Books to the Ceiling

I find that reading Simenon’s Maigret novels produces a pleasantly narcotizing effect, like drowsing in the first strong sunshine of Spring. Sure, there’s been a murder, and often the victim is some hapless soul down on his or her luck, but as regards the investigation, there’s rarely any undue urgency. Life proceeds at its usual measured pace; violence, while present and even menacing, is obliquely alluded to rather than explicitly described. This is not to say that Chief Superintendent Maigret is indifferent - far from it. But his determination is quiet, his manner deliberate. Members of his team - Lucas, Janvier, and the rest - are given their assignments and carry them out conscientiously. They report back to their “chief” and await further instructions. But rarely is anyone forced to work through the night or, God forbid, to miss a meal. Maigret is usually able to go home and have lunch with his wife. (In Donna Leon’s procedurals, Guido Brunetti also heads home to partake of the midday meal en famille - though it is hard to imagine two more dissimilar women than the quietly domestic Madame Maigret and the fiery Paola Brunetti!)

Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard opens with the discovery of a body in a narrow cul-de-sac off the Boulevard Saint-Martin. The identity card found in the victim’s wallet proclaims him to be one Louis Thouret. He has been stabbed in the back, and recently; at the time of its discovery, the body is still warm. Gradually, as the investigation gets under way, Maigret and his team enter into the world of Louis Thouret. Maigret’s first call is on the family, which consists of a wife, a daughter, and several sisters and brothers-in-law. The environment he encounters there is stifling. Madame Thouret is the very emblem of a bourgeois housewife. Dour and humorless - ‘hard as nails!’ as one of the detectives acidly observes - she has never let her husband forget that he hasn’t risen in the world as she would have like him to do. There he was, laboring day after day as an assistant manager at the retail firm of Kaplan et Zanin in the Rue de Bondy. He would head out every weekday morning to catch the same train, and return in the evening, also by the same train… But there’s a problem with this familiar scenario: unbeknown to Madame Thouret and the rest of the family, Kaplan et Zanin had ceased to exist some three years prior. Yet this sudden loss of employment had in no way altered Monsieur Thouret’s daily routine. And he was still, as it were, “bringing home the bacon.”

What gives here? Needless to say, this is where the story gets really interesting. In swift, spare prose, Simenon apprises us of Louis Thouret’s guilty secret, or rather secrets, as there are several that gradually come to light. As more new information comes in, it is examined and analysed during clipped exchanges of dialog. No one makes speeches; everyone beavers away until the truth at last comes to light. I have to say that for me, that truth, as revealed in the novel’s very last pages, was rather anti-climactic. By that time, though, I didn’t really care, as I was genuinely grateful for this delightful escapist entertainment.

In an article in The January 30 2006 issue of The New Statesman, Jason Cowley says of Simenon: “In truth, he is a limited artist, but an interesting one.” I would more or less agree with that assessment - although, maybe I’d modify it a bit: Simenon is limited in some ways but incredibly deft in others; moreover, he can be at times, not just interesting, but downright fascinating. In the Maigret novels, Simenon does not expend much time and energy on description, although he invariably manages to convey a vivid impression of Paris in the mid-twentieth century. The books are likewise short on introspection or philosophizing, but every once in a while, we are allowed into the inner sanctum of the Chief Superintendent’s mind. Interesting thoughts often dwell there. I particularly liked this poignant reflection:

“In the old days he had been particularly struck, even one might say romantically stirred, by the sight of those who, discouraged and defeated, had given up the struggle, being swept along willy-nilly by the great, surging tide of humanity.

Since then, he had come to know many such people, and it was no longer them whom he most admired, but rather those just one step above them on the ladder, who were clean and decent and not in the least picturesque, and who fought day in and day out to keep their heads above water, or to nurture the illusion, or perhaps the faith, that they were alive and that life was worth living.”

Jason Cowley describes Simenon as “grotesquely prolific.” Well, he did write more than 400 books! I have not read any of the crime novels that are not in the Maigret series. Simenon called those his “romans durs” - hard novels. Cowley says these books tend to be more thoughtful than the procedurals, and indeed, I have seen them praised often, especially Monsieur Monde Vanishes, Red Lights, and Dirty Snow. (These titles, and others, have been re-issued in the past several years by New York Review Books, a publishing enterprise whose stellar efforts all book lovers should be grateful for.) Naturally, the romans durs have their place in ever-growing, never-diminishing stack of must-reads…

[ In regards to the passage quoted above: the expression "willy-nilly" always puts me in mind of a quatrain from "The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam." This bit of poetry doesn't really have anything to do with Maigret and Simenon - at least, I don't think it does - but it has haunted me for years:

XXIX.

