‘Yes.’
‘Unless Isabelle and your uncle met up in the meantime and yielded to their passion.’
‘No.’
‘Why are you so categorical? Do you think that in that world …’
‘I say no because my uncle spent the whole of the First War outside of France and when he came back, the child, Philippe, was two or three years old.’
‘Let’s admit it. Lovers see each other …’
‘No.’
‘They never saw each other?’
‘I already told you.’
‘So for fifty years they write to each other almost daily, and, one day, your uncle tells you about a marriage that will take place in a more or less distant future. Which means, I imagine, that he and Isabelle were waiting for the prince to die so that they could get married.’
‘I think so.’
Maigret had wiped his brow and looked at the lime tree outside the French windows, as if he needed to resume contact with a more grounded reality.
‘We’re reaching the epilogue. Ten or twelve days ago, it doesn’t matter which, the eighty-year-old prince falls from his horse in the Bois de Boulogne. On Sunday morning he dies of his injuries. Yesterday, Tuesday, or two days later, your uncle is murdered, in the evening, in his office. The consequence of this is that the couple who have waited for fifty years to be united at last will not be. Is that right? Thank you, Monsieur Mazeron. Would you please be so kind as to give me your wife’s address?’
‘23, Rue de la Pompe, in Passy.’
‘Do you know your uncle’s notary or lawyer?’
‘His notary is Maître Aubonnet, on Rue de Villersexel.’
A few hundred metres away. Those people, apart from Madame Mazeron, lived almost next door to each other, in the part of Paris that Maigret knew least.
‘You are free to go. I assume I can always contact you at your home?’
‘I won’t be there very much this afternoon, because I have to take care of the funeral, the announcements, and above all I need to contact Maître Aubonnet.’
Mazeron had left unwillingly, and Jaquette had burst out of the kitchen and closed the door behind him.
‘Do you need me now?’
‘Not right away. It’s lunchtime. We’ll come back this afternoon.’
‘Do I have to stay here?’
‘Where would you go?’
She had looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘I’m asking you where you wanted to go.’
‘Me? Nowhere. Where would I go?’
Because of her attitude, Maigret and Janvier had not left straight away. Maigret had called Quai des Orfèvres.
‘Lucas? Have you got someone to hand who could come and spend an hour or two at Rue Saint-Dominique? Torrence? Fine. Get him to jump in a car …’
Consequently, while the two men had lunch, Torrence was snoozing in the Count of Saint-Hilaire’s armchair.
As far as anyone could tell, nothing had been stolen from the flat. There had been no break-in. The murderer had come in through the door and, since Jaquette swore that she hadn’t let anyone in, they had to believe that the count himself had opened the door to his visitor.
Did he expect him? Did he not expect him? He hadn’t offered him a drink. They had found only a single glass, on the desk, beside the bottle of cognac.
Would Saint-Hilaire have stayed in his dressing gown to receive a woman? Probably not, if they were able to rely a little on what they knew of him.
So it was a man who had come to see him. The count was not suspicious of him, because he had sat down at his desk, by the proofs that he had been busy correcting a moment before.
‘Did you notice whether there were any cigarette butts in the ashtray?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Or cigar butts?’
‘None of those either.’
‘I bet that before this evening we will have a phone call from young Monsieur Cromières.’
Another one with the gift of infuriating Maigret.
‘The prince’s funeral must be over.’
‘That’s quite likely.’
‘So Isabelle is at her house, Rue de Varenne, surrounded by her son, her daughter-in-law and their children.’
Silence fell. Maigret frowned, as if hesitating.
‘Do you plan to go and see them?’ Janvier asked with a hint of concern.
‘No … Not with those people … Will you have a coffee? Waiter! Two black coffees.’
It looked as if he was furious with everyone today, including the more or less high-ranking civil servants who were eating at the nearby tables and observing him ironically.
3.
As soon as he had turned the corner of Rue Saint-Dominique, Maigret saw them and groaned. There were a good dozen of them, journalists and photographers, standing outside the home of the Count of Saint-Hilaire, and some of them, as if preparing for a lengthy siege, were sitting on the pavement with their backs to the wall.
They had recognized him in the distance as well and hurried towards him.
‘Our dear Monsieur Cromières is going to love this!’ he muttered to Janvier.
It was inevitable. Whenever a case was dealt with by a local station, someone always alerted the press.
The photographers, who had a hundred pictures of him in their files, snapped away at him as if he had changed since the previous day, or any other day. The reporters asked questions. Luckily they revealed that they knew less than one might have feared.
‘Is it a suicide, inspector?’
‘Have any papers disappeared?’
‘For now, gentlemen, I have nothing to say.’
‘Should we conclude that it might be a political matter?’
They walked backwards in front of him, clutching their notebooks.
‘When will you be able to give us a clue?’
‘Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week.’
He had the misfortune of adding:
‘Maybe never.’
