The Bells of Bicêtre
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"When I was a boy, most of the books I used to borrow from a lending library (they had black cloth bindings and a pleasantly musty smell) boasted a preface, and I must confess that, now that I have been writing myself for over forty years, I sometimes wish that fashion had not vanished. I remember with particular nostalgia certain novels by Conrad, preceded not by one preface only but by a preface to the second edition and even to the third, plus a foreword and a note, a whole series of informal writings that delighted me almost as much as the story itself."--preface by Simenon |
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Les Anneaux de Bicêtre (1963, English: The Bells of Bicêtre) is a 'roman dur' by Georges Simenon.
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Summary
René Maugras, one of the magnates of the Parisian press, has just been struck by a hemiplegia after one of those lunches at the Grand Véfour where, every month, he meets up with the friends from his early days, all of whom have also become celebrities in their own fields: Jean Marel, academician and playwright, Besson d'Argoulet, from the Academy of Medicine, Clabaud, one of the masters of the Bar...
Maugras is placed in Bicêtre under the supervision of the great neurologist Audoire. Paralyzed, deprived of the use of speech, he is at the same time cut off from the outside world and abruptly stripped of the brilliant character he embodied. He gradually returns from death to life, through a long relearning process that mobilizes all the forces of his body and soul. With the naked lucidity of the creature, made close by the spirit of ragged old men who haunt the adjoining hospice, he looks back on his modest origins, analyzes and judges his choices, his passions and his compromises. Finally, and above all, he tries to understand this being that he has only been in contact with in his hectic life of a man striving for success: Lina, his wife, Lina whom he knew as a little television extra and who has never been able to adapt to the artifices of his worldly life, Lina who, today, is bogged down in alcoholism. At the end of this profound re-conquest through hardship, Maugras has learned the patience of understanding and the price of each moment of life. Reconciled with himself, he is ready to return to the skin of René Maugras.
Special aspects of the novel
The story is told in the third person and overlaps, according to the hero's mental associations, memories of the past and events of the present. The action here is all internal: it is a crisis of consciousness whose meditative cycle closes with the end of the illness. Like a curve completed in a ring, if we attribute to the novel a symbolic title.
The documents provide the exact interpretation, based on the transfer of an auditory perception to a visual one: the hero of the novel remembers that when he was very small, he called rings "the bells because of the concentric circles they throw in space"; this synesthesia appears several times in Simenon. On the other hand, the yellow envelope accompanying the manuscript, in the Fonds Simenon in Liège, gave as the first title of the novel: Les cloches de Bicêtre. On the reason for this change.
Data sheet of the work
Spatio-temporal setting
Space
Time
Contemporary time
The characters
Main character
René Maugras. Director of a large Parisian newspaper. Divorced and remarried, a daughter from his first marriage. 55 years old.
Other characters
- Lina, wife of Maugras.
- Miss Blanche and Joséfa, nurses.
Adaptation
- 1977 : Les Anneaux de Bicêtre, téléfilm français réalisé par Louis Grospierre, d'après le roman éponyme de Simenon, avec Michel Bouquet, Claude Jade et Dani.
Éditions
