Les Soeurs Lacroix

The novel, set in Bayeux (Calvados), was written at the Hôtel de l’Étoile in Saint-Thibault-sur-Loire, near Sancerre, in December 1937. Simenon knew the region well, having not only set several novels there but also lived there in 1923 and 1924, when he was secretary to the Marquis de Tracy.

Simenon constructs here one of his most suffocating family confinements. Everyday gestures take on the weight of menace, and meals become hostile ceremonies. Each family member watches the others, while the children seek to escape a household where feelings have slowly turned to poison; when arsenic itself finally appears, the crime is no longer simply something to solve but the product of a long family decay.

First serialized in La Revue de France from January to March 1938, Les Sœurs Lacroix belongs fully to Simenon’s “romans durs.” Without Maigret, without a real investigation, and with almost no escape to the outside world, the author observes the slow unfolding of tragedy within a closed universe, where fatality arises less from circumstance than from the repetition of resentment.

Menguy, 55.