Madame Maigret's Friend

by Georges Simenon

  He was right. It was like me in the same way that a drawing scribbled on a marble-topped café table by an amateur cartoonist is like an actual flesh and blood person.

  In the book, I was bigger than in real life, heavier too, with a heaviness that was, if I can put it this way, positively ponderous.

  As for the story, it was unrecognizable, and in the plot I used methods that were unexpected to say the least.

  The same evening, I found my wife with the book in her hands.

  ‘It was the dairy maid who gave it to me. Apparently they’re all talking about you. I haven’t had time to read it yet.’

  What could I do? As the man named Sim promised, it was not a newspaper. Nor was it a serious book, but a cheap publication to which it would have been absurd to attach any importance.

  He had used my real name. But he could have retorted that there are a certain number of Maigrets in the world. I simply vowed to receive him quite coldly if by any chance I met him again, although I was convinced that he would avoid setting foot in the Police Judiciaire from now on.

  But I was wrong about that. One day, when I knocked at the chief’s door without having been summoned, in order to ask for his opinion about something, he called out:

  ‘Come in, Maigret. I was just about to phone you. Our friend Sim is here.’

  Our friend Sim was not embarrassed at all. On the contrary, he was absolutely at his ease, with a bigger pipe than ever in his mouth.

  ‘How are you, inspector?’

  ‘He’s just read me a few passages from the thing he’s written about the house,’ Guichard said.

  ‘I already know it.’

  Guichard had an amused gleam in his eyes, but it was me he seemed to be making fun of this time.

  ‘He’s been making some very relevant points. I think you should hear them. He’ll tell you himself.’

  ‘It’s quite simple. In France up until now, with very rare exceptions, the sympathetic role in literature has always been played by the criminal, while the police are ridiculed, or worse.’

  Guichard was nodding approvingly. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’

  It was indeed true. Not only in literature, but also in everyday life. That brought back a somewhat bitter memory from my early days, at a time when I was on the beat. I was just about to arrest a pickpocket outside a Métro station when the man started yelling something – ‘Stop, thief!’ perhaps.

  Instantly, twenty people jumped on me. I told them that I was a policeman, and that the individual walking away was a repeat offender. I am convinced they all believed me. And yet they did everything they could to delay me, thus giving the pickpocket time to get away.

  ‘Well,’ Guichard went on, ‘our friend Sim is planning to write a series of novels in which the police will be shown in their true light.’

  I made a grimace that did not escape the chief.

  ‘More or less in their true light,’ he corrected himself. ‘Do you understand? This book is only a sketch of what he plans to do.’

  ‘He used my name in it.’

  I thought the young man would be embarrassed and apologise. Not at all.

  ‘I hope you weren’t shocked by that. I couldn’t help myself. When I imagine a character with a particular name, I find it impossible to change it. I tried in vain to put together all the syllables you could possibly think of to replace the word Maigret. In the end, I gave up. He wouldn’t have been my character any more.’

  He said my character, calmly, and the worst of it was that I did not react, perhaps because of Guichard and the mischievous gaze he kept fixed on me.

  ‘This time, it wouldn’t be a series of pulp novels, but what he calls … How was it you put it, Monsieur Sim?’

  ‘Semi-literature.’

  ‘And you want me to …’

  ‘I’d like to get to know you better.’

  As I said when I started: he had no doubts. I even think it was his strength. It was partly thanks to this that he had already managed to get the chief on his side.

  Guichard, who was interested in all specimens of humanity, now said to me quite gravely, ‘He’s only twenty-four.’

  ‘I find it hard to construct a character if I don’t know how he acts at every moment of the day. For example, I can’t write about a millionaire until I’ve actually seen one in his dressing gown, having a boiled egg for breakfast.’

  All this happened a long time ago, and I wonder now for what mysterious reason we listened to all this without bursting out laughing.

  ‘So, you’d like …’

  ‘To get to know you better, to see you living and working.’

