Don’t forget that the policeman was often born in the same street as the criminal, had the same sort of childhood, stole sweets from the same sweetshop . . . Deep down the policeman understands the criminal because he could so easily have become one. They inhabit the same underworld.
Simenon, interview (1963)
‘Georges Sim has the honour to invite you to the christening of his boat, the Ostrogoth, which will be carried out by M. Le Cure of Notre-Dame next Tuesday at the place du Vert-Galant.’
It had not taken the boat-builders of Fecamp long to build the fishing cutter, even if, as became clear later, they had cut some corners. The Ostrogoth had survived the short sea passage to Le Havre and had ascended the Seine as far as the lie de la Cite where it was moored in the spring of 1929. Sim and Tigy invited all their friends to the naming ceremony, although Josephine Baker was not there, having set off on a two-year world tour in August 1928, shortly before the return of the Ginette, noting sadly in her diary that ‘Georges disappeared one day, as suddenly as he arrived. He is married. ’ But otherwise le tout Paris was present and the christening (the only form of religious ceremony Sim requested in his life, apart from his first wedding) was followed by a three-day party. The party was not just celebrating the arrival of the Ostrogoth but the departure of Tigy and Sim. The boat was to become their home for the next three years and they
did not berth in Paris again for over twelve months.
In his life on the water Sim had discovered the perfect solution to several problems. There was a discipline and regularity to proceeding along a river or canal which was the perfect framework for his daily work, but which also assured him of constant change. Tigy could continue to paint, although she had to abandon her portraits. But her work had taken precedence for six years, instead of three, and she was now ready to place it second to his. Finally the distractions of Paris were banished, but life on the water remained full of new possibilities. Sim was in fact almost ready to start writing ‘seriously’. All he needed was to find the appropriate form. He had called the Ostrogoth after his supposed ancestors, identifying himself in doing so as Flemish, and it was of some significance that in searching for the vital ingredient that remained to be found before he could begin his ‘real’ writing he turned the boat northwards, towards the mists and plains of Belgium and Holland and away from the sunshine and easy pleasant life of the south, the life of Porquerolles and the voyage of the Ginette. On their way north Tigy and Sim, once more with Boule and Olaf, passed by Liege but did not stay long. Sim wanted to show his old friends his new boat and he paid a brief visit to his mother. No doubt she would have gone through her current list of miseres with him, among them the fate of her new friends Joseph Andre, a retired railway conductor, and his wife, also called Henriette, who was dying and whom Mme Simenon was helping to nurse. Mme Andre died in June and four months later - to the day - Henriette married Joseph Andre.
Before setting out Sim had contributed thirteen stories to a new magazine founded by Jef Kessel. The magazine was called Detective-, it sold 350,000 copies with its first issue and the stories, billed as ‘mystery’ stories, were in fact classic ‘whodunnits’ in the English style, the sort of story in which Sim was quickly to lose interest. But they marked a new direction in his writing.
In 1929 Sim did not quite match his prodigious output of the previous year, but he still published thirty-four novels, many of them for Fayard, a leading house which had become his -most important publisher. The seeds of what was to follow can be found in several of these last romans populaires, for three of them contained a police inspector called ‘Maigret’.
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Sim gave a precise account of the origins of Jules Amedee
Francois Maigret, and it stood unchallenged for many years:
It happened that one morning on board my boat the Ostrogoth , anchored in the port of Delfzijl, I tried to write a detective novel. It was something of a step up the ladder towards ‘literature’, much as I detest that word. There is nothing easier in fact than to write a detective story. For a start there is at least one corpse, more in American detective stories. Then there is an inspector or a superintendent who conducts the enquiry and who has the right to probe into the past and present life of each of the characters. And finally there are the suspects, in varying numbers and different degrees of camouflage as the author decides will best lead to the final denouement . . . When I wrote my first detective story at Delfzijl in the North of Holland I was completely unaware that it would be followed by many others containing many of the same characters. Even the outline of Maigret was sketched. He was a big man, who ate a lot, drank a lot, followed the suspects patiently and eventually uncovered the truth. Most of my popular novels had been published by Fayard so I sent the manuscripts there ... I waited at Delfzijl, where I had to break the ice around my boat each morning because it was mid-winter. I did not have to wait for long. I was summoned to Paris by telegram and when I arrived I saw that my publisher had my manuscript on his desk.
That was written in 1979, in Je suis reste un enfant de choeur. In 1966
he had written in ‘La naissance de Maigret’:
I see myself once more on a sunny morning in a cafe which was called I think Le Pavilion, where the patron spent several hours each morning polishing his wooden tables with linseed oil. I never again saw such shining tables in all my life. At that hour there was no one sitting at the big central table, so typical of Holland, a cafe where newspapers, carefully folded around brass rods, awaited the regular customers. Had I drunk one, two or even three little glasses of schnapps and bitters? In any case after an hour, feeling rather sleepy, I began to see the powerful and imposing bulk of a gentleman emerging, who it seemed to me would make an acceptable detective-inspector.
