Maigret and the wine merchant

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Maigret and the Wine Merchant (French: Maigret et le marchand de vin ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 71st novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . Written from September 23 to 29, 1969 in Epalinges , the book was published by Presses de la Cité that same year . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published in 1972 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1986 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Hainer Kober in the anthology Christmas with Maigret .

A wealthy wine merchant is found murdered after a rendezvous with his private secretary. Commissioner Maigret soon realizes that no one is mourning the deceased who has created a host of enemies through his ruthless career advancement and numerous extramarital affairs. When investigating the dead person's environment, the winter flu-ridden commissioner has to admit that he has hardly ever had to deal with so many unpleasant people as this one.

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Corner of Rue Fortuny / Rue de Prony in the 17th arrondissement of Paris

December in Paris . In the Quai des Orfèvres, Maigret interrogates Théo Stiernet, a young man who murdered his own grandmother for a few francs and shows no remorse. He is happy to drop the case when he is called to Rue Fortuny on another murder case. Oscar Chabut, the well-known wine merchant and owner of the wholesale chain Le Vin des Moines , was shot there after leaving a posh hour hotel . In the establishment there is still his private secretary Anne-Marie Boutin, known by everyone because of her appearance as the "grasshopper", with whom Chabut regularly met on Wednesdays for a shepherd's hour.

It soon turns out that she isn't the only woman Chabut cheated with. Almost every female person in his company and his private environment occasionally shared the bed with the wine merchant, a fact that his wife Jeanne was obviously well known and left her unmoved. But not only the innumerable horned husbands impose themselves as possible perpetrators, with his ruthless career advancement Chabut has created numerous enemies, and even his father Désiré, the landlord of a small bistro, does not like his son. Maigret is portrayed as a man from a humble background who, although becoming wealthy professionally, never fully felt that he belonged to the circles into which he had risen. So the wine merchant sought confirmation in the fact that he treated the people around him roughly and could get any woman into bed.

Maigret does not find anyone mourning Chabut's death, and it seems almost impossible to pinpoint the culprit among the many who conveniently see his death. Jeanne Chabut, the wife who has been betrayed many times, coolly prepares for the takeover. Chabut's unsympathetic financial advisor Stéphane Louceck, who acted as he saw fit in the Avenue de l'Opéra branch, shows himself to be extremely buttoned up. The small publisher Jean-Luc Caucasson, who tried to blackmail Chabut because of his affair with his wife, tried to get his threatening letters published. But the hottest lead is an anonymous caller who Maigret believes she recognizes Gilbert Pigou, an accountant who was laid off by Chabut in June.

While Maigret sent the entire police station out on the hunt for Pigou one night, it was the wanted man who came to the flu-ridden inspector of his own accord in his private apartment on Richard-Lenoir Boulevard. In an intimate conversation over a grog, Maigret Pigou's sad life story learns. The bookkeeper, without any confidence in his abilities, had always made do with his small, insignificant post in Chabut's service, but his dissatisfied wife Liliane drove him to more ambition and higher earnings. So he began to embezzle small amounts of money to fool his wife into a raise or a Christmas bonus. When Chabut caught his eye, he dismissed his accountant without notice, not without humiliating and even slapping him in front of his secretary precisely because of the miserable nature of his little deception.

Pigou, who could not find a new job at an advanced age and without references, did not admit the dismissal to his wife and faked her daily going to work for months. Only when his reserves were running low did he go into hiding, which worried his wife little and only drove him into the arms of the financially stronger Chabout. So your most urgent question to the Commissioner is whether the suspicion of murder against your husband is sufficient as a reason for divorce. While the homeless Pigou was becoming increasingly neglected, Chabut remained the only fixed point in his life. He secretly persecuted his former boss and got deeper and deeper into hatred for the allegedly guilty party for his misfortune. In the end he murdered his former employer, whose daily routine he had long known by heart by the time he had his weekly rendezvous with his secretary. Although he had to give himself away, Pigou thirsted for attention and kept looking for contact with the investigating commissioner, until he confessed the whole story to him on the final visit and received some comforting words from Maigret in return. But despite all the sympathy, Maigret has to handcuff his visitor in the end.

interpretation

According to Lucille F. Becker, wine merchant Oscar Chabut is one of a number of strong, successful characters in Simenon's work who arouse envy and hatred in those around them. Chabout used his money and power to humiliate all people, and his female adventures were still primarily used to ensure his dominance. He expresses his worldview at one point to his secretary, to whom he confesses that if he cannot achieve the love of people, he prefers hatred to indifference. For Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus , the wine merchant is “one of the most disgusting characters in the late Maigret novels”. It is typical for Simenon that it is precisely the upstarts in the upper middle class who are portrayed in a particularly negative way. As an alternative to Chabut, who achieved his rise only at the expense of the ruin of numerous small traders, Simenon draws his father, who with his old bistro has also remained true to his traditional social status. The multitude of Chabut's love adventures inevitably reminds Tilman Spreckelsen of Simenon himself and his boast of having slept with 10,000 women in his life, although the wine merchant shows the dark side of such a lifestyle.

