‘You should speak to Louise. You’re not being polite.’
It was he who, when we left, always insisted:
‘You’re wrong to think she isn’t interested in you. On the contrary, she likes you very much. She always asks me questions about you.’
Towards Christmas, the girl who squinted became engaged to the pianist, and they were no longer seen on Boulevard Beaumarchais.
I do not know if Louise’s attitude was beginning to discourage the others, or if we had been less discreet than we thought we were. The fact remains that, every Friday, there were fewer and fewer people in Anselme and Géraldine’s apartment.
The big heart to heart with Jubert took place in February, in my room. That Friday, he was not in evening dress, I noticed it immediately. He had the bitter, resigned air associated with certain leading roles at the Comédie Française.
‘Even so, I still came to tie a knot in your cravat!’ he said with a grimace.
‘Aren’t you free?’
‘Oh, I’m completely free, as free as the air, freer than I’ve ever been before.’
And, standing in front of me, my white cravat in his hand, his eyes looking straight into mine:
‘Louise has told me everything.’
I was flabbergasted. Because she had not yet said anything to me. Nor had I said anything to her.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You and she.’
‘But—’
‘I asked her the question. I went to see her yesterday, specially.’
‘What question?’
‘I asked her if she wanted to marry me.’
‘Did she say no?’
‘She said no. She said she liked me a lot, that I’ll always be her best friend, but that—’
‘Did she talk to you about me?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘What, then?’
‘I understood! I should have understood right from the first evening, when you ate those petits fours and she looked at you so indulgently. When women look indulgently at a man who behaves the way you were behaving . . .’
Poor Jubert! We lost touch with him almost immediately, just as we lost touch with all those gentlemen from the Highways Department, apart from Uncle Léonard.
For years, we never knew what had become of him. I was nearly fifty when one day, on the Canebière in Marseilles, I went into a pharmacy to buy some aspirin. I had not read the name on the shopfront. I heard an exclamation:
‘Maigret!’
‘Jubert!’
‘What are you up to these days? No, that’s a stupid question, I’ve long known what you’re up to, thanks to the newspapers. How’s Louise?’
Then he told me about his eldest son, who, by a gentle irony of fate, was preparing his exam to get into the Highways Department.
• • •
With Jubert missing at Boulevard Beaumarchais, the Friday parties became even more poorly attended, and there was often now nobody to play the piano. On those occasions, it was Louise who played, and I turned the pages while a couple or two danced in the dining room, which had grown too large.
I do not think I asked Louise if she wanted to marry me. Most of the time, we spoke about my career, the police, the profession of inspector.
I told her how much I would earn when I was at last appointed to Quai des Orfèvres, adding that it would take at least another three years, and that until then, my income would be insufficient to maintain a household with dignity.
I also told her about the two or three conversations I had had with Xavier Guichard, already the chief, who had not forgotten my father and had more or less taken me under his wing.
‘I don’t know if you like Paris. Because you do realize I’ll be obliged to spend my whole life in Paris?’
‘But we can live as quietly here as in the provinces, can’t we?’
At last, one Friday, none of the guests was there, only Géraldine, who opened the door to me herself, dressed in black silk, and said to me with a certain solemnity, ‘Come in!’
Louise was not in the drawing room. There were no trays of cakes, no refreshments. Spring had come, and there was no fire in the hearth. It seemed to me that there was nothing to cling on to. I had kept my hat in my hand, embarrassed by my tailcoat and my polished shoes.
‘Tell me, young man, what are your intentions?’
It was probably one of the most difficult moments of my life. Her voice struck me as brusque and accusatory. I did not dare raise my eyes. Looking down at the leaf-patterned carpet, all I could see was the hem of a black dress, with the end of a very pointed shoe sticking out. My ears turned red.
‘I swear to you . . .’ I stammered.
‘I’m not asking you to swear. I’m asking if you intend to marry her.’
I looked at her at last, and I do not think I have ever seen an old woman’s face express so much affectionate mischief.
‘Of course!’
Apparently – or so I have been told subsequently – I sprang up like a jack-in-the-box and repeated in an even louder voice:
‘Of course I do!’
And almost yelled, a third time:
‘Of course, for heaven’s sake!’
She did not even raise her voice to call: ‘Louise!’
Louise, who had been standing behind a half-open door, now came in, quite shyly, her face as red as mine.
‘What did I tell you?’ her aunt asked.
‘Why?’ I cut in. ‘Didn’t you believe it?’
‘I wasn’t sure. It was my aunt . . .’
Let us move on, because I am convinced the marital censorship board would cut the passage anyway.
As for old Léonard, I have to say that he showed less enthusiasm and never forgave me for not belonging to the Highways Department. Almost a hundred years old, rooted to his armchair by his infirmities, he would shake his head as he looked at me, as if there was something not quite right about the way the world functioned these days.
‘You’ll have to take some leave to go to Colmar. What about the Easter holidays?’
