Dirty snow: part 1

As advertised at reference 2, I have been taking another look at reference 1, and am now half way through a third reading, counting the one back in 2008 as the first.

The book is set in a large town, large enough to have trams and cinemas, and occupied by the Germans. Now Simenon was brought up in Liège, lived there as a young man, and it seems reasonable that this town should be modelled on Liège.

Montagne de Bueren

But the setting in the book is very vague, perhaps deliberately so, with just one street name, unlike Maigret in Paris where there are lots of street names and I have rarely, if ever, failed to find one in my Michelin street map, printed more than sixty years after Maigret started out in the 1930's. The one street name in this book is the rue Verte, of which there are several around Liège, but none of them in a suitable place. There is a river in the book and Liège has a river. There is an old basin and Liège did once have a basin, but long a park  - Parc d'Avroy - by the time of the second war. There is a high town and a low town. This I can't find in Liège, although there is a citadel on a hill and there is the famous Montagne de Bueren snapped above, rather like one of the escaliers around Sacré-Cœur in Paris, which figure in Maigret stories. There are also plenty of old French river towns which have high towns and low towns. Presumably the toffs live high and the affordables live low, down in the unhealthy swamps and marshes by the river. There is also Brading on the Isle of Wight, which has something of the sort, albeit on a more modest scale.

Liège was occupied by the Germans during both world wars, on the first occasion after a heroic ten day siege which slowed down the execution of the Schlieffen Plan, perhaps fatally. Simenon was old enough to know all about and remember the first occupation and he sat out the occupation of France in the Second World War out in the country, in the west of France. From the book, he also clearly knows all about the nuances of collaboration. One does, somehow, have to get along with the occupying forces.

Liège: note that north is right, rather than the usual top

The next port of call was Liège's old basin, in which connection I turned up the helpful and interesting reference 3. Liège sits on the junction of the Meuse and the Ourthe and at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were lots of channels and lots of flooding (and lots of cholera). Eventually it was decided to take a dangerous loop out of the Meuse, making the resultant ox-bow into a commercial basin, roughly 1 (avenue Blonden), 2 (boulevard d'Avroy) and 3 (boulevard Piercot) on the map above. But it did not seem to catch on, and it did not last half a century before it became a park.

I then got interested in Liège more generally, discovering that from having been an important prince bishopric in the High Middle Ages, it had morphed into a major industrial city by the end of the nineteenth century, the same sort of place as, say, Sheffield. It even had coal mines at one point. And I think it still has an important small arms industry, perhaps responsible for Belgians' former reputation as arms dealers to the world. See reference 4. Also quite big enough to carry the sort of low life, both legal and illegal, which meant so much to Simenon.

1340

1400

1627

1640 - this time viewed from the left of the previous snap

Physical

Note Cleves, middle right in the first map, an exporter of royal wives.

Closing with physical, at which gmaps is no good at all. And no match at all for proper Ordnance Survey maps. Maybe Google will get there in the end if they throw enough money at it - enough money and computers to do away for the need for artist specialists to produce maps like that above. From this map I learn that Liège, middle right, is at the south eastern corner of the Low Countries, at the foot of the Ardennes. With the Meuse rising to the west of Liège, draining the Ardennes, turning north at Liège and getting renamed the Maas before flowing into the Rhine south of Arnhem (of the bridge too far) and east of Rotterdam. The bigger blob, Brussels, is in the middle, on the right hand side of the left hand page, at the boundary between dark green for low and light green for slightly less low. West north west of Liège. That is to say, nearly west.

At the end of all of which, the most that I can say is that the town of the story draws on Simenon's early life in Liège - but also on other places that he had come across. Perhaps even Paris, another important river port in his day. But I don't think that one can say that the story is set in Liège, in the way that one can say that most of the Maigret stories are set in Paris.

PS 1: Wikpedia tells me that the spelling of Liège was changed from Liége in 1946. Perhaps the latter sounded too German, not quite the thing at the time.

PS 2: along the way I learn that 'Anvers' is the French version of 'Antwerp'. A place that crops up often enough in Simenon, usually in connection with diamonds, crime or both. Something I had not bothered to look it up in the years I have been reading him. Not impressed with myself.

Reference 1: La Neige était Sale - Simenon - 1948. A book only very slightly older than I am.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/shadow-rock-farm.html.

Reference 3: https://histoiresdeliege.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/lancien-bassin-de-commerce-en-avroy/.

Reference 4: http://www.ufa-belgium.com/. Perhaps they are corresponding members of the NRA (of America).