Maigret and the Clochard

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Maigret and the Clochard (French: Maigret et le clochard ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 60th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written from April 26 to May 2, 1962 in Echandens and was published the following year by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1964 . In 1989 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Josef Winiger .

Commissioner Maigret has never seen a murder attack on a Clochard . So when a Parisian homeless man nicknamed "Doctor" is pushed into the Seine and almost drowns, the inspector begins to be interested in the background to the unusual act and investigates the victim's past. Madame Maigret, of all people, has a lot to say about the past of the former doctor.

content

Pont Marie in Paris

March 25th is the first spring day of the year in Paris , and so Commissioner Maigret is also in the spring mood when he and Inspector Lapointe go to a local meeting at Pont Marie, where he meets examining magistrate Dantziger and prosecutor Perrain. A murder attempt was carried out on a clochard who was sleeping under the bridge: presumably in his sleep he was hit on the head and then thrown into the Seine before the boatmen Jef van Houtte and Justin Goulet fished him out of the water. Now he is in a coma in the Hôtel-Dieu . Van Houtte's statement directs the police on the trail of two men in a red Peugeot 403 who are said to have thrown the Clochard into the river.

Maigret cannot remember ever hearing of an attack on a clochard. The other homeless people also speak with respect of the victim, who is only known as the “doctor”. His identity card is made out in the name of François Keller from Mulhouse in Alsace . This is where Madame Maigret and her Alsatian relatives come into play: Her sister knows about a doctor named Keller who has always been headstrong and unadjusted. After his wife became wealthy through an inheritance, the couple became increasingly estranged. Through parties and receptions, she sought connection to the high society. He looked for meaning in his work and wanted to practice like Albert Schweitzer as a tropical doctor in Gabon . But even in the colonies he could not obey any rules, was expelled and returned to France, where his trace was lost. Maigret tracks down Keller's daughter Jacqueline Rousselet and Keller's wife, who lives on the Île Saint-Louis , just a few hundred meters from her husband's shelter. And he visits cellars in the Hôtel-Dieu. Although Maigret doesn't seem to be receptive yet, Maigret is sure that he understands his every word, but has decided not to speak.

In the meantime, Inspector Lapointe has managed to locate the red Peugeot. This belongs to Jean Guillot, who was actually on the Quai des Célestins with his friend Lucien Hardoin on the night of the crime, but it has been proven that he was half an hour earlier than van Houtte stated, and what they threw into the water was Guillot's deceased Great Dane Nestor. After the first doubts arose about the Flemish ship's statement, Maigret followed his barge De Zwarte Zwaan until he was able to put it between Meulan-en-Yvelines and Mantes-la-Jolie near Juziers . Next to van Houtte are his wife Anneke and their newborn baby as well as his brother Hubert on the ship. Although the Flemish resists the renewed questioning by all means, Maigret gradually learns that the boat was originally owned by Anneke's father Louis Willems, with whom Jef had hired as an assistant. Willems would never have agreed to marry his daughter to the destitute Jef, but a few weeks before the wedding the drunken skipper went overboard and drowned. The alleged accident occurred in Paris near the Pont de Bercy, which at the time served as Keller's night quarters.

Pont de Bercy in Paris

For Maigret, all the pieces of the puzzle are now coming together: Van Houte had helped with Willems' death and had been watched by the Clochard. When he rediscovered him under another bridge two years later, he wanted to get rid of the witness and pushed him into the river like his first victim. However, another skipper heard the drowning man's screams, whereupon Van Houtte had no choice but to help with the rescue. During the subsequent police questioning, he tried to link the crime with the chance observation of the red Peugeot from the same evening, which he thought could not be found. Despite all the contradictions in his testimony, van Houtte does not confess, and there is no solid evidence against him. Finally Maigret draws his last trump card and brings perpetrators and victims together in the Hôtel-Dieu. But Keller denies recognizing his attacker, and Maigret has to let the Flemish go. Unlike the public prosecutor and examining magistrate, the commissioner at least shows understanding for the Clochard, who has long since strayed so far from the rules of the game that a jury trial is no longer important to him. In the summer Maigret meets the recovered "doctor" again under the Pont Marie. And when the clochard tells him that Maigret's conclusions are true, but that he doesn't want to judge anyone, a brief moment of complicity arises between the two men.

Form and language

The language of the Maigret novels is simple and concise. Simenon often draws detailed, atmospheric pictures of the locations. Sun also sets Maigret and the tramp one with a detail described spring walk. The novel is largely presented in dialogue form as direct speech and counter-speech, question and answer, for example during interrogations by the inspector and in Maigret's conversations with his wife. The descriptive passages mainly revolve around the feelings of the commissioner and in particular the influence of the weather on his condition.

