SIMENON SIMENON. LES MAISONS DE SIMENON

En 1935, Simenon loue pour trois ans un luxueux appartement au 7 boulevard Richard-Wallace

Nel 1935, Simenon affitta per tre anni un lussuoso appartamento in boulevard Richard-Wallace 7

In 1935, Simenon rents a luxurious apartment for three years at 7 boulevard Richard-Wallace.

SIMENON SIMENON. SIMENON, MAIGRET ET LE MYTHE DU MEDECIN

Quelques déclarations du romancier à propos de la médecine et la part médicale chez Maigret 

SIMENON SIMENON. SIMENON, MAIGRET E IL MITO DEL MEDICO 

Alcune dichiarazioni del romanziere sulla medicina e la parte medica in Maigret

SIMENON SIMENON. SIMENON, MAIGRET AND THE MYTH OF THE DOCTOR 

Some statements by the novelist about medicine and the medical part in Maigret

Dans sa dictée Un homme comme un autre, Simenon disait : « Dans chaque ville où j’ai vécu, c’est dans un petit groupe de médecins que je me suis inséré, encore que je ne connaisse rien à la médecine. Je me suis demandé pourquoi. Je crois avoir trouvé la réponse : la plupart des médecins s’interrogent sur l’homme. » Ce sont ces interrogations sur la destinée humaine, que Simenon attribue comme qualité presque essentielle aux médecins, qui font que le romancier se sentait de l’attirance pour le monde de la médecine. Il aimait converser avec des médecins, qu’il invitait souvent chez lui, ainsi qu’il s’en souvient dans ses Mémoires intimes, à propos de l’année 1967 : « Je reprends l’habitude des « dîners » de toubibs, à peu près mensuels, que j’ai commencés depuis deux ou trois ans. J’invite cinq ou six de mes amis médecins accompagnés de leur femme. A Paris aussi, boulevard Richard-Wallace, nous réunissions le dimanche quelques médecins de nos amis […]. A Lakeville, nous avons réuni des praticiens à notre table. C’est pour moi une très vieille tradition. » 

Dans Quand j’étais vieux, Simenon écrit : « Maigret voulait être médecin. Et moi ? Je n’y ai pas pensé étant jeune. Plus tard, oui. Mais sans regret ». En 1968, le romancier était mis sur le grill par un groupe de médecins, pour une longue interview publiée dans la revue Médecine et Hygiène. Cette interview se concluait par ces mots adressés par les intervieweurs à Simenon : « C’est grâce à vous que nous avons compris ce qui pouvait se passer dans la tête d’un criminel. Mieux qu’aucun traité de psychiatrie, qu’aucune expérience vécue n’a jamais pu nous le montrer, c’est la relation Maigret-malade du médecin avec son patient que nous avons pu transposer, c’est ce qui nous permet de vous dire que le personnage du médecin dans votre œuvre, c’est Maigret. » La déclaration a, bien entendu, un petit côté flatteur, mais ce qu’on peut en retenir, c’est que ces médecins ont remarqué que Maigret, dans sa façon d’enquêter, travaille comme un « médecin des âmes », et que sa relation à un suspect ou à un coupable est bien autre chose que celle d’un policier traquant un gibier. 

Dans la même interview, Simenon expliquait que pour que Maigret puisse jouer ce rôle de « médecin des âmes », il fallait que son héros ait « une petite part d'esprit médical en lui. » Il avait donc imaginé que le commissaire, avant d’entrer dans la police, avait commencé des études de médecine, interrompues à la mort de son père. Le romancier, au fil du temps, a confié nombre de ses interrogations à son personnage, et on trouve bien des similitudes entre le créateur et sa créature. Si certaines sont plus ou moins voulues de la part de Simenon (la pipe, les goûts culinaires), une bonne part d’entre elles est sans doute inconsciente. En 1962, le romancier donnait une conférence lors d’un congrès de la fédération internationale des associations d’écrivains-médecins ; la conférence débutait par la narration de faits souvent ressassés par Simenon : les étudiants en médecine en pension chez sa mère à Liège, son rêve d’une « sorte de médecine des corps et des âmes qui ne chercherait pas seulement à dépister la maladie et à la guérir, […] mais encore à redresser les destinées accidentellement faussées. » Ceci sonne incontestablement maigretien… 

