Act of Passion

Lettre à mon juge (Letter to My Judge) was written by Belgian author Georges Simenon in 1946 during his stay at Bradenton Beach, Florida and published in Paris the following year by Presses de la Cité. It is a dark psychological account of a man overcome by buried passions, who becomes a murderer.

Unusually among Simenon's output, it is written in the first person.

The novel is in the form of a long letter written in prison by condemned murderer Dr Charles Alavoine, who wants to explain his side of the story to the judge, as the ritual process of his trial, during which he was anxious to spare further grief to his family, did not bring out his motives. In the letter he tries to explain what sort of man he is and how he came to commit his crime.

The son of a brutish peasant farmer in the Vendée and his effacing wife, he qualified as a physician and bought a practice in the town of La Roche-sur-Yon. After losing his first wife, who left him with two daughters, his widowed mother looked after him and his family. He later married the bourgeois Armande, who, with the tact and style he lacked, was in no time running his home, his practice and indeed all aspects of his life.

Never convinced himself of his role as healer to and pillar of the community, he was easy prey to a young woman whose pain he could sense, even if at first he could not diagnose it. Martine was from Belgium, a drifter, existing on odd secretarial jobs and one-night stands with passing men. Although Martine was neither beautiful nor sophisticated, she and Alavoine instantly enjoyed passionate sex. Then, with Armande's reluctant acquiescence, he hired Martine as his assistant and visited her lodgings whenever he could. This lasted until Armande caught them in flagrante and told both to go. The guilty pair went to Paris, where Charles acquired a practice with a flat in a working-class district.

At last able to spend all night together, their relationship deepened, but in the process exposed the deep psychological flaws their relationship suffered from. As he learned how bruised and vulnerable she was from past troubles, Charles began behaving like his father and would beat her to escape his own demons. One night he decided that the only way to end this descending spiral into depravity was to strangle her.

The last chapter notes briefly that by the time this confession reached its addressee, Alavoine had committed suicide in the prison infirmary.

...
Wikipedia