During the course of the day I gave this character a number of accessories; a pipe, a bowler hat, a heavy overcoat with a velvet collar. And, as my deserted barge was cold and damp, I furnished his office with an old cast-iron stove . . . By noon the following day the first chapter of Pietr-le-Letton had been written.
Until quite recently these two accounts were accepted as the definitive version of the genesis of Maigret: Pietr-le-Letton (The Case of Peter the Lett), written at Delfzijl and published in 1931 by Fayard, was not only ‘the first Maigret’ but was the first novel Simenon agreed to have published under his own name. In fact, Pietr-le-Letton was not the first ‘Maigret’ to be published; it was not the first book to be published under Simenon’s own name; it was not written in Delfzijl; and it was not the first book in which Commissaire Maigret appeared. A learned controversy has been mounted on all these points for several years which has established to date that although Pietr-le-Letton was the first proper ‘Maigret’ to be written, probably in Paris in the summer of 1930, and the first to be accepted, a bulky detective with a pipe first appears in L’amant sans nom by ‘Christian Brulls’ written in 1929 and published by Artheme Fayard. The detective was called N.49. In the following year Fayard published Train de nuit (also written in 1929) in which a ‘Commissaire Maigret’ attached to the brigade mobile of Marseille appears, who is calm and shows understanding towards criminals. This was the book actually written in Delfzijl in September 1929, when the Ostrogoth (due to the haste of its builders) was laid up for recaulking. But it was not written during the depths of winter, and not even in the Ostrogoth, but in a neighbouring, abandoned, barge where Sim set up a big packing case for the typewriter, a smaller one for his seat and two even smaller ones for his feet. Maigret next appeared in La femme rousse, written just after Train de nuit by which time the Ostrogoth had reached Wilhelmshaven; but here Maigret had a minor role compared to his junior inspector, Torrence, who had also been in Train de nuit.* However La femme rousse ‘by G. Sim’ was turned down by Fayard, and was published only in 1933, by Tallandier.
* Torrence, together with Commissaire Lucas, had first appeared in L’inconnue by C. Brulls (Fayard, 1930).
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Next came the first Maigret book, where the Commissaire was the central character and Torrence was his assistant. Maigret was enormous, had a pipe, a bowler hat, a heavy overcoat and a stove, worked with Juge Comeliau, was married, lived in the boulevard Richard-Lenoir and was sympathetic to a young girl caught up in crime. This book, called La maison de I’inquietude, was also written in the bitter cold of a northern winter, but at Stavoren in Friesia, not Delfzijl, and was indeed sent to Fayard, who once again refused it. So Simenon sent it instead to the magazine L’Oeuvre which published it as a serial from 1 March 1930, before Train de nuit and La femme rousse.
All of these novels were at first refused. All were experimental and popular rather than genuine ‘Maigret’s’ but in quality they were better than anything Sim had written before. After Stavoren, Tigy and Sim went to the north of Norway and Lapland by passenger boat, and then returned to Paris on the Ostrogoth in April 1930, one year after setting out. It was probably here, rather than in Stavoren, that Sim wrote Pietr-le-Letton, since it seems to contain material from Lapland. It was accepted by Fayard and published on 26 May 1930 in Ric et Rac, a feuilleton, from July to October 1930.
Pietr-le-Letton was the first ‘Maigret’ written in the full sense, not just with the character but in the style. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that Simenon always claimed it was the first ‘Maigret’. In fact in telling how he invented Maigret, he improved the story in his usual way, recalling some of the amusing circumstances of the maiden voyage of the Ostrogoth when he was writing ‘pre-Maigrets’, and attributing these incidents to a book which he wrote only on his return to Paris.
In April 1930, when the Ostrogoth returned to Paris, Sim was in a curious position. He was the author of 122 successful pulp novels, sold outright without royalties and published under pseudonyms, and was in the process of producing another twenty-five similar works in the course of the current year, but he had become convinced that he was ready to write under his own name and that he had discovered the form and above all the character to start the next stage of his career. His publishers, however, did not agree with him. They were dismayed and even dismissive of his conviction that this unlikely seeming commissaire de police, who did not follow clues or a process of deduction and did not seem to be
committed to the war against crime, would ever reach a large public. Time and again Sim’s prototype ‘Maigrets’ were turned down, Fayard, his chief hope, being the least enthusiastic. Artheme Fayard saw Sim as a highly satisfactory producer of large sums of money for publisher and author, and the last thing he wanted to do was to disturb the arrangement. It took Simenon nearly a year to persuade him otherwise. ‘My God it was a battle to launch Maigret, ’ Simenon recalled in his interview with Roger Stephane. ‘It was the only time in my life when I became deeply involved in the commercial side of publishing a novel ... I knew this was my big chance and it had to work immediately or it might hang fire for ten years.’