  Of course, the chief did not give me any orders. I would doubtless have objected. For some time now, I had been wondering if this was all a hoax on his part. He still had a certain bohemian side to his character, from the days when bohemians went in for practical jokes.

  It was probably to give the impression that I did not take any of this too seriously that I shrugged and said, ‘Whenever you like.’

  At which Sim stood up, delighted. ‘Straight away.’

  Once again, with hindsight, it may seem ridiculous. The dollar was worth some improbable amount. The Americans lit their cigars with thousand-franc notes. Montmartre was filled with Negro musicians, and wealthy mature ladies had their jewellery stolen at tea dances by Argentinian gigolos.

  La Garçonne was a huge bestseller, and the vice squad were up to their eyes in ‘orgies’ in the Bois de Boulogne which they hardly dared interrupt for fear of catching consular officials in the act.

  Women wore their hair short, their skirts too, and men wore pointed shoes and trousers tapered at the ankles.

  That is no explanation for anything, I know. But everything is part of everything. And I can still see young Sim coming into my office in the morning, as if he had become one of my inspectors, saying pleasantly, ‘Don’t put yourself out,’ and sitting down in a corner.

  He still did not take any notes. He asked few questions. He preferred statements to questions. He told me subsequently – not that I necessarily believed him – that someone’s reaction to a statement is more revealing than his answer to a specific question.

  One lunchtime, when Lucas, Janvier and I went to have our aperitif at the Brasserie Dauphine, as we often did, he joined us.

  And one morning, when I went to the chief’s office for the daily report, I found him sitting in a corner of the room.

  This lasted a few months. When I asked him what he was writing, he replied,

  ‘I’m still turning out pulp novels to earn my living. From four to eight in the morning. By eight o’clock I’ve finished my day. I’ll only start on my semi-literary novels when I feel ready.’

  I have no idea what he meant by that, but, after a Sunday when I invited him to lunch in my apartment on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and introduced him to my wife, he suddenly stopped his visits to the Quai des Orfèvres.

  It was an odd feeling to no longer see him in his corner, standing up when I stood up, following me when I left and accompanying me step by step through the offices.

  Sometime in the spring, I received a card that was unexpected to say the least.

  Georges Sim has the honour to invite you to the christening of his boat, the Ostrogoth, as performed by the Curé of Notre-Dame, next Tuesday, at Square du Vert-Galant.

  I did not go. I heard later from the local police that for three days and three nights a gang of bizarre characters had made a g
reat racket on board a sumptuously appointed boat moored bang in the middle of Paris.

  Once, crossing the Pont-Neuf, I saw the boat in question, and at the foot of the mast, someone typing, wearing a sea captain’s cap.

  The following week, the boat was no longer there and Square du Vert-Galant had returned to normal.

  More than a year later, I received another invitation, written this time on one of our fingerprint charts.

  Georges Simenon has the honour of inviting you to the anthropometric ball which will be held at the Boule Blanche on the occasion of the launch of his detective novels.

  Sim had become Simenon.

  Or to be more precise, feeling perhaps that he was now an adult, he had gone back to his real name.

  I took no notice. I did not attend the ball in question, although I found out the following day that the prefect of police had gone.

  Through the newspapers. The same newspapers that informed me, on the front page, that Chief Inspector Maigret had just made a striking entrance into the field of detective fiction.

  That morning, when I arrived at the Quai and climbed the main staircase, I saw only sardonic smiles, amused faces turning away.

  My inspectors were doing everything they could to keep a straight face. During the daily report, my colleagues pretended to treat me with new respect.

  It was only the chief who behaved as if nothing had happened, and who asked me, with an absent air, ‘What about you, Maigret? What about your current cases?’

  In the shops in the Richard-Lenoir area, not a single shopkeeper neglected to show my wife the newspaper, with my name in capital letters, and ask her, impressed, ‘This is your husband, isn’t it?’

  Unfortunately, it was!

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