He tried to retract his mistake:
‘I’m joking, of course. Please be so kind as to let us work in peace.’
‘Is it true that he was writing his memoirs?’
‘Indeed, two volumes have already been published.’
A uniformed officer was standing outside the door. A few moments later, after Maigret rang at the door, Torrence, in his shirt-sleeves, came and opened it.
‘I was obliged to call a local sergeant, chief. They had got into the building and thought it was amusing to keep ringing the bell every five minutes.’
‘Any news? Phone calls?’
‘About twenty. Newspapers.’
‘Where’s the old woman?’
‘In the kitchen. Every time the phone rings she hurries in the hope of answering before I do. The first time, she tried to grab the receiver out of my hands.’
‘She herself hasn’t made any calls? You know there’s a second phone in the bedroom?’
‘I’ve left the door of the office open to hear her movements. She hasn’t gone into the bedroom.’
‘She hasn’t gone out?’
‘No. She tried to go out to get some fresh bread, she told me. As you didn’t give me any instructions on the subject, I decided to prevent her. What should I do now?’
‘Go back to Quai des Orfèvres.’
For a moment the inspector had considered going back there too, and taking Jaquette to question her at leisure. But he didn’t feel ready for this interrogation. He decided instead to linger in the flat, and in the end he would probably try to get the old maidservant to speak in Saint-Hilaire’s office.
While waiting, he opened the tall double French windows and sat down in the chair that the count had occupied so often. His hand was reaching out towards a bundle of letters when the door opened. It was Jaquette Larrieu, more sour and more suspicious than ever.
‘You have no right to do that.’
‘You know who these letters are from?’
‘It d
oesn’t much matter whether I know or I don’t. It’s private correspondence.’
‘Please do me the favour of going back into the kitchen or your bedroom.’
‘I’m not allowed to go out?’
‘Not for now.’
She hesitated, trying to come up with a cutting reply, which she didn’t find, and, pale with rage, she resigned herself to leaving the office.
‘Go and find me the silver-framed photograph that I noticed in the bedroom this morning.’
That morning, Maigret hadn’t paid very much attention. Too many things were still alien to him. It was a matter of principle to him not to try to form an opinion too quickly, because he mistrusted first impressions.
Over lunch outside the restaurant, he had suddenly remembered a lithograph that he had seen for years in his parents’ bedroom. It must have been his mother who had chosen it and hung it up. The frame was white, in the style of the early years of the century. It showed a young woman by a lake, wearing a princess dress, a wide-brimmed hat with an ostrich-feather on her head and a pointed parasol in her hand. The expression on her face was melancholy, like the landscape, and Maigret was sure that his mother found the picture poetic. Wasn’t it the poetry of the times?
The story of Isabelle and the Count of Saint-Hilaire had recalled that picture so precisely to his memory that he could even see the wallpaper with the pale-blue stripes in his parents’ bedroom.
And yet, in the silver frame that he had noticed that morning in the count’s bedroom, and which Janvier was bringing him now, he saw the same outline, the same style of dress and an identical melancholy.
He had no doubt that it was a photograph of Isabelle in about 1912, the time when she was still a girl, and when the future ambassador had first met her.
She wasn’t tall and, perhaps because of her corset, she seemed to have a slender waist, and her bosom was, as they said in those days, ample. Her features were delicately drawn, her mouth thin, her eyes clear, blue or grey.
‘What do you want me to do, chief?’
‘Sit down.’
He needed someone there, as if to check his impressions. In front of him, the bundles of letters were arranged by the year, and he picked them up one after another. He didn’t read everything, of course, because it would have taken several days, just odd passages here and there.
‘My handsome friend … Very dear friend … Sweet friend …’
Later, perhaps because she felt herself to be in a closer communion with her correspondent, she wrote simply: ‘Friend’.
Saint-Hilaire had kept the envelopes, which bore stamps from different countries. Isabelle had moved around a lot. For a long time, for example, the letters from the month of August were sent from Baden-Baden or Marienbad, the aristocratic spa towns of the day.
There were also some sent from the Tyrol, many from Switzerland and Portugal. She related the small events that filled her days with charm and vivacity and described quite wittily the people she met.
Often she referred to them only by their first names, sometimes by a simple initial.
It took Maigret some time to find his bearings. Helped by the postage stamp and the context, he gradually managed to decipher these puzzles.
Marie, for example, was a queen who was still on the throne at the time, the queen of Romania. It was from Bucharest, where she was staying at the court with her father, that Isabelle wrote, and a year later she was to be found again at the Italian court.
‘My cousin H …’
The name returned in its entirety in another letter, the Prince of Hessen, and there were others, more or less cousins or second cousins.
During the First War, she sent her letters via the French embassy in Madrid.
My father explained to me yesterday that I must marry the Prince of V—, whom you have met at my house several times. I asked him for three days to reflect and, during those three days, I cried a lot …
Maigret puffed on his pipe, sometimes glancing at the garden, at the leaves of the lime tree, and passed the letters one by one to Janvier, keeping an eye on his reactions.
