He was my father, and I loved and respected him, but I was no longer trying to understand him. And that lasted for years. Is it always like that? I’m inclined to think it is.
By the time I became curious again, it was too late to ask the questions I would so much have liked to ask, the questions I blamed myself for not asking when he was still there to answer them.
My father had died at the age of forty-four, of pleurisy.
I was a young man, and had already started my medical studies. The last few times I had gone to the chateau, I had been struck by how pink my father’s cheeks were, how shiny and feverish his eyes became in the evening.
‘Are there consumptives in the family?’ I asked my aunt one day.
‘No, of course not!’ she replied, as if I had spoken about a shameful vice. ‘They were all as strong as oak trees! Don’t you remember your grandfather?’
Actually, I did. I remembered a particular dry cough that he would put down to tobacco. And as far back as I could remember, I saw my father’s cheeks looking as if the same fire was smouldering beneath them.
My aunt too had those pink flushes.
‘From always living in the heat of a bakery!’ she would retort.
She nevertheless died, ten years later, of the same illness as her brother.
As for me, when I got back to Nantes, where I had to go to pick up my things before beginning a new life, I hesitated for a long time then presented myself at the home of one of my teachers and asked him to examine me.
‘No danger of that!’ he reassured me.
Two days later, I took the train for Paris.
• • •
This time, my wife will not begrudge me returning to the subject of Simenon and the image he has created of me, because I need to discuss a point he raised in one of his recent books, a point that particularly touches me.
It is even one of the points that has most bothered me – far more than the small matter of clothes or other things I have amused myself raising.
I would not be my father’s son if I was not touchy about my profession, my career, and that is what I want to talk about now.
I have sometimes had the impression, a disagreeable impression, that Simenon was trying in a way to apologize for me to the public for having joined the police. And I am sure that, in the minds of some, I could only ever have seen that profession as second best.
There is certainly no doubt that I started studying medicine, a profession I chose of my own free will, without being forced into it by more or less ambitious parents, as is often the case.
I had not thought about it for years, nor did I even think of tackling the matter, but precisely because of a few sentences written about my vocation, the subject has gradually asserted itself.
I have not talked about it to anyone, not even my wife. Today, I will have to overcome a certain modesty on my part to make things clear, or try to.
In one of his books, then, Simenon spoke of a ‘mender of destinies’. He did not invent the phrase. It is indeed mine, and he must have heard me use it one day when we were having a friendly chat.
I wonder if it did not all start with Gadelle, whose tragedy, I have realized subsequently, had made a greater impression on me than I had thought.
Because he was a doctor, because he had failed, the medical profession began to assume an extraordinary prestige in my eyes, to the point of becoming a kind of priesthood.
For years, without realizing it, I tried to understand the tragedy of that man, who had grappled with a destiny he could not measure up to.
And I remembered my father’s attitude towards him. I wondered if my father had understood the same thing as me, and if that was why, whatever it cost him, he had let him try his luck.
From Gadelle, imperceptibly, I went on to most of the people I had known, simple people most of them, leading apparently straightforward lives, but who nevertheless had eventually had to confront their own destinies.
Let us not forget that these are not the thoughts of a mature man I am trying to transcribe here, but rather the thought process in the mind of a young boy, and then of an adolescent.
My mother’s death seemed to me such a stupid, such a pointless tragedy!
And all the other tragedies I had known, all those failures, plunged me into a kind of angry despair.
Was it impossible to do anything about it? Did we simply have to accept that there did not exist a man more intelligent or more informed than everybody else – a man I saw more or less in the guise of a family doctor, a Gadelle who had not failed – capable of saying gently but firmly:
‘You’ve taken a wrong turning. By acting in that way, you’re bound for disaster. Your real place is here and not there.’
That is it, I think: I had the obscure feeling that too many people were not in their rightful places, that they were making an effort to play roles they were not suited to, and that consequently, the game, for them, was lost in advance.
I really do not want it to be thought that I had any pretensions to one day become that kind of God the Father.
Having tried to understand Gadelle, then to understand my father’s behaviour towards him, I continued to look around me and ask myself the same questions.
Here is an example that may be amusing. One year, there were fifty-eight of us in my class, fifty-eight pupils from different backgrounds, with different qualities, ambitions and faults. I amused myself imagining what I thought of as the ideal fates of all my classmates. In my mind, I called them, ‘The lawyer . . . The tax collector . . .’
I also strove for a while to guess how the people close to me would eventually die.
Is it more understandable now why I had the idea of becoming a doctor? The word police, at that time, conjured up for me only the uniformed officer at the corner of the street. And although I may have heard of the secret police, I did not have the faintest idea what it might be.
Now, suddenly, I had to earn my living. I arrived in Paris without even a vague notion of the career I was going to choose. Given my unfinished studies, I could hardly hope to find anything other than office work, and it was in that spirit, although without enthusiasm, that I started reading the small ads in the newspapers. My uncle had suggested keeping me on in the bakery and teaching me his trade, but to no avail.
