Across the Street (Simenon novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Etait-ce cela la vie ? Un peu d’enfance inconsciente, une brève adolescence, puis le vide, un enchevêtrement de soucis, de tracas, de menus soins et déjà, à quarante ans, le sentiment de la vieillesse, d’une pente à descendre sans joie?" |
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Across the Street (1945, French: La Fenêtre des Rouet, literally, The window of the Rouet family) is a 'roman dur' by Georges Simenon. It is the story of the downward spiral of a spinster, who lives a vicarious life by spying on her neighbors across the street.
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Plot
In the cramped quarters of a house that belongs to her family, 39 year old Dominique Salès lives a confined and insipid existence. Next door, she rents a room to a young couple, the Caille's, whose vitality disturbs the disillusioned old spinster. Across the street: the Rouet's house, rich industrialists, the father and mother on the second floor, the son and daughter-in-law on the first, Augustine in the mansarde. Spying on the smallest gestures of her neighbors, Dominique Salès finds a kind of existence by proxy.
One day, she observes that Antoinette Rouet, returning home, finds her husband, who has a heart condition, in agony. Instead of helping him, she pours the drops of her medicine at the foot of one of the houseplants in the apartment.
Dominique is offended and will be even more so by the liberties that the young widow allows herself; she will send her anonymous letters and will even go so far as to follow her. Antoinette, who has rejuvenated the apartment where her parents-in-law want her to continue to live, has a first lover, then a second one whom she receives at home until the moment when, surprised by the Rouets, she is chased out of the house after having offered the old maid, who never stops spying on her, the spectacle of a delectable scandal.
But Dominique, for some time already, had taken to envying the pleasures and freedom which devour Antoinette. And when the the Caille, in their turn, are about to leave with their exuberant happiness, Dominique Salès, in view of the emptiness which surrounds her, becomes aware of the failure of her own life. Desperate, she takes a fatal dose of sleeping pills after having strewn her bed with roses and put on her most beautiful nightgown - the one she had embroidered in the past, when she was thinking of marriage.
Special aspects of the novel
The narrative technique allows the dialogue and thoughts of the Rouets to be suggested by adopting - except in the last chapter - the point of view of the old girl projected on what she observes through the window opposite.
Book Details
Space and time
Space
- Paris (Faubourg Saint-Honoré)
Time
Contemporary era.
The characters
Main character
Dominique Salès. Daughter of a general, without profession. Single. 39 years old.
Other characters
- Germain Rouet, engineer, and his wife
- Antoinette Rouet, their daughter-in-law, close to thirty years old
- Albert and Lina Caille, tenants of Dominique Salès.
Adaptations
- 1988 : La Fenêtre des Rouet, épisode 12 de la série télévisée française L'Heure Simenon réalisé par Josef Rusnak
Similarities with other 'romans durs'
- Les Fiançailles de M. Hire , also about spying across the street