Although Georges Simenon was a master of publicity very few people knew his real name, even in private life, and when Artheme Fayard finally decided that the ‘Maigrets’ should be published, but under a different name to the previous pulps, and that this time they would use the writer’s real name, he had to ask what this was. Most people thought he was called Georges Sim; he was sometimes still called ‘/e petit Sim’, as by Colette; and in Italy, when early ‘Maigrets’ started appearing in translation, one reviewer pointed out that Simenon was the nom de plume of the much better known Georges Sim. So, unknown as he was, Simenon decided that what was needed was a massive publicity investment. The result was the ball given for the launching of the ‘Maigret’ series on 20 February 1931 at a Montparnasse nightclub, La Boule Blanche, in the rue Vavin. It was called a bal anthropometrique, the police term for the department where suspects were stripped naked, measured and photographed. The guests wore fancy dress, anything evoking the criminal or police world, and many were in apache dancing costumes. There were painted faces, funny hats, paper streamers, everyone had to be fingerprinted at the door, and the invitations were designed like a police record card. Much of the life had gone out of Montparnasse in October 1929, with the Wall Street Crash. Simenon’s ball was to be an attempt to revive the spirit of the old days. The 400 guests were joined by nearly twice as many gatecrashers, and more whisky and champagne had to be sent round from La Coupole. The cost exceeded the whole of Fayard’s publicity budget and the author had to invest some of his unearned royalties. But the ball was a great success and made the newspapers all over France. Even the
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prejet de police was reported to have been there. Simenon and Maigret became well-known names, and Simenon signed copies of the first two titles to be published, M. Gallet, decede (The Death of Monsieur Gallet) and Le pendu de St Pholien, the covers for the first time bearing his own name (though it was later, not here, that he signed books ‘The first novel by Simenon for eight days’ in reference to a publicity campaign for Jef Kessel boasting of‘The first novel by Kessel for three years’).
The first reviews for Maigret were good. Many of the reviewers took the point that this was an attempt to raise the standard of the detective novel. These detective stories were better, it was immediately said, than the average. But other reviews did not omit to mention what was to be a recurring source of suspicion, the author’s speed of production, and Le Canard Enchaine, as acid then as now, wrote: ‘Georges Simenon wants to be famous at any price. If he doesn’t achieve fame with his bal anthropometrique he intends to walk around the pond in the Jardins des Tuileries on his hands - whilst writing a novel.’ The ball, described in several newspapers as ‘a night of madness’, was the last of Simenon’s famous parties. He and Tigy gave up their apartment in the place des Vosges shortly afterwards.
In the first nineteen ‘Maigrets’ Simenon relied heavily for his settings on his recent travels through France. Not one of them is set entirely in Paris and nine of them are set entirely outside it. Since they concern the work of a commissaire in the Paris police force it is clear that he was already taking liberties with reality. Simenon, although this is a fact which it is easy for a foreign reader to overlook, always saw France through the eyes of a foreigner. He had acquired a certain idea of France and he was to make it a universal idea of France, in so far as any one writer’s view of a country can ever be universal. Maigret’s France is a pungent, colourful country where life was largely lived in public, in bars, markets and streets. It is less a land of private interiors, or family discussions in peasant kitchens, or private discussions in cabinet meetings or board rooms, or banal rites of passage such as weddings or first Communion celebrations. The only interior life which is almost always described is that of ‘ la maison , the headquarters of the police judiciaire, the criminal investigation department of the Paris police, on the Quai des Orfevres, the tall grey
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building on the lie de la Cite which looks south over the Seine towards the left bank and the Latin Quarter. The rest of France, as described in the first series of nineteen ‘Maigrets’, is very much . the France visited by the man from out of town - in this case, the visiting commissaire, in the author’s case, the writer in search of a real landscape for his imaginary world. Two of the books are set on French canals; three are set on the banks of French rivers; in another a suspect attempts to drown Maigret in the torrential River Marne, and in the last of the series Maigret retires to a little house on the banks of the Loire; three are set in Channel ports; two are set in Dutch or Flemish towns which Simenon had visited in the Ostrogoth, and Liege provides the setting for another two of the books, Simenon thereby making another departure from reality by sending a French police officer outside France for nearly a quarter of his first nineteen enquiries. It is not difficult to see why Artheme Fayard was disconcerted.
The other unusual point about the early ‘Maigrets’ is the extent to which they were worked out in the author’s subconscious from the beginning. If one takes the first, Pietr-le-Letton, it is noticeable how many themes are introduced which are to reappear in the seventy-five novels and forty-nine short stories which were to follow. Apart from the immediate importance of topography and atmosphere there is the use of hotel settings, both cheap hotels and luxury hotels, the power of political influence over justice, the power of social snobbery, the casual introduction of sex and the strongly cinematic nature of the descriptions of town life in general and port scenes in particular:
It was in that direction that he began to run. Once past the trawler not a soul was in sight. The night was pierced by the green and red lights of the harbour entrance. Then the lighthouse on the rocks lit up a great slice of the sea, every fifteen seconds, throwing its beams, for the length of a flash over the cliff below, which reappeared and disappeared like a ghost.
