Maigret as a furnished gentleman

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Maigret as a furnished gentleman (French: Maigret en meublé ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 37th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from February 14 to 21, 1951 in Lakeville , Connecticut , and was published in the same year by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Jean Raimond was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1957 . In 1979 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Wolfram Schäfer.

Inspector Janvier was shot while monitoring a boarding house . Maigret, whose wife is away, stays in one of the furnished rooms. Soon he comes across a fugitive robber. But any other boarder could just as easily have fired the shot at his inspector. Only the landlady considers all her guests, Maigret and the robber included, to be very charming people.

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Rue Lhomond in the 5th arrondissement in Paris

Maigret is a widower of straw . His wife has gone to see her sick sister and the inspector is bored in the Paris spring. A new case comes in handy. A few days ago the La Cigogne nightspot was attacked. The toilet woman was able to identify the young Émile Paulus as one of the perpetrators. Half of the booty and the murder weapon, a toy pistol, are found in his pension, but Paulus remains missing. Inspector Janvier watches over the pension until one night he is shot at. Albert Janvier, who is Maigret's dearest employee next to Lucas' right hand, survives seriously injured, and Maigret unceremoniously lodges himself as a guest in Paul's room on Rue Lhomond.

Maigret gets to know the landlady Mademoiselle Clément, a luscious, talkative, life-affirming maiden who reminds the inspector of an oversized talking doll. And he gets to know her boarders, who, according to Mademoiselle Clément, are all very charming people: the young actress Blanche with her alleged "uncle", the piano teacher Valentin, Monsieur Kridelka, a nurse in the psychiatry, the typist Isabelle, the student Oscar Fachin , the married couple Lotard and Saft, the former with child and the latter in anticipation of offspring. In fact, Maigret finds no evidence that any of them could have shot his inspector. In return, on a sleepless night, he tracks down the enormous food consumption of his landlady. He searches her room and discovers Paul, whom Mademoiselle Clément is hiding under her bed. The naive young robber is arrested and betrays his partner Jef Vandamme in Brussels. But both questioning still did not reveal any motive for the shot at Janvier.

Finally Maigret's attention is drawn to the Boursicaults' apartment on the first floor of the house opposite, where the curtains are often drawn for days. As paymaster at sea, Désiré Boursicault is often absent for long periods of time, his wife Françoise is bedridden and almost paralyzed. Nevertheless, there are indications that she receives male visitors while her husband is away. Maigret reveals her past: As a young, once pretty girl, the now withered woman, marked by her illness, was working in a night bar when Julien Foucrier, a similarly frivolous boy like Émile Paulus decades later, fell in love with her. Foucrier, constantly worried about money and driven by the urge to impress his beloved, committed a robbery of the moneylender Mabille, then went into hiding, lived in Panama for decades until he returned to Paris seven years ago due to illness, where he was on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir lives in the immediate vicinity of the Maigrets.

In Paris, Foucrier met his childhood sweetheart Françoise again. She still loved him too, but a divorce from her husband, for whom she felt grateful, was out of the question. Both met in cafes in Boursicault's absence, when she fell ill in her apartment more and more often. There Foucrier was caught by police surveillance on rue Lhomond. of which he believed the action was a wanted murderer. He dared not leave the house until the threatened return of the husband forced him to flee that night and in desperation he shot Inspector Janvier with Boursicault's revolver. Foucrier faces Maigret on the condition that he leaves Françoise out of the game. Back at the Quai des Orfèvres , Maigret keeps his promise and passes Foucrier's presence on Rue Lhomond as a coincidence. However, he cannot share the enthusiasm of the young inspector Lapointe for the arrest of the murderer.

interpretation

Peter Foord compared Maigret as a furnished gentleman with Maigret and the dancer, written just a few weeks earlier . In both novels, one of Maigret's two young inspectors - once Janvier, once Lapointe - is the focus. In both cases, the Commissioner leaves his office on the Quai des Orfèvres and stays on site to get to know the environment in which the crime was committed. According to Alexandra Krieg, Maigret goes to the Pension Mademoiselle Cléments in a milieu of petty bourgeoisie and stranded people on the lower subsistence level. He immerses himself so deeply into the living conditions of the guesthouse guests that at the end of the day he knows every detail of their lives and would “greet them like old friends” when they met again. Telephone calls with the Quai des Orfèvres tore him briefly from the scene, “but no sooner had he hung up the phone than Maigret seemed to immerse himself again in the atmosphere of his street section.” In Madame Maigret's absence, Mademoiselle Clément takes on her role, the maternal inspector to take care of. At the beginning Maigret draws the comparison, "whether she wasn't a kind of Madame Maigret, a Madame Maigret who had no husband to look after and who consoled herself by mothering her tenants."

