The President

Restored to print for the first time in more than forty years, The Presidentwas hailed by the New York Timesas a “tour de force� At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirement-self exile-on the Normandy coast, writing his anxiously anticipated memoirs and receiving visits from statesman and biographers. In his library is the self-condemning, handwritten confession of the premier’s former attach , Chalamont, hidden between the pages of a sumptuously produced work of privately printed pornography-a confession that the premier himself had dictated and forced Chalamont to sign. Now the long-thwarted Chalamont has been summoned to form a new coalition in the wake of the government’s collapse. The premier alone possesses the secret of Chalamont’s guilt, of his true character-and has publicly vowed: “He’ll never be Premier as long as I’m alive... Nor when I’m dead, either.� Inspired by French Premier Georges Clemenceau, The Presidentis a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a probing account of the decline of power. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Called the “world’s most prolific novelist” by Life magazine, and several times a candidate for the Nobel Prize, Georges Simenon (1903-1989) published more than four-hundred novels, seventy-five of them featuring his celebrated detective, Commissaire Maigret.