When I Was Old
“But the first day that I began to write it, towards the ninth or tenth page, I had the feeling that it was useless to try to go on to the end, that I wouldn’t be able to make it come to life.
As I always am when I’m writing, I was alone in my study, with the curtains drawn. I paced up and down five or six times, and if they hadn’t seemed in some way human, I would have torn up those few pages and waited a few days before beginning another book.
That has happened to me two or three times in a year. This time, I began to sob. Then, without too much confidence, I went back to my typewriter. Now I think it’s the best of the Maigrets. I will know when I begin the revision. Since the Cannes Festival, I’ve been wanting to write a novel that would be full of sunshine and tenderness. I had one in mind, with the characters and the background at hand. I only wrote three pages of that one. It wasn’t about Maigret, and my principal characters were in their thirties. I suddenly realized that in Mai...gret et les Vieillards, which in a way replaced this abandoned novel, I expressed the same tenderness, put in as much sunshine, but with characters who were all between seventy-two and eighty-five years old … Well then!MoreLess
As I always am when I’m writing, I was alone in my study, with the curtains drawn. I paced up and down five or six times, and if they hadn’t seemed in some way human, I would have torn up those few pages and waited a few days before beginning another book.
That has happened to me two or three times in a year. This time, I began to sob. Then, without too much confidence, I went back to my typewriter. Now I think it’s the best of the Maigrets. I will know when I begin the revision. Since the Cannes Festival, I’ve been wanting to write a novel that would be full of sunshine and tenderness. I had one in mind, with the characters and the background at hand. I only wrote three pages of that one. It wasn’t about Maigret, and my principal characters were in their thirties. I suddenly realized that in Mai...gret et les Vieillards, which in a way replaced this abandoned novel, I expressed the same tenderness, put in as much sunshine, but with characters who were all between seventy-two and eighty-five years old … Well then!MoreLess
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