Maigret in the house of unrest

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Maigret in the House of Unrest (French original title: La maison d'inquiétude ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . The novel is usually not counted among the series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective inspector Maigret , which appeared from 1931, but is considered the last of four precursors in which Simenon developed the character. It was probably written in 1929 in Delfzijl, the Netherlands, and was published under the pseudonym Georges Sim from March 1 to April 4, 1930 in the daily newspaper L'Œuvre . The book edition was published in February 1932 by J. Tallandier. The first German translation by Thomas Bodmer was published by Kampa Verlag in 2019 .

A confused young woman appears at the police station at night and confesses a murder to Commissioner Maigret, then disappears again. Only hours later, the murder of a retired captain is actually reported. In the house where the crime was committed, Maigret meets the young woman again, but she doesn't want to be able to remember her nocturnal statement.

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During the night between Saturday, November 8th and Sunday, November 9th, Maigret is almost alone at the Paris police station on the Quai des Orfèvres . Then a young woman comes in who gives the inspector the impression of mental confusion and confesses to a murder. When Maigret is distracted by a phone call, she disappears as suddenly as she came. In the following morning hours, a murder is reported from Montreuil : Georges Truffier, a retired merchant marine captain , has been stabbed to death. The mysterious thing is that the concierge did n't see anyone go in and out all night. And when Maigret learns that a young woman named Hélène Gastambide lives in the house, who with her striking blonde hair resembles the mysterious visitor to the police station, the two events of the night are linked for him.

There is a ghostly atmosphere in the Gastambides apartment: Evariste Gastambide, a millionaire heir, had lost his fortune in a speculation and then went abroad with his family. After returning to Paris a few years ago with his two children, but without his wife, he found his way through as a representative of encyclopedias. He seems just as absent-minded as his daughter Hélène, who vehemently denies the nightly visit to the police station. The son Christian is a criminal with a criminal record who spends most of the day in pubs. He openly announces that his father and sister are not quite right in their heads. A note in the murdered man's apartment leads Inspector Maigret to Post Office 42, where he learns that Henry Demassis, the dead man's nephew, was writing poste restante letters to Hélène Gastambide. They met several times a week in the old captain's apartment.

But there is something completely different to report about Hélène: She should also regularly go dancing in the Moulin Rouge , a milieu that does not at all want to suit the over-excited, nervous young woman Maigret met. Finally, the commissioner discovers the background to the supposed double life: They are two different, but amazingly similar women. One is Hélène Gastambide, the other is called Ninie, grew up in Calcutta and now lives as a prostitute on Montmartre . There she was approached by Christian Gastambide and hired as a double for his sister. In truth, as Evariste Gastambide involuntarily recognizes at the sight of her, she is his daughter and Hélène's twin sister, who stayed with his late wife in Calcutta.

Christian had learned of his sister Hélène's secret meetings with Henry Demassis, blackmailed the captain out of financial difficulties and murdered him when he no longer wanted to pay hush money for his nephew's affair. In the act he was surprised by his sister, but he managed to persuade the mentally unstable woman that she was to blame for the captain's death. Thereupon Hélène didn’t know what else to do but to contact the criminal police. Christian realized that she would not be able to withstand Maigret's interrogations, hid her in a boarding house and replaced her with the prostitute Ninie. After his confession and one last evening he got drunk without restraint, he shot himself.

However, his act has another victim: Evariste Gastambide died of a heart attack while trying to take on the murder to protect his son. When Maigret learns how heavily the old man's life was overshadowed by a hereditary disease, this arouses his sympathy. Not only did it attack his state of mind, responsible for his erratic behavior and ruin, it also spread to his children, a neurasthenic daughter and a criminal son. Hélène, who is in hiding, can be found undisturbed and is taken in by her lover Henry and looked after by a neurologist. Maigret, on the other hand, entrusts the care of ninies to his assistant, the philanderer Torrence, so as not to make his wife jealous.

History of origin

Maigret sculpture in Delfzijl

Georges Simenon created various legends about the invention of his most famous character Maigret . After the most famous, the figure was created on the extended work trips that the then author of trivial novels went on with his boat Ostrogoth through the rivers and canals of France to northern Europe, in the fall of 1929 in Delfzijl, the Netherlands, while he was dozing in a café in the morning sun "Anyway, I looked after one hour in a little sleepy state, the contours of a massive, motionless Lord before me arise would, it seemed to me, give one acceptable commissioner." Simenon brought the creation Maigret with the novel the Strange case of Peter the Lett in Connection, the first novel in the later Maigret series, which was published by Fayard in Paris from 1931 onwards, and which over the years made 75 novels and 28 short stories . In fact, Simenon researchers now assume that a forerunner of the Maigret series was created at this mythical place. According to an investigation by Francis Lacassin, it could have been Maigret in the House of Trouble .

