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Paris...The Maigret Forum This is not a static website. It changes almost daily. The Maigret "Forum," an open bulletin board for notices, opinions, information and discussion related to Maigret and Simenon, has become the most active feature of this site. It's where new books, websites, articles and features are first announced and displayed, and includes an indexed archive of the entire past Forum... back to 1997!
Click here for the current Forum.
Here's a recent sample -
Maigret of the Month: Maigret et l'affaire Nahour (Maigret and the Nahour Case)
6/16/09 –
1. A story of Jules...
The novel opens with a phone call which awakens Maigret in the middle of the night. Since he has a hard time extracting himself for the unpleasant dream in which he is immersed, his wife has to call him. And she calls him by his first name, which is rare – in fact, she has rather the habit of calling him by his family name. Let's see what the corpus shows us...
• From the first dialogue (from the point of view of the chronology of the corpus, not the internal chronology of the biography of the Chief Inspector) between Maigret and his wife, she calls him by his family name: "'Tell me, Maigret...' she said when she came back." (LET, Ch. 19, Maigret returning after Pietr's suicide.) [N.B. In Daphne Woodward's (Penguin) translation: "'Tell me, dear...' she began when she came back."]
• In the very great majority of cases, Mme Maigret uses this family name to address her husband. For several reasons...
"She called him Maigret under certain circumstances, when she recognized that he was the man, the master, the power and intelligence of the household!" (FOU)
"First of all, for many years, no one had called him Jules, to the extent that he had almost forgotten his first name. His wife herself had the habit, which made him smile, of calling him Maigret." (FAC). She'd called him "Jules" at first, when they'd met, and at the beginning of their marriage... "What are you thinking about, Jules? She didn't call him Maigret yet, at that time, but she already had for him that sort of respect he was due" (PRE), but Mme Maigret had quickly understood that her husband had little affinity for his first name, which he didn't seem to particularly like. He told it reluctantly to the Americans (CHE, REV, LOG), and the very rare people who used it were old schoolmates, for the most part characters not presented favorably in the corpus (for example Malik in FAC, Fumal in ECH, and Florentin in ENF).
So it's not surprising that Mme Maigret prefers to call him by his family name (and we note that already in PRE, while she calls him Jules throughout the novel, she slips in "Tell me, Maigret!" in Ch. 5)... even on the phone "'Is that you, Maigret?' His wife. For his wife had never gotten used to calling him other than by his family name." (NEW)
- The cases where she still calls him Jules are rarities... besides the one in NAH, there's only this:
""Is there something on the tip of my nose?" he ended up grumbling.
"No."
"So why are you laughing at me?"
"I'm not laughing. I'm smiling."
"Like you're making fun of me. Is there something funny about me?"
"There's nothing funny about you, Jules."
It was rare for her to call him that, and it was only when she was feeling tender." (COR)- "For the longest time, maybe because once they'd done so and laughed about it, they'd called each other Maigret and Mme Maigret, and they'd almost gotten to where they'd forgotten they had first names like everyone else." (cho). In fact, this way of calling each other had become a game, but also a kind of complicity, a tenderness at the heart of the couple... "He didn't call her by her first name, nor she by his. She didn't call him dear, nor did he her. What for, since they felt in a way that they were the same person?" (FAN)
complete article
original FrenchMurielle Wenger
A phenomenal author and his phenomenal character
Georges Simenon was by many standards the most successful author of the 20th century, and the character he created, Inspector Jules Maigret, who made him rich and famous, ranks only after Sherlock Holmes as the world's best known fictional detective. There is nothing commonplace about the life of Georges Simenon, and he and his works have been the subject of innumerable books and articles. The Maigret stories are unlike any other detective stories — the crime and the details of unraveling it are often less central to our interest than Maigret's journey through the discovery of the cast of characters... towards an understanding of man. Simenon said he was obsessed with a search for the "naked man" — man without his cultural protective coloration, and he followed his quest as much in the Maigrets as in his "hard" novels.
Steve TrusselThis site, first opened on August 29, 1996 as "Inspector Maigret," has spread in various directions from its beginning as primarily a bibliography of editions in English. The "new look" reflects various aspects of this development, but the bibliography remains a central feature.
Counting Maigret: statistics etc.For the forty-year period from 1931 through 1972, a new Inspector Maigret investigation appeared at the average rate about 2.5 per year: 75 novels and 28 short stories, 103 episodes of what has been called George Simenon's "Maigret Saga."
Full-length texts - reviews and articles about Maigret and Simenon, as well as new translations of stories, articles, (and even a novel!) which have never appeared in English.
Index to the texts and articles on various pages.
Articles from the Simenon symposiums, journals, program listings, and other not-Maigret-only Simenon material.
Gallery: Maigret covers and photos
Maigret paperback covers, postage stamps, theme music, locations... more.
Plots of all the Maigret novels and stories.
Shopping for Maigret: books on-line
The one-button, quick-links to the main on-line book dealers are still available, for shopping for Maigret titles.
Maigret on Screen: films and videos
Various aspects of Maigret on film and video.
Links to the rest of the on-line world of Maigret on the Internet.
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