Editing Georges Simenon (section)

==Early life and education==
[[File:Simenon-rue Leopold.jpg|thumb|left|upright|26 rue Léopold, Liège, the house where Simenon was born]]

Simenon was born at 26 Rue Léopold (Liège) (now number 24) to Désiré Simenon and Henriette Brüll. Désiré Simenon worked in an accounting office at an insurance company and had married Henriette in April 1902. Simenon was born either at 11.30 pm on Thursday 12 February 1903 (according to the birth certificate) or just after midnight on Friday 13th (the date possibly being falsified on the certificate due to superstition).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Marnham |first=Patrick |title=[[The Man Who Wasn't Maigret|The Man who Wasn't Maigret, a portrait of Georges Simenon]] |publisher=Harvest Books |year=1994 |isbn=0156000598 |pages=10–11}}</ref>

The Simenon family was of [[Walloons|Walloon]] and [[Flemish people|Flemish]] ancestry, settling in the [[Limburg (Belgium)|Belgian Limburg]] in the seventeenth century.<ref name=":0">Marnham (1994). pp. 14, 311-13, 324</ref> His mother's family was of Flemish, Dutch and German descent. One of his mother's most notorious ancestors was [[Gabriel Brühl]], a criminal who preyed on Limburg from the 1720s until he was hanged in 1743.<ref name=":0" /> Later Simenon would use Brühl as one of his many pen names.<ref>{{Cite web |title=15 |url=https://translationreview.utdallas.edu/abr/ABR_19.1-2.2014.pdf |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200801015456/https://translationreview.utdallas.edu/abr/ABR_19.1-2.2014.pdf |archive-date=1 August 2020 |access-date=17 March 2020 |website=UT Dallas}}</ref>

In April 1905, two years after Simenon's birth, the family moved to 3 rue Pasteur (now 25 rue Georges Simenon) in Liège's {{ill|Outremeuse|fr}} neighbourhood. Simenon's brother Christian was born in September 1906 and eventually became their mother's favourite child, which Simenon resented.<ref>Marnham (1994). pp. 30-31</ref> The young Simenon, however, idolised his father and later claimed to have partly modelled Maigret's temperament on him.<ref>Marnham (1994). p. 29</ref>

At the age of three, Simenon learned to read at the Ecole Guardienne run by the Sisters of Notre Dame. Then, between 1908 and 1914, he attended the Institut Saint-André, run by the Christian Brothers.<ref>Marnham (1994). p. 32</ref>

In 1911 the Simenons moved to 53 rue de la Loi, where they took in lodgers, many of them students from Eastern Europe, Jews and political refugees.<ref>Marnham (1994). pp. 34-35</ref> This gave the young Simenon an introduction to the wider world, which was later reflected his novels, notably ''Pedigree'' (published 1948) and ''Le Locataire'' (''The Lodger'') (1938).

Following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Liège was occupied by the German army. Henriette took in German officers as lodgers, much to Désiré's disapproval. Simenon later said that the war years provided some of the happiest times of his life. They were also memorable for a child because "my father cheated, my mother cheated, everyone cheated."<ref>Marnham (1994). pp. 39-43</ref>

In October 1914 Simenon began his studies at the Collège Saint-Louis, a [[Society of Jesus|Jesuit]] high school. After a year he switched to Collège St Servais, where he studied for three years. He excelled at French, but his marks in other subjects declined. He read widely in the Russian, French and English classics, frequently played truant, and turned to petty theft in order to buy pastries and other war-time luxuries.<ref>Marnham (1994). pp. 45-48</ref>

In 1917 the Simenon family moved to a former post-office building in the rue des Maraîchers.<ref>Marnham (1994). p. 43</ref> Using his father's heart condition as a pretext, Simenon left school in June 1918 without taking his end-of-year exams.<ref>Marnham (1994). pp. 51-52</ref> After brief periods working in a pâtisserie and a bookshop, Simenon found himself unemployed when the war ended in November 1918. He witnessed scenes of violent retribution against residents of Liège accused of collaboration, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. He described these scenes in ''Pedigree'' and ''Les trois crimes de mes amis'' (My Friends' Three Crimes) (1938).<ref>Marnham (1994). pp. 53-54, 212</ref>