Group at the Grand Cafe by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER THREE

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Frankly speaking, Maigret had never felt particularly sympathetic toward Urbain, but he would have had trouble giving the reason for it. The owner of the Grand Café carried out his trade of café owner, smiled or laughed with the customers, came running as soon as one needed him for a game. But was it his lack of spontaneity? Often, when he laughed at one of the mechanic's jokes, for example, one had somehow the impression that he would rather snap back, and sometimes you were surprised at his brief glances from which all trace of amenity was missing.

"That's the problem!" the former superintendent had said to himself. "Isn't it just the fact of a thirty-five-year-old man dragging all the day long in the sawdust of a provincial café?"

And here was this same Urbain, in Maigret's dining room, where, having expressed his inclinations of revolt, or maybe challenge, he was giving free rein to his emotions, forgetting any human decency, and after a grimace, bursting suddenly into tears.

"This is the first time that I've ever cried in front of a man," he thundered in a last attempt at decency. "But the situation is far too stupid! If this continues, I believe I'll wind up putting a bullet into my own head…"

It was one of those moments when, faced with a too great injustice of fate, you just want to stamp your feet.

"Why was it necessary that when you finished the game yesterday evening, I was taken with a fit of jealousy? Oh, I knew that Angèle had promised not to see him any more. From next week, she wasn't even going to go Orléans once a week anymore, I'd begged her so often. The fact remains that yesterday, to have stayed more than one hour close to the butcher, to think that he had… Have you never been jealous, you?"

Maigret was satisfied to nod his head with the bland indifference of a confessor.

"I couldn't take it any more. I went out the back way, as I sometimes do, and, for a quarter of an hour, I remained leaning on the parapet of the bridge, in the darkness…"

"You're sure that nobody saw you?"

"Even if someone had seen me, it was dark enough so they wouldn't have recognized me. A few minutes ago, when the Orléans superintendent asked me some questions, I realized that he suspected all the regulars at the café, but me more than the others. Tell me, will I have to explain everything? And must my wife learn about it, so that my home life, which is bad enough already, will become a total hell? That's what I came to ask you."

"I can't do without Angèle, you understand? I can't say how it started. Maybe in the beginning it was only curiosity. Then it became an obsession, so much so that now I suffer when customers look at her or pass very close to her. My wife, today, means nothing to me. I would leave her sooner than to lose Angèle.

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