Maigret and the old lady

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Maigret and the old lady (French: Maigret et la vieille dame ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 33rd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . From November 29 to December 8, 1949 in Carmel-by-the-Sea , the novel was published in the following year by Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1954 . In 1978 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Renate Nickel.

A lovely old lady calls Commissioner Maigret to a seaside resort in Normandy for help after her maid dies because it has cost her manor from the poisoned sleeping potion. Now the old lady, who was born the daughter of a fisherman in the place to which she returned decades later as a rich woman, fears that the attack was aimed at her. Only a few days ago, the entire family came to celebrate her birthday, and Maigret soon discovers that the members of the family are not all good on the old lady.

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Panorama of Étretat

Maigret travels to the seaside resort of Étretat near Le Havre on the coast of the English Channel at the end of the season in September . Two people have independently asked for his help in solving a murder case: a lovely old lady named Valentine Besson, who has personally traveled to Paris to ask the Commissioner for help, and her stepson, MP Charles Besson, who is the Minister to request Maigret's assistance. Rose Trochu, Valentine Besson's maid, died. And the circumstances of her death - she drank an arsenic- poisoned sleeping pill that was actually intended for her rule - suggests that, in truth, Valentine Besson should have been the victim of the attack.

In Étretat Maigret met the local inspector Castaing. And he visits Valentine, who is respectfully called the “lady of the castle” in town. She was the daughter of a fisherman from Étretat before she married Ferdinand Besson, who built up the cosmetics empire Juva after inventing an acne cream . In truth, however, he always remained the little pharmacist who hadn't learned how to handle money and who ended up ruining his company just as consistently as he had once built it up. After his death, Valentine was left with nothing but a small pension and the Villa La Bicoque , which her husband had built in her birthplace, filled with worthless furniture and fake jewelry.

It was only a few days ago that the children from their first marriage came to her birthday. Valentine's daughter Arlette arrived without her husband, the dentist Julien Sudre, who preferred to stay in Paris to paint, which gives her the opportunity to secretly meet her lover Hervé Peyrot. The two step-sons from their first marriage are of very different styles: Charles, who traveled with his wife Emilienne and four children, is a naive, gullible politician, while Théo Besson is a single bon vivant who imitates the Duke of Windsor in clothes and gestures . What all children share, however, is that they do not speak well to the old lady. Arlette loves her mother as little as she loves her daughter. Emilienne accuses Valentine of having robbed Ferdinand's sons of their inheritance, and the impoverished Théo has also fallen out with his stepmother.

Valentine presents herself to Maigret with engaging openness and relentlessly exposes the weaknesses of every member of her family. The only person Maigret hardly learns about is the dead maid, and he has to keep reminding himself that Rose is the one who was poisoned. Théo seems to be the only one who knew Rose personally. He met the girl in secret in the village and went out with her a few times. In his words, she was a little peasant girl who read too much and asked too many questions. In Rose's hometown of Yport , Maigret faces a wall of silence, and it takes time and persuasiveness to get the Trochu family to understand that he is not just Madame Besson's paid and prejudiced lackey. Eventually he learns that Rose became estranged from her parents because she was striving for higher things. But she did not find her ideals embodied in her employer, whom she despised because of her avarice and envy. The origin of a valuable ring with emerald , which is found in the midst of the poor legacy of the maid, remains a mystery .

A second death occurs unexpectedly: Rose's brother Henri is shot by Valentine Besson in the middle of the night in the garden of La Bicoque because the old lady allegedly thought he was a burglar. It turns out that Théo Besson used both siblings to confirm his suspicions that Valentine was embezzling money from his father's inheritance. He flattered Rose and incited her to steal a ring to prove that it had never been exchanged for imitations as Valentine claimed. Without letting his siblings know, Théo asked his stepmother for a share of the property that had been put aside. However, when Valentine agreed to a midnight meeting, he sensed a trap and sent Henri, whom Valentine actually ambushed and shot him instead. She had previously murdered her maid, Rose, when she realized that she was carrying Théo. In doing so, she took advantage of the girl's curiosity about all medicines intended for her mistress to poison her. While Théo cannot be proven to have committed a criminal offense, Valentine is arrested. But Maigret is certain that she will also ensnare the judge in her role of the lovely old lady.

