Christmas with the Maigrets

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Christmas with the Maigrets (French: Un Noël de Maigret ) is a crime story by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the most extensive story in a series of 75 novels and 28 stories about the detective inspector Maigret . The story was written from May 17 to 20, 1950 in Carmel-by-the-Sea and was published in March 1951 as the cover story of a collection of three stories in the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation Maigret and Santa Claus by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1962 . In 1986 the Diogenes Verlag brought out a new translation by Hans-Joachim Hartstein under the title Maigrets Christmas Party. From 1994 this version appeared under the title Christmas with Maigret in various edited volumes and individual publications. In 2018, Kampa Verlag published the translation of Wille / Klau under the title Christmas at the Maigrets .

At Christmas of all times and in his home environment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, two neighbors asked Inspector Maigret to investigate. Although no crime has happened, a little girl claims to have seen Santa Claus that night . As proof, she can show an expensive doll that the nocturnal visitor gave her before it suddenly disappeared again as it had appeared before.

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Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in winter

On Christmas morning, Inspector Maigret was having breakfast with his wife in his apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in Paris when two women crossed the street to see him. They are Madame Doncœur and Madame Martin from the house across the street, and it is clear that the former, an elderly maid and secret admirer of the inspector, has to urge her reluctant neighbor to tell Inspector Maigret the strange experience of her niece Colette on Christmas night.

7-year-old Colette Martin is a half-orphan. Her mother died two years ago in a car accident caused by her father. Paul Martin was thrown off course by the event; he started drinking and doing odd jobs to make ends meet. Colette has lived with his brother Jean and his wife Loraine ever since. The sales representative Jean had to spend Christmas Eve in Bergerac on business, Colette has been in bed with a broken leg for weeks, and so it was Madame Martin and her neighbor Madame Doncœur who wanted to bring the little one on Christmas morning and were greeted by her with an incredible Christmas story . Colette said that Santa Claus was in her room in the middle of the night and gave the girl an expensive doll. The man put his finger on her mouth so that she would be silent, quietly fiddled with the floorboards and then left the Martins' apartment again.

While Madame Martin attaches no importance to the story, for Madame Doncœur the doll is proof enough that Colette did indeed have a nightly visit from a man in costumes, and she asks Commissioner Maigret to look into the matter. The latter puts his inspector Lucas, who is bored in the abandoned police station on the Quai des Orfèvres , on his father. It soon becomes clear that neither Paul nor Jean Martin could have been with Colette that night. Instead, the girl reports to the inspector about another man who had only paid her aunt a nightly visit a few days ago, which led to a loud argument between the two adults.

Unmoved, Madame Martin goes out on Christmas Day, ostensibly to do some shopping, but Maigret soon finds out that she has actually left a suitcase in the luggage storage of the Garde du Nord . Before her marriage, Loraine was employed by the souvenir dealer Lorilleux, who secretly sold erotic books and disappeared years ago without a trace. Maigret suspects that Santa Claus in Colette's room could be the same Lorilleux, but Madame Martin is obstinate for a long time and refuses to give evidence even when Maigret confronts her with numerous witnesses of her morning joyride. Only when her husband's return from Bergerac is imminent and Maigret bluffs that Lorilleux is already in his custody does she confess.

In the suitcase at the train station is the money of a dead person, Julien Boissy, who was a wealthy customer of Lorilleux and who was murdered by him for greed. Loraine managed to make her boss afraid of the police persecution, so that he deposited the stolen money with her and went into hiding in Belgium for years. He had only returned a few days ago and asked for the booty, which he was looking for in Colette's room on Christmas night after Loraine had refused to hand it over. After Loraine Martin has dropped her mask, she shows herself to be the only woman interested in money who has no family feelings towards her husband or niece. After their arrest, the Martin brothers stay alone in the apartment, while Maigret gives his childless wife the gift of being able to offer the girl a home for a few days. But as much as this prospect makes Madame Maigret happy, she is already mourning the impending separation from the child.

background

Christmas with Maigret is the last and at the same time the most extensive of the 28 stories that focus on the Parisian commissioner Maigret. Its size is almost exactly between the 75 Maigret novels, the shortest of which is Maigret's Memoir , and the longest short story Maigret's Pipe , so that Steve Trussel found it difficult to decide which category the story should be classified into. The story, which takes place in wintry Paris, was written by Simenon at a very different time of the year in a distant place: It was created in May 1950 as the last work in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California . In June, the writer divorced his first wife in Reno , Nevada , and remarried a day later. In September he moved to new quarters in Lakeville , Connecticut , where he would live for the next almost five years before moving back to Europe.

In the French original, Un Noël de Maigret appeared in March 1951 in a volume with two other longer short stories: Sept petites croix dans un carnet (German: Seven crosses in a notebook ) and Le Petit Restaurant des Ternes (German: The restaurant on the Place des Ternes ). Both are non-Maigret stories without the Paris commissioner. What they have in common with Un Noël de Maigret , however , is that they are all based in Paris and play between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. As a result, Christmas with Maigret appeared in various anthologies together with other stories by Simenon, for example in 2009 in the Diogenes compilation All Maigret Stories . The longest Maigret story, however, was also repeatedly published as an independent publication.

interpretation

From a simple Christmas story, according to Peter Foord, Simenon builds a criminal case over five chapters that takes place on a single day, Christmas Day, and on which the detective does not leave his home boulevard Richard-Lenoir. The action is triggered by a shy older neighbor who is secretly in love with the famous inspector. He treats the case like a private investigation, and his private apartment becomes an office where all threads come together. Although the commissioner is in telephone contact with the commissioner's office on the Quai des Orfèvres and its inspectors Lucas and Torrence, it is Madame Maigret who remains at her husband's side from the beginning to the end of the case, which is combined with the local scene and the Christmas season ensures a special intimacy of the story.

