An intuitive novelist who saw writing as the job of a craftsman, Simenon worked at a steady pace, forced his publishers to bring out a higher number of titles than they usually did, strictly prohibited them from making corrections to his typescripts, and made sure he had a say in the choice of covers. Although he seems to have thoroughly mastered the various stages that put his books in the hands of readers, his body of work remained open, organic, alive to possibilities, renewing its forms and in the process offering his readers great freedom within the pages of his stories.

Through his candid remarks to the press, photographs of his family life and the places where he did his writing, a selection of manuscripts, typescripts and first editions, along with a cycle of film adaptations, our Simenon exhibition invites visitors to get to know the author as well as read, hear, and see his work. To journalists who regularly put the question to him, he would, clearly amused, rattle off some of the numbers, 103 Maigrets, 117 psychological thrillers, and 25 autobiographical texts.