Into this Universe, and why not knowing,
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. ]

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For further exploration of the subject of Georges Simenon, see Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. In addition, the increasing number of re-issues of the novels has prompted numerous tributes by reviewers, such as this recent one by Paul Theroux in the Times Literary Supplement. Georges Simenon 1903-1989

Travel is one of the many aspects of life in the French countryside written about by Graham Robb in The Discovery of France. In a number of instances, the author refers to a singular little guidebook:

“One of the best short guides to the experience of travelling in post-Revolution France is a French-German phrase book published in 1799 by Caroline-Stephanie-Felicite Du Crest de Saint-Aubin, who is usually known as Mme de Genlis.”

The full title of this little book is The Traveller’s Companion for Conversation, being a Collection of Such Expressions as Occur Most Frequently in Travelling and in the Different Situations in Life. Apparently at least four more editions of this book were published subsequent to the one referenced by Graham Robb. How do I know this? Here is a picture of the fifth edition, lying somewhat incongruously on our kitchen table! The publication date of this small volume is given as 1821. This version has been enlarged to include English, Italian, Spanish, and somewhat to my amazement, Russian.

How did I come by this artifact of another era? My mother was an inveterate traveler, particularly in Western Europe. She loved France, Italy, and the British Isles. (It is a love she bequeathed to me.) After her first trip to Italy, taken with my father when she was in her forties, she resolved to learn Italian. She accomplished this goal with remarkable speed and facility. She went back to Europe again and again, sometimes with my father, sometimes with tour groups, occasionally alone. At some point during her wanderings on the continent, she obtained Mme de Genlis’s book. It is one of the few possessions of hers that I have retained. I admit that I never examined it closely until I found it mentioned in Graham Robb’s book.

The Traveller’s Companion does not much resemble contemporary phrasebooks. Rather its entries are miniature dialogues, or, in some cases, monologues. They serve as a timely reminder that the rigors of travel are not unique to the 21st century. Below are some sample entries.

Dialogue IV: Conversation on Board a Ship or Yacht:

“I am very sick.

Lay yourself flat upon your belly; shut your eyes; remain in that quiet posture, and your sickness will abate.”

But if it doesn’t…. “I suffer extremely; I am unwell, pray, hand me a bason [sic].”

Dialogue V: On Crossing the Water in a Ferry:

“Now take off the horses from the carriage. The horses ought not to be yoked to the carriage in a ferry.”

“Why so? Because nothing can be more dangerous. The indolence, which hinders us from unyoking the horses, has caused a thousand unhappy accidents.”

Dialogue VI: Enquiries in a journey which cannot be otherwise performed than in a Sedan Chair, or on Mules:

“Is the road very dreadful? Yes, it is very narrow and on the brink of precipices.”

Dialogue VIII: On the Accidents that might happen on the Road:

“My friends, could you assist us? We are in great distress, you shall be well paid for your trouble.

We are sticking in a hole. Lend us two of your horses to draw us forwards.

You will do us a great favour.”

Followed by this plaintive outbreak:

“Dear friends, I beg you!”

Alas, things appear to go from bad to worse:

“He has a hole in his head!

We must first wash out the wound well with fresh water, and afterwards apply a poultice to it of Cologne water mixed with fresh water.”

Then later:

“Take courage, my friend! your fall does not appear to be dangerous. Poor man! I sympathize greatly with your sufferings, I assure you.”

(At this point, I couldn’t help but think of Mercutio, mortally wounded by Tybalt.

“Romeo: Courage, man, the hurt cannot be much.

Mercutio: No, ’tis not so deep as a well nor as wide as a church door but ’tis enough, ’twill serve…” And so, sadly and with dire consequence, it did.)

I have finished reading Graham Robb’s majestic slow-moving epic of French history, or as the subtitle more precisely defines it, “A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War.” The massive research that went into this project, the effort involved in shaping huge amounts of minutiae into a coherent form - I am awed by the scope of this author’s achievement.

In the first part of The Discovery of France, Robb describes the ethnic and linguistic diversity of basically tribal people who in no way thought of themselves as belonging to a single nation. In the second part of the book, regions are mapped, travel and tourism become increasingly common, and the inhabitants of the towns and villages of the pays are dragged forcibly into the twentieth century. Robb offers a candid assessment of what was gained and lost in the process.