It was old Géraldine who wrote to Louise’s parents, several times – to prepare them for the shock, as she put it – announcing the news to them.
At Easter, I was given just forty-eight hours’ leave. I spent most of it on trains, which were not as fast then as they are now.
I was received correctly, without much enthusiasm.
‘The best way to know if your intentions are serious is to keep away from each other for a while. Louise will stay here this summer. In the autumn you can come back and see us.’
‘Am I allowed to write to her?’
‘As long as you don’t overdo it. Once a week, for example.’
It seems funny now. It certainly was not at the time.
I had vowed, without any ulterior motive, to have Jubert as my best man. When I went to see him at the pharmacy on Boulevard Saint-Michel, he was no longer there, and nobody knew what had become of him.
I spent part of the summer looking for an apartment and found the one on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir.
‘Just until something better comes along, you understand? When I’m made an inspector . . .’
5.
Which deals in a somewhat incoherent fashion with hobnailed boots, apaches, prostitutes, hot-air vents, pavements and railway stations
Some years ago now, some of us came up with the idea of starting a kind of club, more like a monthly dinner, which was to be called the Hobnailed Boots Dinner. We met for an aperitif at the Brasserie Dauphine to discuss who should or should not be allowed to join, including a quite serious debate about whether those from the other house – Rue des Saussaies – would be eligible.
Then, as was to be expected, things got no further. At the time, there were at least four of us, among the chief inspectors in the Police Judiciaire, to take a certain pride in the name ‘Hobnailed Boots’, which used to be applied to us by cabaret singers, and which some young inspectors just
out of the academy sometimes use among themselves about those veterans who have been through the mill.
The truth of it is that in the old days it took many years to earn one’s stripes, and exams were not enough. An inspector could not hope for promotion until he had slogged away in pretty much all the departments.
It is not easy to give the new generations a more or less accurate idea of what that meant.
‘Hobnailed boots’ and ‘big moustaches’: these words came quite naturally to people’s lips when they talked about the police.
To be honest, I too, for years, wore hobnailed boots. Not because I liked them. And not, as the cartoonists seemed to insinuate, because we considered such footwear the height of elegance and comfort, but for more down-to-earth reasons.
Two reasons, to be precise. The first was that with the wages we earned, we could only just make ends meet. I often hear people talk about the joyful, carefree early years of the century. Young people cite the prices of that period with envy: Havana cigars for two sous, dinner with wine and coffee for twenty sous.
What is forgotten is that at the beginning of his career, a public official earned just under a hundred francs.
When I was on the beat, I would tramp kilometres and kilometres of pavement in a day – often a thirteen- or fourteen-hour day – and in all weathers.
So that the problem of resoling my shoes was one of our first problems as a married couple. When I brought my pay envelope to my wife at the end of the month, she would arrange its contents into a number of little piles.
‘For the butcher . . . For the rent . . . For the gas . . .’
There was almost nothing left to make up the last pile of coins.
‘For your shoes.’
The dream was always to buy new ones, but for a long time that remained merely a dream. Often I went for weeks without admitting to her that between the nails, my soles, which had become porous, greedily drank in the water from the gutters.
I mention this here, not out of resentment, but rather in a cheerful spirit, because I think it is necessary in order to give an idea of the life of an ordinary police officer.
There were no taxis, and even if the streets had been full of them they would have been inaccessible to us, as were the carriages we only used on rare occasions.
In any case, the job of a policeman on the beat was precisely to walk the pavement, to be part of the crowd, from morning to night or from night to morning.
Why, when I think about it, do I have, above all, a memory of rain? One might think that for years, all it did was rain, or that the seasons were not the same in those days. It is obviously because the rain added a number of extra tribulations to the job. It was not only your shoes that got drenched. There were the shoulders of your cape, which were gradually transformed into cold compresses, your hat which dripped, your hands which turned blue and which you thrust deep into your pockets.
The streets were less well lit than they are now. In the outlying parts of the city, some of them were not even paved. After nightfall, the windows were yellow squares in the darkness, houses still being largely lit by gas, or even, in the case of the poorer dwellings, by candle.
And then there were the apaches.
It was the fashion, in the shadowy area around the old city walls, for some young men to flash their knives around, and not always for profit, to steal respectable people’s wallets or watches.
It was mainly a matter of proving to themselves that they were men, hard men, able to impress the young whores who plied their trade under the gas lamps in their pleated black skirts, their hair gathered into large buns.
We were not armed. Contrary to what the public imagines, a plainclothes policeman is not entitled to have a revolver in his pocket and if, in some cases, he does carry one, it is against regulations and he must take full responsibility for it.
Young officers could not afford that liberty. There were a certain number of streets, around La Villette, Ménilmontant and Porte d’Italie, which we would hesitate to enter, and where the noise of our own footsteps made our hearts pound.
