Maigret and the old people

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Maigret and the Old People (French: Maigret et les vieillards ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 56th novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 short stories about the detective Maigret . The novel was written in Echandens from June 15 to 21, 1960 and was pre-published in 22 parts by the French daily Le Figaro from October 11 to November 4 of that year . The book was published in November 1960 by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1961 . In 1984 Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Annerose Melter.

When the retired ambassador, Count Armand de Saint-Hilaire, was found shot, the government feared political entanglements and demanded absolute discretion from Commissioner Maigret. The investigation leads him into the milieu of the nobility , which intimidates him and evokes distant childhood memories. Not only was the deceased 77 years old, the others involved in the case also have one thing in common: they are all old people.

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French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay
Rue Saint-Dominique in the 7th arrondissement

It is a wonderful May in Paris , which inevitably brings back memories of his childhood in Commissioner Maigret. His latest case, the murder of Count Armand de Saint-Hilaire, also takes Maigret back to the time when the son of an estate manager in Saint-Fiacre secretly admired the lords of the castle. On the other hand, the Commissioner does not welcome the interference of the French Foreign Ministry in the person of the young Cromières, who with his loquacity and arrogance Maigret combines all prejudices against the Quai d'Orsay . Count de Saint-Hilaire was a long-time French diplomat and ambassador before the 77-year-old retired 10 years ago, and so the Foreign Ministry fears compromising revelations and demands the strictest confidentiality from the commissioner.

At the scene of the crime, the Count's study on Rue Saint-Dominique, Inspector Maigret was astonished that four shots were fired at Saint-Hilaire, even though the first shot in the head was fatal. His housekeeper Jaquette Larrieu, 73 years old and in his service for 42 years, found the dead man. Maigret soon discovers a secret that nobody in the Count's circle is a secret: As a young man, Saint-Hilaire fell in love with Isabelle, daughter of the Duke of S., who was around five years his junior. She could not consent to the improper marriage with the still incapacitated Saint-Hilaire and instead married the Prince de V. However, although Saint-Hilaire and the Princess de V could only see each other from a distance on rare occasions, their love grew cold never and they wrote each other heartfelt letters every day until his death.

When Maigret learns that the Prince de V died of an accident just days before Saint-Hilaire's death, he suspects a connection between the deaths. After all, the prince's death made the long-awaited marriage between Isabelle and her Armand possible. But in the circle of the de V family, one always seems to have viewed the love of the princess, who herself was tolerated by her husband, with indulgence. Saint-Hilaire's only relative and main heir, his nephew Alain Mazeron, was not very close to his uncle either, but his antiquarian bookshop seems to be able to bring in enough that he was not in acute financial need. Maigret can most likely imagine that the housekeeper, who at a young age herself was Saint-Hilaire's lover, murdered him out of jealousy about the impending wedding. However, Jaquette has long been privy to love, wrote some of the love letters according to the count's dictation and led the princess through his apartment behind the back of her employer.

Intimidated by the old people's milieu, their concepts of honor and their secrecy, Maigret's investigation has come to a dead end when, almost out of embarrassment, he orders a paraffin test to be carried out on the housekeeper. The proof that she must have fired surprised him the most. But even during the interrogation on the Quai des Orfèvres , the murder suspect remained obstinate, refused the obligatory sandwiches and asked to confess with the venerable Abbé Barraud. This finally reveals the background to Maigret. After a friend's death from cancer, Count de Saint-Hilaire believed, according to the autopsy results, to be wrongly ill with cancer. For him, the news of the death of Prince de V was not a good news because he feared that his lifelong love for Isabelle would be overshadowed by a marriage that would only be shaped by his illness and his rapid physical decline. He drew the conclusions and shot himself with his own revolver. When his housekeeper discovered the suicide, she feared that he would be buried in a church. She decided to disguise the act as murder by shooting the dead person more times with averted eyes and then throwing the gun into the Seine . When Maigret returned to his wife that evening, he had to shake off the case like a memory of a distant past, but also a preview of an imminent future.