Simenon a-t-il fait de Maigret un aspirant à la médecine parce que lui-même l’était aussi ? Ou s’est-il attribué après coup cette aspiration, qu’il reprend à son compte ? Nous avons mentionné plus haut cette affirmation, dans Quand j’étais vieux, qu’il n’avait pas pensé, étant jeune, à devenir médecin. Dans la conférence de 1962, Simenon dit encore : « Que serait-il arrivé si la mort de mon père n’avait pas mis fin à mes études ? Aurais-je choisi la carrière médicale ? » Grâce aux recherches menées par les biographes du romancier, on sait aujourd’hui que la mort de Désiré n’a pas été la véritable cause qui a fait que le jeune Georges a interrompu ses études… Ne mêle-t-il pas dans ses déclarations un peu de ce qu’il avait écrit à propos de Maigret ? 

Retenons cependant de cette conférence ces mots de Simenon qui devaient être sincères : « médecins et romanciers, nous avons les uns et les autres, vis-à-vis de l’homme, […] un même angle de prise de vue et nous cherchons en lui la même petite lueur de vérité. » 

Murielle Wenger 

SIMENON SIMENON "REPORT" - GEORGES SIMENON, THE ART OF FICTION No. 9

The Paris Review - n. 233 Issue Summer 2020 (from issue 9 / Summer 1955) - Carver Collins - André Gide, who was writing a study of Georges Simenon’s fiction at the end of his life, called Simenon “perhaps the greatest novelist” of contemporary France.

Simenon published his first novel, Au Pont des Arches, at seventeen, and by writing it in ten days began at once his phenomenal practice of rapid production. Using at least sixteen pen-names ranging from Christian Brulls to Gom Gut, he began writing scores of commercial novels—one of them in exactly twenty-five hours—with the intention of training himself for more serious works. He shortened the period of training in commercial novels when he began to write a transitional fiction—his series of books about the detective Maigret. From the Maigrets he moved on rapidly to the tense psychological novel of less than two hundred pages—known to his thousands of European readers as “a simenon”—and of which he has now written more than seventy-five.

Today, except for an infrequent Maigret, he publishes only serious novels. These books, which he writes in French, are not only translated widely but continually used for movies and television—in adaptations which Simenon does not supervise, for dramas which he does not see.

Among his novels currently available in English translation are The Heart of a Man, The Snow Was Black, Four Days in a Lifetime, I Take this Woman, The Girl in His Past, The Brothers Rico, and most recently, in a combined volume, The Magician and The Widow.

Simenon was born in Belgium in 1903, spent much of his life in France, and came to live in the United States ten years ago.

SCENE:

Mr. Simenon’s study in his rambling white house on the edge of Lakeville, Connecticut, after lunch on a January day of bright sun. The room reflects its owner: cheerful, efficient, hospitable, controlled. On its walls are books of law and medicine, two fields in which he has made himself an expert; the telephone directories from many parts of the world to which he turns in naming his characters; the map of a town where he has just set his forty-ninth Maigret novel; and the calendar on which he has X-ed out in heavy crayon the days spent writing the Maigret—one day to a chapter—and the three days spent revising it, a labor which he has generously interrupted for this interview. 

In the adjoining office, having seen that everything is arranged comfortably for her husband and the interviewer, Mrs. Simenon returns her attention to the business affairs of a writer whose novels appear six a year and whose contracts for books, adaptations, and translations are in more than twenty languages.

With great courtesy and in a rich voice which gives to his statements nuances of meaning much beyond the ordinary range, Mr. Simenon continues a discussion begun in the dining room...>>>

SIMENON SIMENON LA CARTE POSTALE - LA CARTOLINA DI MAIGRET – MAIGRET'S POSTCARD

New York - 1930

SIMENON SIMENON "REPORT" - THE ESOTERIC, ESSENTIAL MAIGRET

The Times Literary Supplement - 12/06/2020 - Jonathan Gibbs - The first time we meet Chief Inspector Maigret, in Pietr the Latvian (1930), he is reading a telegram in his office at the Quai des Orfèvres, but straight away he gets up to fiddle with his stove. He raised his eyes. It seemed to him that cast-iron stove in the middle of his office with its chimney tube rising to the ceiling wasn’t roaring properly. He pushed the telegram away, rose ponderously to his feet, adjusted the flue and thrust three shovels of coal into the firebox. Maigret might well be associated primarily with his pipe(s), no less than Sherlock Holmes, but his stove is an equally significant feature. It fixes him as a man with basic physical needs, as a man of the people, of the soil, even just as much as the animal metaphors that Georges Simenon applies to him, making his hero variously bovine, ursine, “like a big shaggy dog” and, in one memorably odd moment, like an elephant...>>>

