IN sImeNoN’s footsteps

1. Place Saint-Lambert – Palace of the Prince-Bishops

Simenon bought his first pipe at the Grand Bazar at the age of 13 years. Before she married, his mother was a saleswoman in the haberdashery department at the Innovation store, which is today the head office of Fnac. This is where his parents met. The former Prince-Bishops’ Palace today hosts the law courts and provincial palace.

Whilst as a journalist Georges Sim often attended the law courts through his professional activities, he was also a diligent visitor in his spare time to consult Theodore Gobert, a historian who wrote Rue de Liége [Liège’s streets]. In the mind of the novelist, the square is also linked to the social upheavals and anarchist attacks that left a mark in his memory.

When you arrive in Place Saint-Lambert,you can hear trampling of many feet and can see hundreds,

perhaps even thousands of people jostling towards the nearby Grand Bazar as well as long lines of trams standing still one behind the other.

[Georges Simenon, Pedigree, 1948].

2. Place du Marche – City hall

Simenon married Régine Renchon on 24th March 1923 at La Violette, the traditional name of the city hall. Almost 30 years later, in May 1952, the famous novelist returned there with his second wife and was welcomed this time as a celebrity. To the left, at the foot of the staircase, the name of Arnold Maigret is engraved on a memorial on the façade of the city hall. Whilst a journalist, through the news items he covered, Simenon must have come across this Maigret from Liège reported missing in 1945 after deportation to a concentration camp.

Did he remember this name when creating his famous detective? According to the writer, he “never even knew there was a Maigret in Liège ”.

At that time, I liked to roam around the city hall, which, in Liège more than elsewhere, is the real centre of the country’s life.

I would stroll which ever way the wind blows, appreciating the noise, comings and goings, colours, music… I liked the juniper aroma in the nearby cafés which were the haunt

of Walloon poets and artists from the local theatres.

[Georges Simenon, Quand j’étais vieux, 1970].

3. Place du Commissaire-Maigret en rue Leopold 24

The Espace Maigret, installed behind the city hall, is located near to the house where Simenon was born on Rue Léopold. The ground floor was occupied by the Cession mil-linery and the young Georges was born on 12th or 13th February 1903. Simenon himself claimed it was Friday the 13th, but his superstitious mother is said to have insisted that the 12th featured on the official documents.Simenon went to the city hall every day: “For professional reasons, I had to be at the central police station at eleven o’clock every morning, where four fellow journalists and myself were given the daily reports”.

To the right stands the Maison Hosay, where Hosay Chocolate is made and sold.

A vast basement window covered by an iron grill is lit up by Auer lights. From this basement window, heat and a

nice smell of chocolate rise up, spreading several metres over the pavement. You can smell the Maison Hosay three buildings away before you reach it. The fragrance

follows you, only taking its leave three houses further on. In the meanwhile, you cannot help but admire the shop window, standing on the grid that warms your feet, taking in the aromas.

[Georges Simenon, Je me souviens, 1945].

4. Pont des Arches

It was a chemists located near to this bridge to which the young Simenon drew the name Au Pont des Arches, the title of his first novel published in 1921 and sub-titled Petit roman humouristique de mœurs liégeoises “A small humorous novel about Liège’s habits”.

Slowly, as if dazed by sleep, the Meuse River flows, smoothly, caressed

by small yellow rays of sunlight that struggle to pierce the blueish mist. On the bank, Quai de la Goffe deploys its full range

of colours, its lifeblood, where large baskets of fruit seem to exude a smell of the dew-soaked countryside.

[Georges Simenon, Lettres à une petite bourgeoise].

5. Church of Saint-Pholien

Joseph Kleine, a 24-year old painter who belonged to the La Caque group which Simenon attended, was found hanged from the handle of the door to the Church of Saint-Pholien. This occurrence was transposed in Simenon’s novel, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien. The current church is the fourth to bear the same name

“It was not pretty,” admitted one of the characters from The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien.

It did not even have a style… but it was very old, with something mysterious in all its different contours”.

[Georges Simenon, Le pendu de Saint-Pholien, 1931].

6. Place de l’Yser

Simenon experienced the square’s foundation when it was called Place de Bavière and used as a battlefield by gangs of youths from two rival Parishes. It was on the border between Saint-Pholien and Saint-Nicolas. Such parochial attitudes can be explained by the location of two former craftsmen’s brotherhoods: the tanners of Saint-Pholien and the weavers of Saint-Nicolas.

Some streets belonged, on one side, to one of the parishes, and on the other to the enemy parish.