background

After Simenon had written the novel Maigret and the Old People in June 1960 , he immediately started a diary which he later published under the title When I was old and which runs from June 1960 to February 1963. For Murielle Wenger it is no coincidence that both works are already determined by the theme of age in their titles. In the introduction to When I Was Old, Simenon described - in retrospect from 1969, when he had overcome the feeling -: “In 1960, 1961 and 1962, for personal reasons or for reasons I do not know, I felt old and started writing these notebooks. At that time I was approaching sixty. "

The first diary entry of When I was old describes the genesis of Maigret and the old people : After Simenon was President of the jury of the Cannes International Film Festival in May 1960 , he began work on a novel "full of sun and tenderness", one Non-Maigret novel with characters in their thirties. However, the work already stalled on the third page, Simenon turned instead to a Maigret novel, which moved in a completely different scenario in the circle of old people, but exuded the same tenderness and the same sunny atmosphere as he realized afterwards. Even the deliberately simple Roman Maigret and the old people made difficult progress at first. Simenon broke into a crying fit after a few pages and wanted to destroy the supposedly unsuccessful beginning. He got over his dejection, went on with the work, and in retrospect thought the result was his best Maigret.

Simenon's biographer Stanley G. Eskin suspects that the aborted attempt at the novel was Le Train (filmed as Le Train - Just a Touch of Luck ), which Simenon put aside because of problems with the main character and, unusual for the author, the interrupted work rarely resumed later, ended the following year. According to Fenton Bresler, the completed novel Maigret and the Old People shows nothing of the exertions and inner struggles during its creation. On the contrary, it is introduced in a tone of cheerful serenity.

interpretation

The bright spring day that opens the novel Maigret and the Old People is a typical example of the influence of weather on the well-being of Simenon's protagonist. He puts Commissioner Maigret into a mixture of lightheartedness and melancholy, that ambivalent mood that then pervades the novel. According to Murielle Wenger, the central themes are: sun, tenderness and age. In addition to the sunny Parisian spring and the tender letters of two lovers, age is reflected in the motifs of physical decline, nostalgia directed to the past, and life balance. The aging Commissioner Maigret is contrasted at the beginning with the brazen young official of the Foreign Ministry, and the novel is pervaded by Maigret's memories of his childhood in Saint-Fiacre, which was first framed in Maigret and the Saint-Fiacre affair . While the petty bourgeois Maigret usually detests the bourgeoisie , he shows respect and compassion for the aristocracy , although he initially feels alien and insecure in their milieu.

Tilman Spreckelsen dates the plot to 1960, the time the novel was written . He dismisses the fact that this contradicts the dates of earlier Maigret novels as “nitpicking”. Rather, the focus is on an unbreakable love that has endured two world wars and several French republics . But not only the aristocratic lovers, but also the Maigret couple reminds Spreckelsen of Jacques Brel's La chanson des vieux amants (the song of the old lovers) . While the commissioner and his wife exchange an accomplice-like look at the beginning of the novel in memory of their first rendezvous, at the end they embrace as tightly as if they never want to let go of each other. For Fenton Bresler, such scenes also express the author Simenon's longing for domestic harmony, because at the time the novel was written, his second marriage was characterized by great tensions.

A leitmotif of the novel is the question raised by an article in the medical journal The Lancet as to whether a psychiatrist, a teacher, a writer or a detective is most likely to be able to understand a person. This, according to Josef Quack, programmatic thesis about Maigret's conception of police work is ironically decided in favor of the priest in the novel, because only the Abbé Barraud shows himself ultimately able to solve the moral dilemma of the housekeeper and thus solve the death of the count. Nonetheless, Maigret and the Old People is a novel that brings Maigret's self-image to the fore, for example when the inspector argues: “He did not consider himself a superman, nor did he consider himself infallible. On the contrary, every investigation, no matter how simple it was, he always began with a certain humility. "His image of man reveals his humanity :" Even if he had no great hope for humanity and its future, he did believe further to the people. ”For Murielle Wenger, these sentences can also be transferred to Simenon, the author who in his work constantly tried to understand people from within.

