Maigret versus Picpus

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Maigret contra Picpus (French: Signé Picpus ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 23rd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Fontenay-le-Comte in the summer of 1941 . It was prepublished in Paris-Soir in 34 episodes between December 11, 1941 and January 21, 1942. In January 1944, Editions Gallimard published the book edition in the anthology Signé Picpus , which also contained the novels Maigret and his rival and Maigret and the maid . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1961 under the title Maigret gives away his pipe . In 1982 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Hainer Kober under the title Maigret contra Picpus .

The opponent Maigret has to deal with in this novel signs with the name Picpus. He announces the death of a fortune teller, which also occurs, although Maigret has all known fortune tellers in Paris monitored. The whole city is looking for that ominous Picpus. Maigret, however, also follows other leads. And he discovers a man trapped in the dead man's apartment.

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At the corner of Place de la République and Boulevard Voltaire, the novel is the Café des Sports .

Paris in hot August. Mascouvin, a colorless middle-aged bachelor whose only passion is playing bridge in a comtesse's private game club, approaches Maigret to admit that he had embezzled 1,000 francs to settle his gambling debts. He reports something that makes the inspector sit up and take notice. In the Café des Sports on the Place de la République , he found a note on the blotting paper that a previous guest must have written: “Tomorrow afternoon at five I will kill the fortune teller. Signed Picpus. ”Maigret has 482 Parisian fortune tellers monitored, but at the specified time an unreported and therefore not monitored fortune teller is stabbed to death: Marie Picard, who goes by the stage name Mademoiselle Jeanne.

But not only the dead person is found in the apartment, but also a man trapped in the kitchen: Octave Le Cloaguen, a 68-year-old retired ship's doctor who looks slightly idiotic to the inspector and claims to have been locked in by Jeanne when he was there knocked on the door. La Clouagen is used to being locked in, as his wife and daughter regularly get him out of the way in his apartment when they have visitors. They explain that he hasn't been the same since his travels in Asia, just walks aimlessly through the streets and prefers his sparsely furnished room to the otherwise expensive apartment.

Mascouvin, shaken by the death of the fortune teller, has meanwhile attempted suicide, which he survived, seriously injured. Maigret meets his younger half-sister Berthe Janiveau, who reports that Macouvin was an orphan. He is a very conscientious person and carefully supported her financially after the death of her stepparents. Another trail leads Maigret to Morsang-sur-Seine , where Mademoiselle Jeanne often spent months. Here he notices Monsieur Blaise, a reindeer who spends his weekends in Morsang, ostensibly to fish all day, although Maigret immediately realizes that his pike have only been bought. And while all of Paris is searching for Picpus, Maigret discovers his secret: In the Café des Sports , a Hercules figure named Picpus is depicted on an advertising poster for a freight forwarder, and from whom the author of the murder attempt merely borrowed the name.

When Le Cloaguen went into hiding, the examining magistrate's case was resolved. But while he has the whole city searched for the supposedly crazy, Maigret is more interested in the history of the ship's doctor who once saved a young Argentine woman from yellow fever . Since then he has received an annual pension of 200,000 francs from her rich father, has given up his job and settled in Saint-Raphaël . Despite the prosperity, he suffered from his despotic wife. When he died, his only concern was to save his pension. She left for Paris and got an old clochard to slip into the role of her husband. Since then, she and her daughter have kept the man who was afraid of women and at the same time financially dependent on them, almost like a prisoner. When Maigret tracks down the supposed Le Cloaguen in the attic, he is relieved to have escaped the two greedy women, to give up his role and finally to be allowed to smoke a pipe again. Maigret learns his real name: His name is Picard and he is the father of the dead fortune teller.

Through the tricky questioning of a naive milk seller named Emma, ​​Maigret succeeds in gaining access to a whole gang of blackmailers . The head of the gang is Monsieur Blaise. Mascouvin and Mademoiselle Jeanne brought him information about their customers. Through the fortune teller, Blaise also found out about her father's wrong game and planned to blackmail the Le Cloaguen family. When Jeanne wanted to protect her father, Blaise ordered her murder. Mascouvin, who had fallen into the clutches of the blackmailers to support his half-sister, got scruples and invented the story of Picpus to save the fortune teller he did not know, and his own embezzlement to protect himself from the gang in prison . When the woman died anyway, he saw no other way out than to go into the Seine . In the end, Maigret confesses to the Argentine, who now lives in Paris, that she was cheated out of his pension by the wife of her late savior for years, but she just shrugs her shoulders indifferently. The money that other crimes were made about doesn't matter to their wealth.

Origin and historical background

With the novel Maigret (German: Maigret and his nephew ), Simenon ended the series of his first 19 Maigret novels in 1934 and turned to his non-Maigret novels, with which he pursued higher literary ambitions. In 1939 he returned for the first time in a novel to his popular detective inspector. In a letter to André Gide , he announced: "In order to take care of the family pot on the stove, I thought of writing a few more Maigrets." Signé Picpus was Simenon's fourth Maigret novel to follow. On November 18, 1941, the daily Paris-Soir wrote a competition for Simenon's latest novel, in which readers could influence the staff. In fact, Simenon had already completed the manuscript in the summer of 1941. Signé Picpus appeared in a pre-publication in Paris-Soir in 34 episodes between December 11, 1941 and January 21, 1942.

