Félicie

PENGUIN CLASSICS

‘I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of
Chekhov'

– William Faulkner

‘A truly wonderful writer … marvellously readable
– lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with the world he creates'

– Muriel Spark

‘Few writers have ever conveyed with such a sure
touch, the bleakness of human life'

– A. N. Wilson

‘One of the greatest writers of the twentieth
century … Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his
brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories'

–
Guardian

‘A novelist who entered his fictional world as if
he were part of it'

– Peter Ackroyd

‘The greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we
have had in literature'

– André Gide

‘Superb … The most addictive of writers … A unique
teller of tales'

–
Observer

‘The mysteries of the human personality are
revealed in all their disconcerting complexity'

– Anita Brookner

‘A writer who, more than any other crime novelist,
combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal'

– P. D. James

‘A supreme writer … Unforgettable
vividness'

–
Independent

‘Compelling, remorseless, brilliant'

– John Gray

‘Extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth
century'

– John Banville

It was a quite extraordinary moment, in that it
probably lasted for no more than a second, but it was like those dreams which, people say, seem
to go on for a long, long time. Years later, Maigret could still have pointed out the exact spot
where it had happened, the part of the pavement on which his feet had been standing, the very
flagstone on which his shadow had fallen; he could not only have reconstituted the smallest
details of the scene, but also recalled the wafted smells and the vibrations of the air which
had the feel of a childhood memory.

It was the first time that year that he'd
gone out without an overcoat, the first time he'd been in the country at ten in the
morning. Even his large pipe tasted of springtime. It was still chilly. Maigret walked heavily,
hands in his trouser pockets. Félicie walked by his side, just a little in front of him,
having to take two quick steps to his one.

They were both walking past the front of a new
shop built of pink brick. In the window were a few vegetables, two or three kinds of cheese and
a selection of sausages in an earthenware dish.

Félicie put on a spurt, stretched out one
arm, pushed open a glazed door, and it was then, sparked off by the bell which was set ringing,
that it happened.

Now, this shop doorbell was no ordinary doorbell.
Metal
tubes dangled behind the door. When the door opened, the tubes knocked
against each other and began to chime, making light, ethereal music.

Long ago, when Maigret was a boy, there had been
a pork-butcher in his village who had had his shop completely refurbished. It had a set of
chimes just like these.

That is why that moment seemed to hang suspended.
For a time whose length was impossible to determine, Maigret was transported out of the living
present and saw his surroundings as though he were not inside the skin of the thick-set
detective chief inspector whom Félicie had in tow.

It was as if the boy he had once been was hiding
somewhere, invisible, looking on with a strong urge to burst out laughing.

Get a grip! What was this solemn, bulky adult
doing in a place which was as insubstantial as a child's toy, following Félicie, who
was wearing a ridiculous red hat that looked straight out of the pages of a children's
picture book?

An investigation? Was he looking into a murder?
Hunting down the perpetrator? And doing so while the little birds chirruped and the grass was an
innocent green and the bricks as pink as Turkish delight and there were new flowers everywhere
and even the leeks in the window looked like flowers?

Yes, he would remember this moment later and not
always fondly. For years and years, it was a tradition at Quai des Orfèvres, on certain
frisky spring mornings, to call out to Maigret with heavy sarcasm:

‘Oh, Maigret …'

‘What?'

‘Félicie's here!'

And in his mind's eye he would see that
slim figure in the striking clothes, those wide eyes the colour of forget-me-not, the pert nose
and especially the hat, that giddy, crimson bonnet perched on the top of her head with a
bronze-green feather shaped like a blade stuck in it.

‘
Félicie's here!
'

A growl. Everyone knew that Maigret always began
growling like a bear whenever anyone reminded him of Félicie, who had given him more
trouble than all the ‘hard' men who had been put behind bars courtesy of the
inspector.

That May morning, standing in the doorway of the
shop, Félicie was all too real. Above the transparent advertising stickers for starch and
metal polish was written, in yellow letters,
Mélanie Chochoi, Groceries
.
Félicie waited until the inspector decided to emerge from his daydream.

