Maigret's Trains

"No one suspected that a drama was being played out in the waiting-room of the small railway station where only six depressed-looking passengers were waiting, amid the smell of coffee, beer, and lemonade. ... night was falling ... The German and Dutch Customs and railway officials could still be seen pacing up and down in the murk of the platform."

"Neuschanz railway station is located in the extreme north of Holland, on the German frontier. It is not an important station ... no main lines pass through it. There are trains only in the mornings and evenings ... The same ritual is repeated each time. The German train stops at one end of the platform. The Dutch train waits at the other end. The officials wearing orange caps and those in greenish or Prussian blue uniform meet, and together while away the hour's wait for Customs formalities ... The passengers then go and sit in the buffet which is typical of all frontier buffets. The prices are marked in both cents and Pfennigs. A showcase contains Dutch chocolate and German cigarettes. Both gin and schnapps can be had..."

At the center, a character who will take a long time to talk about...

"Less notice was taken of a passenger ... a tall, heavy, broad-shouldered man. He was wearing a thick black overcoat with a velvet collar." [tr: Tony White]

In Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien (Maigret and the 100 Gibbets), the first of the Maigrets (written in September 1929 but published two years later), the setting is railway. And Maigret decides straightaway, in the tradition of the detective story, until then dominated by the logical Anglo-Saxon investigator, that enigmas are solved like a puzzle, that the brilliant investigator, private or official, unravels. When Maigret takes the train, it is not like Sherlock Holmes — Holmes and Watson take the train to Paddington or Charing Cross. That's all. With Maigret it's something else — we are on the train:

"... nearing Mantes, the lights had been turned on in the compartments. ... When the train reached Evreux, it was quite dark ... a dense fog ... fringed by iridescent sheen ... The rumbling wheels set a rhythm to his thoughts." (Le Port des brumes, 1931). (Death of a Harbormaster) [tr: Stuart Gilbert]

" I was assigned to stations. More precisely, I was posted to that gloomy, sinister building known as the Gare du Nord. ... When I see the Gare de l'Est, for instance, I can never help feeling depressed, because it reminds me of mobilization. The Gare de Lyon, on the other hand, like the Gare Montparnasse, suggests vacations."

"But the Gare du Nord, the coldest, the busiest of them all, brings to my mind a harsh and bitter struggle for one's daily bread. Is it because it leads toward mining and industrial regions?"

"... suburban trains, which come, not from pleasant villages like those in the west or south, but from black. unhealthy built-up areas."

"In the opposite direction, it's toward Belgium, the nearest frontier, that fugitives for the most varied reasons try to escape. I have grim memories of the Gare du Nord. I don't know why, but I always picture it full of thick, damp early-morning fog, with drowsy crowds flocking toward the tracks or toward Rue de Maubeuge." [tr: Jean Stewart]

"The huge glass roof of the Gare du Nored gave no protection from the gusts of wind that swept the platforms. Several panes had been dislodged and lay in fragments on the lines. ... Maigret stood at the entrance to platform 11, where a crowd had gathered to meet the North Star". ... The yellow dot of the train's light appeared in the distance." (Pietr le Letton, 1929). (Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett) [tr: Daphne Woodward]

"It was as cheerful in the streets as under the glass roof of the Gare du Nord" (Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters, 1951) (Maigret and the gangsters),

Another station, Bréauté-Beuzeville, at the intersection of lines of Le Havre, Fécamp and Etretat, doesn't particularly enjoy Maigret's favor:

"La Bréauté station, where Superintendent Maigret left the main-line train from Paris to Le Havre at half past seven in the morning, gave him a foretaste of Fécamp.

