Picpus

One of the first full length stories of the second cycle of Maigret, with the first having wound up getting on for ten years earlier. A story which I last read towards the end of 2018 and noticed at reference 1, quite possibly read once or twice before that, but of which I remembered nothing. Not even bits and pieces coming back to me as I worked my way through.

An intriguing enough story which ends, as is usual, with the perpetrators all locked up, but not so usually with one of the perpetrators likely to get off with a very light sentence. Maigret bit cross about that.

Another story which gives space to weekends on the river, hence the pike of the last notice. While this time I noticed the tanches, wrapped in green stuff to keep them cool while being delivered to a friend in Paris, which I eventually decided were probably the same as our tench and which both Littré and Wikipedia tell me is a member of the large carp family, along with minnows. A family which has had over 3,000 members over the years and still has over 1,000.

With Picpus being the name of a street, a boulevard and a cemetery, all in the east end of Paris, near all of the Porte de Vincennes, the confluence of the Seine and the Marne and the Quai de Bercy, this last known in Simenon's day for the wine warehouses there and which gave its name to the dead drunks fished out of the river, known to the policemen who had to deal with them as bercies.

PS: written at Fontenay-le-Comte in the Vendée, Simenon's home during the war and which I often use for 'F' when playing the alphabet game with French towns while trying to get to sleep. From where I associated to Fresnes, a prison which often crops up in Maigret stories and which I now know is a place on the southern fringe of Paris. Another F-town for me, there being bonus points for variety. Which reminds me that I need to talk to the rules committee about when the name of a municipality or a commune counts as the name of a town. When is a place a town for the purposes of the alphabet game? Would Belgravia count if one was playing with English towns?

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/pike.html.

Reference 2: Signé Picpus - Simenon - 1941. Volume XI of the collected works.

Reference 3: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160664/. The 1943 film of this story. No doubt the fact that a very public figure like Simenon continued to make a good living during the occupation did him no good after the event - when he moved across the Atlantic to get away from inquisition and retribution, merited or not.