All of them have come from ebay France, at quite reasonable prices, often less than the postage involved. These two being dispatched from the Mondial Relay office in Aubenas, a town a little to the west of Montélimar, on the Rhône. A town which, to judge from Google Street View, looks to have preserved rather more of the France that Simenon would have known from the Paris of the inter-war years than Paris does now. At least that was my first impression: perhaps a fit topic for essays by students of sociology. After all, at least one director of television adaptations of the Maigret stories thought that Budapest was the place to go to evoke the built environment of old Paris.
Rather impressed with ebay, both for the breadth of its stock of second-hand books and for the ease with which one navigate a version in a language which one does not know well.
The Rencontre edition has also served well, much easier to read (in bed) than paperback editions, in which the pages rarely open flat. Their only real weakness is the blue, imitation leather covering of the cardboard used to make the hard covers, is apt to split with use, along the junction between front and sides. Irritating, but easy enough to fix with Sellotape, if not with lesser brands.
Reference 1: https://www.mondialrelay.fr/.
Reference 2: https://www.henkel.com/. The German company which now owns Sellotape, once proud to be British. There is still supposed to be a Sellotape website, to make us feel better about its loss, but the links given do not seem to work.
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