In the little hotel where I lodged on the Left Bank, there lived on the same landing as me a man who intrigued me, a man in his forties in whom I saw, God knows why, a certain resemblance to my father.
Physically, he was as different as possible from the thin fair-haired man with drooping shoulders whom I had always seen in leather gaiters.
This man was short and stocky, with brown hair. He was going prematurely bald, which he concealed by carefully bringing his hair forward, and he had a small black moustache, the ends of which he curled with an iron.
He was always dressed very respectably in black, wore an overcoat with a velvet collar (which explains a certain other overcoat), and carried a cane with a solid silver pommel.
I think the resemblance to my father lay in his bearing, in a certain way of walking without ever hurrying, of looking and listening and then somehow withdrawing into himself.
I met him by chance in a local fixed-price restaurant. I learned that he had his evening meal there almost every day, and for no particular reason I started to feel that I wanted to make his acquaintance.
I tried in vain to guess what his job was. He was most likely a bachelor, since he was living alone in the hotel. I heard him get up in the morning and come back in the evening at irregular hours.
He never had any visitors, and the one time I met him in company he was in conversation, on the corner of Boulevard Saint-Michel, with an individual so dubious-looking that one would have had no hesitation, at the time, in calling him a member of an apache gang.
I was on the verge of finding a place in a lacemaking firm in Rue des Victoires. I was due to go there the following day with references I had request
ed in writing from my former teachers.
That evening, in the restaurant, driven by some instinct or other, I made up my mind to get up from the table just as my neighbour was putting his napkin back in its pigeon-hole, so that I found myself holding the door open for him.
He must have noticed me before. Perhaps he had guessed how much I wanted to speak to him, because he now looked at me intently.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Then, as I was standing there on the pavement:
‘Are you going back to the hotel?’
‘I think so . . . I don’t know . . .’
It was a fine night in late autumn. The banks of the river were not far, and you could see the moon rising above the trees.
‘Alone in Paris?’
‘I’m alone, yes.’
Without asking for my company, he accepted it, took it as a given.
‘Are you looking for work?’
‘How did you know?’
He did not trouble to reply and slipped a cachou into his mouth. I was soon to understand why. He suffered from bad breath and knew it.
‘Are you from the provinces?’
‘From Nantes, but I was born in the country.’
I felt quite confident, talking to him. It was more or less the first time, since I had arrived in Paris, that I had found a companion, and his silence did not bother me at all, no doubt because I was accustomed to my father’s benevolent silences.
I had told him almost my whole life story by the time we found ourselves on Quai des Orfèvres, on the other side of the Pont Saint-Michel.
He stopped in front of a big half-open door and said, ‘Do you mind waiting? I’ll only be a few minutes.’
A uniformed policeman was on duty at the door. After walking up and down for a while, I asked him, ‘Isn’t this the Palais de Justice?’
‘This entrance is to the premises of the Sûreté.’
My neighbour’s name was Jacquemain. He was indeed a bachelor, as I was to learn as we strolled by the Seine that night, crossing the same bridges several times, almost always with the mass of the Palais de Justice looming over us.
He was a police inspector, and he spoke to me about his profession, as briefly as my father would have done about his, and with the same underlying pride.
He was killed three years later, before I myself had started working in those offices on Quai des Orfèvres which had assumed such prestige for me. It happened somewhere over towards Porte d’Italie, in the course of a brawl. A bullet which was not even intended for him hit him full in the chest.
His photograph is still there, with others, in one of those black frames surmounted by the words ‘Killed on duty.’
He did not talk much. Mainly, he listened to me. Which did not prevent me, at about eleven that night, from asking him in a voice trembling with impatience, ‘Do you really think it’s possible?’
‘I’ll give you an answer tomorrow evening.’
Obviously I could not go straight into the Sûreté. It was not yet the days of diplomas, and everyone had to work their way up through the ranks.
My only ambition was to be accepted, in any position, in one of the police stations of Paris, to be allowed to discover for myself an aspect of the world that Inspector Jacquemain had merely allowed me to glimpse.
As we parted on the landing in our hotel, which has since been demolished, he asked me, ‘Would you mind very much having to wear a uniform?’
I gave a little start, I admit, a short hesitation which did not escape him and which could not have pleased him.
‘No . . .’ I replied in a low voice.
And I did wear one, not for long, seven or eight months. Since I had long legs and was very thin and very fast – strange as that may seem today – I was given a bicycle and, in order to teach me to get to know Paris, a city where I was still constantly getting lost, I was entrusted with the task of delivering messages to the various offices.
Has Simenon ever written about that? I do not recall. For months, perched on my bicycle, I weaved my way between the carriages and the omnibuses, still horse-drawn, which, especially when they hurtled down from Montmartre, scared me to death.