In Pietr-le-Letton the examining magistrate is already named Comeliau, and he is already out of sympathy with Maigret. Mme Maigret is already waiting at home, ready to kiss her husband on his return and not ask questions; she is already stirring her saucepans preparing ‘ quelque ragout odorant\ We already know that she
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is from Alsace and she already has her drily humorous reaction to Maigret’s silences. And Maigret himself, although not fully developed, is nobody else but Maigret — watchful, grumpy, large, imperturbable and armed with his terrible patience. Wanting to arrest a man, but having no reason to do so, he decides to follow his quarry all over France if necessary. This method of investigation is exhausting and dangerous. Abused by a sharp-tongued woman in public, Maigret has to hold his tongue. In the lobby of the Hotel Majestic he has to wait for hours being made to feel uncomfortable by both staff and guests. Maigret is a sensitive man and he suffers when he is uncomfortable. But when he decides to act he has the ruthlessness of a man who cares for nothing. He orders a place to be laid for him in the dining room of the Majestic, at the table of his quarry. The waiter’s horrified objections are brushed aside, his adversary says nothing, they sit there silently, eating. Then, without warning, Maigret speaks: ‘Your moustache is coming unglued.’ And when the book finishes hunter and hunted are together again, in a cheap seaside hotel. Both men have fallen in the sea during the arrest. Now they are sitting in the little bedroom, wrapped in the proprietor’s dressinggowns. Pietr the Latvian is small and elegant and well wrapped up. Maigret is wearing a garment that fails to cover his knees and reveals his strong, hairy calves. Maigret orders two grogs and, in the intimacy of the bedroom, settles down to hear his man’s life story.
So, from the start, Maigret refuses to judge the criminals he is tracking, preferring in most cases to understand them. He immerses himself in the life of those he hunts. He uses unorthodox methods of investigation and does not hesitate to break the laws of trespass and criminal damage if necessary. He can feel personal embarrassment, he is indeed sensitive to rebuffs, but he has a natural insolence and a brutality of manner which he deploys when least expected to disconcert a witness. The plot of a ‘Maigret’ is like life, studded with absurdities rather than heroism. And the life is, from the start, partly the author’s life. We meet Maigret at the beginning of Pietr-le-Letton on a winter’s evening in his office: ‘Lifting his head he had the impression that the murmuring from the cast-iron stove, which stood in the middle of the room and which was attached to the ceiling by a thick black pipe, was dying down.’ And when, some minutes later, he sets
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out for the first time down the Quai des Orfevres, his brown hair already flecked with grey, he is going to the Gare du Nord, to meet a train arriving from Belgium. He is starting his enquiries on the same railway platform from which Simenon had set out, seven years earlier, to start his.
When Fayard was finally persuaded to publish Maigret, after Simenon had finished Pietr-le-Letton in the spring of 1930, it was on condition that he would have several titles to launch at the same time. So Simenon found himself back in France on the Ostrogoth, moored at Morsang outside Paris, and writing the next three ‘Maigrets’. In the first of these, M. Gallet, decede, Simenon used Sancerre, the Ile-de-France and Paris as his settings, and the intrigue takes place among the French royalists whom he had met when he first arrived from Liege. Then, in Le pendu de St Pholien, Maigret finds himself involved in a case which takes him to Liege. The private circle of friends he has to penetrate there is based on ‘La Caque’, and the key to the crime he is investigating is the suicide of de petit Kleine’.
In Le pendu de St Pholien Simenon fictionalises the real story by suggesting that Klein, as he is called in the novel, killed himself out of remorse for a murder he himself had committed some time before, during a meeting of ‘Les Compagnons de l’Apocalypse’, the fictional equivalent of ‘La Caque’, when ‘the little group of geniuses, thrown together by chance’, had become so bored that it had to find something interesting to do, no matter what, and murder seemed the next experience to try. The exact ambience of the real ‘La Caque’ is re-created although in real life, so far as is known, it did not lead to murder. But Simenon played with the suggestion that it had done, and he evoked the guilt felt by the participants in such a casual, thoughtless crime in convincing detail.
The book confirms Maigret’s eccentricity. It starts with an incident in which the great detective, motivated by idle curiosity in a hotel in Bremen, provokes the suicide of a man who is merely acting in a suspicious manner. In the denouement it turns out that the man Maigret had driven to suicide was the only witness of the murder committed by Klein, and that he could not get over it. He was haunted by it every day of his life. But his remorse had not driven him to suicide, as it had Klein; instead he had turned to blackmail. He had forced the other former members of ‘Les
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Compagnons’, who had all become wealthy or successful figures, to give him large amounts of money, and when he received the money the haunted man always burnt it.
Le pendu de St Pholien is a curious book, the first of many novels in which Simenon explored his childhood and his life in Liege. It contains a lachrymose mother and a devoted father who was patient and generous with a delinquent son. And it turns on the fact that the crime committed in Liege during a meeting of ‘Les Compagnons’ was about to become null and void by reason of lapse of time, the ten-year period of ‘prescription’ after which no one could be prosecuted for it. Interestingly enough Simenon wrote this story just eight years after the death of the real Kleine, and it was published one year later. If there were any consciences Simenon wished to tweak in Liege, they would have had a difficult twelve months.
One of the most characteristic phrases in the Maigret series is ‘i7 s’est mis a boire (he started to drink). The role of alcohol in Simenon’s imaginary world can hardly be overemphasised. In Les vacances de Maigret (A Summer Holiday), Maigret on holiday with his wife in Les Sables d’Olonne finds himself alone for much of the time because Mme Maigret has had to undergo an emergency appendix operation. When he visits the convent nursing home he turns his head away when talking to the nuns because of the smell of the calvados which he drinks every day after his lunch. He takes his supper alone in the evenings in the hotel dining-room. When people ask for M. Leonard, the hotel proprietor, he usually ‘bursts out of his wine cellar’, although he is generally ‘more or less sober’. Each morning the patron offers Maigret a glass of white wine, the first of the day, de coup de blanc du patron . Maigret patrols the town, not wanting to sit on the beach with the mothers and children. In the market he stops in front of the shellfish stall and, testing for freshness, he offers a lobster a matchstick which the animal grasps at once. Another white wine. Then on to a bar with a terrace overlooking the sea, the usual table, which has become his table, what will he have to drink? A white wine. And when he returns to lunch the waitress remembers that he had ordered a calvados after his first lunch and assumes he always takes a calvados and ‘he dared not refuse’.
In the nineteenth book, called simply Maigret (Maigret Returns ), the book that was supposed to be the commissaire’ s farewell,
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Maigret, by now a rather old man in retirement, is recalled to Paris to defend the family honour. His incompetent nephew, not cut out to be a policeman, is mishandling a case and Maigret has to take it over as a private detective. For twelve hours he sits in a bar in Pigalle in the rue Fontaine, drinking beer and then calvados, saying nothing, watching and being insulted by the gang he will eventually arrest. For much of the rest of the time he is sitting in the Chope du Pont Neuf, the police bar, opposite the Quai des Orfevres, drinking more beer and watching the senior officers who have replaced him and who have arrested his incompetent nephew.* In La nuit du carrefour (The Crossroad Murders), Maigret and a colleague are searching a premises at night, their guns in their hands, and they enter a room where a meal has been abandoned. There is a decanter containing white wine on the table and Maigret empties it into his mouth: 'll s’est mis a boire .’ It is a refrain, and so faithful was the 1960s’ BBC TV series to this aspect of the Maigret books that a temperance pressure group started to count the amount of alcohol Maigret drank in each episode and an Anglican bishop implored the producers to reduce it. Wine, beer, fine or calvados, alcohol - as presented by Simenon — is a consolation, a medicine, a fuel, a celebration. For the crooks it is often pastis, the drink of Paris and the drink of real men. But for Maigret alcohol, an essential fuel, is generally beer. Maigret of course was born near the Loire, a region of excellent 'petits blancs\ and he worked in Paris, a city where men drink pastis or beaujolais. So why did he drink beer, the drink of the north of France, the drink of Belgium?
In an unpublished talk which he gave in 1953, in Connecticut, Simenon answered this question as follows:
It’s a mistake to think that an author deliberately decides that a character will be constructed in such or such a way and will have this or that preference. The creation of a character is a more or less mysterious process which takes place largely in the subconscious. To be completely frank I might say, ‘Maigret
* Maigret’s usual haunt was the Brasserie Dauphine, in real life the Trois Marches on the corner of the rue de Harlay, which has since disappeared. This has created a vacuum, usually filled, so far as tourists are concerned, by the Restaurant Paul in the place Dauphine.
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drinks beer because he cannot drink anything else. ’ Why do you have a long nose, and why do you eat chips with most meals?
He went on to recount how, on a recent trip to Belgium, he had revisited three of the places where, as a young man, he had drunk beer, and he explained the exact differences between the three bars, the sort of glasses one drank from, the sort of beer they served, how it tasted and the different behaviour of the men and women who served it. ‘Why does Maigret drink beer?’ he concluded. ‘I think I have answered that question . . . for me the delicious smell of freshly drawn beer remains the smell of Belgium. ’ And, later, Simenon said that one of the reasons why Maigret drank so much was because when he was writing the early ‘Maigrets’ he was drinking quite a lot himself.