SIMENON SIMENON. PARIGI 1935, BETTOLE E POSTRIBOLI

I nuovi misteri di Parigi in "Police secours"

SIMENON SIMENON. PARIS 1935, COUPE-GORGE ET TAPIS-FRANCS

Les nouveaux mystères de Paris dans "Police secours"

SIMENON SIMENON. PARIS 1935, THROAT CUTTER AND TAVERNS
The new mysteries of Paris in "Police Secours"

Su richiesta del suo amico Pierre Lazareff, direttore di Paris Soir, Simenon nel 1935 acconsente a tornare dalle inchieste del suo commissario, ai luoghi della vera criminalità parigina, per le pagine del quotidiano pubblicato da Eugene Merle, un editore per il quale Simenon aveva scritto sia dei romanzi brevi che dei racconti popolarI. Lo scrittore ha ormai ingranato con la sua serie delle inchieste di Maigret, è passato da Fayard alla prestigiosa editrice Gallimard per cui ora scrive i suoi romans-durs. L'idea di Lazareff è quella di pubblicare una sorta d'inchiesta a puntate per passare in rassegna il lavoro in alcuni commissariati parigini, seguendo le indagini e scoprendo i casi realmente avvenuti che la polizia deve affrontare giorno per giorno. Questa raccolta di reportage sarà intitolata  Police Secours e in seguito costituirà una breve antologia omonima.

Anche in  questa circostanza Simenon dà un certa attenzione al lato umano dei vari casi e soprattuto alle condizioni e alla vita della gente comune, oltre a realizzare una sorta di mappa cittadina della malavita e a passare in rassegna i tipi di reati che la forze dell'ordine dovevano contrastare. Ci imbattiamo in un morto tra i portoghesi, tra gli zingari nel XVIII arrondissement, tra operai stranieri nel XIX, ma anche tra protettori di mezza tacca. Insieme a cadaveri in fondo al fiume, ma tra anche prostitute sfigurate e addirittura smembrate... potenti racket criminali che non perdonano.
Ma l'impressione suscitata da queste nefandezze si ridimensiona, quando Simenon viene a conoscere il numero dei morti uccisi in un anno a Parigi. Scopre infatti che sono solo 69 su oltre 4 milioni di persone. E per questo si domanda come può essere...: "...una proporzione addirittura più bassa di quella di una nazione apparentemente molto più tranquilla: penso alla Svizzera. Come mai relativamente più omicidi nei pacifici cantoni svizzeri che nella caotica capitale francese?...".
Non si può restare colpiti dal modo in cui le vicende raccontate in questa rassegna somiglino nella drammaticità alle vicende che ritroviamo nelle sue opere, Maigret o  romans-durs che siano. Storie comuni, personaggi rappresentanti delle fasce più basse della popolazione e dove l'evento più piccolo può dare vita a disgrazie e drammi sociali. "...desiderate che ve ne illustri uno dei più esemplari? - E' la domanda che lo scrittore pone al lettore del quotidiano in uno dei capitoli,  "Bettole e postriboli" - In un tranquillo appartamento di places des Vosges abita un invalido di guerra, che lavora come ascensorista. La sera, quando rincasa, è sempre teso, ha necessità di riposare e di dormire. Il suo vicino é un'altro reduce, lui invece intossicato dai gas venefici, ora venditore di aspiratori elettrici. Ora, dopo il lavoro quest'uomo ascolta per ore sempre gli stessi dischi sul suo grammofono. E i suoi dischi sono solo sei! E questo succede tutti i giorni... Il mutilato si lamenta con il portiere dello stabile, poi protesta con il proprietario del caseggiato. Infine presenta anche un esposto al commissariato. Ma tutto questo non serve a zittire il grammofono, almeno fino alle dieci di sera. E infatti questo non gli basta, il mutilato é ormai esasperato da quel grammofono. E questo porta il primo ad  aggredire sulle scale  il secondo. I vicini quella volta riescono a separarli. Una notte, il mutilato, fuori di sè, si reca dal vicino con un fucile, un residuato bellico e gli spara. Il  melomane viene ferito, ma non muore, anche se dovrà sottoporsi all'impianto di uno stomaco artificiale...".

