To tell the truth, Maigret had never particularly liked Urbain, but he would have found it hard to say why. The owner of the Grand Café did his job as café proprietor, smiled or laughed with the customers and came running the minute he was needed for the card game. But perhaps he lacked spontaneity? Often, when he laughed at one of the mechanic’s jokes, for instance, he gave the impression that he would rather bite, and sometimes he could be caught darting glances devoid of any pleasantness.
‘It’s boredom,’ Maigret said to himself. ‘It’s no fun for a man of thirty-five to hang around all day in the sawdust of a provincial café …’
And now this same Urbain, after showing vague signs of rebellion and possibly defiance, was giving free rein to his emotion, forgetting all human dignity, in Maigret’s dining room where his face crumpled and he suddenly broke down in tears.
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever cried in front of a man,’ he mumbled in a last attempt to compose himself. ‘But the situation is just too ridiculous! If this goes on, I think I’ll end up blowing my brains out …’
He was in one of those states when, faced with too great an injustice of fate, a person feels like stamping their feet.
‘Why was it that, when you finished the game last night, I had a fit of jealousy? Oh! I know Angèle had promised me not to see “him” again. From next week, she wouldn’t even be going to Orléans once a week, as a result of my pleading with her. Even so, yesterday, after spending an hour close to the butcher, thinking that he had … Have you yourself never been jealous?’
Maigret merely shook his head with the sanctimonious indifference of a confessor.
‘I couldn’t stand it any more … I went out through the back, as I sometimes do, and, for a quarter of an hour, I stood there in the dark, leaning on the parapet of the bridge …’
‘Are you certain that no one saw you?’
‘Even if someone did see me, it was so dark they couldn’t have recognized me … Earlier, when the chief inspector from Orléans questioned me, I realized that he suspected all the café regulars, but me more than any of the others … Am I going to have to tell him everything? And will my wife have to find out, which means that my home life, which is already not much fun, will become hell? That’s what I have come to ask you …
‘I can’t live without Angèle any longer, do you understand? I couldn’t say how this love began … At first, I think it was simply curiosity … Then it became an obsession, to the point where it hurts me when customers look at her or brush past her … My wife means nothing to me, these days … I’d rather leave her than lose Angèle … But I swear, inspector, I didn’t kill the butcher …!
‘What should I do? How can I prove it? What should I say when I’m questioned and am unable to provide an alibi! Who will believe me when I say that I spent those minutes fuming, leaning on the parapet of a bridge?
‘I didn’t kill him, that’s the truth! And my situation is even worse because I would have been capable of doing it, but not like that, from behind, on the road …
‘Tell me: do you believe me?’
Maigret felt his gaze burning with fever and anxiety on him, and he looked away.
‘Please say, do you believe me?’
‘I can’t answer you …’
‘So you don’t believe me, and you know me! What will those who don’t know me think …?’
‘Please calm down.’
‘That’s easy to say!’ sneered Urbain.
‘There is no suggestion that anyone will bother you … Detective Chief Inspector Gabrielli came to see me earlier and he spoke to me briefly about you … Any suspicions they may have against one or the other of you are so vague that I believe ultimately the case may well remain unsolved …’
He had spoken softly, still without looking at Urbain, and that was so out of character for Maigret that Urbain, frowning, tried in vain to understand what this attitude concealed.
‘You think they won’t find the murderer?’
‘I have no idea …’
‘Thank you …! I took you for a friend, an ally, if you prefer … I was wrong, earlier, to bare my soul in front of you … I’m sorry …! You’re going to think I have no shame …’
‘I assure you I don’t!’ Maigret repeated emphatically.
Why didn’t anyone understand that he couldn’t say anything?
‘Go home … Try to calm down … Stop getting so worked up … If you’re questioned, answer as you see fit … As far as I’m concerned, I have forgotten everything you told me …’
But he knew that a man never forgives another for having witnessed him humiliating himself, especially for nothing! Urbain, who had gradually regained his composure, tried to smile, or rather to smirk.
