Maigret and the Spinster by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon [Simenon, Georges]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Georges Simenon
ISBN: 9780860091479
Publisher: Mariner
Published: 1941-12-31T11:00:00+00:00

3

Maigret was feeling warm, “warm and cozy,” as he used to say when he was a child, and if the lights had suddenly been turned on, he would have appeared, leaning back, huddled in his overcoat, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes half closed, as the very incarnation of contentment.

But in fact it was just a device, a little game that he played with himself whenever he became so saturated with a single problem that he felt incapable of further reasoning. If it had been summer, he would have been sitting in the sun on a café terrace with a glass of beer in front of him, his eyes half shut, simmering.

When they had put in central heating at the Quai des Orfèvres, and the Chief Superintendent had sought and obtained permission to keep his old anthracite stove, some of the young inspectors had raised their eyebrows. Had they but known, it was just the old familiar game. Whenever things were going badly, whenever he had teased and worried a particular problem until it had lost all meaning and become a tangle of loose ends, Maigret would fill his stove to bursting point and then after poking it and turning it full on, toast himself on both sides in front of it. Little by little he would be filled with a glow of well-being, his eyelids would begin to prickle, and he would see everything around him through a haze, which was not entirely due to the smoke of his never extinguished pipe.

In this torpid bodily state, his mind was freed, as in dreams, to wander at will, sometimes in pursuit of will-o’ – the-wisps, but occasionally along paths which reason alone could never have discovered.

Madame Maigret had never caught on. Often, after an evening at the movies, she would touch him on the arm and say with a sigh:

“You slept through it again, Maigret…I can’t see the point of spending twelve francs for a seat when you have a perfectly good bed at home.”

The auditorium was pitch-dark, heated by the warmth generated by hundreds of human bodies, pulsating with the lives of all these people, so close together and yet unknown to one another. Above their heads ran the long, triangular beam of pallid light from the projection room, a focus for tobacco smoke.

If anyone had asked him what the film was about…As if that mattered…He watched the images flickering on the screen without attempting to relate to them in any way. Then, conscious of a slight rustle nearby, he looked down.

This powerful man, who for nearly thirty years had, in a sense, been involved with the uttermost frenzy of human passion, with murder, that is, was a puritan. In the semidarkness, he could sense the movements of the woman next to him and her companion’s on the other side, though all he could see was the man’s pale hand. He gave a brief shocked cough. Earlier, when she had pulled her coat from under him, he had had the impression that she was very young.

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