It is no longer given to everyone to commission a portrait from a painter, but these days everyone has at least had the experience of being photographed. And I suppose everyone knows that sense of discomfort that seizes us when faced with an image of ourselves that is not quite right.
I hope what I am trying to say is understood. I feel somewhat ashamed to insist. I know I am touching on an essential, highly sensitive point and, unusually for me, I suddenly feel afraid of ridicule.
I think it would be more or less of no consequence to me if I were depicted in ways that are completely different from the way I really am, even to the point of verging on slander.
But I come back to the analogy of photography. The lens does not allow complete inaccuracy. The image is different without really being different. Faced with a photograph, you are sometimes incapable of putting your finger on the detail that shocks you, of saying exactly what is not you, what you do not recognize as yourself.
Well, for years, such was my situation in relation to Simenon’s Maigret, whom I could see growing every day by my side, to the point that people were eventually asking me in good faith if I had copied his mannerisms, others if my name was really my father’s name or if I had borrowed it from Simenon.
I have tried to explain as best I could how things happened at the beginning: innocently, without any sense that it might have consequences.
The very fact that the fellow to whom good old Xavier Guichard introduced me in his office one day was so young gave me no cause for suspicion, but rather made me somewhat dismissive.
But a few months later, I was well and truly caught in a mechanism from which I have never emerged, and the pages I am writing now will not save me from it entirely.
‘What are you complaining about? You’re famous!’
I know! I know! People say that when they have not been through it. I even concede that there are times, and certain circumstances, when it is not unpleasant. Not just because it boosts my self-esteem, but often for practical reasons: being able to get a good seat in a train or a crowded restaurant, not having to queue for things.
For many years, I did not object, any more than I demanded apologies from the newspapers.
Nor am I suddenly claiming that I was seething inside, or champing at the bit. That would be an exaggeration, and I hate exaggeration.
But I did promise myself that one day I would say what I have to say, with good humour and without any resentment, and that I would make things clear once and for all.
And that day has arrived.
Why is this book called Memoirs? I am not responsible for that, I repeat, and the word was not chosen by me.
I am not going to talk about Mestorino, or Landru, or the lawyer in the Massif Central who killed his victims by plunging them in a bath tub filled with quicklime.
No, what I am doing is simply confronting a character with a character, a truth with a truth.
• • •
I will explain immediately what some people mean by truth.
It was right at the beginning, at the time of that anthropometric ball which, along with some other more or less spectacular and tasteful manifestations, launched what were already being called the first Maigrets, two books entitled The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien and The Late Monsieur Gallet.
I shall not conceal the fact that I read both books immediately. And I can still see Simenon coming into my office the next day, pleased with himself, displaying even more self-confidence, if possible, than before, but nevertheless with a touch of anxiety in his eyes.
‘I know what you’re going to say!’ he cried even before I could open my mouth.
He began pacing up and down.
‘I know the books are filled with technical errors,’ he went on. ‘There’s no point counting them. They’re quite deliberate, and I’ll tell you why.’
I did not register everything he said, but I remember the essential phrase, which he often repeated to me subsequently, with a satisfaction verging on sadism:
‘The truth never seems true. I don’t just mean in literature or painting. Do I even need to mention Doric columns? We think they’re absolutely straight, but they only give that impression because they’re slightly bent. If they were straight, our eyes would see them as bulging outwards.’
In those days, he still liked to show off his erudition.
‘Tell anyone a story. If you don’t organize it, it’ll be considered incredible, artificial. Organize it, and it’ll seem truer than life.’
He trumpeted these last words as if they were a sensational discovery.
‘Making it seem truer than life, that’s the crux of it. Well, I’ve made you truer than life.’
I was speechless. In the heat of the moment, the poor chief inspector that I was, the chief inspector who was ‘less true than life’, could find nothing to say in reply.
And with an abundance of gestures and a hint of a Belgian accent, he went on to demonstrate to me that my investigations, as he had told them, were more plausible – did he actually say ‘more accurate’? – than the way I had experienced them.
During our first encounters in the autumn, he had not been lacking in self-confidence. Now, thanks to his success, he was brimming over with it, he had enough to give away to all the timorous people in the world.
‘Let me explain . . . In a real investigation, there are sometimes fifty officers, maybe even more, involved in searching for the culprit. It’s not just you and your inspectors following leads. The police and the gendarmerie throughout the country are alerted. A watch is kept on the stations, in the ports, at the borders. Not to mention the informers, let alone the amateurs who join in the game.
‘Try, in the two hundred or two hundred and fifty pages of a novel, to give a more or less faithful account of all that activity! A multi-volume saga wouldn’t be enough, and after a few chapters, the reader would get totally confused and be put off.
‘But in real life, who is there every morning to stop things getting confused, who is there to put everyone in their places and concentrate on the crucial lead?’
He looked me up and down triumphantly.