If Maigret’s acquaintance with drink was part of Simenon’s ‘certain idea of France’ this was even more the case with Maigret’s relationship with food. When he first arrived in Paris, and was too poor to eat properly, Maigret would spend hours looking through the windows of charcuteries. Maigret, like Simenon, was attracted to markets. He spent recreational hours patrolling the stalls. His social life was virtually confined to twice-monthly dinners with his friends Dr Pardon and his wife Francine. The dinners were held alternately in their apartments and before they were held Maigret and Pardon would talk to each other on the telephone during office hours for some time, in considerable detail, about what was to be eaten. There was never a case, of crime or illness, that was so pressing that it made this regular discussion of the menu impossible. Mme Maigret was of course a notable cook and housekeeper. Since she never knew when her husband would be home, or if he would be home at all, she had to prepare dishes which could be put aside and reheated, in this respect being part of the peasant tradition of cookery, and specialising in what Simenon called ‘ les plats peuple , simple homecooking. Maigret ‘adored ragout ’; ‘fricandeau a Voseille (veal stewed in sorrel sauce) was another of his favourites and was a dish which Simenon regarded as ‘un plat de concierge ’, the one which is simmering gently as you come home in the evening and pass the door of the concierge’s loge, the dish which gives you the necessary courage to ignore the broken lift and press on up to
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your own door on the fourth floor to find out what Mme Maigret, in her turn, has found in the market that day.
In Le fou de Bergerac (The Madman of Bergerac ; 1932) Maigret takes a bullet in the arm in the first chapter while on his way to investigate a case in a small town in south-west France and is from then on confined to bed in Bergerac’s principal hotel. His bedroom is above the hotel dining-room, and he is able to discover the daily menu by using his nose. Mme Maigret arrives to nurse him and quickly gains visiting rights in the hotel kitchen. Soon afterwards she produces a ‘ creme au citron which is, quite simply, a masterpiece. But Maigret’s pleasure in this dish is marred by the smell of truffles which is rising from below. At the end of the enquiry, solved partly by Mme Maigret’s skilful and energetic legwork, Maigret has recovered his health and is at last able to enjoy the cooking of this gastronomic region. As he crosses the town square for the last time it seems to him to be ‘simmering gently’ in the sunlight. Then he orders a meal of truffles and the local foie gras. And then he leaves Bergerac and goes back to Paris where we know he will not starve. For in Paris there will still be the cooking of the provinces, a jambon a la creme, a boeuf bourguignon, une omelette aux peaux de canard, cassoulet, andouillette, cochonnaille, coq au vin. And in Paris there are markets where a large and hungry man can meditate on lunch and pass from stall to stall, gazing at the contents like a schoolboy gazing through the window of a toyshop; or a young man just arrived from Liege, counting his money carefully, can gaze for the first time info the window of Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysees.
Another hallmark of the Maigret books is the simple style and limited vocabulary in which the stories are told. Some words occur again and again, like the refrain in a litany. ‘ Machinalement' (automatically), fatalement ’ (inevitably), ‘ balbutier (to stammer),
‘broncher (to flinch), ‘ pudeur (modesty), ‘ hallucinant ’ (incredible),
‘ lancinant ’ (insistent or stabbing or haunting), ‘ narquois ’ (mocking), ‘ appetissante ’ (of a woman, usually plump) and, of course, 97 s’est mis a boire\ Robert’s Dictionnaire des synonymes gives thirteen synonyms for ‘ machinal ’ and up to fifteen for ‘ pudeur ; even ‘ lancinant ’ has six. The only time Simenon used two words when one would do was in reference to cooking. Usually a dish is ‘mitonne (simmered), but sometimes it is ‘ mijote (simmered). It is one or the other again and again. Simenon narrowed his vocabul
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ary deliberately. He estimated that he restricted himself to a vocabulary of about 2000 words, and he did this partly out of the habits he had acquired when writing romans populaires, partly because he did not wish to lose the size of the readership he had gained with the romans populaires, partly because he wanted to distinguish his work from the self-consciously ‘literary’, and partly as a statement about himself: he remained one of the ‘ petites gens' and he was writing for everybody. The last thing he would have wished to do to a reader would have been to send him or her to the dictionary. He would have considered that rebarbative. For all that the Maigret books were intended to be a step in the literary direction they were also designed to be widely read, which is one of the reasons why they were short. Simenon had very commercial ideas of most people’s reading habits and he thought that a book should be read at a single sitting, say in one night or in half a day. ‘A book,’ he said, ‘should be like a play. You did not return to a play every night for a week and you should not have to do so with a book.’ He may also have been aware of another advantage of writing short books, one which the publishers of popular novels would have drawn to his attention. If a reader has enjoyed a short novel he is left feeling unsatisfied, wanting more, another novel. Whereas the reader who has on the whole enjoyed a novel but found it too long, has paid all the money he will pay for some time before once again feeling the need to enter the author’s imaginary world. In other words a good novel cannot be too short. And there may have been another reason for the simplicity of Simenon’s vocabulary. We know from his published journal Quand j’etais vieux (When I Was Old) that he had a horror of rising from his desk when he was writing. He wrote so fast that he was intolerant of any form of physical interruption. By restricting himself to his 2000 words he had absolutely no need at any stage to consult a dictionary, or a thesaurus, or any grammatical reference work.
