Maigret and the Majestic's cellars

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maigret and the Cellars of the Majestic (French: Les Caves du Majestic ) is a detective novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 20th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in December 1939 in Nieul-sur-Mer . In 1942 Editions Gallimard published the book edition in the anthology Maigret revient , which also contained the volumes Maigret in the house of the judge and Maigret loses an admirer . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1962 under the title Maigret im Luxushotel . In 1982 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Linde Birk under the title Maigret and the cellars of the "Majestic" . In the revised new edition of the translation by Wille / Klau by Kampa Verlag , the quotation marks in the title have been dropped in 2019.

The novel is largely set in the fictional Hotel Majestic on the Paris Champs-Élysées . One morning a hotel guest is found murdered in the cellars of the hotel. The husband of the dead, a wealthy American, is under the protection of his embassy. During his investigations in the luxurious ambience of the hotel, Maigret feels strange and out of place. But in the past life of the dead he discovers a dark point that connects them to a hotel employee.

content

Hôtel Claridge on the avenue des Champs-Élysées , the model for the Majestic

Prosper Donge, a lanky, red-haired young man who after a few years as a waiter on the Côte d'Azur is now head of the coffee kitchen at the Paris luxury hotel Majestic, discovers a corpse in an open locker in the basement of the hotel one morning: Emilienne Clark, the Wife of the American industrialist Oswald J. Clark. Clark spent the evening with his young son's young governess, Ellen Darroman, who is also his lover. Maigret is unsympathetic to the American with the energetic step typical for her country from the first moment. Clark, however, is under the protection of the American embassy, ​​and examining magistrate Bonneau declares the industrialists taboo for Maigret's investigation.

On the night Emilienne died, two of the hotel's servants stayed in the basement reserved for the staff: the accountant Jean Ramuel, who fled his quarreling wife, and the dancer Edgar Fagonet, who calls himself Eusebio Fualdès because of his South American appearance . But the focus of Maigret's interest is the man who found the dead woman: Prosper Donge. After work, the inspector accompanies him to Saint-Cloud , where he lives with Charlotte, a toilet lady in the Pélican amusement bar. Maigret soon suspects that the paths of Donge, Charlotte and Emilienne, who also comes from the south of France, crossed earlier. In Cannes , where carnival is currently being celebrated, the inspector locates a prostitute named Gigi and coaxes her cocaine intoxication into their common past: Emilienne, known as “Mimi”, Charlotte and Gigi were three animators in Cannes. Prosper Donge fell passionately in love with Mimi, who left him when the American Clark, who was traveling through, became interested in her. Charlotte, on the other hand, was touched by Donge's sincere love and from then on lived with him, although he still indulged his feelings for Mimi. It was only years later that he found out about Mimi's son, whose red hair clearly shows Donge's paternity, but which Mimi passed off as Clark's child.

The examining magistrate Bonneau also learns of Donge's past life through an anonymous letter, and when a second dead person is found in the same locker, this time the night porter Justin Collebœuf, he has Donge arrested without further ado and sees the case before it is closed. Only Maigret remains skeptical: the anonymous letter shows Charlotte's typeface, but not her characteristic spelling errors. Although he was forbidden, Maigret continues to investigate Clark's surroundings. After all, the American feels so provoked by the presence of the commissioner and his monotonous questions that he rams his fist in Maigret's face in the hotel's dance bar. This reciprocates with a completely different blow: he passes Clark an old letter from Mimi's to Gigi, which reveals the paternity of Clark's supposed son. The respect of both men for each other increases when they are able to take the blow of the other outwardly unmoved.

Finally, Maigret from Crédit Lyonnais is told that substantial payments have been flowing from America to Prosper Donge for years, albeit under a cover address that was not set up by Donge, but by Jean Ramuel. The accountant, who already had a career as a fraudster and forger of documents, found a letter from Donges one morning in which he wrote to America and asked Mimi about the child. Ramuel recognized the opportunity for blackmail and now wrote threatening letters to Mimi in Donge's name and with his copied writing, with which he gradually blackmailed 300,000 francs for his silence against her husband. It was only when the Clarks were relegated to the Majestic by chance that Ramuel's wrong game threatened to be exposed. Donge asked Mimi to talk to her in the basement, who got a revolver because she thought he was her blackmailer. But when Donge was late for work that morning because of a puncture, Ramuel found the waiting Mimi alone in the basement and killed her. Later he also cleared the only witness, the night porter, out of the way. While Ramuel is arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, the case ends well for Donge: Clark gives his permission to let Donge's son grow up in the care of his father and Charlotte.

Origin and 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: "To take care of the family pot on the stove, I was thinking of writing a few more Maigrets." In December of the same year, Les Caves Majestic was Simenon's first Maigret novel, which after this break originated. It was published in 1942 together with La maison de juge and Cécile est morte by the Paris publisher Gallimard in the anthology Maigret revient ("Maigret returns"), after the readers had been excited about new Maigret novels by scattered rumors.