Schulz-Buschhaus recognizes the figure of the murderer early on in the plot, when Maigret already catches the intense gaze of a limping stranger in the third chapter. At the latest in the fifth chapter, in which Maigret learns of the humiliating dismissal of the accountant Pigou, the question about the perpetrator is answered. From this point on it is only about Pigou's arrest and the clarification of his motives, the story behind his act. For Becker, the way in which the murderer draws attention to himself and encircles the inspector more and more closely in order to be finally caught shows Simenon's Catholic image of man, according to which the guilty person is almost urged to atone for his guilt by confession . In this case, the perpetrator is a lifelong failure who robbed Chabut of the last remnant of his self-respect until he was ashamed to be alive at all. Through his act of desperation, he gains meaning for the first time in life, whereby Maigret instinctively feels that the accountant's main urge is to speak and be understood.

The way in which the inspector manages to get hold of the perpetrator is reflected in the novel by an episode in which Maigret lures a squirrel in his weekend house in Meung-sur-Loire by waiting stubbornly. For Tilman Spreckelsen, the novel shows in some places how the murderer escapes like a squirrel as soon as you try to approach him and is only tamed by Maigret at the end. For Murielle Wenger, other parts of the novel are also structured according to the principle of analogy and contrast. The novel begins with a parallel investigation, with Maigret later noting the similarity of the two self-reliant murderers, who are unable to feel remorse for their deeds. In the middle of the novel, the interest, which initially focused exclusively on the victim, shifts completely to the perpetrator. And finally, throughout the novel, there is a contrast between the cold and snowy December and the cozy, overheated interiors, especially in Maigret's apartment, where the superintendent is cured of his flu and is being looked after by Madame Maigret. According to Schulz-Buschhaus, Maigret's fight against the flu is described in almost the same detail as the search for the murderer.

reception

The New York Times Book Review called Maigret and the wine merchant “a typical Simenon job” and stated: “No exploits, no intellectual feats of deduction, very little action - and yet a story of people with a sad, unsuccessful murderer, [...] solved by a bourgeois police officer with a runny nose and infinite compassion for his fellow man. ” Anatole Broyard described the perpetrator in the New York Times as“ a little gray nothing ”, but praised the conclusion, in which he was touched that Maigret allows him to present his view of things as a "fine moment, a demonstration of what a writer like Simenon is capable of in the flea market of fiction."

The novel was filmed twice: as part of the television series with Jean Richard (1978) and Bruno Cremer (2002). In 2008 Gert Heidenreich read the novel as an audio book for Diogenes Verlag, to which dpa described: “So slowly and carefully Maigret investigated after the murder of the wine merchant Oscar Chabut, so carefully and focused Heidenreich reports on the events that another inspector than Maigret would probably have viewed with a much greater inner distance. ” Walter Kreye read another audio book in 2019 for Audio Verlag .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et le marchand de vin . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1969 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the spinner . Maigret and the wine merchant. Maigret and the Pole . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1972, ISBN 3-462-00851-X .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the wine merchant . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-453-12097-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Christmas with Maigret . Maigret and the wine merchant. Maigret has scruples . Translation: Hainer Kober. Diogenes, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-257-01729-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the wine merchant . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 71. Translation: Hainer Kober. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23871-6 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the wine merchant . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau, Mirjam Madlung. Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-13071-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1968 à 1989 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the 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. 81.
  3. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 49.
  4. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus : Forms and ideologies of the crime novel. An essay on the history of the genre . Athenaion, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-7997-0603-8 , p. 163.
  5. ^ A b Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 71: The wine merchant . On FAZ.net from September 18, 2009.
  6. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus: Forms and ideologies of the crime novel. An essay on the history of the genre , p. 170.
  7. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon , pp. 49-50.
  8. ^ Maigret of the Month: Maigret et le marchand de vin (Maigret and the Wine Merchant) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  9. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus: Forms and ideologies of the crime novel. An essay on the history of the genre , p. 166.
  10. ↑ "No heroics, no great intellectual feats of deduction, very little action - and yet a story of human beings, with a sad, ineffectual murderer. A typical Simenon job, […] solved by a bourgeois policeman with a running nose and infinite sympathy for his fellow man. "In: The New York Times Book Review 1971.
  11. ^ "Though he is only a little gray nonentity in a slender suspense novel, it is a fine moment nevertheless, a demonstration of what a writer such as Simenon can do in the flea market of fiction." Anatole Broyard : In the Flea Market of Fiction . In: The New York Times, July 13, 1971.
  12. ↑ Maigret and the wine merchant on maigret.de.
  13. ↑ New audio books for children and adults  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / content.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de   on the website of the Stuttgarter Nachrichten of July 10, 2008.