SIMENON SIMENON. "THE OPEN WINDOW"

Social dimension in the Maigret Short Stories

SIMENON SIMENON. "LA FENETRE OUVERTE" 

Dimension sociale dans les nouvelles Maigret

SIMENON SIMENON. "LA FINESTRA APERTA"

La dimensione sociale nei racconti di Maigret

In ‘La fenêtre ouverte’ (‘The open window’), Maigret arrives at 4 o’clock to arrest Oscar Laget, a crooked financier. But, as Maigret is being met by Ernest Descharneau, Laget’s clerk, there is a detonation and Laget is discovered dead in his office, an apparent suicide. Maigret is suspicious: why is a window open in the corridor, when it is a cold day, and why is the smell of gunpowder in Laget’s office stale? Maigret questions Madame Laget and Descharneau, discovering that the latter had been Laget’s superior officer during the war but had subsequently been employed by him after his gun-shop business failed, although he disapproved of his employer’s shady business practices. When he learns from Madame Laget that her husband usually returned at 3 o’clock for a sleep in his office, Maigret deduces that Descharneau had shot Laget in his sleep, then, when Maigret arrived, pressed a button under his desk setting off a firecracker in the open window in the hall. This explained the detonation and appeared to clear Descharneau of any involvement. Descharneau denies all, but hangs himself in his cell. 

Superficially, this seems to be a classic detective story in the deductive mould, with Maigret putting together his knowledge of Laget’s routine, Descharneau’s background with guns and the stale smell of the gunpowder to solve the mystery. However, in the space of a few pages, Simenon gives the narrative a significant social dimension and the killer an important motive. Laget’s business activities had started during the feverish economic boom of the early 1920s and although his first business venture only lasted a short time – ‘the chemical products firm lasted three years […]. One fine day Laget shut up shop’ – the prolonged period of expansion created a space in which even inefficient companies could survive, providing they were not too scrupulous in their operations. As Descharneau explains to Maigret: ’At that point there was some talk of prosecution, which did not prevent Laget, a year later, from launching a new concern. […]. Laget would disappear for two or three days, then come back in a state of great excitement by a side door and make me sign some papers: ‘Hurry !...This time we’re going to make our fortunes!...’ 

Just as the post-war boom provided opportunities for the likes of Laget, the turbulence of the economic situation saw other small businesses, such as Descharneau’s, disappear; Laget’s rise and Descharneau’s fall show the two sides of the coin of a decade in which social mobility was high as a result of the enrichment of some and the impoverishment of others. As Descharneau recounts to Maigret: ‘When we were demobbed I found my shop closed down and my wife ill. I had a little money left and I was unlucky enough to invest it in a concern that collapsed soon after…’ In this financial and social turbulence, it is, paradoxically, the honest man, Descharneau, who finds himself economically dependent on the unscrupulous Laget: ‘I didn’t even know what I was signing. Whenever I hesitated, he’d accuse me of ingratitude, reminding me that he’d rescued me out of the gutter…’ 

It is not difficult for Maigret to feel sympathy for Descharneau: ’One of those failures who are perhaps the most pitiful legacy of the last war or at any rate its most lamentable victims. A man who had been Lieutenant Descharneau and whose character must then have been above reproach. At the armistice, he found nothing left of his former life. His business was ruined, his wife died. And it was Laget, whose vulgarity and unscrupulousness had worked wonders in that uneasy period.’ 

In fact, rather than being a “victim of the war”, it might be more accurate to describe Descharneau as a victim of the peace, a victim of the unbridled expansion of capitalism during the post-war boom. And it is Maigret’s understanding of social relations in this period which provides the framework in which his analysis of material clues can point to a motive for the killing and thence to his resolution of the case. 

William Alder 

SIMENON SIMENON. LES MAISONS DE SIMENON

En 1924, Georges et Tigy sont installés au 21 place des Vosges

Nel 1924, Georges e Tigy si sistemarono in piazza dei Vosges 21

In 1924 Georges and Tigy settled at 21, place des Vosges

Place des Vosges Paris