Lettre à ma mère
One of the first 150 copies on pur fil paper, this copy no. 2.
Signed presentation inscription: “à mon vieil ami et éditeur Sven Nielsen et à Colette, en souvenir de trente ans de collaboration sans masques et en toute affection, Georges Simenon, décembre 1974.”
Accompanied by an original black-and-white photograph of Georges, Marc and Henriette Simenon together, at Lakeville, in August 1952. This was to be the only visit Simenon's mother ever paid her son. [Provenance: Claude Menguy archives, given by Simenon; photograph taken by Denyse Simenon.]
In 1970, at the age of seventy, Simenon was called to his mother’s bedside in Liège. Born Henriette Brüll, she was hospitalized, and he remained with her for eight days. This encounter inspired this book and its posthumous words: “We never loved each other while you were alive, you know it well. Both of us pretended…”
Unloved by his mother — Henriette preferred his younger brother Christian — Georges Simenon suffered from her indifference and her jealousy: she regarded her son’s success as an injustice done to Christian. Simenon portrayed her in Pedigree, as the touching figure of Elise Peters, and later in Le Chat, in an unflinching and uncompassionate portrait; the 1970 film adaptation by Pierre Granier-Deferre, with Simone Signoret, conveys the full measure of the character. This mother, ignored and even disliked, died in December 1970 at the age of ninety, having scarcely ever left her native city of Liège. Her trip to Lakeville was one of her rare journeys abroad.
Copy no. 1 belonged to Georges Simenon himself. Quite logically, no. 2 was the copy Simenon reserved for his publisher and friend, Sven Nielsen.
Nielsen had met Georges Simenon in 1945, and Simenon agreed to write the preface for the first book Nielsen published, Traqué, by the Norwegian author Arthur Omre. This marked the beginning of a very long collaboration — and friendship — as Simenon transferred, in 1947, all the rights to his work to Presses de la Cité, to the detriment of Gallimard. Until 1981, Presses de la Cité would publish 141 previously unpublished books by Simenon, with an average print run of 300,000 copies.
A lasting friendship united the two men; Simenon remained unfailingly loyal to Nielsen on editorial matters.
A choice copy.