The reappearance from the investigation and the return to his life as a police officer leaves the detective with a feeling of psychological exhaustion and sadness. In addition, in this case he has to act against his compassion for an invalid and her lifelong admirer. George Grella drew the parallel between the commissioner and his author Simenon, who once described his own work as a "calling to unhappiness". The interrogation of the sick Françoise Boursicault, for whom he caused a double ailment with his interrogation, was a particular burden on the inspector. The tormented woman's thin neck brings to light a drastic childhood memory in which little Jules Maigret had to cut off the head of a chicken. Maigret, on the other hand, has almost fatherly feelings towards Paul, who is barely of age. John Raymond pointed out that the "fateful" Maigret always shows a very special sympathy for the youth and their special problems, their sometimes comical, sometimes tragic entanglements.

According to Peter Foord, the investigation ends a long way from where it started with the robbery of a nightclub. Tilman Spreckelsen described the first half of the book as "mere decoration of the actual case [...]: the light, almost comedic [...] mirror image of the other, which in the end shows the greater force and tragedy." Murielle Wenger interpreted the two in a similar way linked parallel stories. They give the novel a development from the dramatic beginning with the injured Janvier through a comical interlude about Mademoiselle Clément and Paulus to the dramatic end with the arrest of the lover Foucrier. The comic highlight is the nightly consumption of a sandwich that Mademoiselle Clément actually prepared for Paulus. Similar to the later flower pot with which Françoise Boursicault gives signs to her lover, the sandwich becomes a thing symbol that expresses relationships that are not expressed between the figures.

reception

Heinrich Meyer judged: "The almost lyrical story Maigret en meublé seems to me to have been very successful ." He said that the novel stuck in his memory, "because everything went on so calmly and slowly and at the same time as pleasantly as if the guesthouse in Mlle Clement the quiet side street would be constantly lit by the sun. ”As in other Maigret novels, Leo Harris saw“ an irresistible temptation ”due to“ the simplicity of dialogues and the language in which the place and atmosphere are drawn ”. For Oliver Hahn on maigret.de, Maigret, as a furnished man , is “one of the most amusing Maigrets”, not least thanks to Mademoiselle Clément.

The novel was filmed a total of four times: as part of the television series with Rupert Davies (1961), Kees Brusse (1965), Jean Richard (1972) and Bruno Cremer (2004). In 2006, Diogenes Verlag published an audio book reading by Gert Heidenreich .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret en meublé. Presses de la Cité, Paris 1951 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret as a furnished gentleman. Translation: Jean Raimond. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1957.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret as a furnished gentleman. Translation: Jean Raimond. Heyne, Munich 1967.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret as a furnished gentleman. Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 1979, ISBN 3-257-20693-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret as a furnished gentleman. Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, Volume 37. Translation: Wolfram Schäfer. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23837-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions. In: Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 49.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Maigret en meublé (Maigret Takes a Room / Maigret Rents a Room) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  4. ↑ Alexandra Krieg: In search of traces. The detective novel and its development from the beginning to the present. Tectum, Marburg 2002, ISBN 3-8288-8392-3 , pp. 55-57.
  5. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret as a furnished gentleman. Reading by Gert Heidenreich. Diogenes, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-257-80043-6 , Chapter 2, Track 3, approx. 4:00.
  6. ↑ “Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” In: Georges Simenon, The Art of Fiction No. 9. Interviewed by Carvel Collins . In: The Paris Review 9, summer 1955.
  7. ↑ George Grella: Simenon and Maigret. In: Adam, International Review. Simenon Issue, Nos. 328-330, 1969, pp. 56-59 ( online ).
  8. ↑ Josef Quack: The limits of the human. About Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Friedrich Glauser, Graham Greene. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-2014-6 , p. 17.
  9. ^ John Raymond: Simenon in Court. Hamilton, London 1968, ISBN 0-241-01505-7 , p. 164.
  10. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 37: Maigret as a furnished gentleman . On FAZ.net from December 29, 2008.
  11. ↑ Heinrich Meyer : The art of storytelling . Francke, Bern 1972, pp. 195-196.
  12. ↑ "There is an irresistible lure about thesis stories, due as much to the simplicity of the dialogue, and of the language in Which the venue and atmosphere are sketched in." In: Crime reviewed by Leo Harris. Books and bookmen , Volumes 5-6, 1959.
  13. ↑ Maigret as a furnished gentleman on maigret.de.
  14. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's website.