Inserted between Part One and Part Two is a chapter entitled “Interlude: The Sixty Million Others.” These “others” are the animal populations of France: livestock, horses, bears that dance and smuggler dogs. Well, I told you it was an unusual book…

Highlights from Part Two: the “discovery” of the Verdon Gorges, the longest, deepest canyon in Europe. Robb explains that until 1905, this natural wonder “…was known only to a few woodcutters and carvers who saw no reason to share their knowledge of the local inconvenience with the outside world.”

In the penultimate chapter, “Journey to the Centre of France,” we’re treated to a delightful - and insightful - disquisition on the role played by the bicycle in the French countryside in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Robb makes a strong case that the importance to regional history of this basic mode of transport has been vastly underrated. He provides examples of bike rides of seemingly heroic lengths undertaken routinely by ordinary people. And of course, from these humble beginnings came the Tour de France, which turns out to have a fascinating history of its own. (Robb did much of his research using this time-honored conveyance!)

Still, nothing quite matches for sheer strangeness the picture of the shepherds in the Landes hanging out on stilts! This photo is cropped; the one in the book shows four additional “stilted shepherds” in a group farther back in the fields and to the right of these two individuals. (As I was Googling “French peasants on stilts,” I came upon an article on “Sylvain Dornon, Stilt Walker of Landes” from an 1891 issue of Scientific American.)

Julian Barnes, a lifelong Francophile, was frankly amazed at the wealth of anecdote and obscure nuggets contained in The Discovery of France. In the November 30, 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement he named it one of the year’s best books and went on to suggest a more descriptive subtitle: “How cartographers, bureaucrats, and tourists discovered that Paris was not the same thing as France, that most of the country never regarded itself as being part of France, and how the nation was created only by destroying or homogenizing those aberrant regions, whose singularities, once suppressed, were then celebrated as typically French.”

I’m only half way through The Discovery of France, but I feel that I must write about it now. It is not a book that one can rush through; I have no idea when I’ll finish it. For one thing, I have to keep pausing to shake my head in amazement.

It is one of the strangest books I have ever read, filled with anecdotes and tales of a way of life that has been pretty nearly lost to modernity. Despite the paucity of written records, Graham Robb has managed to re-create and animate this complex, extremely obscure world in great detail.

In 1983, Kiri te Kanawa released a recording called Songs of the Auvergne, by Joseph Canteloube. I had never before heard this music, but, like many others at the time, I fell in love with it instantly. One thing surprised me: the Auvergne is a region in central France. Yet these songs were in some strange dialect that bore no resemblance to the French I’d studied in school. It turns out that until quite recently, France was a land of dialects - many of them. Here’s the title Chapter Four of The Discovery of France: “”O Oc Si Bai Ya Win Oui Oyi Awe Jo Ja Oua.” (I have omitted several diacritical marks.) These are some of the major forms of the word “yes,” as rendered in the various provincial languages.

Robb also informs us that “The Pyrenean village of Aas, at the foot of the Col d’Aubisque, above the spa town of Eax-Bonnes, had its own whistling language which was unknown even in the neighboring valleys until it was mentioned on a television programme in 1959.” We learn that shepherds living in isolation during the long summers developed “an ear-splitting, hundred-decibel language” that could be heard and understood by listeners as far away as two miles. This particular dialect was used during the Second World War by shepherds endeavoring to assist Jewish refugees and others as they crossed over into Spain. Unfortunately, it appears at the present time to be lost: “A few people in Aas today remember hearing the language, but no one can reproduce the sounds and no recordings were ever made.”

In a chapter entitled “Migrants and Commuters,” we learn about the lives of the colporteurs, or pedlars, who, besides traveling with 100-pound baskets or wooden chests strapped to their backs, performed a variety of services for the folk of the villages they passed through: “They pierced ears, extracted teeth and told fortunes. Even after the practice was outlawed in 1756, Bearnese pedlars in Spain castrated boys whose parents hoped to secure them a place in a cathedral choir.”

I haven’t read that extensively in French history and literature, but Robb is writing here about a country I find virtually unrecognizable. Stay tuned for a report on the second half of this remarkable book! Meanwhile, put yourself in the mood with these two soundtrack suggestions:

Of course, the aforementioned Les Chants d’ Auvergne, sung by Kiri te Kanawa with Jeffrey Tate conducting the English Chamber Orchestra, on London/Decca;

L’Arlesienne Suites One and Two, by Georges Bizet. Favorite recording: Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra