Across the Street

In an apartment in Faubourg Saint-Honore that has seen better days, Dominique, the daughter of a general, is busy mending her dress. It is hot. She sits in her slip as she sews and listens to the noises of the city, listens to the scratchy tango the couple in the other room, her boarders, play on the gramophone while they make love. Sometimes Dominique cannot resist looking through the keyhole, though it hurts her and makes her giddy. In three months she will be forty. All the shutters across the street are wide open. Dominique watches the Rouets. She follows their gestures, the movements of their lips. It is a long story without words, and she knows the smallest episodes of it. Then one day she sees Monsieur Rouet in his bed gasp his last while in the next room Antoinette, his wife, stands holding the medicine, her hand on the doorknob. With his usual mastery Georges Simenon describes the day-to-day suffering of a woman who lives alone and only through the lives of others.