Fifty years after the first novel dedicated to the figure and investigations of Inspector Maigret, “Pietr le Latvian”, Georges Simenon wrote this “Lettre à Monsieur et Madame Maigret”, published in “Le Nouvel illustré” on October 3, 1979, then as a preface to “La Première Enquéte de Maigret” (Edito-service, Geneva, 1980), and finally published in “Adelphiana, 1963-2013” “Dear Maigret, I imagine you will be surprised to receive a letter from me, since it has been about seven years since we last saw each other. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the day we first met, in Delfzij. At the time, you were about forty-five. I was twenty-five. After that, however, for a long time you were fortunate not to age. Only at the end of our adventures and our periodic meetings did you reach fifty-three, because At that time, police officers retired at fifty-five, and this also applied to a Chief Commissioner of the Judicial Police like you.” Simenon extends his happy anniversary wishes to his creation, a policeman who has become immortal, always able to unravel intricate skeins, delicate cases and to descend into the depths of the human soul and rise to the surface with the right answers to mysteries that seem unfathomable.
At the cinema
Here's the everlasting Maigret on film. The inspector is played by Denis Podalydès, straight from the Comédie-Française, in Pascal Bonitzer's "Maigret: Love and Death." The film is based on "Maigret and the Old Gentlemen," Georges Simenon's fifty-sixth detective novel, written in June 1960 and published the same year. Berthier-Lagès, a former ambassador, is shot dead in his Parisian apartment. He had cultivated a fifty-year platonic relationship with a noblewoman, Isabelle. Another female figure takes center stage: the elderly housekeeper Jaquette Larrieu, and suspicion centers on her. The commissioner, with offices on Rue des Orfèvres, must unravel a mystery woven of complicity, silence, private vices, and public virtues. The setting is high society, which builds a wall of unspeakable secrets that the policeman seeks to tear down. There's a substantial legacy, and not just in the narrative twists. In Simenon's plot, interest in the characters and their personalities seems to prevail over the search for the culprit. Everyone is observed by Maigret with his usual acuity. In this film version, cell phones are used, Paris is even more modern, and technology is an integral part of social and economic life. We're at the beginning of this century. But Maigret, with his inseparable pipe, elegant, and a lover of good wine and fine cuisine, seems stuck in his time, in an old-fashioned investigation reliant on intuition and experience. Podalydes arrives after so many legendary figures: Harry Baur, Michel Simon, Jean Gabin, Bruno Cremer, and Gino Cervi in Italy. And, more recently, Gérard Depardieu in the 2022 film directed by Patrice Leconte. This Maigret is always good and reliable. And he seems to have understood everything beyond appearances.
The City of Light
The film's extraordinary backdrop is Paris. There's the Place Dauphine, a seventeenth-century square built by Henry IV in honor of his son, the future King Louis XIII, one of the most beautiful in the City of Light, and the Canal Saint-Martin, an unmissable destination for any stroll through the arrondissements of the French capital. With his wife, Louise, Maigret dines amiably at a bistro, Paul Bert, near the Bastille, which attracts a growing number of gourmets, not just French ones. Simenon's best wishes to his inspector: "I wanted to wish you and Madame Maigret a happy anniversary. Tell her that thanks to a certain Courtine, who could rightfully claim the title of king of gastronomes, your recipes have traveled the world over, and that, for example, in Japan or South America, there are gourmets who never fail to add a drop of plum brandy to their coq au vin. As for those who succeeded you at the Quai des Orfèvres, dear Maigret, know that many have adopted your way of conducting investigations, and even your obsessions, and some of them, after retiring, have written their memoirs, following their names with the phrase: 'alias Inspector Maigret.' It is a fully deserved tribute. I embrace you with deep emotion, you and Madame Maigret, who probably doesn't suspect that many women envy her, that many men wish they had married a... woman like her and that, among others, there is a charming Japanese woman who plays her character in a television series, while a Japanese man takes on her role as commissioner.
Affectionately,
Georges Simenon