Finally he took one step forwards, found himself
in the real world once more and picked up the thread of his investigation into the murder of
Jules Lapie, also known as Pegleg.

Her features sharp and aggressively sarcastic,
Félicie waited for his questions as she had been doing all morning. Behind the counter, a
short, motherly woman, Mélanie Chochoi, hands crossed over her ample stomach, gazed at the
strange couple formed by the detective chief inspector of the Police Judiciaire and
Pegleg's housekeeper.

Maigret was drawing gently on his pipe, looking
around him at the brown racks full of tinned foods and then,
through the shop
window, out at the unfinished road, where the recently planted saplings were still no more than
the frail offspring of trees. Taking his watch from his pocket, he spoke at last:

‘You came in here at quarter past ten, you
said. That's correct, isn't it? How can you be sure that was the exact
time?'

A thin, scornful smile parted
Félicie's lips.

‘Come and see for yourself,' she
said.

When he was standing next to her, she pointed to
the back of the shop, which was Mélanie Chochoi's kitchen. In the semi-darkness could
be seen a rattan chair on which a marmalade cat had rolled itself into a ball on a red cushion;
just above it, on a shelf, an alarm clock registered 10.17.

Félicie was right. She was always right. The
grocer was wondering what these people had come to her shop for.

‘What did you buy?'

‘A pound of butter … Would you get me
a pound of butter, Madame Chochoi? The inspector here wants me to do exactly what I did the day
before yesterday. Slightly salted, wasn't it? … Wait … You can also give me a
packet of peppercorns, a tin of tomatoes and two loin chops …'

Everything was strange in the world which Maigret
inhabited that morning, and it required an effort on his part to convince himself that he was
not some sort of giant floundering through a toy construction set.

A few kilometres out of Paris, he had turned his
back on the banks of the Seine. At Poissy he had climbed the slope and suddenly, surrounded by
the reality of fields
and orchards, he had discovered this remote world whose
existence was signalled by a signboard on the side of a new road: Jeanneville Village.

A few years earlier there would have been the
same fields, the same meadows, the same groves of trees here as elsewhere. Then a man of
business had come this way, with a wife or mistress named Jeanne no doubt, hence the name
Jeanneville which had been given to this world in gestation.

Roads had been laid out and avenues planted with
still uncertain saplings, their thin trunks wrapped in straw to protect them from the cold.

Villas and houses had been built willy-nilly. It
did not amount either to a village or a town, it was a universe apart, incomplete, with gaps
between the buildings, wooden fences, areas of waste-ground, ridiculously useless gas-lamps on
streets which were still only names on blue signs:

‘My Dream' … ‘The Last
Lap' … ‘Dunrentin' … each poky house had its name inscribed in a
decorated plaque, and lower down the hill were Poissy, the silver ribbon of the Seine, where all
too real barges plied, and railway tracks on which real trains ran. Further along the plateau,
farms could be seen, and the steeple at Orgeval.

But here the only manifestation of true reality
was the old woman who ran the grocery, Mélanie Chochoi, who had been uprooted by the
developers from a neighbouring town and given a fine, brand-new shop so that buying and selling
would not be entirely absent from this new universe.

‘Anything else, dear?'

‘Wait a minute … What else did I buy
on Monday?'

‘Hairpins.'

Mélanie's shop sold everything:
toothbrushes, face-powder, paraffin, picture postcards …

‘I think that's all, isn't
it?'

From the shop, as Maigret had already checked,
Pegleg's house could not be seen, nor the path that ran round the outside of the
garden.

‘The milk!' said Félicie,
remembering. ‘I was forgetting the milk!'

She explained to the inspector, still with that
air of sovereign disdain:

‘You've been asking so many questions
that I almost forgot my jug of milk … Anyway, I had it on Monday. I left it in the
kitchen. A blue jug with white dots, you'll see it next to the butagaz stove. Isn't
that so, Madame Chochoi?'

