Now that I have started, with clothes, I have to continue, if only for my own peace of mind.
Simenon asked me recently – by the way, he too has changed from the young man I encountered in Xavier Guichard’s office – Simenon asked me, in a somewhat mocking tone:
‘Well? How’s the new Maigret coming along?’
I tried to reply with the words he had once used.
‘He’s taking shape! He’s still just an outline. A hat. A coat. But it’s his real hat. His real coat! Maybe the rest will come gradually, and he’ll have two arms, two legs, maybe even a face? Maybe he’ll start to think for himself, without the help of a novelist.’
By the way, Simenon is now more or less the same age I was when we first met. At that time, he had a tendency to consider me as a mature, or even old, man.
I did not ask him what he thought about that today, but I could not help remarking:
‘Do you know, with the years you’ve started walking, smoking a pipe, even talking like your Maigret?’
Which is true, and which gives me – I hope the reader will grant me that – a quite delicious feeling of revenge.
It is rather as if, late in the day, he was starting to think he was me!
3.
In which I will try to speak about a bearded doctor who influenced the life of my family and perhaps, when it comes down to it, my choice of career
I do not know if I will find the right tone this time. This morning, I have already filled my waste-paper basket with torn-up pages.
And last night I was on the point of giving up. As my wife read what I had written during the day, I watched her while pretending to read the newspaper, as usual. After a while, I had the impression something had startled her, and from then until the end, she kept throwing me surprised, almost pained little glances.
Instead of speaking to me immediately, she walked silently to the drawer and put the manuscript away. It was a while before she said, making an effort to keep her comment as light as possible:
‘It sounds as if you don’t like him.’
There was no need to ask her who she meant, and now it was my turn not to understand, to look at her wide-eyed.
‘What are you talking about?’ I exclaimed. ‘Since when has Simenon stopped being our friend?’
‘Yes, obviously . . .’
Trying to recall what I had written, I wondered what it was she might have at the back of her mind.
‘I might be wrong,’ she said. ‘I must be wrong, since you say so. But I had the impression, reading some passages, that you were expressing a genuine resentment. Please don’t get me wrong. Not the big kind of resentment we admit to. Something more muted, more . . .’
She didn’t add the word – I did it for her: ‘ . . . More shameful . . .’
I can honestly say that, in writing, that was far from my intention. Not only had I always had the most cordial relations with Simenon, but he had soon become a family friend, and the few times we went away in the summer it was almost always to visit him in his successive residences when he was still living in France: in Alsace, on Porquerolles, in the Charente, in the Vendée, and Lord knows where else. More recently, when I agreed to go on a semi-official tour of the United States, it may have been because I knew I could see him in Arizona, where he was then living.
‘I swear to you . . .’ I began gravely.
‘I believe you. It’s the readers who may not.’
It is my fault, I am convinced of it. I am not very good at irony, and I realize that when I attempt it, it must seem quite heavy. Out of a kind of modesty, I have actually been trying to handle a difficult subject, one that is somewhat wounding to my pride, in a fairly light-hearted manner.
In short, what I have been trying to do is nothing more, nothing less than to adjust one image to another image, a character, not to its shadow, but to its double. And Simenon was the very first to encourage me in this undertaking.
To soothe my wife, who is almost fiercely loyal in her friendships, I hasten to say that Simenon, as I said yesterday in other terms, because I was joking, is nothing like the young man whose aggressive self-confidence sometimes made me raise an eyebrow. On the contrary, it is he who has now grown deliberately taciturn and speaks with a certain hesitation, especially about the subjects closest to his heart, fearing to make assertions, looking – I would swear – for my approval.
Having said that, will I tease him again? A little bit, in spite of everything. It will probably be the last time. The opportunity is too good to miss.
In the forty or so books he has devoted to my investigations, there may well be only about twenty references to my background or my family: a few words about my father and his profession as an estate manager, a mention of the school in Nantes where I studied for a while, some very brief allusions to my two years as a medical student.
This, of course, is the same man who needed nearly eight hundred pages to recount his childhood up until the age of sixteen. Little matter that he did it in the form of a novel, or whether his characters were accurate or not, he seemed to believe that his hero was only complete when surrounded by his parents and grandparents, his uncles and his aunts, whose every fault, illness, little vice and tumour he reports to us. Even his neighbour’s dog gets half a page.
I am not complaining. The only reason I am pointing this out is that it is an indirect way of defending myself in advance from the accusation that might be made that I am spending too much time talking about my family.
As far as I am concerned, a man without a past is not completely a man. In the course of certain investigations, I have sometimes paid more attention to a suspect’s family and entourage than to the suspect himself, and it is often in this way that I have discovered the key to what might otherwise have remained a mystery.
It has been said, correctly, that I was born in the centre of France, not far from Moulins, but I do not recall it having been made clear that the estate of which my father was the manager was a property of three thousand hectares, on which there were no fewer than twenty-six smallholdings.