interpretation

Hans Altenhain refers to the unusual beginning of Maigret and the old lady for a detective novel , in which the inspector feels transported back to childhood on his trip to Étretat: “Everything had something unreal about it and was reminiscent of a toy, a child's drawing. […] For a moment Maigret forgot his age […] Although of course he knew exactly that it was not true, every time he came to the sea, he had the idea of ​​moving in an artificial, unreal world, in the nothing bad could have happened. ”Throughout the novel, Maigret has repeatedly sentimental impulses. And he confesses: “He wanted the world the way you discover it as a child. In his mind he always said: 'As in the pictures.' [...] Somehow he spent his life looking at the other side of the coin, but he had retained the childlike longing for the world 'as in the pictures'. "

Such an ideal life in retirement seems to lead the old lady, whom Maigret completely enchants at the beginning. When he finally discovers that she murdered two people out of sheer greed for money, he feels downright betrayed. Simenon's crime colleague Patricia Highsmith sees the figure “that gloomy and charming old lady in Etretat” in a whole series of “villains in female form”, which takes time from the tiger-like Aline in Maigret to the old “vulture figure” in Maigret contra Picpus are enough. Lucille F. Becker even describes a collection of “murderous, castrating mothers in the Maigret novels” who are “two-dimensional caricatures of a pathological psychological profile”.

reception

The literary magazine Time and Tide ruled in 1958: “The plot of Maigret and the old lady [...] would not be worth much if it had been implemented by another author, but Maigret's methods and Simenon's talent for conjuring up an atmosphere with local color, together hold the reader captive. ”Peter Foord, on the other hand, described the novel as less interesting than others, since the investigations were condensed into just two days in a methodical routine without major interruptions and digressions.

For the reviewer of the world , Maigret and the old lady proved “that a bear can rightly find himself in a doll's house and that even with large calvados carafes he cannot be fooled. Simenon's human comedy takes on the traits of a subtle chamber play here. ”According to Tilman Spreckelsen, “ the suffering of the victim's family is subtly but unavoidably brought into focus in the novel. The author's sympathy belongs to them, for them he takes sides, as is rarely the case for one of his creations. ”For Oliver Hahn on maigret.de, Simenon's questioning of the victim's family was a“ particularly impressive scene ”. He also highlighted the curiosity "how Maigret is exposed to constant alcohol consumption and never has the opportunity to say no" because he does not want to offend people.

The novel was filmed a total of four times: in 1974 as the Russian movie Maigret i staraya dama , directed by Vyacheslav Brovkin with Boris Tenin as Maigret, as well as in the television series with Rupert Davies (1960), Jean Richard (1979) and Bruno Cremer ( 1994). In 1955, the NDR produced a radio play under the title Maigret and the nice old lady . Director was Raoul Wolfgang Schnell , Maigret was spoken by Gustav Knuth . In 2006 the Diogenes Verlag published an audio book reading by Friedhelm Ptok .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et la vieille dame . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1950 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old lady . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1954.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old lady . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old lady . Translation: Renate Nickel. Diogenes, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-20503-1 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old lady . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 33. Translation: Renate Nickel. Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23833-4 .

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 . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 49-50.
  3. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old lady . Reading by Friedhelm Ptok. Diogenes, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-257-80042-8 , Chapter 1, Track 1.
  4. ↑ Hans Altenhain: Maigret goes into itself. On the occasion of Georges Simenon's 70th birthday . In: Merkur , Volume 27, 1973, p. 202.
  5. ^ A b Maigret of the Month: Maigret et la vieille dame (Maigret and the old lady) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old lady . Reading by Friedhelm Ptok. Diogenes, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-257-80042-8 , chapter 5, track 1.
  7. ^ Gavin Lambert : The Dangerous Edge . Grossmann, New York 1976, ISBN 0-670-25581-5 , p. 183.
  8. ↑ Patricia Highsmith : Simenon in court . In: Franz Cavigelli, Fritz Senn (Ed.): About Patricia Highsmith . Diogenes, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-257-20818-9 , p. 96.
  9. ^ "Even the series of murderous, castrating mothers in the Maigrets are two dimensional caricatures of a pathological psychological profile." In: Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 11. See also footnote 40, p. 137.
  10. ↑ "The plot of Maigret and the Old Lady [...] might not amount to much if it were handled by another, but Maigret's methods and Simenon's gift for creating and evoking local atmosphere combine to hold the reader captive." In: Time & Tide Volume 39, Time and Tide Publishing 1958, p. 892.
  11. ↑ Like a big bear in a doll's house . In: Die Welt, August 23, 2003.
  12. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 33: Maigret and the old lady . On FAZ.net from November 30, 2008.
  13. ↑ a b Maigret and the old lady on maigret.de.
  14. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's website.