‘You must have started to believe that love really does make people mad,’ he joked in a phony voice.
‘I’ve seen more tragic cases!’ replied Maigret. ‘Do you really not want anything to drink?’
‘No, thank you …! As you said earlier, there must be a lot of people at my place … It’s my job to serve drinks, isn’t it …? And to make up a fourth when there’s a player short … Goodbye, inspector!’
He was barely out of sight when Madame Maigret, forgetting her usual tactfulness, said:
‘He looked as if he’d been crying …’
And, since her husband didn’t answer, now she became angry.
‘Have you sworn never to open your mouth again? And are you going to sit there all day fretting? You know, I’m beginning to wonder what’s behind all this.’
Maigret smiled and said sardonically:
‘Actually, you’re right. Perhaps I’m the one who killed the poor butcher!’
‘Don’t be stupid. I’m not talking about the murder, I mean that girl’s visit …’
‘No, please! No jealousy …’
‘Why not?’
‘Because this isn’t the time … Now look! Things are already sad enough as it is …!’
‘What’s sad?’
‘This whole little tragedy … Because it’s such a little tragedy! So petty! So laughable even, when you think about it! Would you ever imagine that an Angèle could drive two sensible men crazy …?’
‘She’s the type …’
‘The poor, sickly looking type of girl …! Undernourished, big eyes with dark rings under them and a pasty complexion that’s never seen the sunlight …’
‘That means nothing.’
‘You’re right! That means nothing! As we can see from the fact that, for two men, this Angèle embodied the feminine ideal and became their main reason for living … I knew that, in some cases, there can be a sort of bewitchment … In rural villages, with the solitude, the heat, the doldrums, you see young, good-looking, strong and loyal men fall madly in love with a singer in some dive and fight over her …
‘It must be because they have nothing to compare her to …
‘But here …! In a decent town in the heart of the Loire, a few kilometres from Orléans …!’
His wife glanced at him, surprised to hear him be so loquacious, which was rare. She didn’t dare interrupt him for fear he would stop abruptly.
‘And yet …’ he went on. ‘Look! Can you tell me why, every night for more than a year, I’d leave this house at five to five, and why, shortly afterwards, I’d push open the door of the Grand Café, and why, for almost two hours, I’d lay down little coloured cards, with great seriousness, as if my life depended on it?’
‘It’s not because of her?’
‘Don’t be silly …! I knew you wouldn’t understand … I was talking to you about bewitchment … Well, that’s another form of it … A compulsion, if you prefer, a need you create for yourself when you have nothing better to do …’
This was the first time he had ventured an allusion to his retirement, but it was not the first time Madame Maigret had thought about it.
‘You go there once, twice … Then, one fine day, you feel disconcerted if for some reason the game doesn’t take place … You get used to certain faces, certain jokes … You have “your” chair, “your” deck of cards …’
He was talking not to her, but to himself. Since that morning, since the previous day, this had been brewing inside him, and it was a relief to give free rein to his disgust.
‘That’s what it leads to …! So why wouldn’t other men, in the same circumstances, not grow fond of a girl and end up seeing her as the centre of their lives?
‘I recall people’s reactions to crimes of passion, when I was still at the Police Judiciaire. I’d show them a photograph of a woman, and they would nearly always protest:
‘“She’s not even attractive! How could someone kill for her?”
‘The heroines of crimes of passion are never beautiful! It’s a more subtle poison. When Urbain saw one of us inadvertently looking at the girl, he suffered as much as if he had cancer … The idea that the butcher …
‘Are you beginning to understand?’
‘Did he kill him?’ Madame Maigret had the misfortune to ask in her innocence.
‘You too, you’re going to keep harping on about that? Is that all that interests you people? Blood! Mystery! Murder! Murder! Murder …! But, for heaven’s sake, don’t you see there are other things in life?