I say enemy parish because, for the kids we were then, they were a very considerable barrier. It was dangerous for a kid from Saint Nicolas to venture alone into

Saint-Pholien, because there was the risk of being hit by stones or even being beaten up. [Georges Simenon, Vent du nord vent du sud, 1976].

Every second Sunday, the young Georges went there to watch his father Désiré conducting exercises with the civil guard, the ‘Sunday soldiers’. The novelist’s father could hardly have imagined that his eldest son would enjoy a triumphant welcome at this square on his return to Liège in May 1952.

7. Church of Saint-Nicolas – Georges-Simenon Youth Hostel

Inaugurated in 1996, the Georges Simenon youth hostel stands here. On seven of the eight suitcase-shaped benches that bedeck the forecourt, a rough adaptation in seven parts of the beginning to The Widow is engraved (the eighth bears Simenon’s signature). The adaptation is admittedly approximate in nature yet is far from clumsy, since the reconstructed sentence can be read by starting with any of the seven benches. Next to the youth hostel stands the Church of Saint-Nicolas which was the parish of the Simenon family, where they had a pew (the last row on the right). For Simenon, the church remains linked to his first childhood love and its “square, ungainly bell tower” overlooks the district “standing immobile in front of a sky of menacing immobility”:

It was my grandfather with his big white moustache, who, at Sunday mass, went among the faithful, rattling the money in

a copper box with a long wooden handle. Once he had finished, he would return to his pew, count out the coins and insert them one by one into a slit in the pew specially fitted to serve as a deposit box.

[Georges Simenon, Je me souviens, 1945].

8. 34 Rue des Recollets

The birthplace of André-Modeste Grétry, a composer who was chapel-master at the court of King Louis XV, is today the Grétry Museum.

Its windows have retained their greenish tinged thick

glass framed by lead. It is a house not out of place

in the paintings of Flemish masters, in chiaroscuro, with simple, polished walls;

I house that I would have liked…

In the narrow streets surrounding the Church

of Saint-Nicolas, the children play outside, milling about in the streamthat smells of poverty, shabby and dirty,

wearing clogs on their feet.The women, on the doorsteps, bellies stuck out and hands on their hips, call to each other shrilly from

one doorstep to another.

[Georges Simenon, Mémoires intimes suivis du Livre de Marie-Jo 1981].

9. Rue Roture

Formerly the quintessence of a working class street.

I believe that there is only one city in the world, Liège, my home town, that boasts about officially possessing,

for several centuries, a Rue Roture. It is a narrow, probably medieval street, which leads to Rue Puits-en-Sock, around fifty metres from my grandfathers old millinery.

The houses are tiny and cladded with lime. When I was a child and young man, a sort of stream flowed down the middle of the road, carrying, not spring water or drinking water, but washing water, laundry effluent and even waste water from the toilets. The inhabitants had no shame, quite

the opposite in fact, to proclaim that they lived “in Roture”, because they said“in Roture” as the French say “in Avignon”. It was a world apart, the most underprivileged place in the city, but nonetheless, many of its windows

were by no means lacking in pots of geraniums.

[Georges Simenon, De la cave au grenier, 1977].

10. 58 Rue Puits-en-Sock

The former millinery of Chrétien Simenon, Georges’ grandfather. The cradle of the family.

My grandfather was a milliner. His shop was dark, with two large murky

mirrors the only form of interior decoration. In the darkness of the backroom, lines of wooden heads for the

hats stood on the shelves.

[Georges Simenon, Je me souviens, 1945].

11. 57 Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse

The Notre-Dame school, where the future novelist learned how to read.

12. Rue de l’Enseignement

No. 5: the former home of Simenon’s mother, Henriette Brull. She lived here until 1968, in particular with her second husband. This is where Georges came to visit her on his return to Liège in 1952. It was also in this house that Henriette is said to have experienced a difficult relationship and communications with her spouse (in a similar manner as with her son) and whose atmosphere is said to have inspired the novel The Cat, played on film by Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret in 1971.

No. 6: the building that housed the former Velden boiler-workers workshop. The Velden family was one of the most deep-rooted in Outremeuse. Désiré Simenon regularly played whist here on Friday evenings.

No. 29: the third home of the Simenon family in Outremeuse. This is where the young journalist Georges Sim wrote his first novel. It was also his last home before his departure for Paris.

13. Rue de la Loi

No. 48: the primary school attended by the young Georges.In class, taught by the friars of the church schools,

I was the teacher’s pet. For example, I had the great honour of being responsible for the stove which I loaded with wood every half hour or every hour.