Although, according to Guido Reineke, the novel "is certainly not a literary masterpiece", it contains some literary stylistic devices such as symbols of things . For Reineke, the three different colored marbles in the Clochard's pocket stand for his former family: father, mother and child. Murielle Wenger, on the other hand, sees it as a symbol for the paradise of childhood, which lies far in the past. As is often the case with Simenon, the characters are indirectly characterized by their way of life and their emotions. At the end there is the interrogation in the inspector's office, which is typical of the Maigret series, a ritual that always follows the same rules and is accompanied by Maigret's pipe smoking and the consumption of sandwiches and beer. The increasing aggressiveness of the interrogated skipper throughout the novel reaches its climax in Maigret's office, before it subsides again when confronted in the hospital. Without the arrest of the suspect, the novel ends with a (semi) open ending .

interpretation

Photo of a clochard by Eugène Atget , Paris 1898

The clochard is a common character in Simenon's novels. Murielle Wenger feels reminded by the "Doctor" François Keller of the boatman Jean Darchambaux from Maigret and the towman from Providence , who is also a former doctor, and Marcel Vivien in Maigret and the lonely man once left his family to go to the Paris streets to live. Lucille F. Becker refers to the figure of the stray Léopold in Simenon's autobiographical novel Family Tree . At the age of 16 Simenon had fantasized about ending up as a clochard one day. In Simenon on the couch , he confessed “that I still feel that the state of the clochard is almost an ideal state. The real Clochard is undoubtedly a much more perfect person than we are. ”Thus the refusal of the Clochard to betray a murderer and to judge him gives him a nobility in Maigret's eyes, which he admires, although at the same time he feels disappointment. that he lacks the necessary testimony to convict the suspect.

The philosopher Paul Smeyers cites the novel Maigret and the Clochard as an example for the question of when knowledge can become problematic. Maigret is satisfied with not clearing up his case completely, he accepts the refusal of his witness to testify without putting further pressure on him. He does this out of the knowledge that the simple logic of crime and punishment itself creates injustice, and that it is not always beneficial for higher justice to clarify the facts for their own sake. Maigret takes on the burden of not getting to the bottom of things, knowing that he has chosen the better solution: “Those who live under the bridges are invisible, but see everything. You should be left alone like everyone else. "

reception

Jean Richard (1974)

The literary magazine Welt und Wort ruled in 1965 about Maigret and the Clochard : “A very appealing story from the Maigret series.” The New York Times Book Review saw the novel 1974 “filled with an authentic Parisian atmosphere”. Dick Datchery recommended the book in The Critic to readers with a faint heart, adding, “This is a calm, muted story with little mystery or tension […]. As usual, there is a fine mixture of first-class characters, and Maigret's brooding is guaranteed to please his fans. "

Tilman Spreckelsen didn't really like Simenon's story of the doctor who becomes a clochard, but if you let yourself into it, "the story definitely gets momentum". He referred to the spring fever that rose in the inspector: "Despite the evil attempted murder, the book is almost irritatingly cheerful over many pages." The fact that the assassination attempt on the Clochard turned out to be completely unnecessary in retrospect, given his mentality and secrecy, led him to the conclusion: "One seldom reads such an age-old commitment to the basic absurdity of life at Simenon."

The novel was filmed twice as part of French television series: in 1976 Jean Richard played Commissioner Maigret, in 2004 his colleague Bruno Cremer . The Ernst Klett Verlag published a shortened and simplified language edition for the French classes. The demand from treatment in school lessons meant that the German-language edition was out of print for a long time.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et le clochard . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1963 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Clochard . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1964.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Clochard . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1971.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Clochard . Translation: Josef Winiger . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-21801-X .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the Clochard . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 60. Translation: Josef Winiger. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23860-0 .

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. 59.
  3. ↑ Detlef Richter: Maigret and the Clochard (Georges Simenon); Volume 60 on leserwelt.de.
  4. ↑ a b c Maigret of the Month - January 2009: Maigret et le clochard (Maigret and the Bum) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ↑ a b c Full scripts in foreign language lessons using the example of Georges Simenon's “Maigret et le clochard” . Seminar paper by Guido Reineke.
  6. ^ Georges Simenon: Simenon on the couch . Diogenes, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-257-21658-0 , p. 17.
  7. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 17.
  8. ^ Paul Smeyers: Statistics and the Interference to the Best Explanation: Living Without Complexity? In: Paul Smeyers, Marc Depaepe: Educational Research: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics . Springer, Dordrecht 2010, ISBN 978-90-481-9872-6 , pp. 171-172. Quote: “Who lives under the bridges is invisible, but sees everything. They and others should be left alone. "
  9. ↑ Welt und Wort Volume 20. Heliopolis, Tübingen 1965, p. 117.
  10. ^ "A brand-new Inspector Maigret thriller, full of authentic Paris atmosphere." In: The New York Times Book Review Volume 79, 1974, p. 104.
  11. ↑ "This is a quiet low-key story with little mistery or suspension [...]. As usually there is a fine mixture of choice characters and Maigret's musings are guaranteed to please his fans. For the faint of heart. "In: The Critic Volume 32, Thomas Moore Association 1973, p. 83.
  12. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 60: The Clochard . On FAZ.net from June 23, 2009.
  13. ↑ Maigret and the Clochard on maigret.de.
  14. ↑ Finally back: Maigret and the Clochard on maigret.de.