‘It’s you, as you know perfectly well. It’s the person leading the investigation. I’m well aware that a chief inspector in the Police Judiciaire, the head of a special squad, doesn’t run around the streets in person questioning concierges and bar owners.
‘And I’m also aware that, except in exceptional cases, you don’t spend your nights pacing deserted streets in the rain, waiting for a light to come on in a window, or a door to open.
‘All the same, it’s exactly as if you were there yourself, aren’t I right?’
What could I say to that? From a certain point of view, it was logical.
‘Simplification! The first quality, the essential quality of a truth is to be simple. And I’ve simplified. I’ve reduced the machinery around you to its simplest expression, but the result hasn’t changed anything at all.
‘Instead of fifty more or less anonymous inspectors running around in confusion, I’ve kept just three or four, each with his own personality.’
‘The others aren’t happy,’ I tried to object.
‘I’m not writing for a few dozen officers in the Police Judiciaire. If you write a book about teachers, whatever you do you’re bound to upset tens of thousands of teachers. It’d be the same if you wrote about stationmasters or typists. Where were we?’
‘The different kinds of truths.’
‘I was trying to demonstrate to you that mine is the only valid one. Would you like another example? There’s no need to have spent the days I’ve spent in this building to know that the Police Judiciaire, being part of the Prefecture of Police, can only operate within the boundaries of Paris, and by extension, in some cases, in the Department of the Seine.
‘But in The Late Monsieur Gallet I write about an investigation that took place in the centre of France.
‘Have you been there, yes or no?’
Of course, I had.
‘It’s true, I have been there, but at a time when—’
‘At a time when, for a while, you worked, not for the Police Judiciaire, but for the Sûreté. Why bother the reader with these bureaucratic niceties?
‘Should I explain at the beginning of each book: “This happened in such and such a year, when Maigret was attached to such and such a department”?
‘Let me finish . . .’
He knew he was about to touch on a sensitive subject, but would not let go.
‘In your habits, in your attitudes, in your character, where do you most belong? Are you a man of Quai des Orfèvres, or a man of Rue des Saussaies?’
I beg pardon of my colleagues in the Sûreté, among whom I have some good friends, but I am not telling anyone anything new in admitting that there is, let us say, at the very least a rivalry between the two houses, the Police Judiciaire on Quai des Orfèvres and the Sûreté in Rue des Saussaies.
Let us also admit something that Simenon had grasped from the start, which is that at that time in particular there were two quite different types of police officer.
The men of Rue des Saussaies, who report directly to the Minister of the Interior, find themselves, by the force of things, handling political matters.
I do not hold it against them. I simply confess that, as far as I am concerned, I prefer not to have to deal with such things.
Our field of activity at Quai des Orfèvres may be more restrictive, more down to earth. We are concerned with villains of all kinds, with everything that comes within the concept of a criminal investigation department.
‘You’ll concede that you’re a man of the Quai. You’re proud of it. Well, I’ve made you a man of the Quai. I’ve tried to make you the embodiment of it. Should I, for the sake of accuracy, because I know you’re obsessed with accuracy, confuse that image by pointing out that in a particular year, for complicated reasons, you temporarily switched to the other house, which allowed you to work in the four corners of France?’
‘But—’
‘One moment. The first day I met you, I told you I wasn’t a journalist, but a novelist, and I remember promising Monsieur Guichard that my books would never contain any indiscretions that might cause his department problems.’
‘I know, but—’
‘Wait, Maigret, for heaven’s sake!’
It was the first time he had called me that. It was also the first time this young man had shut me up.
‘I’ve changed the names, except for yours and those of two or three of your colleagues. I’ve also taken care to change the locations. Often I’ve even taken the precaution of changing the characters’ family relationships.
‘I’ve simplified. Sometimes I’ve left only one interrogation, where you must have carried out four or five, only two or three avenues of inquiry where you may at first have been faced with ten of them.
‘I claim that I’m the one who’s right, that my truth is the right one. I’ve brought you proof.’
He pointed to a pile of books he had placed on my desk when he arrived and to which I had not paid any attention.
‘These are the books written by specialists in police matters over the last twenty years, true stories, the kind of truth you like.
‘Read them. You know most of the cases these books talk about in detail.
‘Well, I bet you won’t recognize them, precisely because the concern for objectivity falsifies the truth, which is always, which must always be simple.
‘And now . . .’
At this point, I’d like to get straight down to my confession. It was at that precise moment that I realized what was really bothering me.
He was right, for heaven’s sake, on all the points he had just enumerated. It hardly mattered to me, any more than it did to him, that he had reduced the number of inspectors, or that he had me spending my nights in the rain instead of them, or that, deliberately or not, he had mixed up the Sûreté with the Police Judiciaire.
The thing that shocked me, when it came down to it, the thing I did not yet want to admit to myself, was . . .
My God, how difficult this is! Remember what I said about the man looking at his photograph.
