Le Passage de la ligne
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Le Passage de la ligne (1958) is a 'roman dur' by Georges Simenon which tells the story of Steve Adams as he climbs up the ladder of life and crosses the social status line three times. The novel was not translated into English as of 2020.
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Production
Simenon completed the novel in Noland, Échandens, in Switzerland, February 27, 1958.
Summary
Steve Adams crossed the line three times, not that of the equator, but the dividing line that separates one social status from another higher than it. Having reached the age of 50, he feels the need to tell what this triple exploration has meant for him.
Child of divorced parents, Steve experienced in Normandy, with his maternal grandparents, whose poverty bordered on the embarrassing, a loneliness which gave rise to an irrepressible need to escape. After a jolted adolescence where he finds some affection at his aunt Louise's house, he joins his father who has remarried in England, then returns to France where he fails at the high school in Niort, the town where his mother works, who he sees rarely. He interrupts the first bac exams to head for Paris.
Hired as an errand boy, he discovers the big city, rubs shoulders with street life, but avoids bonding, except for brief sexual experiences. Until the moment when, after three years, he meets his first man to take him across the dividing line, Mr. Haags, a highly organized professional jewelry thief, who offers him a rather original job consisting of frequenting the big hotels ('palace hotels') of Deauville and the Mediterranean, to prepare his thefts. Having become an “assistant” as discreet as he is efficient, Steve enters the world of wealth.
Mr. Haags disappears and Steve, after acquiring a luxurious Amilcar, becomes private secretary to Gabrielle D., a businesswoman with a supercharged existence. Through her, it is the world of powerful people that Steve rubs shoulders with. This second passage of the line ends with the war of 1940 which sends Mrs. D. to United States and Steve Adams in the British Navy, because he is of English nationality.
Back in Paris after the war, aged 37, he sets up, thanks to the experience acquired, an advertising company: the success is overwhelming. This third passage of the line - which he performs alone - coincides with the marriage of Steve who marries a young girl of 22 years old, from a very honorable bourgeois family.
It is then that the rupture occurs: Steve feels trapped in this over-accomplished fate. Suddenly, in 1953, he leaves his wife and fortune to take refuge near Toulon where he opens a small antique dealer business. Without however being able to shake off the impression that he is out of place, that he is playing the role of a usurper.
Particular aspects of the novel
First-person narrative, in the form of memoirs the narrator writes for others. The facts, recounted in the order of their succession, are interspersed, especially in the second and third parts, by an introspection of the hero who seeks to locate the stages of his destiny in the "boxes" of society. We note intermittent returns to childhood with, implicitly, the absence of the mother.
We will also note remarks on the human geography of the districts of Paris, on the dress protocol of 'palace hotels' inhabitants, on the invasion of advertising in the 1930s.
When he works at Les Halles, unloading vegetables at the market, this is also described in The Outlaw.
Data sheet of the book
Space-time frame
Space
Saint-Saturnin (near Bayeux). Tottenham Corner (near London). Niort. Paris. Hyères. References to Cherbourg, Caen, Poitiers and Cannes.
Time
The characters
Main character
Steve Adams, of English father and French mother. Successive jobs (see summary). Married then separated, no children. 49 years.
Other characters
- Gary Adams, English, accountant on a British ship, father of Steve
- Antoinette Nau, former bar waitress in Cherbourg, divorced from Gary Adams, then housekeeper-mistress of Judge Gérondeau in Niort, mother of Steve
- Aunt Louis, sister of Antoinette
- Alvin Haags, international crook, no mention of nationality
- Gabrielle D., businesswoman, twice widowed, in her fifties
- Laure, wife of Steve.
Éditions
- Édition originale : Presses de la Cité, 1958
- Tout Simenon, tome 9, Omnibus, 2002 Template:ISBN
- Livre de Poche, n° 35050, 2008 Template:ISBN
- Romans durs, tome 10, Omnibus, 2013 Template:ISBN
Source
- Maurice Piron, Michel Lemoine, L'Univers de Simenon, guide des romans et nouvelles (1931-1972) de Georges Simenon, Presses de la Cité, 1983, p. 200-201 Template:ISBN
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