The Widower

With his usual mastery and sensitivity, Simenon explores here his favorite subject—the nature of married relations.

A solitary, self-content designer stumbles across a battered prostitute in a gutter. Literally. He takes her to his little apartment on a modest Parisian street, nurses her back to health, and eventually marries her.

One evening, instead of finding her at home, in the kitchen, wearing her shabby little black dress, he finds her at the Hôtel Gardénia, in Room No. 44, wearing a chic white dress, with expensive shoes, a bunch of withered roses in her hands. Dead.

His wife of fourteen years—someone very close yet enormously distant—is gone. The widower is left with a lot of questions: Does nearness breed devotion or deception, admiration or contempt? What about love? Did his unwitting callousness drive his wife to suicide? Timely and timeless questions all. That is Simenon—timeless himself.