The Christmas season always plays a special role in Simenon's work. For the author himself, the season was combined with nostalgic memories of his childhood, the festive loneliness in his first year in Paris and the extravagant New Year's parties the writer gave at the height of his fame. Above all, however, according to Murielle Wenger, it was a time of melancholy for Simenon . For Franz Schuh , Christmas with Maigret gives an insight into the bourgeois Christmas rituals , which range from slippers and dressing gowns to the same Christmas presents: while the inspector receives a pipe every year, his wife can look forward to a new food processor. However, the lack of snow disappoints the expectations of a fifty-year-old commissioner who still wishes for snowfall on Christmas morning like a small child.

But Christmas is also the time when Maigret and his wife are particularly reminded of their childlessness. They are an aged couple who have no one to spoil. In Maigret's memoirs and Maigret and the Man on the Bench , it is suggested that one of the couple's children died in childbirth. Since then, Madame Maigret's childlessness has been a great grief. In Christmas with Maigret it is now like a Christmas “gift from heaven” that the Maigrets are temporarily allowed to take care of the motherless Colette, whose father is unable to look after her and whose cold-hearted aunt has neglected her. The girl is no longer mentioned in any of the inspector's cases, but in Maigret's memoir he reports: “We took one in once, a little girl whose mother I sent to prison for the rest of my life. […] This girl still visits us from time to time. She's grown up now, and my wife always enjoys going shopping with her in the afternoons. "

reception

Word and world sums up the plot: "Maigret observes a strange criminal case from close quarters that keeps him in suspense over Christmas and can also satisfy him personally". According to Peter Foord , Christmas with Maigret is also fascinating and satisfying for the reader, with the simplicity of its original idea and the structure of the plot. Murielle Wenger considers the “sad and beautiful story” to be one of the most touching texts from the Maigret series, which lets you feel the close relationship between the author and his character in the novel. According to the Stuttgarter Nachrichten , Simenon describes "the interior from the dressing gown to the type of tobacco with a great attention to detail". For Franz Schuh, the “insight into the very humane and very bourgeois life at Christmas time” comes from a time when “the crime thriller was still in order”.

The story was filmed four times as part of television series about Commissioner Maigret. The leading roles were played by Rupert Davies (Great Britain, 1961), Gino Cervi (Italy, 1965), Jan Teulings (Netherlands, 1967) and Jean Richard (France, 1983). In 1986 the ORF produced the radio play Maigret's Christmas Party , directed by Klaus Gmeiner . Horst Christian Beckmann spoke to Commissioner Maigret . Hilde Mikulicz , Sonja Sutter , Brigitta Köhler and Karl Michael Vogler could also be heard in other roles . In 1997 Edgar M. Böhlke read the story for Schumm speaking books . In 2006 the Diogenes Verlag published a reading by Hans Korte . According to the Stuttgarter Nachrichten , Kortes humming and subtle voice imitation is the "best remedy for self-made pre-Christmas stress: on the sofa with tea and biscuits, exhale and listen." Walter Kreye read another audio book in 2018 for Audio Verlag .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Un Noël de Maigret . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1951 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and Santa Claus . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1962.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and Santa Claus . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1972.
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret's Christmas party . Translation: Hans-Joachim Hartstein. In: Maigret stories . Diogenes, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-257-00993-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Christmas with Maigret . Translation: Hans-Joachim Hartstein. Together with Maigret and the wine merchant and Maigret has scruples . Diogenes, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-257-00993-3 .
  • Georges Simenon: Christmas with Maigret . Translation: Hans-Joachim Hartstein. Diogenes, Zurich 1994, ISBN 3-257-22763-9 .
  • Georges Simenon: Christmas with Maigret . Translation: Hans-Joachim Hartstein. In: The Complete Maigret Stories . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-06682-1 , pp. 990-1078.
  • Georges Simenon: Christmas with the Maigrets . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kampa, Zurich 2018, ISBN 978-3-311-13094-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Un Noël de Maigret in the Simenon bibliography by Yves Martina.
  3. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 80.
  4. ↑ How Many Maigrets? on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h Maigret of the Month: Un Noël de Maigret (Maigret's Christmas) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 17.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 410.
  8. ^ A b Franz Schuh : Das Kriminal: When the crime thriller was still in order . In: Literatures January / February 2007, p. 36.
  9. ^ Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs . Diogenes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-257-23835-8 , p. 125.
  10. ↑ Welt und Wort Volume 18, 1963, p. 192.
  11. ^ "Sad and beautiful story". Quoted from: Which Maigret to Read First? on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  12. ↑ a b Critique of the Stuttgarter Nachrichten on the audio book reading by Hans Korte. Quoted from: Georges Simenon: Christmas with Maigret ( Memento from December 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of Diogenes Verlag .
  13. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  14. ↑ Maigret's Christmas party in the HörDat audio play database .