Not only was my grandfather, whom I knew, one of the tenant farmers who worked these smallholdings, but he was the descendant of at least three generations of Maigrets who had tilled the same land.
When my father was young, a typhus epidemic decimated the family, which included seven or eight children, leaving only two survivors, my father and one sister, who would later marry a baker and move to Nantes.
Why did my father go to the secondary school in Moulins, thus breaking with such long-established traditions? I have every reason to believe that the village priest took an interest in him. But it was not a complete break with the land, because, after two years in a school of agriculture, he came back to the village and went into service at the chateau as assistant estate manager.
I still feel a certain embarrassment talking about him. I have the impression, in fact, that people say to each other:
‘The image he’s kept of his parents is the kind of image we have of our parents when we’re children.’
And for a long time, I wondered if I was mistaken, if my critical spirit might have been at fault.
But I have sometimes met other men like him, especially among those of his generation, most of them in the same social position, a position that might be called intermediate.
For my grandfather, the people in the chateau – their rights, their privileges, their behaviour – were not up for discussion. What he thought about them deep down, I never knew. I was still young when he died. I nevertheless remain convinced, remembering certain looks, and, in particular, certain silences, that his approval was not passive, that it was not even always approval, or resignation, but that it derived, on the contrary, from a certain pride, and above all from a very strong sense of duty.
It was that feeling that endured in men like my father, combined with a reserve, a need for decency that might have seemed like resignation.
I can still picture hi
m very well. I have kept photographs of him. He was very tall, very thin, and his thinness was exaggerated by narrow trousers covered until just below the knee by leather gaiters. I always saw my father in leather gaiters. It was a kind of uniform for him. He did not have a beard, but long reddish-blond whiskers in which, when he came home in winter, I felt little ice crystals as I kissed him.
Our house was in the courtyard of the chateau, a pretty two-storey pink brick house, which stood out from the low buildings where the families of valets, grooms and guards lived, men whose wives mostly worked in the chateau as laundresses, dressmakers or kitchen maids.
In that courtyard, my father was a kind of monarch, to whom the men spoke with respect, doffing their caps.
About once a week, soon after nightfall, sometimes as early as dusk, he would set off in his cart with one or more tenant farmers for some distant fair, to buy or sell animals. He would not return until the following evening.
His office was in a separate building. On the walls were photographs of prize bulls and horses, calendars of fairs and, almost always, drying as the year went on, the finest sheaf of corn gathered on the estate.
At about ten o’clock, he would cross the courtyard and enter a world apart. Walking around the outside of the buildings, he would climb the large front steps, beyond which the farmers never went, and spend a certain time within the thick walls of the chateau.
In a way, it was an equivalent for him of what the morning report is for us in the Police Judiciaire, and, as a child, I was proud to see him climbing that prestigious flight of steps, looking very erect and without a trace of servility.
He spoke little, and rarely laughed, but when he did you were surprised to discover how young, almost childish, his laughter was, and to see him amused by quite silly jokes.
He did not drink, unlike most of the people I knew. At each meal, a little carafe reserved for him would be put on the table, half filled with a light white wine harvested on the estate, and I never saw him have anything else, even at weddings and funerals. And at fairs, where he was obliged to frequent the inns, he was automatically brought a cup of coffee, to which he was partial.
In my eyes, he was a man, and more specifically a man of a certain age. I was five years old when my grandfather died. As for my maternal grandparents, they lived more than fifty kilometres away, and we only visited them twice a year so that I did not really know them. They were not farmers. They owned a grocery in quite a large town, with a bar attached to it, as is often the case in the country.
I could not say for sure today, but that may well have been the reason our relations with the in-laws were not closer.
I was just under eight when I finally noticed that my mother was pregnant. Through whispers and words caught by chance, I more or less grasped that the pregnancy was unexpected, that after my birth the doctors had decreed that any more children were unlikely.
I reconstructed most of this later, piece by piece, which I suppose is always the way with childhood memories.
At that time, in the next village, which was larger than ours, there was a doctor with a pointed red beard named Gadelle – Victor Gadelle, if I am not mistaken – of whom people did not speak much, and almost always with an air of mystery. It may have been because of his beard, and also because of everything that was said about him, but I think I almost thought of him as some kind of devil.
There was a tragedy in his life, a real tragedy, the first I had ever heard about and one that made a great impression on me, especially as it was to have a profound influence on our family, and through that, on my entire life.
Gadelle drank. He drank more than any of the local farmers, not only from time to time, but every day, starting in the morning and only finishing at night. He drank enough to spread a smell of alcohol through a warm room, a smell that always filled me with disgust.
In addition, he did not take much care of his appearance. It might even be said that he was dirty.
