Through the superabundant oeuvre of the creator of Maigret runs the single and same obsession, which is to discover ‘the naked man.’ A titanic undertaking which he here applies to his own existential journey. A reworking of Je me souviens... (1945) (I Remember…), in which he recounted his childhood for his son, the fictionalized autobiography Pedigree (1948) is resolutely inscribed in this memory driven endeavour.

‘A kind of island in [his] production,’ in the words of its author himself, the pivotal novel of this Pléiade collection occupies an untypical place in Simenon, but it is incontestably illuminating. Within it we discover, amongst the ‘everyday folk’ of his first years in Liège, a Roger Mamelin who is none other than Georges the child. In it is also set in place, throughout its very numerous pages, a subtle dialectic between the real and the fictional. Each in their own way, the other novels of the volume in question, the third published by Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, enable a decoding, even if a slight one, of the personality of a writer who remains in the eyes of many a genuine enigma. In this he follows the example of his fellow beings in the human condition, whom he strives hard to capture, book after book, in their puzzling – and often worrying – strangeness.

After the publication in 2003 of 21 of Simenon’s novels in the prestigious Pléiade collection, gathered together in two volumes, Jacques Dubois, Emeritus Professor at the ULg, and Benoît Denis, first assistant in the Romance languages and literatures department, have today just edited a third. The long autobiographical novel Pedigree occupies a central place in it, and is surrounded by other texts which bring out its originality and spotlight its particular role in the writer’s literary trajectory.

Editing literary works more often than not resembles a long march, as this volume’s two designers willingly acknowledge, as the task obviously does not consist of correcting an author’s text, but of publishing a text which matches as closely as possible the author’s intentions. The basic rule is to choose the last edition checked through by the author in his lifetime. In the present case, Pedigree, initially published in 1948, was the subject of three successive editions following the lawsuit in which Simenon was sued by people who recognized themselves – or believed they recognized themselves – inn certain of the book’s characters, a lawsuit which led to contentious passages being removed. The last of the editions, dating back to 1958, was reviewed by Simenon: it can thus be considered definitive. But the variants of the two preceding editions have been provided in the profuse critical apparatus which accompanies it and which reveals the measure of the task’s complexity.