Every time she supplied any piece of information,
she did so in a loud voice, like Caesar's wife who must be above suspicion.

She's the one who insists that nothing
should be overlooked.

‘And what did I tell you last Monday,
Madame Chochoi?'

‘I do believe you said my Zouzon's
got worms, seeing as how he's always swallowing his fur …'

Zouzon was obviously the tomcat snoozing on the
red cushion on the chair.

‘Wait a sec … You took your
Ciné-Journal
and one of them twenty-five sou novels.'

At one end of the counter was a display of the
gaudy covers of popular magazines and books, but Félicie did
not even
give them a second glance and just shrugged her shoulders.

‘How much do I owe you? Please hurry,
because the inspector insists that everything should happen the way it did on Monday, and I
didn't stay here this long then.'

Maigret broke in:

‘Tell me, Madame Chochoi, since we're
talking about Monday morning … When you were serving this young lady, did you happen to
hear the sound of a car?'

The grocer stares out at the sunlit landscape
through the window.

‘I couldn't rightly say … Wait
a bit … It isn't as if we get a great many cars round here. You just hear them
passing by on the main road … What day was it? … I can remember a small red car
which drove past behind the house where the Sébiles live. But as to saying what day that
was …'

Just in case, Maigret jotted down in his
notebook:
Red Car, Sébile
.

Then he was outside again with Félicie, who
swayed her hips as she walked and wore her coat over her shoulders like a cape, leaving the
sleeves trailing loosely behind her.

‘This way. When I go home, I always take
this short cut.'

A narrow path between kitchen gardens.

‘Did you meet anyone?'

‘Wait. You'll see.'

He saw. She was right. As they joined a new,
wider path, the postman, who had just come up the hill, passed them on his bike, turned to them
and cried:

‘Nothing for you, Mademoiselle
Félicie!'

She eyed Maigret:

‘He saw me here on Monday, at the same
time, just like almost every morning.'

They skirted an appallingly ugly house covered
with sky-blue stucco and set in a garden filled with lifeless earthenware animals then walked
along a hedge. Félicie pushed open the side-gate. Her trailing coat brushed against a row
of redcurrant bushes.

‘Here we are. This is the garden.
You'll see the arbour in a moment.'

They had left the house at a few minutes before
ten by the other door, which opened on to a wide avenue. To get to the shop and come back they
had described almost a full circle. They walked past a border of carnations, which would soon
flower, and beds of young salad plants of a delicate green colour.

‘
He
should have been here
…' Félicie said sternly, pointing to a tightly drawn string and a dibble pushed
firmly into the earth. ‘
He
had started pricking out his tomatoes. The row is half
finished. When
he
failed to appear, I assumed
he
had gone off for a glass of
rosé …'

‘Did he drink a lot of that?'

‘When he was thirsty. You'll find his
glass upside down on the barrel in the wine store.'

The garden of a careful man with a modest private
income, the kind of a house that thousands of hard-pressed citizens dream of building, where
they might spend their declining years. They moved out of the sunlight and stepped into the
bluish shade of the yard, which was a continuation of the garden. There was an arbour
on the right. On the table in the arbour was a small decanter containing some
strong spirit and a glass with a thick bottom.

‘You saw the bottle and the glass. Now this
morning you told me your employer never drank spirits when he was by himself, and especially not
what's in that decanter.'

She gives him a defiant look. She seems to be
constantly presenting him, and not by accident, with a sight of the clear blue of her irises, so
that he can see in them for himself a confirmation of her total innocence.

Even so, she retorts: ‘He was only my
employer.'

‘I know. You already told me.'

Good God! How irritating it is to have to deal
with someone like Félicie! What else has she said in that shrill voice which grates of
Maigret's nerves? Oh yes, she said:

‘It's not my business to reveal
secrets which are not mine to tell. To some people I may have been just his live-in housekeeper.
But that was not how he saw me, and one day people will discover that …'