Maigret’s Little Joke by Georges Simenon

Author:Georges Simenon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-03-17T15:13:20+00:00

* * *

V

« ^ »

The storm had gone on well into the night and broken the weather, which for more than a week had been set fair. That morning the air was almost cool, with a greyish mist drifting about the streets and the sun as pale as in February.

It wasn’t this which made Maigret morose. Just as he was leaving to go and fetch his papers, his wife had asked him, as on the other mornings:

“Have you got any plans for today?”

He had said no, as on the other days too.

“Would it bore you to have lunch at home?”

He hadn’t realized straight away what she was getting at.

“Why should it bore me?”

It was then that she had sighed:

“My feet are aching so. I’d like a rest for a day.”

In other words it wasn’t the restaurant lunch she was worried about, but the perambulations across Paris to which her husband afterwards subjected her. What day was it? Since he had been on holiday, he had no longer bothered to think. It must be Friday, and she was already worn out.

“Be back soon,” he had muttered.

“You’re not disappointed?”

“Not a bit.”

“Anyway, I must sort out my dresses.”

Each day, as a matter of fact, to please him, she had worn a different dress, and she hadn’t all that many summer dresses.

All the same, perhaps he ought not to have made her eat in a suspicious-looking bistro, off the Boulevard de la Chapelle, and then walked her along in the rain! He had thought she was enjoying it. They had both been soaked, and each time a squall had caught them, Maigret called out to her:

“Imagine you’re at the seaside!”

It didn’t seriously matter. Her feet probably really were hurting her; they had always been sensitive.

He bought his papers, sat down in his corner of the terrace, despite the nip in the air, ordered his already traditional cup of coffee.

There was nothing in the morning papers. They merely reproduced, with fewer details, what the evening papers had printed the day before.

It was like a blank, all of a sudden, as if the case had reached the doldrums. He felt cheated. His first thought was: “What can they be up to, then?”

He thought of Janvier and the others at the Quai des Orfèvres, whose job it was to resolve the problem, and several minutes went by before his sense of humour regained the upper hand and he could laugh at himself.

He had just been reacting like the typical reader. He had not been issued with his twice-daily dole and he was in a huff over it. Like the public at large, he had felt for a while that the police force was not doing its job, and he could now better understand the persistence of the Press, when they laid siege to his door during the course of a sensational case.

“It doesn’t matter what you give us, inspector, but give us something!”

Thereupon he read the rest of the paper, the state of the weather at the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.