The most stubborn guest in the world
The most persistent guest in the world (original title: Le Client le plus obstiné du monde ) is a story by Georges Simenon and is about an enigmatic man who spends a whole day alone in a Parisian café. The work belonging to the series of Maigret novels and stories was written in Canada in 1946 and appeared in Maigret et l'Inspecteur malgracieux in 1947 .
action
Just as every morning, Joseph, the waiter at the Café des Ministères , opens the small, old-fashioned café on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Rue des Saints-Pères in the 7th arrondissement , which is frequented mainly by regulars from the nearby ministries . As he is just beginning his preparations and leans over the coffee machine, a strange man enters the restaurant with a suitcase and sits down, although the chairs have not yet been put down. Only at nine o'clock does Joseph deign to bring the strange and quiet guest a coffee. The whole day he sits in the corner; Joseph is getting creepy and he calls Inspector Janvier from the criminal investigation department, who appears and checks his wanted lists. Since there is apparently nothing against the man and he is not doing anything prohibited, the inspector refuses to be shown the man's personal details. During the course of the day, an unknown woman enters the pub, whose middle-class life for Joseph does not correspond to the type of woman who goes to bars alone. The woman sits down at a table near the stranger and has a package in front of her. All witnesses later recall that the package later disappeared. At eleven o'clock - Joseph begins to raise the chairs - the man is still there; by then he had had three coffees, a quarter of Vichy and a lemonade. Joseph's nerves are strained to the limit. Finally the stranger leaves the café and shortly afterwards Joseph hears a shot from outside. An unknown dead person is found; the mysterious stranger with the suitcase has disappeared without a trace.
The next morning, Inspector Maigret takes over the investigation and goes with Janvier to the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the more modern Café Chez Leon opposite the Café des Ministères . The forensic investigation shows that the deceased had a ticket from the Paris suburb of Juvisy with him; there is also a set of stamps with the words I'll finish you off . The autopsy reveals that he was a heavy drinker and suffered from tropical diseases. In the bar, people remember the dead person who was a guest the previous evening and who looked nervous. The two commissioners then question the witnesses in the Café des Ministères , but they contradict each other. Maigret is soon convinced that it was the dead man who was ambushing someone and not the other way around. He now has the idea of first looking for the mysterious woman, and asks whether there is still a pub nearby. You discover the nearby restaurant À l'Escargot and find out that this woman had eaten there the day before and stayed for a long time. After the waiter closed the place at eleven o'clock, he saw her standing under a nearby tree. Then Maigret and Janvier take a taxi to the suburb to follow the trail of the unknown dead. During the initial investigations at the Juvisy train station, they discover that it is the notorious drinker Combarieu, who frequented the bars near the train station and sublet in a nearby eatery. Finally, the two commissioners discover that the couple they are looking for are Monsieur and Madame Auger, who live in a nearby new development. Madame Auger immediately confesses the crime and explains the background to the inspectors. Her brother-in-law Combarieau, who had long lived in Africa without his wife, Mme Auger's twin sister, on his return suspected Auger and his wife of having betrayed him. When he was written to in Gabon that his wife had died, he was lied to because Mme Auger was really his wife.
Maigret ultimately cannot clarify Mme Auger's true identity; in court she is acquitted for self-defense.
Background of the creation and publication
In 1934, after Maigret and his nephew , Simenon temporarily finished the Maigret series and wrote mainly so-called romans de la destinée . In 1936 Simenon got his commissioner back, first in the small form. In these short stories, such as Mademoiselle Berthe and her lover (1936) or Madame Maigret's lover (1939), Simenon Maigret prepared a comeback in 1942 with Maigret loses an admirer u. a. in front. Simenon wrote the story in 1946 while on vacation in the fishing village of St. Andrew on Canada's Atlantic coast; it appeared in 1947 in the anthology Maigret et l'inspecteur Malgracieux at Presses de la Cité . In 1989 the story appeared in a translation by Linde Birk in the Diogenes anthology Maigret and the most stubborn guest in the world , who also kills the five other Maigret stories Jeumont, 51 Minutes Stay, The Wax Drops, The Doubtful Monsieur Owen, Mr. Montag and Man poor people not included.
expenditure
- Maigret and the most stubborn guest in the world . Zurich: Diogenes, 1989
- Le Client le plus obstiné du monde, de Georges Simenon, illustrés par Loustal . Carnet Omnibus, 2000
- It is available in German translation in the anthology, All Maigret Stories ( ISBN 978-3-257-06682-1 ) published by Diogenes in 2009 .
Web links
- The most stubborn guest in the world at Maigret.de
- Maigret of the month: Le client le plus obstiné du monde
- Le client le plus obstiné du monde at Tout Maigret
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.mdr.de/mdr-figaro/literatur/georges-simenon110.html
- ↑ It was there that the novel Le Clan des Ostendais (Eng. The Flight of the Flemings ) was written. Compare Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon. Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 .