'Strictly speaking, it started like a flu.' Norbert Monde is an industrialist, successful owner of a Parisian company for commission business and export, respected head of the family, wealthy and highly respected. One day, on the way to work, a shiver runs over him. It is his forty-eighth birthday. No one congratulates him - neither his wife nor his children, not even the employees. As if he were a nobody. Monsieur Monde digs deep into the company's coffers, shaves off his beard, swaps his tailor-made suit for a second-hand one and disappears. His escape takes Monsieur Monde south to the Côte d'Azur. Here he is finally allowed to be nobody. Biography (Georges Simenon)