I was also in charge of the bell, which I used to announce the time for prayers in all the classes.

[Georges Simenon, Un Homme comme un autre, 1975].

No. 53: the second home of the Simenon family in Outremeuse. Georges’ mother sub-let rooms to university students who sometimes came from Central or Eastern Europe.

All the household’s life was focused on the kitchen, where the tenants themselves came to eat before us. There was always

a strong smell of soup and stewing dishes. There was so much steam in the air that it stuck to the windows and walls painted in pale green, down which it zigzagged.

[Georges Simenon, Destinées, 1981].

14. 25 Rue Simenon (formerly Rue Pasteur)

The Simenon family’s first home in Outremeuse.

The district was relatively new and mostly populated by minor civil servants, employees, a few annuitants, and even,

the pride of Rue Pasteur, a magistrate, as well as, opposite him, the firstviolin from the Royal Theatre. It was in this street that I made my first steps and that

I encountered my first friends.

[Georges Simenon, Les Libertés qu’il nous reste, 1980].

15. Place du Congrès

This was the favourite playground of Georges as a small boy, and now plays host to a bust of the novelist.

It is a square peopled by meek and modest people, far from the centre and I spent many marvellous hours there.

[Georges Simenon, Quand j’étais vieux, 1970].

16. 16. 16. The corner of Place du Congrès and Rue de la Province

The path taken by Simenon on his way to be an altar boy at the Bavière hospital chapel. The description of this route can be found in The Testimony of the Altar Boy, a short story that was part of the collection Maigret and the Surly Inspector.

17. Bavière Chapel

The former Bavière hospital chapel where young Georges was an altar boy.

The mass for which I was altar boy at the hospital

chapel took place at six o’clock in the morning, in daylight, even bright

sunshine in the summer, but in almost total darkness in winter. I have to admit I ran there and back, keeping to the middle of the street,

afraid of the shadows and porches, to reach the tiny yellow lantern, disproportionally small compared

to the large hospital entrance. When I arrived out of breath, I finally felt safe and, after having greeted the old caretaker,

I headed towards the chapel

[Georges Simenon, Je suis resté un enfant de chœur, 1979].

18. Boulevard de la Constitution

The former lancers’ barracks. Soldier Simenon, number 7980, was assigned to a sup-ply company, which meant he was mainly at the service of the troop’s horses, carrying out grooming tasks, a responsibility which was not really to his liking. He retained his employment as a journalist during this period, with the Gazette de Liége and did not hesitate to criticise the army in his articles. However, this led to him receiving a severe dressing down from his superiors who he did not risk deriding further.

19. 35 Rue des Écoliers

A sign evokes the former cabaret L’âne Rouge, showing that this venue witnessed the establishment of a cabaret in 1972 aiming to maintain the memory of the one on Rue Sur-la-Fontaine, where Simenon, almost fifty years earlier, first tasted nocturnal life. Today, the cabaret is no more, but the sign remains. The cabaret on Rue Sur-La-Fon-taine inspired a novel written in 1932 called L’Âne-Rouge (The Red Ass), whose action takes place in Nantes.

20. 13 Rue des Écoliers (Impasse de la Houpe)

It was via the cul-de sac behind the black gate, to the left of the former joiners, that the members of La Caque (see also point No. 5) reached their meeting place. It drew its name from its smallness and was attended by Simenon and many artists (including renowned painters such as Mambourg, Lafnet, Scauflaire, etc.).

In a stationery shop window, Maigret found some postcards

showing the old church, which had been lower, squatter and completely black. One wing had been shored up with timbers.

On three sides, dumpy, mean little houses backed up against its walls and gave the whole place a medieval

look. Nothing was left of this Court of Miracles except a sprawl of old houses threaded with alleys and dead ends, all giving off a

nauseating odour of poverty. A stream of soapy water was running down the middle of Rue du Pot-au-Noir, which wasn’t even two paces wide. Kids

were playing on the doorsteps of houses teeming with life.

The house numbers had worn away, so the inspector had to ask for directions to number seven, which

turned out to be down a blind alley echoing with the whine of saws and planes, a workshop with a few carpenter’s benches at which three men were

labouring away. All the shop doors were open and

some glue was heating on

a stove.

[Georges Simenon, Le pendu de Saint-Pholien, 1931].

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The excerpts are free translations made the the translators of the Tourist Information Office. It is therefore possible that these lines do not always exactly correspond to the texts you might have read.