The officials still wore frock coats and top hats and, from a certain rank upwards, morning coats.
The policemen, for the most part, were men of a certain age, often with red noses, whom you would see drinking at zinc counters with coachmen, and of whom the cabaret singers made fun shamelessly.
I was not married. My uniform made me embarrassed about courting girls, and I decided that my real life would only begin the day I entered the ‘house’ on Quai des Orfèvres, no longer as a messenger bearing official notes, but as an inspector, by the main staircase.
When I spoke to him of this ambition, my neighbour did not smile, but looked at me with a thoughtful air and murmured, ‘Why not?’
I did not know that I would go to his funeral so soon. My prognoses about human destinies still left a lot to be desired.
4.
In which I eat Anselme and Géraldine’s petits fours under the noses of the Highways Department
Did my father or my grandfather ever ask themselves if they could have been anything other than what they were? Had they had other ambitions? Did they envy other people whose fates were different from theirs?
It is strange to have lived for so long with people and to know nothing of what today would seem essential. I have often asked myself the question, feeling as I do that I have straddled two worlds that are completely alien to one another.
Simenon and I talked about this not so long ago in my apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. It may have been on the eve of his departure for the United States. He had lingered in front of the enlarged photograph of my father, although he had seen it for years on the wall of the dining room.
Examining it with particular attention, he threw me searching little glances, as if trying to establish comparisons. It seemed to have made him thoughtful.
‘When it comes down to it, Maigret,’ he finally said, ‘you were born in the ideal surroundings, at the ideal moment in the evolution of a family, to become a top-ranking functionary, a civil servant.’
That struck me, because I had already thought about it, in a less specific and above all less personal fashion, having noted the number of my colleagues who came from peasant families that had only recently lost direct contact with the land.
‘I’m ahead by a generation,’ Simenon continued, almost with an air of regret, as if he envied me. ‘I have to go back to my grandfather to find an equivalent to your father. My father was already at the functionary stage.’
My wife was looking at him attentively, making an effort to understand.
‘Normally I should have attained the liberal professions by the back door, from below,’ he went on in a lighter tone. ‘I should have struggled to become a neighbourhood doctor, a lawyer, an engineer. Or else . . .’
‘Or else what?’
‘Become embittered, a rebel. That’s the majority, inevitably. Otherwise, there would be a surfeit of doctors and lawyers. I think I’m from the stock that provides the largest number of failures.’
I have no idea why this conversation has suddenly come back to me. It is probably because I am writing about my early years and trying to analyse my state of mind at the time.
I was alone in the world. I had just arrived in a Paris I did not know, a Paris where wealth was displayed more ostentatiously than it is today.
Two things stood out: that wealth, on one side, and on the other side, poverty. And I was on the latter side.
There was a world that led a life of refined idleness while the crowd looked on. The newspapers reported all the doings of these people who had no concerns other than their pleasures and their vanities.
Never for a moment was I tempted to rebel. I did not envy them. I did not hope to be like them one day. I did not compare my lot with theirs.
As far as I was concerned, they were part of
a world as different as that of another planet.
I remember that in those days I had an insatiable appetite, which was already legendary when I was a child. In Nantes, my aunt liked to tell about how she had seen me come in from school and eat a two-kilo loaf of bread, which had not prevented me from having dinner two hours later.
I was earning very little money, and my great concern was to satisfy that appetite. For me, luxury was not what appeared on the terraces of the famous boulevard cafés, or in the shop windows of Rue de la Paix, but, more prosaically, in the pork butchers’ displays.
On the routes I habitually took, I knew a certain number of pork butchers’ shops that fascinated me, and in the days when I still rode around Paris on my bicycle, I would calculate my time in order to gain the few minutes I needed to buy a piece of sausage or a slice of pâté from them and eat it in the street, along with a roll bought from the bakery next door.
My stomach assuaged, I felt happy, full of self-confidence. I was doing my job conscientiously. I attached importance to the slightest tasks that were entrusted to me. There was no question of overtime. As far as I was concerned, all my time belonged to the police, and it struck me as quite natural that I should be kept working fourteen or fifteen hours in a row.
I do not say this to give myself credit. On the contrary: as far as I can recall, it was a state of mind that was common at the time.
Few policeman had had more than an elementary education. Thanks to Inspector Jacquemain, it was known in the upper echelons – although I myself was as yet unaware who knew, or even that anybody knew – that I had started my further education.
After a few months, I was quite surprised to see myself appointed to a post that struck me as quite unexpected: that of secretary to the chief inspector of a police station in the Saint-Georges district.
It was, however, a post that was not highly regarded at the time. A station secretary was known as the chief’s dog.
My bicycle, my helmet and my uniform were taken away from me, as was the possibility of stopping at a pork butcher’s in the course of my errands in the streets of Paris.
Maigret's Memoirs Page 5
