Have you ever wanted to disappear; to just walk away from work, family and financial obligations, without a word to anybody, without leaving a hint as to where you might  be going? Disappearance, or escape, is a common enough fantasy, perhaps tempting middle-aged men more frequently than anybody else. Such a man succumbs to that temptation in Monsieur Monde Vanishes, a short novel by the prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903-1989).
   Monde’s escape is a simple matter of boarding a train, leaving behind his orderly life in Paris, to push through a long, dark night to the seedy, dangerous port of Marseilles. I’ve long been a fan of Simenon’s sparse but vivid prose. He’s known for his ability to set a scene, to create an atmosphere, and to draw credible characters with a minimum of  exposition. His descriptive skills are impressive. “The rhythm of the train took possession of him. It was like some music with a regular beat, the words for which were provided by scraps of phrases, memories, the passing images that met his eyes, a lonely cottage in the countryside where a stout woman was washing clothes, a stationmaster waving his red flag in a toy station, people passing ceaselessly by him on their way to the toilet, a child crying in the next compartment and one of the soldiers asleep in his corner, his mouth wide open in a ray of sunlight.”
   Simenon is best known for the 70-some-odd mysteries in the Inspector Maigret series, which are entertaining, certainly, but also formulaic. More significant are his noir crime stories, which he called “hard novels.” Monsieur Monde is one of these, full of foreboding, set in a nocturnal Riviera that tourists only see in nightmares, peopled with whores, thieves and junkies. Monde learns to navigate this world, in which nobody can be trusted, as adeptly as he navigated the Paris of a wealthy executive, husband and father. He becomes first the protector and then the companion of Julie, a loose woman with a shady past, and he settles comfortably into a job as assistant manager of the seedy nightclub where she works as a hostess.
   Monde’s new, modest life proceeds smoothly until one night when his first wife, Therese, wanders into the club. Therese had walked out on Monde many years earlier. Having since taken a second wife and raised two children to adulthood, Monde has scarcely given her a thought for decades. But he becomes curious about Therese's situation when the death of her partner-in-crime brings a police investigation into the nightclub. Therese, he learns, is a drug addict, living the dangerous life of a degenerate on the edges of  the underworld.
   The simple compassion that had led Monde to take Julie under his wing compels him to rescue Therese, despite the knowledge that getting her clear of the police and free of her addiction will require resources far beyond those available in his present position. As Monde busies himself securing drugs for his new charge and making preparations to leave the Riviera, Julie and Therese each ask, repeatedly,  “What will you do?” His invariable response is, “It doesn’t matter.”
   When Monde left Paris, he was fleeing the emotional wasteland of a petit bourgeois lifestyle. He had no more than a polite relationship with a vacuous wife; he only saw his daughter when she wanted money to provide luxuries her husband couldn’t afford; and he was humiliated by the public homosexuality of his son, Monde’s heir apparent in the family business. But now, after an evening of reflection at Therese’s sickbed, he has decided to go back to that world, and to take her along.
   Returning to Paris, Monde installs Therese in a small apartment, although he explains they will have no continuing relationship; he has engaged the family physician, Dr. Boucard, to oversee her recovery from addiction. The doctor tries to talk his friend out of this scheme, but quickly gives up, recognizing a profound, albeit unspoken, change in his friend.  “Boucard desisted,” writes Simenon, “probably because, like everybody else, he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eye with cold serenity.”
   Only Monde’s wife fails to see the transformation. At their perfunctory reunion, she immediately voices her displeasure. “You haven’t changed,” is her superficial assessment.
   “Yes, I have,” says Monde, finally comfortable in his own skin, secure in the knowledge that his fate will be determined not by the circumstances of his life, but by his actions.

NB: A shorter version of this article was published as Tempted To Disappear on Technorati. For those who wish to read Simenon's best work, I recommend the excellent editions issued by New York Review Books Classics.