“Maigret Goes to School” by Georges Simenon Essay

Introduction

Commissar Maigret has entered the history of detective literature along with Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Nero Wolfe. It is the very example when the character starts living his own, valid life without the author’s participation. And Maigret was so realistic a character, that he was even honored with a monument in Delfsail in 1966, wherein 1929 George Simenon wrote the first novel about Commissar. Though Maigret was mentioned in earlier compositions by Simenon, about 80 stories were written about him. Jules Joseph Anselm Maigret was born in 1915 in Saint-Fiacre village, in the family of the Count of Saint-Fiacre.

Some of his brand attributes are his pipes, his compound advance to detecting (at times trusting his pure insight, at times on method), and his affection for alcohol. Often during an inquiry, he will stop into a small cafe or bar for a drink and probably a light lunch. His drink of choice is beer or cider, although he has also been recognized to drink Pastis as well as wine at dinner or when it is the only thing obtainable. This is not to state that he is a drunk, as it is a subject of individual arrogance that he can hold his liquid, and would be deeply humiliated if he permitted himself to get intoxicated. Maigret is often dressed in a heavy overcoat, even when going to the Riviera – a fact which guides people strange with him to mark him immediately as a policeman.

Plot overview

Joseph Gastin, a school director from Saint-André-sur-Mer, near La Rochelle, has been expecting Maigret. The ex-postmistress of his little town, Léonie Birard, had been murdered, shot in the eye with a 22 gun from some distance, as she looked out the window of her accommodation.

Gastin was considered as a stranger in the village, is convinced that he is viewed as the key suspect. Maigret calls Lieutenant Daniélou and tells him he’ll bring Gastin back, and gets to know from him of new confirmation: one of the boys in Gastin’s group of students, Marcel Sellier, has confirmed that he’d seen the teacher coming from the instrument shed at the time the killing took place, and there was a 22 in the hut, belonging to Jean-Paul Gastin, his son. Gastin rejected having gone to the shack. Getting to Saint-André, Maigret comes into the inn to check it, as the Bon Coin, where he is shocked to find out that the maid and cook, Thérèse, is a woman he’d once met in his headquarters in Paris.

Gastin is put in jail in La Rochelle. Maigret acquires the sense of the town, and questions the boy, Sellier, the son of the town policeman, who attaches to his story. No one is useful, but on the day of Léonie’s funeral, Maigret, at last, achieves a possibility for a confidential talk with Jean-Paul, who informs him that Marcel had lied, that he’d been at the other window, and consequently could not have observed anyone coming out of the hut. Moreover, he had seen his father go to the house for coffee and returned. Realizing that Marcel is defending someone, Maigret goes to the residence of Joseph Rateau, son of the butcher, Marcellin Rateau.

He’d been laid up with an injured leg, and his window was observable from both the school window and Léonie’s. Maigret makes him acknowledge that it was his father who had shot her, with an unsuccessful shot. She had been disgusted by everyone in town and had mocked everyone.

Discussion

Further than the story it tells, it appears that the main theme of this novel is that of melancholy, or nostalgia for school memories, for a world which had evaporated, the nostalgia of a man who mentions, step by step, the impact of age.

One of the most descriptive moments in the novel is when the author tells the following:

I had a curious dream. More precisely, it wasn’t exactly a dream. I was still in a kind of voluptuous half-sleep and I was regarding with curiosity a man I could only see the back of. He was bigger, with broader shoulders, heavier than me. Though I could see his back, I felt in him a certain calmness that I envied him. He was wearing blue linen trousers, a gardener’s apron, and wore a beat-up straw hat. He was in a garden. Along the low wall which separated his garden from the neighboring one, had been planted all the aromatic herbs and he was busy hoeing them. It took me a while, in my half-sleep, to realize that he wasn’t a real person but one that comes out of my imagination. It was Maigret, in his garden at Meung-Sur-Loire, a Maigret in retirement, he too, but many years younger than I. It seemed that I knew the smallest corners of the red tile house where Mme Maigret was busy in front of her oven. It seemed to me also that I saw Maigret, in the afternoon, heading peacefully towards his usual cafe, where he found his partners for a game of belote. He no longer fished. He claimed the water was too polluted. He wasn’t troubled. He kept busy all day and often took long walks arm-in-arm with his wife. Now maybe I fell completely asleep or suddenly awakened. The images disappeared. I keep them in my mind and they remain, for me, Maigret in retirement.

