Aging & Wisdom Quote by Georges Simenon

There is something chillingly mechanical in that adverb: tirelessly. Simenon doesn’t say Mussolini watched, enjoyed, or inspected. He “contemplate[s],” a verb that turns a mass spectacle into an object of private, almost meditative attention. The dictator isn’t merely receiving a parade; he is studying it, as if the bodies passing before him are raw material for a project. In one clean stroke, Simenon frames fascism less as a frenzy than as an administration of flesh.

The phrase “a parade of thousands of young men” does the rest. It’s not a crowd, not citizens, not soldiers with names, but a counted resource, standardized by youth and masculinity. Fascism loved pageantry because pageantry is politics made legible: straight lines, synchronized motion, a state that can be seen to work. Simenon’s eye, trained by fiction to notice power’s quiet habits, lingers on the leader’s posture rather than the marchers’ zeal. That choice carries subtext: the parade is supposedly for the public, but its real audience is the man at the top, verifying that obedience scales.

Context matters. Simenon came of age in a Europe where strongmen marketed themselves through spectacle, and writers traveled, reported, and sometimes flirted with the aesthetics of authority before history clarified the cost. The sentence reads like a snapshot taken before the shutter fully understands what it’s capturing: a ruler calmly appraising a future battlefield, a generation being rehearsed into submission while he thinks, without visible strain, about how to use it.