The question of whether or not there was an original model for Commissaire Maigret has received several answers. Even the origin of the name is uncertain. Tigy remembered quite clearly that the name had been chosen by Simenon from the list of fellow tenants written up on the notice outside the concierge’s loge in the place des Vosges. If so, this was a coincidence, bearing in mind the police officer called Maigret serving in Liege at the time
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Simenon was a reporter on the Gazette, particularly as he was stationed in the town hall, which Simenon visited almost every day of the week.* Among the real-life policemen Simenon had known was a friend of his grandfather, a retired police inspector who used to drop into the house in the rue Puits-en-Sock for a pipe and a glass of schnapps. There were also numerous senior officers of the Liege police who were not called Maigret but whom Simenon certainly knew. But the policemen who were generally given the credit for a resemblance were Parisian, in particular there was Commissaire Guillaume, head of the brigade speciale of the Parisian police judiciaire. Although the character of Maigret came from Simenon’s imagination, and from his past, many of Maigret’s methods seem to have been based on the techniques of Commissaire Guillaume.
The early ‘Maigrets’ were apparently such a success that they were read by the head of the Paris CID, Xavier Guichard. He later summoned Simenon and told him that a writer who was going to such lengths to make his books realistic should be told how to avoid so many fundamental errors. Simenon was then introduced to M. Guillaume and was allowed to roam behind the scenes at the Quai des Orfevres and even to be present during the questioning of witnesses. He watched witnesses being broken down over a period of twenty-four or forty-eight hours during a questioning marathon conducted by a team of six or seven policemen, and he said that in his belief a man like Guillaume would never have used violence during an interrogation simply because he had no need to. He also watched while a witness was stripped naked and questioned in front of a room packed with fully clothed police officers. ‘I assure you that nothing disconcerts a man like being stripped naked, without pockets, without anything at all. It’s very difficult to tell lies for long in that costume,’ he said.
In Pietr-le-Letton, as we have seen, Maigret already had the castiron stove in his office, an authentic interior detail of the Quai des Orfevres. In Le pendu de St Pholien it is clear that Simenon was already familiar with police procedure at both the Paris and Bremen city mortuaries. The first book contains references to such police methods as the Interpol standard card index and Dr
* The real Commissaire Maigret was eventually deported from Liege during the Second World War and died in a concentration camp.
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Locard’s ear-identification chart, and the second to the detailed forensic examination of a dead man’s suit. The opening words of La nuit du carrefour refer to an interrogation ‘a la chansonnette which had lasted seventeen hours, and that was written in April 1931, only two months after the bal anthropometrique. It seems clear that before Xavier Guichard summoned Simenon to the Quai des Orfevres the author, like an experienced reporter, had arranged to do some research, in order to update and bring to life the knowledge he had already acquired by attending the series of lectures at the University of Liege in 1920 and 1921. Yet Simenon consistently denied that he had made serious efforts to research police methods before creating Commissaire Maigret. ‘When I wrote the first six or seven “Maigrets”,’ he said in 1963, ‘I had never set foot in the Quai des Orfevres. I had walked past it because I used to love walking beside the Seine, but I knew absolutely nothing about police organisation. ’
Simenon’s sensitivity may have come in part because he was anxious to emphasise the imaginative aspects of his most popular creation as opposed to the realistic nature of the books. In either case the real origins of Maigret lay far away from the Quai des Orfevres and from the divisional inspectors of the 1st Division of Liege - men such as Oscar Neujean, Joseph Mignon and Alphonse Manaerts. For his real origins we must look to the imposing bulk of ‘ Vieux-Papa ’ pouring over the edges of his armchair in the enclosing warmth of the family hearth in the rue Puits-en-Sock; to the authority of Chretien Simenon with his pipe and his schnapps; and to the supportive interest and refusal to condemn of his own father Desire. The real origins of Maigret are to be found in the disturbed child’s ultimate resource, the father who did not reject a boy in trouble but who tried to put things right, the first person in Simenon’s life who showed him how ‘to understand and not to judge’. Maigret as the good policeman was an echo of the good father, the man who corrects you but who understands. In Quand j’etais vieux Simenon even declared that: ‘For thirty years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.’ Maigret was the redresseur des destins, the ‘mender of destinies’, fulfilling this role even in the pre-Maigret books, as for instance in Train de nuit by ‘Christian Brails’, when a police inspector based in Marseille called Maigret shows so much understanding for the sister of a murderer that he puts her on the train
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to Paris with her share of the stolen loot. In many of the subsequent stories Maigret frequently did what he could in order not to press charges, or at least to reduce their seriousness. He was of , course, throughout his career, operating under the shadow of the guillotine. The crime of murder was still in legal terms an offence that attracted a uniquely severe punishment, and this gave Maigret’s detections and his acts of merciful understanding an exceptional importance, for among the powers he disposed of was the power of life and death.