reception

Jean Richard (1974)

According to Murielle Wenger, Maigret and the Old People is ranked among the best novels in the Maigret series by many critics, a judgment that she agreed with because the subject alone deserves respect. For Michel Lemoine, the novel goes well beyond most detective novels, it goes beyond most novels of any genre. Publishers Weekly called the American anthology A Maigret Trio , which included Maigret and the old people as well as Maigret Experienced a Defeat and Maigret and the Lazy Thief , as "three superb detective novels". For The Publisher's Trade List Annual , they provided "fine examples of both Maigret's investigative skills and Simenon's mastery of plot and characters."

Newgate Callendar emphasized in the New York Times the "sharp, economical, realistic" spelling that is as typical of Simenon as his "ability to capture the reader and keep his interest awake". Best Sellers magazine came to the conclusion: "Maigret remains one of the most human creations among famous literary detectives." The novels are full of sophistication and psychological insight, and Simenon succeeds in making his characters stand out from the shadows and breathing life into them. The Pittsburgh Press located the novel around a "tender bitter-sweet love story" slightly below the Simenon standard.

The novel was filmed three times as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret: in 1962, Rupert Davies played the Commissioner in the British episode Voices From The Past . In 1980 Jean Richard followed in the episode Maigret et l'ambassadeur and in 2003 Bruno Cremer in the episode Maigret et la princesse in two French TV series. The film adaptations put a very different emphasis on their plot: while in Maigret et l'ambassadeur, for example, the commissioner meets with Saint-Hilaire before the death of Saint-Hilaire and philosophizes on the subjects of life, old age and death, the film adaptation with Bruno Cremer addresses her Particular attention is paid to the princess and her long-term love affair with the dead.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et les vieillards . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1960 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old people . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1961.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old people . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1966.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old people . Translation: Annerose Melter. Diogenes, Zurich 1979, ISBN 3-257-21200-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old people . Complete Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 56. Translation: Annerose Melter. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23856-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et les vieillards in the Simenon bibliography by Yves Martina.
  3. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . In: Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 50.
  4. ↑ a b c d e Maigret of the Month: Maigret et les vieillards (Maigret in Society) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ↑ Georges Simenon: When I was old . Diogenes, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-257-22829-5 , p. 7.
  6. ↑ Georges Simenon: When I was old . Diogenes, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-257-22829-5 , p. 11.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 339.
  8. ^ A b Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 305
  9. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 111.
  10. ^ Bill Alder: Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories . McFarland, Jefferson 2013, ISBN 978-0-7864-7054-9 , pp. 157, 159.
  11. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret-Marathon 56: The old people . On FAZ.net from May 22, 2009.
  12. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old people . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23856-3 , p. 165.
  13. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the old people . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23856-3 , p. 166.
  14. ↑ Josef Quack: The limits of the human. About Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Friedrich Glauser, Graham Greene . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-2014-6 , pp. 43, 57.
  15. ↑ Michel Lemoine: Une œuvre, une critique . Cahiers Simenon, Volume 18. Amis de Georges Simenon, Brussels 2004, p. 199.
  16. ↑ "Three superb detective novels". Quoted from: Publishers Weekly Volume 203, 1973, p. 149.
  17. ↑ "A Maigret Trio offers fine examples of both Maigret's deductive skills and Simenon's mastery of story and character." Quoted from: The Publisher's Trade List Annual Volume 3, RR Bowker 1985.
  18. ↑ "the writing here is sharp, economical, realistic [...] his ability to involve the reader and continue to keep him interested". Quoted from: Newgate Callendar: Criminals At Large . In: The New York Times, March 4, 1970.
  19. ^ "Maigret remains one of the most human creations among famous fictional detectives." Quoted from: Best Sellers Volume 32, United States Government Printing Office 1972, p. 528.
  20. ↑ "slightly substandard Simenon [...] tender bitter-sweet love story". Quoted from: Press Book Shelf . In: The Pittsburgh Press, April 7, 1973.
  21. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.