“Simenon famously claimed to have had sex with 10,000 women, and was equally famously corrected by his estranged second wife, who claimed the real figure was 1200. She had good data. When they lived in the US, Denise and Georges would go to brothels together; she liked chatting to the girls in the lobby while he was upstairs having sex with one of them. When he’d finished he would come down, and if she was having a good time she would say: ‘Why not have another one, Jo?’ Which must rank as one of the strangest sentences ever spoken in the history of marriage.”

(Simenon wrote the very popular Maigret novels)

John Lanchester · Maigret’s Room: The Home Life of Inspector Maigret · LRB 4 June 2020