The Blue Room (novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Andrée still lying on the ravaged bed, naked, thighs spread, a thread of sperm seeping from the dark patch of her sex." --first page of The Blue Room (1964) by Georges Simenon |
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La Chambre bleue (1964, English: The Blue Room) is a 'roman dur' by Georges Simenon with an open ending. The plot show similarities to that of The Accomplices.
Summary
Incarcerated and interrogated by Judge Diem, Antoine "Tony" Falcone, as he apathetically answers the court's questions, calmly and retrospectively analyzes his short-lived adulterous affair with Andrée Despierre, a schoolmate whom chance had put in his path a few months earlier. Tony, a salesman and repairman of agricultural machinery in Saint-Justin-du-Loup in the region of Poitiers, lives with his wife, Gisèle, and their six-year-old daughter, Marianne, a simple relationship from a modest family in the countryside. Born into a family of Italian emigrants from Piedmont, whose mother died violently while her sons were still young children, Tony and his brother grew up with their father, the old mason Angelo. After ten years away from his native village, Tony returned with his young wife to found a home near his family. However, handsome and always ready to meet new lovers without any other commitment than to satisfy his sexual desire, he also leads his own life with the complicity of his brother who runs a hotel-restaurant in the nearby village of Triant.
For a few months, Tony has been sleeping with Andrée, the sad and apparently "cold" wife of the village grocer, married for convenience, who has always been fascinated by him and who offered herself one evening on the side of a road and has since been able to fully satisfy her desires and her love nourished since her childhood. Deeply in love, she asks him, during their eighth clandestine meeting in the Blue Room of the fraternal hotel, if he loves her and could live with her if she and he would make themselves free. Tony, not paying any serious attention to these questions, answers the first question more or less in the affirmative, while getting dressed, but on the verge of being surprised by Nicolas, Andrée's husband, discreetly flees. Instinctively, he decides not to see Andrée again, even though his sexual relationship with her was the most intense and satisfying he had ever had. Two months later, while letters from his lover indicate that all is well, Nicolas, in poor health, dies in conditions that arouse suspicion in the village and worry Tony. Since their last meeting, he runs away from her and finds refuge in her home - more tender than usual for Giselle and Marianne with whom he goes on vacation, for the first time, to Les Sables-d'Olonne -, sensing indistinctly that a drama is setting in.
During the winter, while they still have not seen each other, Andrée becomes more insistent and writes him a final message "To you!" paradoxically as explicit about her expectations as it is ambiguous about the meaning and the means. Tony's uneasiness is at its height until the fateful day of February 17 when, absent from the region for the whole day for work, he is arrested by the gendarmes on his return in the evening for the murder of his wife. From then on, flabbergasted, he answers the various questions of the judges and experts, and is charged with the poisoning of his wife by strychnine put in a lethal quantity in a jar of jam that he had brought back in the morning from the Despierre grocery store where Gisèle had ordered. Two exhumations and analyses of Nicolas' body would also evoke a poisoning, uncertain however: Andrée is arrested. The "frenzied lovers", as the press headlines it, overwhelmed by the testimony of the villagers and that of the Despierre mother, who asserts that the labels sealing the jar were intact in her grocery store that morning, are found guilty of the murder of their respective spouses and sentenced to death, commuted to hard labor for life.
Analysis of the novel
The story is told from a single but doubly distributed point of view: the couple's (very detailed) romantic encounters and what follows are evoked both by Tony's memories and by his answers to the interrogations during the trial. From these two intertwined planes, the novel reveals, in a non-explicit way, the difficulty for a defendant to establish his innocence in the face of a justice system that bases the prevention of guilt on a set of appearances and coincidences.