‘I’m trying to explain a tragedy that is painful in other ways, and you’re asking me who killed …
‘Can’t you make an effort and imagine that section of street near the bridge, the Grand Café with, in the summer, its terrace and its bay trees in green barrels; opposite, the red shutters of the butcher’s shop …
‘On one side, the butcher’s wife, who’s in the shop all day long and, every now and then, comes to the doorway to call her kid who’s playing in the street …
‘On the other side, another woman, sad and sickly, and a child, and a man who only thinks of one thing: Angèle!
‘This Angèle who isn’t beautiful, who probably has no personality and whose little body is devoid of any charm! All the same, the butcher and his neighbour go round in circles, like merry-go-round horses, obsessed with a single idea, both consumed with jealousy, watching each other, glaring daggers at each other and blind to all else …
‘Now do you understand?’
And Madame Maigret replied:
‘I’ve understood that men are stupid … Is that what you wanted to explain to me …? Only, now, what’s going to happen? Will he be arrested?’
Then Maigret, in a fit of anger, went up to his room and slammed the door, and, for no reason, turned the key in the lock.
He did not reappear until dinner time, and he was in no better a mood. But he asked cautiously:
‘Did anyone come?’
‘No!’
‘Oh!’
‘Are you expecting someone?’
‘Me …? No …! What an idea …!’
He had done his utmost in a few hours to deter people from appealing to him, but he was still disappointed to see that he had succeeded.
‘Are you going out, after dinner?’
‘Why would I go out?’
‘I don’t know … I was just wondering …’
He didn’t go out. The next morning, he went off fishing early, taking a snack with him, and did not come home until four o’clock in the afternoon, with a large pike and perch whitebait.
‘The funeral is tomorrow morning …’ his wife announced. ‘Shall I go with you?’
‘Why not?’
‘The newspaper seems to be suggesting it was a prowler … There’s not a word about that Angèle …’
‘So?’
‘Nothing … I thought—’
‘You mustn’t think …’
He didn’t go out any more than he had the previous day. The next day, wearing his black suit and accompanied by Madame Maigret, he attended the butcher’s funeral and went all the way to the cemetery. Twice his colleague Gabrielli attempted to engage him in conversation, but each time he pretended to be preoccupied.
Urbain was there, together with Citroën. Angèle, too, was at the church, huddled in a shadowy corner.
‘Aren’t you going back to the café with them?’
There was a pale sun. Men could be seen entering the Grand Café for an aperitif and to carry on talking about the event.
Maigret preferred to be at home and, for a week, he did nothing but fish obsessively; then he decided to renovate his boat, pulled it ashore on to the grassy bank, and worked on it for several more days, permanently splattered with tar and green paint.
‘You know they appear to be dropping the investigation?’
‘Why should I care?’
‘I thought …’
As always happens, once the boat was spruce, he no longer felt like fishing and, since the weather was very mild and the first lilac blossoms were perfuming the bottom of the garden, he spent his time there reading the Duke of Otranto’s Memoirs.
‘Why don’t you go and play cards again in the evenings? You used to enjoy it …’
He didn’t reply. But the simple mention of cards put him in a bad mood.
One day, his wife told him:
‘The butcher’s shop is up for sale … His widow got a hundred thousand francs from the insurance and she’s going to live with her sister in Orléans …’
No reaction, other than grumpiness still, and it took weeks and weeks for Maigret to get back to more or less his old self.
One day when he’d been out for a walk and came home at around eight in the evening, Madame Maigret commented:
‘You’re back very late …’
‘I played backgammon …’ he admitted.
‘At the Grand Café?’
‘No, at the Commerce … With the new butcher …’
‘Why have you never wanted to tell me what happened?’
‘Because!’
‘And now? Can I still not know the truth?’
‘No!’
That summer, they decided to visit Savoie, of which they saw very little because Madame Maigret was not a good walker.