Le Testament Donadieu

In the villa Les Tamaris, which he had rented at Porquerolles, Simenon wrote, during the summer of 1936, the novel to which he entrusted all his hopes: to break free (at last) from the detective novel, to be recognized as a writer in his own right, and to be crowned with a literary prize — in this case the Goncourt, for which he was considered a serious contender. Simenon himself called Le Testament Donadieu his “first great novel.” This substantial book (750 typescript pages) cost him dearly. In an interview with a journalist from Liège for L’Indépendance belge (5 December 1936), he revealed what lay behind it: “I might have produced this book sooner had I been certain of sustaining the nervous and muscular effort I knew it would require of me.” Unlike his earlier novels, the work demanded by Le Testament Donadieu — by its scale and the direction he gave it — bore no relation to the ten days or so his novels usually took him: “Until now I had been able to hold out for ten days, but this time it was a month’s labor. I emerged from the task half neurasthenic, and had to undergo a restorative treatment […].” So great was his horror of making “the slightest correction” to a finished manuscript that, as he put it, “since I make no plan at all, I could hardly remove certain details without harming the balance of the whole.”

Simenon narrowly missed the Goncourt, despite two serious supporters: Gaston Gallimard — to whom he was now bound by contract (since 1933), and to whom he would give four texts in 1937 (Faubourg, L’Assassin, Le Blanc à lunettes and Le Testament Donadieu) — and one of the Goncourt jurors, the turbulent Lucien Descaves. Descaves maneuvered a great deal to see a foreign-born author win the prize, eventually succeeding with the Liège-born Charles Plisnier, crowned for Faux-passeport. Simenon had nonetheless accomplished his purpose: Le Testament Donadieu answered, in his own words, “an observation that had often been made to him. […] ‘When,’ the critics asked, ‘will Simenon give us “his” book?’”