A telephone, too, was for a long time beyond our means. If I happened to be delayed by several hours, there was no way I could call my wife to let her know, and she would spend solitary evenings under the light of the gas mantle in our dining room, listening out for sounds on the staircase and reheating the same dinner four or five times.
As for the moustaches given us by the cartoonists, they are also true. After all, a man without a moustache could easily pass for a servant.
I had rather a long, mahogany-coloured moustache, a little darker than my father’s, with tapered ends. Subsequently, it got shorter, until it was no more than a toothbrush, before disappearing completely.
It is a fact that most of the inspectors had big black waxed moustaches, the kind you see in the cartoons. That is because over quite a long period of time, for some mysterious reason, the profession mainly attracted men from the Massif Central.
There are few streets in Paris I did not tramp, always on the alert, and I got to know all the street people: from the beggar, the organ grinder and the flower seller to the specialist in the three-card trick and the pickpocket, by way of the prostitute and the drunk old woman who spent most of her nights in police stations.
I ‘did’ Les Halles at night, Place Maubert, the riverbanks.
I also ‘did’ the crowds, which was a major task, at street fairs like the Foire du Trône and the Foire de Neuilly, the races at Longchamp, patriotic demonstrations, military parades, the visits of foreign monarchs, processions of coaches, travelling circuses, the flea market.
After a few months, a few years of this profession, you have an extensive repertoire of figures and faces in your head, and they stay engraved there for ever.
Difficult as it may be, I should like to give a more or less accurate idea of our relations with this clientele, including those we periodically found ourselves taking to the cells.
Needless to say, the picturesque aspect soon ceased to exist for us. Inevitably, we looked at the streets of Paris with a professional eye, which hooks on to certain familiar details, seizes this or that peculiarity and draws conclusions.
What strikes me most, as I write about this subject, are the bonds that develop between the policeman and those it is his job to track down. Above all, except in certain rare cases, there is an absolute absence of hatred in the policeman, or even of resentment.
An absence of pity, too, in the sense in which we generally use that word.
Our relations are, if you like, strictly professional.
As can easily be imagined, we see too much to be surprised any longer by some people’s misfortunes or their perversions. We do not feel angry about the latter, but nor, when confronted by the former, does our heart bleed, as may happen to the uninformed layman.
What does exist, and what Simenon has tried unsuccessfully to convey, is, paradoxical as it may seem, a kind of family spirit.
Please do not think I am saying something I am not. We are on opposite sides of the barricade, that much is clear. But to a certain extent, we are also in the same boat.
The prostitute on Boulevard de Clichy and the inspector watching her both have bad shoes and aching feet after walking up and down kilometres of pavement. They have to suffer the same rain, the same icy wind. They both see the night in the same way, both have an identical insight into the hidden aspects of the crowd streaming past them.
It is the same in a fair where the pickpocket makes his way among this crowd. To him, a fair, or any gathering of some hundreds of individuals, means not enjoyment, wooden horses, circus tents, gingerbread, but a certain number of wallets in innocent pockets.
To the policeman, too. And both can spot at a glance the self-satisfied provincial who will make the ideal victim.
The number of times I followed some pickpocket of my acquaintance for hours on end! The one we called the String, for example. He knew I was on his heels, watching ev
erything he did. He knew that I knew. On my side, I knew that he knew I was there.
His job was to appropriate a wallet or a watch, despite everything, and mine was to stop him or to catch him in the act.
Well, the String would sometimes turn and smile at me, and I would smile back. He would sigh and say, ‘It’s going to be hard!’
I was not unaware that he was flat broke, that he would only eat that evening if he succeeded.
Nor was he unaware that I only earned a hundred francs a month, wore shoes with holes in them, and that my wife was waiting impatiently for me.
I arrested him at least ten times, with a pleasant ‘Got you!’
And he was almost as relieved as I was. It meant that he would eat at the police station and sleep with a roof over his head. There are some who know the house so well that they ask, ‘Who’s on duty tonight?’
Because some people let them smoke and others do not.
For the next year and a half, I thought back to the pavements as an ideal place, because I had been assigned to the department stores.
Instead of the rain and the cold, the sun, the dust, I spent my days in an overheated atmosphere that smelled of Cheviot wool, unbleached cotton, linoleum and mercerized thread.
In those days, at intervals in the aisles between the counters, there were hot-air vents, which sent blasts of hot dry air up your body. That was really nice when you arrived wet. You would stand over a hot-air vent and immediately give off a cloud of steam.
After a few hours, you would prefer to remain near the doors, which let in a little oxygen each time they opened.
It was important to act naturally. To act as if you were a customer! Easier said than done, when a whole floor is filled with nothing but corsets, women’s underwear or skeins of silk!
‘Would you mind following me? Please don’t make a fuss.’
Some understood immediately and went with us to the manager’s office without a word. Others would react indignantly, start shouting, even throw a tantrum.
Maigret's Memoirs Page 7