"An ill-lit refreshment room with grimy walls, and a buffet on which a few biscuits were mouldering and three bananas and five oranges were doing their best to form a pyramid. ... To get from one platform to another meant wading up to ones knees in mud. A repulsive little train, assembled from obsolete rolling stock." [tr: Daphne Woodward]

"He left the Paris-Le Havre train at a small, depressing station, Bréauté-Beuzeville. ... The train for Etretat, please? ... There was no restaurant at the station, nor a refreshment bar, only a sort of tavern on the opposite side of the road ... Etretat? You've got plenty of time. That's your train over there. ... some carriages without an engine were pointed out to him ... of an earlier mode, painted an out-of-date green, with a few motionless passengers behind the windows, who seemed as if they had been waiting since the day before. It didn't look real. It was like a toy, a child's drawing." [tr: Robert Brain]

"At Poitiers, while the train was in the station, the lights went up all at once along the platforms ... The train crossed some points ... The lines became more numerous, and at last they reached the platforms, the doors with their familiar notices ... One felt a strong cool breath from the empty blackness into which the rails seemed to vanish ... " (Maigret à l'école, 1953). (Maigret Goes to School) [tr: Daphne Woodward]

"Maigret got off the train at Givet station." (Chez les Flamands, 1932). (The Flemish Shop)

"Maigret surveyed his fellow passengers with wide-open, sullen eyes and, without meaning to, assumed that self-important look people put on when they have spent mindless hours in the compartment of a train. Well before the train began to slow down as it approached a station, men in large, billowing overcoats started to emerge from their various cells ... in order to take up their positions in the corridor. There they would stand with one hand casually gripping the brass bar across the window, oblivious, or so it appeared, of their fellow travelers."

"The train slowed down and pulled into the station at Niort. Maigret stepped onto the cold and wet platform and called to a porter, "How do I get to Saint-Aubin?" "Take the 6:17 train on Platform Three ... The little train, looking black and wet, was already at Platform Three. ... The train stopped. Maigret wiped the condensation from the window and saw a tiny station, with just one light, one platform, and one solitary railway man, who was running along the side of the train..." (L'inspecteur Cadavre, 1941). (Maigret's Rival) [tr: Helen Thomson]

"When Maigret got out of the train at Antibes, half the station was bathed in a glare of sunlight through which the people moved like shadows." (Liberty Bar, 1932). [tr: Geoffrey Sainsbury]

"He slept and was conscious of snoring. When he woke, he saw olive trees on the edge of the Rhône and knew they had passed Avignon." (Mon ami Maigret, 1949) (My Friend Maigret) [tr: Nigel Ryan]

"He awoke at dawn, as he always did when travelling south, just as the train drew into Montélimar. To him, Montélimar had always been the frontier town of Provence. From there on he couldn't bear to miss an inch of the terrain." (La folle de Maigret, 1970) (Maigret and the Madwoman). [tr: Eileen Ellenbogen]

"...along the Marne he saw taverns. ... When he awoke at dawn, in front of the stopped train there was a green-painted gate, a small station surrounded with flowers" (La guinguette à deux sous, 1931). (Maigret and the Tavern by the Seine)

"Right from the start he found Delfzijl disconcerting. At dawn he had found himself rolling through the traditional Holland of tulips. ... what he came to now was something ... far more Nordic than anything he had imagined. A small town. At most, ten or fifteen streets ... the stationmaster was wearing a lovely orange cap." (Un crime en Hollande, 1932). (A crime in Holland). [tr: Geoffrey Sainsbury]

"He imagined in them something strange and vicious."

"...these trains of the night and their agonizing humanity,"

But Maigret doesn't share this feeling:

"At the Gare de Lyons he hesitated. Then at the last moment, he took two wagon-lit places. It was sumptuous. In the corridor they found de luxe travellers, with impressive-looking luggage. ... 'It's the Blue Train,' Maigret mumbled, as if to excuse himself. ... 'Do you sleep well on trains?' 'I sleep well anywhere.'" (Mon ami Maigret, 1949). (My Friend Maigret) [tr: Nigel Ryan]