Simenon's family lived in a wing of the Château de Terre-Neuve near Fontenay-le-Comte in the German-occupied part of France when the novel was written . Simenon had come to terms with the Vichy regime , continued to publish novels with the renowned Éditions Gallimard and was more present on the big screen than any other French writer during the war years, especially on the big screen. Signé Picpus was also filmed in October 1942 by the German-controlled film company Continental-Film .

Fenton Bresler took the novel as an opportunity to point out the contradictions between the reality of the war and the image of France drawn by Simenon. This is how Simenon described, after the occupied Paris had long since ceased to be visited by foreign tourists, unmoved: “Buses full of tourists pushed their way through the streets of Paris. The guides shouted into their loudspeakers ”. And in the avenue de Wagram the taxi drives “between cafes and cinemas, in the cheerful noise of the crowd.” For Bresler, Simenon described a “fairytale picture of a Paris and a France […], how it unfortunately ceased to exist.” And he asked, "Was this a deliberate escape from reality, or was there a blockage in his brain that prevented him from seeing things for what they really were?"

Maigret's method

Josef Quack sees Signé Picpus as an “example novel” for the role Maigret's intuition plays in solving a case. When the superintendent in Morsang-sur-Seine unmasked Monsieur Blaise's duplicity through mere observation, he did not move outwardly, so Madame Maigret had to ask him what he was doing. He is waiting for something, relying “only on his intuition, on tiny clues” until the events form a “logical consequence” for him. When his suspicions are confirmed, his heart makes “a little jump” and the “spark of triumph” shines in his eyes. Even later, when he discovered the missing Picard in the attic, he was “tears in his eyes” with joy, and it goes on to say: “Maigret discovered it all by himself. Without any clues, so to speak, or rather on the basis of clues that the others had neglected, and above all with his extraordinary intuition, his frightening ability to put himself in the situation of others. "

For Maigret, the reward of all the investigative work is the moments when, at the end of a case, an overall picture is formed from the individual pieces of the puzzle, when Maigret is pictorially before her eyes. For example, during the final interrogation with Picard, when the images emerge in front of his inner eye, “Those were really his big hours, hours that belonged to him all alone, that outweighed all the small annoyances and the routine of the examinations.” The ability to Empathizing with other people until he can see their lives in front of him leads to a multiple life: “The people around them had a real life, they lived entirely in the present. Maigret, on the other hand, lived three, five or ten lives at the same time ”. None of this can be seen externally, and so the later exposed blackmailer describes Maigret only unfavorably as a "middle-aged man with a bloated face and a poorly fitting suit".

reception

Thomas Wörtche described the novel as "A study of the height of summer in Paris and the coldness of the heart of its residents." The literary magazine Time & Tide rated the English translation in 1958 as "good", although the tension never subsided. The magazine Punch rated the joint English edition of Maigret macht Ferien and Maigret contra Picpus as a “particularly good couple”, with the second novel “fascinatingly unraveling a plot of unusual entanglements”. For Stanley G. Eskin, however, Signé Picpus was “not so good” in an often suppressed second phase of the Maigret series during the war years. John Raymond, on the other hand, described the 1940s as the "heart" of Simenon's oeuvre and Signé Picpus as "outstanding" in this phase. Tilman Spreckelsen read in his Maigret marathon "a very confused case at first", but the "terms honor and family artfully run through this novel, often these principles are irreconcilable."

The novel was filmed five times. The 1943 film Picpus by Roland Pottier with Albert Préjean as Maigret was followed by the television series with Rupert Davies (1962), Gino Cervi (1965), Jean Richard (1968) and Bruno Cremer (2003).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Signé Picpus. Gallimard, Paris 1944 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is giving away his pipe. Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1961.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret is giving away his pipe. Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Translation: Hainer Kober. Diogenes, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-20736-0 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 23. Translation: Hainer Kober. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23823-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Signé Picpus in Michel Martina's bibliography.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions. Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 53-54.
  3. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 10.
  4. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon. Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 263.
  5. ↑ Maigret of the Month: Signé Picpus (To Any Lengths / Maigret and the Fortuneteller) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon. Pp. 278-279.
  7. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 52.
  8. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 23.
  9. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person. Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 193.
  10. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, pp. 65–66.
  11. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 127.
  12. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 152.
  13. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 153.
  14. ↑ See the section 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 , pp. 34–35, 57.
  15. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret contra Picpus. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, p. 88.
  16. ↑ a b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 23: Maigret contra Picpus . On FAZ.net from September 12, 2008.
  17. ↑ Thomas Wörtche : Leichenberg 02/2002 on caliber .38 .
  18. ↑ " To Any Lengths is good [...], and the excitement is never abated." In: Time & Tide Volume 39, Time and Tide Publishing 1958, p. 199.
  19. ↑ “A particularly good pair; the second fascinatingly unravels a plot of unusual complication. "In: Punch Band 220 1951, p. 126.
  20. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography. Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 248, 251.
  21. ^ "Among them the outstanding Signé Picpus [...]. One might say with justice that the heartland of Simenon's achievement lies in this decade. “In: John Raymond: Simenon in Court . Hamilton, London 1968, ISBN 0-241-01505-7 , p. 92.
  22. ↑ Maigret contra Picpus on maigret.de.