The wax drops
The wax drops (original title: Les Larmes de bugie ) is a story by Georges Simenon , which takes place in a remote village in the forest of Orléans . The work belonging to the series of Maigret novels and stories was written in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1936 and appeared in the volume Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret by Éditions Gallimard in 1944 . The German translation of the story first appeared in 1976 under the title The wax drops in the translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau, in the new translation by Gudrun Zett in 1989 by Diogenes in the volume Maigret and the stubborn guest in the world .
action
Commissioner Maigret is ordered to the province south of Paris; To do this, he has to take the train to Vitry-aux-Loges , a place in the center of the Forêt d'Orléans forest area . From there he is taken by a local butcher to a small village in the forest of Orléans. Life there reminds Maigret of the everyday life of his childhood in the country; so the remote village is not yet connected to the power grid. The old Potin sisters, who live in their parents' house where they run a small shop, are considered wealthy but also very stingy. The younger sister Marguérite was murdered, the older Amélie was injured with eleven stitches in the shoulder and has since fallen silent. Shortly after the investigation began, the Orléans police arrested the murdered’s son, Marcel, a seedy lumberjack. He vehemently denies the act and claims to have done the bookkeeping with his mother that evening and then left. Another suspect named is Yarko, whom everyone calls "Jugo", a Yugoslav who stayed in the area after the end of the war and works as a wooden coachman. He is considered a drunkard, is indebted to the sisters and lives in an old stable in their yard, which also houses his horses.
The instrument of the murder, a knife, can be found in the fireplace; the fingerprints unusable. But Maigret wonders why Marcel should have thrown the knife into the fireplace without worrying about his other fingerprints, on the furniture and the document folder? Why, if he had used it, did he carry the candle back into the room and extinguish it, and why did he go out the front, at the risk of being recognized? For Maigret, Marcel is not the culprit; rather, his assumptions are directed towards the dead sister's silent sister. Maigret suspects that Amélie has been marveling at hating her sister for years and hating her nephew Marcel, who always served himself shamelessly and knew where the money and securities are hidden. Maigret is convinced that Amélie killed her sister and inflicted the superficial wounds on herself. In order to suspect Marcel, the money had to disappear. A drop of wax on one of the empty wine barrels gives Maigret the decisive clue about the money hiding place. Amélie had pushed the papers through the bunghole .
expenditure
Simenon wrote the story in Neuilly-sur-Seine in October 1936; it appeared as a pre-publication on November 22, 1936 in the Paris-Soir-Dimanche newspaper, in book form in the volume of short stories Les Nouvelles Enquêtes de Maigret , which was published in 1944 by Gallimard. It was also included in the Simenon work edition Œuvres complètes (Lausanne, Editions Rencontre, 1967–1973), in Tout Simenon (Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1988–1993) and in Tout Simenon (Paris, Omnibus, 2002–2004) . It is available in German translation in the anthology, All Maigret Stories ( ISBN 978-3-257-06682-1 ) published by Diogenes in 2009 .