He was faintly irritated by these descriptions, which struck him as so unreal. Had he not looked, as a child, with similar unease, at the woman by the lake in his parents’ bedroom? In his eyes it was a false poetry: she was an unreal and impossible creature.
And yet here, in a world that had evolved still further, had become harsher, he found an almost identical image.
This afternoon I had a long conversation with Hubert, and I was completely frank. He knows I love you, that too many obstacles keep us apart, and that I bow to my father’s will …
Only the previous week, Maigret had dealt with a simple and brutal crime of passion, a lover who had stabbed to death the husband of the woman he loved, and who had then killed the woman before at last trying unsuccessfully to slash his own wrists. Admittedly these were just ordinary people of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.
He has accepted that our marriage will be one of convenience, and I promised for my part never to see you again. He doesn’t know that I am writing to you. He holds you in high esteem and does not doubt the respect that you have always shown towards me …
There were moments when Maigret was revolted, felt an almost physical revulsion.
‘Do you believe it, Janvier?’
‘It sounds as if she’s being sincere …’
‘Read this one!’
It was three years later.
I know, dear friend, that you will suffer, but, if it is any consolation I am suffering even more than you.
This was in 1915. She was announcing that Julien, the brother of the Prince of V—, had been killed in Argonne at the head of his regiment. She had, once more, had a long conversation with her husband, who had come back to Paris on leave. What she was telling the man she loved, quite clearly, was that she was going to be obliged to sleep with the prince. Of course, she didn’t use those terms. Not only was there no crude or shocking word in her letter, but the very fact was presented in an almost unreal manner.
While Julien was still alive, Hubert was not worried, being convinced that his brother would have an heir, and that the name of V—would thus …
There was no longer a brother. So it was Hubert’s duty to ensure that there was a descendant.
I spent the night in prayer, and in the morning I went to see my spiritual adviser …
The priest had shared the view of the prince. One could not, for a question of love, allow a name that had been found on every page of the history of France to fade away.
I have understood my duty …
The sacrifice had been made because a child, Philippe, had been born. She also announced this birth, and on this subject there were a few words that made Maigret think:
Thank God! It’s a boy …
Didn’t that mean, in black and white, that if the child had been a girl she would have had to start over again?
And if she had had another daughter, and then another …
‘Have you read it?’
‘Yes.’
It was almost as if they were both prey to the same unease. They were both used to quite a crude reality, and the passions they came across ended in tragedy because they led to Quai des Orfèvres.
This, on the other hand, was as disappointing as trying to grasp a cloud. And when they tried to make out the characters, they remained as vague, as inconsistent as the lady of the lake.
Maigret was tempted just to stuff all those letters into the bookcase with the green curtain, muttering:
‘Heap of nonsense!’
At the same time he felt a certain respect and almost tenderness. Not wanting to yield to sentimentality, he tried to act tough.
‘Can you believe it?’
More dukes, princes and dethroned kings that she had met in Portugal. Then a trip to Kenya, with her husband. Another trip, to the United States, where Isabelle had felt lost, because the life there was too brutal.
… Th
e more he grows, the more like you Philippe becomes. Isn’t that miraculous? Isn’t it as if heaven were trying to reward us for our sacrifice? Hubert is aware of it as well, I can see it in the way that he looks at the child …
Hubert, at any rate, was no longer allowed in the marital bed, and he had no hesitation in seeking consolation elsewhere. In his letters, he was now no longer Hubert, but H …
Poor H. has a new folly and I suspect that it is making him suffer. He is growing visibly thinner, and more and more nervous …
‘Follies’ of this kind appeared every five or six months. For his part, Armand de Saint-Hilaire, in his own letters, could not have been trying to convince his correspondent of his own continence.
Isabelle wrote to him, for example:
I hope that the Turkish women are less wild than people say, and particularly that their husbands are not too fierce …
She added:
Be careful, friend. I pray for you every morning …
When he was an envoy in Cuba, and then ambassador in Buenos Aires, she worried about the Spanish-blooded women.
They are so beautiful! And I, far away and far from view, tremble at the idea that you might one day fall in love …
She was worried about his health.
Are your boils still giving you trouble? With that heat, it must …
She knew Jaquette.
I am writing to Jaquette to give her the recipe of the almond tart that you like so much …
‘Hadn’t she promised her husband that she wouldn’t see Saint-Hilaire again …? Listen to this … It was sent to this address:
‘ “What happiness, at once painful and ineffable, to see you in the distance at the Opéra … I love your greying temples, and that slight paunch lends you an unparalleled dignity … I was proud of you all evening …
‘ “It was only when I got back to Rue de Varenne and looked in my mirror that I was frightened. How could I have failed to disappoint you …? Women fade quickly, and I am nearly an old woman …” ’
Maigret and the Old People Page 4