The Prison (novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Prison (French La prison) is a 1968 novel by Georges Simenon. The dur tale of a husband informed by the police that his wife has shot her sister, the novel takes similar themes to Simenon's domestic crisis novels Lettre à mon juge and La Main.
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Plot
Alain Poitaud is told by the police that his wife, Jacqueline, has just shot and killed her own sister, Adrienne. Alain and Jacqueline, who have been married for seven years and have a little boy being brought up in their country house, have a very busy life: she is a journalist specialising in interviews, and he is the head of a successful illustrated magazine. Theirs is a very glamorous life that leaves them little privacy, though apparently their relationship doesn't suffer. Alain is a rather strange person: superficial, non-conformist, sometimes cynical and a great womaniser.
In an attempt to explain Jacqueline's act, Alain beats around in his memories, while he is questioned by Assistant Superintendent Roumagne, the examining magistrate, Adrienne's husband, her father-in-law and Jacqueline's lawyer. Jacqueline remains completely silent.
Little by little, an answer emerges. The two sisters had never loved each other. Adrienne had been Alain's lover for several years. Now she was having an affair with the man who had been Jacqueline's lover for two years. This is revealed by Roumagne's investigation, who tells the husband that his rival was none other than the photographer for his magazine, Julien Bour, a sickly, spineless individual. The husband's lawyer could therefore plead a crime of passion.
The day after this revelation, Alain, after a final tryst, returns to his country house, which seems foreign to him, embraces his son, who has become attached to a different world, gets drunk along the way, finds Julien Bour, frightened and more miserable than ever; and finally, aware that he is a useless man whose life is over, commits suicide by driving his Jaguar into a tree in the Bois de Boulogne.
== Special aspects of the novel A drama that reveals to a man his deepest truth: that of emptiness.
Details of the work
Space and time
Space
Paris. Saint-Illiers-la-Ville.
Time
Late 1960s.
Characters
Main character
Alain Poitaud. Director of the weekly magazine Toi. Married, with a 5-year-old son. Age 32.
Other characters
- Jacqueline, Alain's wife, freelance journalist, aged 31.
- Adrienne, Jacqueline's sister, aged 28.
- Roland Blanchet, Finance Inspector, husband of Adrienne
- Julien Bour, photographer, lover of both sisters.
