Les Fiançailles de M. Hire
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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« Quatre-vingts à cent francs par jour sans quitter emploi par travail facile. Écrire M. Hire, 67, rue Saint-Maur, Paris. » ... Une sale petite escroquerie légale. Le coup des cent francs par jour sans quitter son travail et de la boîte de couleurs. Vous tentez les petites gens par des annonces et, comme vous leur envoyez quand même quelque chose pour leur argent, on ne peut pas vous poursuivre. --Les Fiançailles de M. Hire (1933) by Georges Simenon |
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Les Fiançailles de M. Hire (1933, Monsieur Hire's Engagement) is a roman dur by Belgian writer Georges Simenon. It tells the story of the final days of Monsieur Hire.
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Plot
In Villejuif, a Parisian suburb, the corpse of a prostitute is found on a vacant lot. The police are convinced that this is a sadistic crime. The janitor of a nearby house testifies that on the night of the murder her tenant, M. Hire, came in with a bloodied handkerchief and a wound on his chin.
Monsieur Hire is a small-time crook of Jewish origin (one-time convict for selling flagellant novels), lives a lonely isolated life without female companionship (apart from his visits to the brothel). A loner, unpopular with his neighbors, he becomes the ideal suspect for the murder of a the young prostitute. The police place him under 24-hour surveillance and wait for him to do anything suspicious.
Once a week, Hire is the unlikely star of a Parisian bowling club, where people think he works for the police. Apart from his passion for bowling, Hire is a peeping Tom and obsessed with the voyeuristic observation of his neighbor Alice. During his nocturnal observations of Alice, he finds out that her fiancé is the killer everyone is looking for.
Eventually Alice notices him spying on her. She manipulates him into not revealing anything about her boyfriend to the police. Mr. Hire believes that she is really in love with him. Naively, he proposes to Alice to flee together to Switzerland, showing her 80,000 francs in bonds. He waits in vain at the gare de Lyon train station for the one he now calls his "fiancée" and, after a night of wandering, decides to return home.
When he arrives, he falls into the trap that Alice has set for him: she has hidden the purse of the murdered prostitute in his room, the evidence that provides proof of the crime, and the police are on the scene, surrounded by a vigilante crowd, ready to lynch him.
Hire takes refuge on the roof of a building, almost falls to his death and dies in the arms of firefighters.
English language editions
Les Fiançailles de M. Hire has been translated into English twice: once by Daphne Woodward as Mr. Hire's Engagement for Hamish Hamilton in 1956, and a second time by Anna Moschovakis as The Engagement for New York Review Books in 2007. The former version also appeared as The Sacrifice, comprising Mr. Hire's Engagement and Young Cardinaud as well as in one of the Simenon Omnibuses; the latter edition contains an afterward by John N. Gray.
Film versions
The book has been filmed as Panique by Julien Duvivier in 1947 and stars Michel Simon and Viviane Romance.
The book has also been filmed by Ladislao Vajda in 1947 in Spanish as Barrio and, with a different cast, in Portuguese as Viela (Rua Sem Sol).
The book has also been filmed as Monsieur Hire by Patrice Leconte in 1989 and stars Michel Blanc and Sandrine Bonnaire
See also