"Quite suddenly, between two small stations, whose names he could not make out, and of which he saw hardly anything in the darkness, except the driving rain against a large lamp and figures of men pushing trolleys, Maigret wondered what he was doing there. Perhaps he had dozed off for a moment in the overheated compartment? ... he knew he was in a train; he could hear its monotonous noise ... All this, and the smell of soot mingling with that of his damp clothes, remained real, and also a steady murmur of voices in a nearby compartment ... He might have been somewhere else, in any little train traveling through the countryside, and he himself might have been a fifteen-year-old Maigret returning from college on a Saturday on a local train exactly like this one, with ancient carriages, their couplings creaking with each pull of the engine. With the same voices in the night at each stop, the same men bustling around the mail van, the same whistle blast from the station master." [tr: Margaret Duff]

"the curtains drawn, and the light dimmed. An elderly couple were stretched full length on the two seats."

"peeped through door after door until he found a compartment in which only the upper couchette was occupied. Here too the curtains were drawn, and only the dim light was burning. ... The air inside was hot and steamy. From somewhere or other came a faint hiss as if one of the joints of the radiator pipes was leaking."

"The night dragged slowly on. Now and then the train stopped. There would be voices on the platform, steps in the corridor, the slamming of doors. And each time it seemed as though they were never going to start again. Was the man weeping? ... the heat was rising ... Maigret slept. The train stopped, then went on... It raced over a steel bridge, making an infernal din. He opened his eyes abruptly..."

"They ran through a little station. Lights flicked past, showing faintly through the curtains."

"A moment or two before, they had been doing fifty miles an hour. They had come down to twenty, or even less," [tr: Geoffrey Sainsbury]

Maigret's other journeys offer fewer surprises. Day journeys are often tedious, as in the short story, Les larmes de bougie (Les nouvelles enquêtes de Maigret, 1938) (Death of a Woodlander):

"He expected to make a brief journey through space, and it proved to be an exhausting journey through time. Barely a hundred kilometers from Paris, at Vitry-aux-Loges, he alighted from a preposterous little train such as one only sees in old fashioned picture books..." [tr: Jean Stewart]

Bernard de Fallois, one of writers of the prefaces to Simenon's Complete Works, writes: "These brief and dense narratives contain, in the minimum of time, the maximum duration." In the second Maigret to appear, M. Gallet, décédé (1931) (Maigret Stonewalled), the Commissioner takes a train precipitously:

"He didn't know the train times. On arrival at the Gare de Lyon he was told the local train was leaving any minute; ... He was the only passenger to get off at Saint-Fargeau, and he had to wander up and down the soft asphalt of the platform for several minutes before he unearthed a porter." [tr: Margaret Marshall]

"there was a good fire ... one of those big railway-station stoves that swallow up endless scuttles-full of coal."

"Things are always happening on the 106, a train which leaves Berlin at 11 a.m. with one or two coaches from Warsaw, passes through Liège at 23.44 (the station is empty then and closes down as soon as the train has left) and finally reaches Erquelinees at 1.57 a.m." [tr: Jean Stewart]

If the train is extensively present in Simenon's universe, railway workers are rarely heroes of his narrations, the only exceptions being Theodore Doineau, "Théo," a minor station chief on the Amiens-Calais line (Le nègre, 1957) (The Negro), and Louis Maloin, switchman for the Dieppe-Maritime. (L'homme de Londres, 1933) (Newhaven-Dieppe). Two very pathetic heroes, crushed by their destiny. In the Maigrets, except for barely sketched silhouettes of a station chief and a controller, one notices only the father of a suspect, Pierre Riquain, SNCF mechanic on the Paris-Vintimille line,

"I wanted him to go into the railways,"

"he would have got a good desk job". [tr: Nigel Ryan]

"most of the houses in the development were occupied by people connected in one way or another with the railroad."

"where an endless stream of freight cars was being shunted into one siding or another. There were twenty engines, belching smoke, whistling and panting. Cars clashed together..." [tr: Eileen Ellenbogen]