The Maigret project (13) The Saint-Fiacre Affair

Penguin Books is currently publishing the entire series of Georges Simenon’s novels starring Inspector Maigret. In "The Maigret Project" I share some observations about each novel.

Somewhere in Maigret’s special murder (Maigret et son mort, 1948), Simenon writes that Maigret adds yet another brushstroke to his mental portrait of the unknown dead man whose murder he is investigating, a man ‘he hadn’t know by life but who he was reconstructing, little by little’. 

Simenon’s readers probably have a similar experience with inspector Maigret himself. If you’ve read one or two of the novels, the Maigret character remains strangely vague and out of focus, more a camera eye than a rounded character. The character grows on you however. Novel after novel, episode after episode, Simenon adds little touches, fresh brushstrokes, without ever getting too specific. 

A novel like The Saint-Fiacre Affair [L’affaire Saint-Fiacre, 1932, in English also known as Maigret goes home], for instance, seems to promise valuable information about Maigret’s youth, as he returns to the small village where he grew up.

Saint-Fiacre was the place of his birth, where his father had been estate manager of the chateau for thirty years! The last time he had gone there had been, in fact, after the death of his father, who had been buried in the little cemetery, behind the church.

In that very same church, a murder will take place. An anonymous letter has announced it to Maigret, even including an exact date. And indeed, although Maigret is present during the entire mass, someone dies. After mass the countess of Saint-Fiacre sits dead in her pew. 

The Saint-Fiacre Affair is an odd one. Every Maigret demands a certain suspension of disbelief, but this time Simenon takes more license than ever. Accurately predicting a heart attack – seriously? The crime lacks any believability and the novel’s finale reminded me of the traditional Poirot ending: an arrogant little man rounds up all the suspects in the same room and basically bullies the murderer into confessing. Not that Simenon isn’t aware of this. ‘The whole scene was badly directed’, he writes, after Poirot’s little meeting is interrupted by gunfire. ‘And Gautier was hamming it up to the rafters when he announced...’ (etcetera) A little further: ‘And yes, it was a play! (...) A play, moreover, that was being performed simultaneously as farce and drama.’ From my point of view it’s mostly a farce, but you can’t blame the author for gently nudging our perception of his work in a different direction. 

And what do we learn about Maigret's youth? Very little. His experience is a familiar one. Usually when we visit place where we grew up, we are surprised by how much smaller they are than in memory. In Maigret’s case, he gets to see the sordid lives behind the beautiful façades that he admired as a child. The classy, stately countess he looked up to as a child, was almost destitute, paid for gigolos and had a severe alcohol problem. 

It is amusing to note that very few people even recognize Maigret in Saint-Fiacre. After all, he hasn’t visited the place in ages, so why would they? The inspector is often just a ghostly presence in these novels and this time, more than ever. Anyway. Back to Paris, please. 

Stray observations: 

• ‘He was a different man. He had reached his limit. And like all weak, meek people, his ferocity was excessive.’ That’s a nice little insight. One of the reasons why I adore reading Simenon. 

• In the original French, it goes like this: ‘C’était un autre homme. Il était poussé au bout. Et, comme tout les faibles, comme tous les doux, il devenait d’une férocité exagérée.’ Nicely done, Shaun Whiteside (i.e. the novel’s translator): making that useless repetition more taut with the rhyming ‘weak, meek’. 

Next episode: The Flemish House.