Let us take just the question of the bowler hat. Too bad if I look ridiculous when I confess that this stupid detail caused me more upset than all the others.
When young Sim came to Quai des Orfèvres for the first time, I still had a bowler hat in my wardrobe, but I only wore it on rare occasions: for funerals or official ceremonies.
Now it so happens that a photograph was hanging in my office, taken some years earlier during some conference or other, in which I was shown wearing that damned hat.
As a consequence of which I still hear, when I am introduced to people who have never seen me:
‘Oh, you’ve changed your hat!’
As for the famous overcoat with the velvet collar, it was not to me but to my wife that Simenon was eventually to furnish an explanation.
I did have one, I admit. I even had several, like all men of my generation. I may well have taken down one of those old coats on a cold rainy day in or around 1927.
I am no dandy. I do not care much for elegance. But perhaps because of that, I hate standing out. And my little Jewish tailor in Rue de Turenne is no more desirous than I am of people turning to look at me in the street.
‘Is it my fault I see you like that?’ Simenon could have replied, like a painter giving his sitter a lopsided nose or a squint.
Only the sitter in question is not forced to spend his whole life face to face with his portrait, and there are not thousands of people believing for ever more that he has a lopsided nose or a squint.
I did not say all this to him that morning. Modestly, I made do with looking away and saying, ‘Did you really have to simplify me too?’
‘At first, yes. The public has to get used to you, to your outline, your walk. I think I’ve just found the word. For the moment, you’re still nothing but an outline, a back, a pipe, a way of walking, of grunting.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The details will appear little by little, you’ll see. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but gradually you’ll become subtler, more complex, more alive.’
‘That’s reassuring.’
‘For example, you don’t yet have a home life, even though Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and Madame Maigret constitute at least half of your existence. All you’ve done so far is phone home, but we’ll see you there.’
‘In my dressing gown and slippers?’
‘Even in bed.’
‘I wear nightshirts,’ I said ironically.
‘I know. That’s the perfect touch. Even if you’d switched to pyjamas, I’d have given you a nightshirt.’
I wonder how this conversation would have finished – probably with an argument – if I had not been told that a petty informer from Rue Pigalle was asking to speak to me.
‘So all in all,’ I said to Simenon as he held out his hand, ‘you’re pleased with yourself.’
‘Not yet, but it’ll come.’
Could I have told him that I forbade him to use my name from now on? Legally, yes. And that would have given rise to what is known as a very Parisian trial, which would only have made me look ridiculous.
The character would have been called something else. But he would still have been me, or more precisely that simplified version of me, which, if his author was to be believed, would gradually become more complex.
The worst of it was that the fellow was not mistaken and that each month, for years, I would open a book with a photographic cover and find a Maigret who was more and more like me.
If only he had stayed in books! But the cinema would soon join in, and later the radio and the television.
It is a strange feeling to see up there on the screen, coming and going, talking, wiping his nose, a man who claims to be you, who has a number of your mannerisms, says things you have said, in situations you have experi
enced, sometimes in settings which have been meticulously reconstructed.
With the first screen Maigret, Pierre Renoir, the result was more or less convincing. I was made a little taller, a little thinner. The face, of course, was different, but some bits of behaviour were so striking that I suspect the actor may have observed me without my noticing.
A few months later, I was twenty centimetres shorter, and what I lost in height I gained in girth, becoming, as played by Abel Tarride, a fat, easy-going fellow, so soft that I looked like a balloon animal about to fly up to the ceiling. Not to mention the knowing winks with which I underlined how clever I was!
I did not stay to the end of the film, and my troubles were not over.
Harry Baur was doubtless a great actor, but he was a good twenty years older than me at the time, with a face that was both soft and tragic.
Let us move on!
Much later, having previously aged twenty years, I grew almost twenty years younger, in the shape of an actor named Préjean, whom I do not blame in the slightest – any more than I blame the others – but who looked much more like some young inspectors today than those of my generation.
Last but not least, I have recently been inflated again, inflated to the point of exploding, and simultaneously, in the guise of Charles Laughton, made to speak English as if it were my mother tongue.
Well, of all of them, there was at least one who had the good taste to go behind Simenon’s back and discover that my truth was better than his.
It was Pierre Renoir, who did not have a bowler hat on his head, but wore a quite ordinary soft hat and clothes such as any public official would wear, whether or not he was in the police.
I realize I have spoken only of unimportant details, a hat, a coat, a coal stove, probably because it is those details that shocked me first.
We are not surprised when we grow up and then become old. But a man simply has to cut off the ends of his moustache and he will cease to recognize himself.
To be honest, I prefer to deal with what I consider small weaknesses, before comparing the two characters in depth.
If Simenon is right, which is quite possible, mine will start to seem colourless and insubstantial beside his famous simplified – or organized – truth, and I will look like a bad-tempered man re-touching his own portrait.
Maigret's Memoirs Page 3