"At last he found himself back in his corner, his cage which protected him against everything that existed outside. After so many years he hardly knew the names of the men who worked in the pressroom, right under his eyes." - Georges Simenon, The Glass Cage
Georges Simenon made it a practice to carefully observe individuals on the street, pick out an interesting face and imagine that person dealing with an unexpected happening that would strip off all comfortable social clothing and serve as impetus to push him or her (usually a him) to the edge. Simeon would then use that very same man or women as his central character in a novel.
And in a Simenon novel, the unexpected incident nearly always takes place at the very beginning in Chapter One. For example, The Strangers in the House has Hector Loursat, a man who was a brilliant attorney in his younger days, forced to arouse himself from his eighteen-year hermit-like existence by a murder committed in his own house. With The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, shipping clerk Kees Popinga is shaken out of his bourgeois slumber by the collapse of his employer’s business. Again, in both cases, the decisive event occurs in Chapter One and the novel is, in effect, the protagonist dealing with the catastrophe.
The Glass Cage is the exact opposite: Emile Virieu’s life transforming episode takes place on the last page of the last chapter. In this way, Simenon's novel is a laser-like examination of Emile's life prior to rather than after the calamity.
And what a life. Emile is the second child of a couple residing in a small French town where his father is a baker and confectioner. Geraldine is his older sister. Even as a baby, Emile’s mother thinks something might be wrong because Emile does not cry nor does he laugh, he simply sits mute observing the world through large, expressionless eyes.
So it goes on throughout Emile’s boyhood and even into adulthood: no smiles or frowns, no friends or chatter or playing outside - Emile continues to remain still and spends many hours reading books. I picture Emile looking a bit like actor Peter Lorre only uglier. Life as forever flat – no highs, no lows; no joy, no sorrow, the barely audible hum of moving through the world in neutral with the emotions turned off.
Although Emile always has his nose in a book, we are never informed what type of book; there are no titles or authors given, instead Georges Simenon leaves it to the reader’s imagination. My own inference is our Mr. Placid reads dictionaries and encyclopedias along with some geography and travel books, certainly no novels or poetry since the third-person narrator informs us more than once Emile is not interested in people.
Incidentally, third person is a most effective way to tell this story - a reader can hover above Emile and view his entire life as if contained in a cube of glass, very much in keeping with Emile’s working year after year in a solitary glass cubical as a proofreader for a minor Paris publisher.
From what I’ve written so far, does Emile Virieu give you the creeps?
He certainly gives many men and women the creeps as he takes he walks on the streets of Paris with those big. expressionless eyes. Emile can sense people cast sidelong glances at him, judging him as strange – and he doesn’t like it.
Emile goes and gets himself married at age twenty-five to a woman three years his senior, an ugly women by the name of Jeanne. This is Jeanne’s second marriage; her first husband died of an infection. Emile moves into Jeanne’s furnished Paris apartment, has sex with Jeanne the first few weeks and then never again (they have always slept in separate beds and besides which, Emile can’t have children).
The couple settle into a dreary, colorless pattern and so it remained for twenty years. Jeanne fixes Emile two boiled eggs for breakfast, the same meal he has always eaten even as a boy; they never quarrel, they watch television together and end each evening with a “Good night, Emile." "Good night, Jeanne.” and that’s it.
Emile doesn’t like to take vacations as he would much prefer to spend his days in his glass cubical doing his proofreading. Then he decides at age forty-four a trip to Italy wouldn’t be a bad idea. Jeanne agrees. Off they go, however their experience is less than ideal – they go to the beach but Emile feels completely out of place with his flabby, pasty white skin and on top of this, neither of them can swim.
They visit the museums and walk the streets of the famous cities but all this does is bring Emile’s sense of alienation into sharper focus: "They were his fellow human beings, but he could see no resemblance to himself in them. What is more, he regarded them as his enemies. He resented their being there; he hated them for being themselves, for behaving differently from himself, for smiling and laughing, for taking in the sunlight, the surroundings, the sights and sounds through every pore of their skin."
Emile and Jeanne return to Paris and Emile encounters more problems and issues that upset his routine, beginning with his brother-in-law Fernand wanting to divorce his sister Geraldine. Upset on top of upset, personal, family and then, if this isn’t enough, new neighbors across the hall.
How much can a man like Emile take? One of the starkest, most unsettling existential tales you will ever encounter. What gives Simenon’s The Glass Cage a particular sting is how similar Emile Virieu’s lackluster routine is to a vast number of men and women working and living in our modern society.
Bust of Georges Simenon in Liege, Belgium
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