The whole novel is created under the notion of “disrepair”, represented by the disrepair of the school, factually and symbolically. Equally, Maigret in this novel feels powerfully the first impacts of age. He remembers his childhood dreams which seem rather far from his current life, he feels old indifference to his young partners, as it is accented in the personality of Louise Boncoeur, of “offensive youth”. Moreover, he thinks of his impending retirement.

Luckily for Maigret, in the center of this disrepair, two persons appear, who are outer this fallen world. Louis Paumelle, with a “soft vivacity”, and above all Célestin Marchandon, whose abundant form recalls Maigret to the actualities of life, and carries him out of the melancholy in which he was jammed. It is beyond doubt, not a misfortune that, after hearing doorkeeper’s account of Lucille. He noticed himself standing before the evocative photos outside the Bar… and then the Chief Inspector went into a pub and ordered a profuse choucroute, brought by an artistic waitress.

Maigret at work

Waiting for their beckons from the ‘aquarium’ Maigret often discovers personalities who come willingly to seek his defense. In Maigret Has Scruples, for instance, a distressed husband goes to Maigret as he is afraid that his wife is planning to poison him. Later his wife turns up and tells, with chilly equanimity, that her husband is actually the would-be prospective victim. Unnecessary to note, Maigret is never betrayed by a weep story and in any case, he finds the reality in the end.

Maigret has no time for high society and reveals no favor to the advantaged but he can be astonishingly moderate with the small people resisting to survive, often revealing sympathy for slaughterers and victims alike.

When he is at work Maigret will typically spend his time smoking, snooping, observing -sometimes for a long time; sitting in cafes, dilapidated clubs, and workmen’ eateries. The drinks ad the meals he orders generally depend on the type of the investigation, and the surroundings. If he starts a case with something alcoholic, calvados or vin blanc and (seldom) whisky, for instance, he goes on with that drink until the case is completely investigated, as if the drink itself is an indivisible part of the all significant tone of the case, so essential to investigating the case.

Even though at the start of a case Maigret carefully sets in movement the total police schedule, his sole link with criminological skill is a young, scrawny, short-sighted technician, who realizes Maigret’s anxiety with character and psychology as the true hints to a crime, and can infiltrate the physical verdicts to reveal these type of evidence.

As he approaches close to realizing the case, he starts thinking, feeling, even performing like the killer; he turns to be petulant and inattentive and often does not reply when asked, or spoken to. At such periods his people sneak around him, realizing a solution is within his clutch.

Conclusion

The Maigret cases are not conundrums for the reader to resolve; they are just the researches of human character and its original senses. Maigret is always wondering why murder has been performed, not by what means. The Maigret novels are about people, focusing on origins and their drives, but not intrigues and suspicions.

In every of the Maigret books, Simenon confines a typical feeling of location, and Maigret’s inquiry is often impacted by the local tone and weather. Maigret goes to school starts with a calm evening and the cloudy skies show the feeling of fear and coercion that have fallen on the town: “It was raining. The streets were running with black mud. The wind was rattling the blinds.”

But the key point of all the Maigret books is that any crime is resolved, the murderer found, and the justice chortles. It is the classic detective story, where an extraordinary investigator sorts out all the facts, which he acquires by listening, observing, and sniffing, and faultlessly finds the murderer.

References

Gabriel, André. “Simenon: Le Hasard Et La Nécessité.” Romance Quarterly 42.4 (1995): 203-219.

Lacassin, Francis, Maigret’s approach to work World classic literature monthly. Vol.3, No.4, 2001.

Maigret Goes to School. (tr. Daphne Woodward) 157 pp. Hamish Hamilton. London.

Maigret Goes to School. (tr. Daphne Woodward) in: Five Times Maigret. 525 pp. 22 cm. [with: Maigret in Montmartre, Maigret’s Mistake, Maigret Has Scruples, Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses]. Harcourt, Brace & Co. New York.