The development of the character Maigret can be traced in a total of four "Maigret pro novels", as Daniel Kampa calls them. What they all have in common is that they were published as penny novels under a pseudonym . Kampa still classifies the first two, Train de Nuit and La femme rousse , as “Schmonzetten”, maudlin love stories in which Maigret only plays a minor role, but already as the “fateful flicker” as which he would later become famous. In the third novel La femme rousse , the crime story has become more important, but Maigret is still in the shadow of his assistant Torrence. Only the fourth and last “Proto-Maigret”, La maison d'inquiétude, is a real detective novel , with a detective Maigret at the center from beginning to end, who already has many similarities with the later series character. According to Pierre Assouline , the novel shows the "most complete archetype" of Maigret, and the writer gets his novel hero under control for the first time. For Patrick Marnham it was "the first real Maigret novel", whereby all four attempts would have exceeded Simenon's previous work qualitatively.

Nevertheless, the novel was not the start of the Maigret series. Simenon's in-house publisher Fayard refused the publication and only accepted Maigret and Pietr the Lette as the first Maigret novel two months later , albeit with great reservations about the audience's suitability of the too common main character and the lack of puzzling element in Simenon's crime novels. La maison d'inquiétude had to appear in March 1930 under a pseudonym as a serial novel in L'Œuvre and two years later as a book edition by J. Tallandier and was not a great commercial success. This led to Simenon henceforth dropping Maigret's first independent criminal case under the table and always giving in retrospect Pietr-le-Letton , a better elaborated and stylistically more typical novel, as the first Maigret novel. In the German first edition 90 years after the novel was written, Kampa Verlag Maigret gave the subtitle Der 0. Fall in the House of Unrest . Reviewers spoke of the "original Maigret".

interpretation

"The props, the atmosphere, Maigret's method, his indulgence for people's weaknesses and his tendency to be a 'fateful flicker' - everything is already there," says Daniel Kampa in the afterword of the novel. From Maigret's office on the Quai des Orfèvres with the famous cannon oven to Maigret's private address on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, many locations have already been mapped out that will later shape the Maigret range. Maigret already has his massive stature, wears his heavy coat with a velvet collar, smokes a pipe passionately and can hardly bear that his favorite pipe breaks in the course of the investigation. Madame Maigret is mentioned as well as Maigret's assistant Torrence or the longstanding opponent Judge Coméliau. The brief drawings of atmospheric details that will shape Simenon's style are as present as “Maigret's method”, his very own empathy for a criminal case, until he has learned to understand all the backgrounds.

According to Frauke Kaberka, it is "his empathy , his antennae for moods and sensations, his extremely fine feeling for human emotions" that have made Maigret popular. For Sylvia Staude, the superintendent's sensitivity stands in contrast to his coarse appearance. He is never interested in forensic evidence or investigative methods: “It's the souls and their astray, abysses that interest him.” What sets Maigret apart is his always palpable sympathy for people, be they victims or suspects. Typical for Gerrit Bartels, for example, is the scene when Maigret looks at the old guest ambide with compassion for so long that observers get the impression of a silent dialogue with the dead person. However, at the beginning of his career, the bulky commissioner can still easily be confused, nervous or angry. And, as maigret.de notes, he hardly ever works in a team or delegates to his assistants. He even uses his fists in arguments.

Lothar Müller sees some aspects of the novel still deeply rooted in the horror literature of the 19th century, such as the motif of the doppelganger , the madness as an explanatory model for human behavior, the psychiatrist who appears and the primal fears of hereditary diseases and physiological determinism . Simenon repeated the twin motif only a few months later in Maigret and Pietr der Lette , where sisters became brothers. For Daniel Kampa, it is a matter of course to borrow an idea and to redesign it, showing how much the author must have seen the early novel as a blueprint for the case with which he later officially heralded the Maigret series.

expenditure

  • Georges Sim: La maison d'inquiétude . J. Tallandier, Paris 1932 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in the house of unrest . Translation: Thomas Bodmer . Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-13000-0 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in the house of unrest . Translation: Thomas Bodmer. Reading by Walter Kreye . The Audio Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-7424-1027-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f Daniel Kampa: Afterword. In: Georges Simenon: Maigret in the house of unrest . Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-70054-8 , without pages.
  2. La maison de l'inquiétude in the Simenon bibliography by Yves Martina.
  3. “the most complete prefiguration of Maigret” Quoted from: Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 87.
  4. Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 182-183.
  5. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , pp. 89-90.
  6. a b Gerrit Bartels: Dead cannot die . In: Der Tagesspiegel from April 14, 2019.
  7. Frauke Kaberka (dpa): His 0th case in the house of unrest . In: Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung of May 8, 2019.
  8. Sylvia Staude: When the father of all commissioners was born . In: Frankfurter Rundschau from April 23, 2019.
  9. Maigret in the House of Unrest on maigret.de.
  10. Lothar Müller : The case zero. Maigret and the masks of Simenon . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung from April 18, 2019.