SIMENON SIMENON. LES DOCTEURS MAIGRET, SIMENON ET CHABOT
Sur le rôle de la médecine dans trois vies : ou quand réalité et fiction se mélangent.
SIMENON SIMENON. I DOTTORI MAIGRET, SIMENON E CHABOT
Il ruolo della medicina su tre piani: quando la realtà e la fiction si intrecciano
The
1951 book Maigret’s Memoirs teaches us that Maigret knew Simenon. The
policeman reports his first meeting with the writer in his chief Xavier
Guichard’s office in the late 1920s and a relationship that extended
well into Maigret’s retirement years. In a 9/26/1979 letter posted in
the newspaper L'Illustré de Lausanne, Simenon dates their first meeting
to 50 years previously and confirms a relationship into the 70s.
(Predictably, the two do not agree on the precise time or place.)
In
addition, we discover Maigret has read all the books about him that
Simenon had written. We also learn the two men shared an interest in
medicine. Drawing upon his two years in medical school at Nantes, his
medical discussions with his best friend Dr. Pardon, his subscription to
the British medical journal Lancet, and his reading of borrowed medical
texts, Maigret often applied his clinical knowledge to understanding
his criminal cases.
Maigret recognized that Simenon regularly
employed a doctor’s viewpoint in understanding as well. And the writer
didn’t disagree. Indeed, in an April 8, 1967 interview published in
Paris Match, he spun the idea this way: “It turns out that it’s with
them [doctors] that I feel the most comfortable, perhaps because they
have almost the same point of view about man as the novelist.”
So,
we either do know factually or can imagine easily that the two men
talked about all sorts of medical topics, from clear-cut subjects to
obscure themes. In particular, they loved to review the details of
police investigations, the complexities of criminal minds, and the
nuances of death, homicide, murder, and suicide. It’s not a stretch to
suspect these two may actually have regretted the professions they had
chosen.
Let’s then, for example, fantasize about how these two
‘doctors’ would have dissected The Teddy Bear right down to the bone.
Just one of Simenon’s numerous novels where life and death are on a
collision course, this story focuses on obstetrician Jean Chabot—a
doctor, drinker, and redhead eerily resembling Victor Gadelle, the
drunken doctor who had killed Maigret’s mother. When the renowned,
fulfilled but overworked Chabot botches a delivery, a tightrope walk
begins. Depressed, he drinks heavily and takes drugs, both only
increasing his vacillation. He rapes a young woman, who becomes
pregnant, and she kills herself. The guilty man prepares himself for
suicide as the solution, but realizing he doesn’t have the courage to
kill himself, he hopes a catastrophe will sweep him away or someone else
will end his misery. When, upon discovering his mistress with another
man, he kills him and asks her to call the police, it looks as though
his wish may come true.
How might Maigret and Simenon have regarded a man of such weakness like Chabot? Contemptuously? Understandingly? Forgivingly?
David P Simmons
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