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Simenon confronts his self-engenreputation as a womanizer. He has in various interviews, the conquest of "tens of thousands" of women, sometimes at a pace of five a day. His message to his children shuffles the terms of his earlier boasts; "Never in my life had I had the idea of playing Pygmalion to any woman, because I have too much respect for human personality." Yet he did not like his first wife's given name, Régine, so he called her Tigy; he renamed the young woman who became their housemaid and his lover, dubbing her Boule instead of Henrīette. His second wife, whom he now reviles and calls D. rather than Denise, underwent a similar transformation: "In Canada I had gotten D. to give up using makeup." Having made them, he could also break them. Tigy agreed to a divorce stipulation that she must always live within six miles of her son's father. Her alimony, Simenon confides to his children and the world, "was high, about as much in dollars as a top executive made at that time [1950], a bit under the salary of a U.S. ambassador." D. gets her comeuppance in these pages, where her husband describes the mother of three of his children as a manic-depressive alcoholic given to stripping in public and calling herself a whore. As for "good old Boule," the time comes when Simenon must get rid of her too, handing her over to his oldest son's household. He complains: "I can tell that she doesn't fully comprehend the sacrifice I am making."
Perhaps such a man should never have had a daughter. Simenon hints that D. made a sexual advance toward Marie-Jo during the child's eleventh year; when the book was published in France, D. sued successfully to have two passages making this charge explicit suppressed. Whatever the facts of this tangled, pathetic affair, Simenon proudly displays Marie-Jo's incestuous feelings toward him. He danced with her to the strains of the Tennessee Waltz wherever he and his entourage happened to alight. He wrote her passionate letters before she was twelve: "Good night, good night, my tender and delicious love," adding an odd postscript: "Please share with your wonderful mother every thing I have said to you here, which is for her too. I know you are not jealous of her." Marie-Jo wore a wedding band her father had bought her when she was eight; she was dutifully informed when Simenon began sleeping with Teresa, her mother's Italian chambermaid. When Marie-Jo killed herself, she left a request that her ashes be strewn in the garden outside the room where her father and Teresa now spend their days. Writes Simenon: "Now that you are here, have come back to your real home, the whole universe has changed in my eyes, and I feel that henceforth I can never think sad thoughts about you. We have finally gotten together again forever."