How, in such circumstances, could he be my father’s friend? That was a mystery to me. But the fact is that he often came to our house and chatted with him, and there was even a ritual: as soon as he arrived, a decanter of brandy which was reserved only for him was taken from the windowed dresser.
Of the first tragedy, I knew almost nothing at the time. Dr Gadelle’s wife had fallen pregnant, for what must have been for the sixth or seventh time. To me, she was already an old woman, although she was probably only about forty.
What happened the day she went into labour? Apparently, Gadelle got home even drunker than usual, and as he sat by his wife’s bedside, waiting for the delivery, he continued to drink.
The wait was longer than normal. The children had been taken to the neighbours. Towards morning, as nothing was happening, the sister-in-law, who had spent the night in the house, had left to check how things were in her own home.
It seems there were screams, a lot of commotion, a lot of movement in the doctor’s house.
When they went in, Gadelle was weeping in a corner. His wife was dead. So was the child.
And, for a long time afterwards, I would still catch the local gossips whispering in each other’s ears, with indignant or dismayed expressions:
‘A real bloodbath!’
• • •
For months the Gadelle case was the subject of all conversations. As was only to be expected, it divided the area into two camps.
Some – and there were many of them – went to the town, which was then a real journey, to see another doctor, while others, indifferent or still trusting in spite of it all, continued to call Gadelle.
My father never confided in me about the subject. I am therefore reduced to speculating.
What I know for certain is that Gadelle never stopped coming to see us. He would come in just as in the past, in the course of his rounds, and the routine was still observed of placing the famous decanter with the gilded edge in front of him.
He drank less, though. It was said that he was no longer seen drunk. One night, in the most distant of the smallholdings, he was called out to a labour and acquitted himself honourably. On his way home, he dropped into our house, but I remember that he was very pale. I can see my father shaking his hand with an insistence that was not in his nature, as if to encourage him, as if to tell him, ‘You see, it wasn’t hopeless.’
Because my father never despaired of people. I never heard him utter an irrevocable judgement, even when the black sheep of the estate, a loud-mouthed tenant farmer whose embezzling he must have reported to the chateau, accused him of some dishonest scheme or other.
In the case of Gadelle, if there had been nobody to hold out his hand to him after the death of his wife and child, he would have been lost.
My father did that. And when my mother was pregnant, a feeling I find hard to explain, but which I can understand, made him persevere.
Nevertheless, he took precautions. Twice in the later stages of her pregnancy, he took my mother to Moulins to see a specialist.
The time came. A stable boy rode out to fetch the doctor some time in the middle of the night. I was not made to leave the house, but remained shut in my room, terribly upset, even though, like all country children, I had a certain knowledge of these things even when I was young.
My mother died at seven in the morning, as day was breaking, and when I went downstairs the first object that attracted my attention, in spite of my emotion, was the decanter on the dining-room table.
I remained an only child. A local girl moved into the house to do the chores and take care of me. I never saw Dr Gadelle cross our threshold after that, nor did I ever hear my father say a word about him.
A very grey, confused period followed this tragedy. I was going to the village school. My father spoke less and less. He was thirty-two years old, and it is only now that I realize how young he was.
I made no objection when I turned twelve and it was decided to send me to the secondary school in Moulins – as a boarder, because it
was impossible to take me there every day.
I only spent a few months there. I was unhappy, a complete stranger in a new world that seemed hostile. I did not tell my father, who would bring me back home every Saturday evening. I never complained.
But he must have understood, because in the Easter holidays, his sister, whose husband had opened a bakery in Nantes, suddenly came to see us and I realized that a plan had been hatched through letters.
My aunt, who had a very pink complexion, was starting to thicken out. She had no children, which was a source of distress to her.
For several days, she hovered awkwardly around me as if to tame me.
She told me about Nantes, their house near the harbour, the nice smell of bread, her husband who spent all night in his bakehouse and slept during the day.
She was very cheerful. I had guessed. I was resigned. Or more precisely, because I do not like that word, I accepted.
My father and I had a long conversation, walking in the country one Sunday morning after mass. It was the first time he had spoken to me as if I was a man. We talked about my future, how there was no way I could study in the village, and how, if I remained a boarder, I would lack a normal family life.
I know now what he was thinking. He realized that the company of a man like him, who had withdrawn into himself and lived mostly with his own thoughts, was not desirable for a boy who still expected everything of life.
I left with my aunt, a big trunk jogging up and down behind us, in the cart that took us to the railway station.
My father shed no tears. Neither did I.
• • •
That is pretty much all I know about him. For years, in Nantes, I was the baker’s nephew, and I almost became accustomed to the man whose hairy chest I saw every day in the glowing light of the oven.
I spent all my holidays with my father. I would not go so far as to say that we were strangers to each other. But I had my own life, my own ambitions, my own problems.
Maigret's Memoirs Page 4