In Maigret and the cellars of the Majestic , Simenon returned to the setting of the very first Maigret novel Maigret and Pietr the Latvian . There the interior of the luxury hotel Majestic was briefly characterized, now Simenon worked out the location in more detail. At the time the novel was written, there was actually a hotel of the same name in Paris on avenue Kléber in the 16th arrondissement . However, in the novel , the Majestic is located on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées in the place of the Hôtel Claridge there , as indicated by the mention of Rue Berri and Rue Ponthieu. Simenon himself had often stayed at the Claridge, which had over 500 rooms.

interpretation

Already in Maigret and Pietr der Lette it was said about Maigret's visit to the Majestic : “Maigret's pure presence in the Majestic inevitably had something hostile to it. In a way, it formed a block that the prevailing atmosphere was unable to incorporate. ”In Maigret and the cellars of the Majestic , too , the inspector is a foreign body in the hotel. Now it is said that he looks like a dilettante who would examine the interlocking processes. In the course of the investigation, Stanley G. Eskin felt that he was "completely immersed in the disciplined hectic pace of this labyrinthine infrastructure."

The different classes within a luxury hotel, the rich guests enjoying their pleasures and the working servants, from the waiter making coffee to the toilet lady, are contrasted in this novel, with Maigret's full sympathy for the latter. At one point it says about Maigret, who is currently looking at the life of the Clark family: "And Maigret, a plebeian to the bone, to the core, looked at everything that surrounded him with hostile eyes." It is completely different Maigret's attitude towards Prosper Donge, whose poor household and sad life story arouses in him pity. When Donge is unjustifiably accused and arrested, the inspector is so upset that in the end he even commits a form of vigilante justice with a punch at the actual perpetrator. In particular, the modest bicycle tour the inspector at Donge's side took to get to know people through the daily commute to work, symbolizes Maigret's sympathy for his suspect.

For Thomas Wörtche , the novel is not least an example of the role of chance and contingency in Simenon's works. A banal incident, namely Donge's flat tire, turns into a catastrophe that ultimately costs two lives. In the end, the same timing of the events also relieves the wrongly accused. It is typical for Simenon that he does not use the “moral paradox” for “all sorts of astute reflections on time and death and justice”, but rather casually reports the processes as a “narrative miniature”.

reception

Maigret and the cellars of the Majestic is particularly highlighted by many critics from the series. Stanley G. Eskin called the novel under the premise that the Maigret series should be regarded as serious literature, “really first class. The pace of the narration, the build-up of tension and the construction of Les caves du Majestic complement each other admirably and go hand in hand with a skilful characterization of the characters and a convincingly portrayed framework. ”Thomas Wörtche also spoke of a“ great novel for many reasons (not least those of narrative economy) ". Oliver Hahn described the novel on maigret.de as a "classic in the series of Maigret novels [...], grippingly told and with a multitude of twists and turns and surprises."

For Gisela Lehmer-Kerkloh, the novel stands out from the Maigret series: “It has everything that characterizes a top Simenon. With just a few words, Simenon succeeds in putting his reader into the atmosphere of the action. He not only traces the flair of the Parisian grand hotel, but especially the France of the common people in detail. You look in vain for superfluous banter, every word has its meaning for the narrative. ” Frank Böhmert summed up:“ Despite all the scarcity, very atmospheric - a typical Maigret. ” Tilman Spreckelsen , on the other hand, went into the differences to the first 19 novels in the series: “The tone has become rougher in this novel, less veiled, less smooth. Unmistakably a new attempt. ”However, he was bothered by how“ horribly ”carelessly a child is transferred to a new family in the end. Die Welt described the audio book: "Melancholic, human - and so addicting that one is glad that Friedhelm Ptok read in more than a dozen cases."

The novel was filmed five times. The 1945 film Les caves du Majestic by Roland Pottier with Albert Préjean as Maigret was followed by the television series with Rupert Davies (1962), Jean Richard (1983), Bruno Cremer (1992) and Michael Gambon (1993). In 2003 SFB - ORB , MDR and SWR produced a radio play adapted by Susanne Feldmann and Judith Kuckart . The speakers included Christian Berkel and Friedhelm Ptok . Ptok also read an audio book production by Diogenes Verlag in 2008, and another reading by Walter Kreye was published by Audio Verlag in 2019 .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret revient . Gallimard, Paris 1942 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in the luxury hotel . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1962.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret in the luxury hotel . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1972.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the cellars of the “Majestic” . Translation: Linde Birk. Diogenes, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-20735-2 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the cellars of the “Majestic” . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 20. Translation: Linde Birk. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23820-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the cellars of the Majestic . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau, Sara Wegmann. Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-13020-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 63-64.
  2. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 263.
  3. ^ A b Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 248.
  4. ^ A b c Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , p. 249.
  5. ↑ a b Maigret of the Month: Les Caves du Majestic (Maigret and the Hotel Majestic) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and Pietr the Lette . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 1. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23801-3 , p. 18.
  7. ↑ a b stroke of luck . In: Die Welt of March 29, 2008.
  8. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the cellars of the "Majestic" . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, reading by Friedhelm Ptok, ISBN 978-3-257-80206-1 , chapter 7, track 1, approx. 7:00.
  9. ↑ a b Thomas Wörtche: Death and Contingency . Lecture on kaliber38.de.
  10. ↑ a b Maigret and the cellars of the Majestic on maigret.de.
  11. ↑ Gisela Lehmer-Kerkloh: KrimiKurier 10 ( Memento of the original from October 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.alligatorpapiere.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on alligatorpapiere.de.
  12. ↑ Frank Böhmert : Read: Georges Simenon, Maigret und die Keller des Majestic (F 1941) ( Memento of the original from January 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / frankboehmert.blogspot.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
  13. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 20: The cellars of the Majestic . On FAZ.net from August 24, 2008.
  14. ↑ Maigret and the cellars of the »Majestic« in the HörDat audio game database .