As to whether or not there was anything of Simenon in Maigret, there is directly conflicting authority. Simenon, like Maigret, had always wanted to be a redresseur des destins, and the profession of novelist was one of the few that allowed him to fulfil this ambition, since the Church was not in his line and since he, like Maigret, had been prevented by circumstances from becoming a doctor. In 1963 he told Roger Stephane, ‘It’s just another legend to say that I identify myself with Maigret. I have never imagined that I resembled Maigret.’ But in 1976 he told Francis Lacassin, his Swiss publisher, that Maigret was ‘one of the rare characters I created with whom I had a certain number of points in common’. What the two had most in common was an understanding of the criminal and therefore of the crime. Like Maigret, Simenon had been born in the same streets as the criminals, and had plundered the same shop tills. Like Maigret, Simenon could very easily have become a criminal. Like Maigret, Simenon - if he had become a criminal - would have been a formidable man to catch. He once said that if he had been born in an urban ghetto he might have become a killer. Could he ever have become a criminal, was he a criminal manque ? His second wife Denyse thinks not, ‘because he lacked the courage to be a criminal’. But had he become one there is perhaps a model of his criminal character in one of the first series of‘Maigrets’, La tete d’un homme (A Battle of Nerves). In this book Maigret is up against a criminal who understands human frailty and motives as well as he himself does. Radek is a Czech and a failed medical student who haunts La Coupole in Montparnasse. Radek murders a rich old lady and sets up a burglar to make it look as though the latter has committed the crime. Radek’s motive is hatred of a society which has failed to recognise his talent. He turns to crime to show society what a mistake it had made. Maigret finally proves a match for him and
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sends him to the guillotine. La tete d’un homme was the fifth ‘Maigref but the first in which the murderer is executed. There were no ‘extenuating circumstances’ for a killer like Radek, a Maigret ‘gone bad’, as Simenon acknowledged in disposing of him so ruthlessly.
Clearly there was something in Maigret which Simenon aspired to be, whether or not he attained it. But this is not to say that Maigret was not at the same time an authentically fictional character, one of his least autobiographical heroes. Simenon after all was not a policeman, he was a novelist. But then so, perhaps, was Maigret.
With the discovery of Commissaire Maigret, Simenon entered an imaginative world that was to make his fortune. This character, emerging as he later claimed through a haze of winter mist and schnapps, was to lead to sales of 500 million and to make him the most widely read living author in the world. But the invention of Maigret was also of decisive importance for Simenon because it liberated him from the weight of production which had been forced on him by the writing of pulp fiction. What happened was that he continued to write his novels at the same speed, but now had to produce only four to six instead of twenty-five to forty each year. Each ‘Maigret’ was soon earning as much money as any five ‘pulps’. The extra time gave him the interval necessary to build up to the tremendous effort he had to make to create these new, ‘real’, characters. His inability to sustain the effort for more than a short period ensured that the production speed was kept up, but the ensuing imaginative exhaustion meant that the production rate dropped.
To get some idea of the effort it took for Simenon to switch from pulp fiction to ‘Maigrets’ and the straight novels which followed it is sufficient to study the change in his production rate between 1924 and 1939. As we have seen, his first three pulp novels were published in 1924. His annual total of pulp novels published between then and 1928 went to fourteen, then sixteen, then eleven, then forty-four. ‘It sounds silly but I used to count automatically, pulp novels eighty pages a day, detective stories forty pages a day, in two sessions,’ he wrote later. ‘And I used to tell myself then that when I had no need to write more than twenty pages a day I would be a king, a landlord living off his
rents. And in fact after the first “Maigrets” I reached the point where I typed no more than twenty pages a day and for no more than sixty days a year.’ In 1930 Simenon wrote four more ‘Maigrets’ and signed a contract to produce a further five so that in the following year the character could be launched with ten books. In 1931 he wrote eight ‘Maigrets’ and his first straight novel, and in these three transitional years his production of pulp novels dropped from thirty-four a year in 1929 to thirteen in 1931. He wrote the last of the 188 ‘pulps’ in 1933.
Although the ‘Maigrets’ were an immediate success Simenon originally saw the commissaire as a transitional figure, a steppingstone to fully fledged literary novels. ‘I still needed a safety net. I was still not able to write a novel where all the characters could roam free ... I thought of the “Maigrets” as semi-literary novels,’ he recalled later. He wrote four ‘Maigrets’ in 1932, two in 1933 and then none for five years. This first series of nineteen culminated in Maigret, with which Simenon intended to say goodbye to his character, and in which he put the commissaire into retirement. He wrote Maigret in June 1933, only two years after the series had been launched, and four months later he signed a contract with Gallimard, the most prestigious publishing house in France. He had by then written fourteen novels which he called romans litteraires or romans durs. Although he had published only six of them he felt ready to embark on the main phase of his career.
In his new persona as a serious novelist Simenon remained as productive as with the ‘Maigrets’. Seven novels were written in 1932, six in 1933, four in 1934, three in 1935, four in 1936, eight in 1937, four in 1938 and six in 1939. During the following six war years Simenon produced twelve more romans durs. So long as his major imaginative efforts were dedicated to the ‘Maigrets’ there were few problems. Maigret, a good man, was a good influence on Simenon’s subconscious. It is significant that the commissaire was never overwhelmed by sexual desire. On at least one occasion, in Maigret, he did climb into bed with a young prostitute, but it was only to engage her in conversation.