Quotes from Georges Simenon

presse-papiers, entrouvrant

We have a tendency to imagine people the way we would like them to be.

Perhaps, when it came down to it, that gaze attracted her? Wasn't this big, placid man, smoking his pipe and staring into space, more of a friend than an enemy?

Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate.

They were reorganizing, as they called it. In the silence of their offices, well-educated, well-brought-up young men from the best families in the country were examining all sides of the matter in a quest for greater efficiency. What emerged from their learned cogitations were hare-brained schemes that found expression every week in new rules.

It seemed to him that he was compelled, by virtue of his wretched calling, to live the lives of a whole lot of other people, instead of quietly getting on with his own.

Maigret had always had a weakness for kitchens, with their appetizing smells and piles of good things to eat, plump vegetables, juicy meat, poultry waiting to be plucked.

It was hard to define the expression he found in Lulu's photographs, an expression she must have had in life. It wasn't sadness, but rather the sullen expression of a little girl who keeps to herself in the school playground and watches her schoolmates play. He would have been hard put to explain in what way she had been attractive, but he sensed it and he had often, in spite of himself, questioned such girls more gently than others.

Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes.

On the second floor he read the numbers on the bronze plaques. The door of no. 17 was open. Valets with striped waistcoats were bringing in the luggage. The traveller had taken off his cloak and looked very slender and elegant in his pinstripe suit. He was smoking a papirosa and giving instructions at the same time.

The committed man, whatever he is, makes me afraid, makes me bristle. I wonder if he is sincere. And, if he appears to me to be so, I wonder if he is intelligent.

Maigret never took notes. If he had a propelling pencil in his hand and a paper in front of him, it was only to make doodles that had no connection with the case.

En resumidas cuentas, en este mundo, cada cual consigue lo que se merece. Pero sólo quienes alcanzan el éxito lo reconocen. - Georges Simenon

He rarely spoke about his job, and even more rarely expressed an opinion about men and their institutions. He distrusted ideas, as they were always too rigid to reflect reality, which, as he knew from experience, was very fluid. It was only with his friend Pardon, the doctor from Rue Popincourt, that he sometimes, after dinner, came out with what might, at a pinch, pass for revelations.

He hadn't complained to anybody. Even Madame Maigret didn't know why he had fallen into disgrace and been transferred to Luçon. This was the hidden face of the profession, of no concern to those outside.

marmots, trinquer

His nose puckered at the smell of Inspector Méjat's brilliantine, a sickly odour that even ten pipes could not have overcome.

I could have been a surgeon too,' he thought to himself. And owned a car like that. Probably not a surgeon, but it was a fact that he had almost become a doctor. He had set out to study medicine and sometimes felt a hankering for the medical profession. If his father hadn't died three years too soon …

He was still staring at her. Because he was pushing her to the limit, or perhaps because she didn't know what else to do, Mrs Mortimer-Levingston threw a fit.

Inside every wrong-doer and crook there lives a human being. In addition, of course, there is an opponent in a game, and it's the player that the police are inclined to see. As a rule, that's what they go after.

He now understood deathbed dramas. Everybody thinks about death. But only one person thinks about it for himself. The others know that in the morning the sun will come through the blinds and their coffee will be served. From The Reckoning

Maigret worked like any other policeman. Like everyone else, he used the amazing tools that men like Bertillon, Reiss and Locard have given the police – anthropometry, the principle of the trace, and so forth – and that have turned detection into forensic science. But what he sought, what he waited and watched out for, was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent.

It was impressive to observe Maigret. In fact, a curious phenomenon was taking place. As he came and went in this house that wasn't his, as he evoked lives he hadn't lived, he was no longer entirely the heavy, placid, rough-hewn Maigret. Without his realizing it, there was a little of Forlacroix in the way he moved, the way he spoke. The two men could not have been more dissimilar and yet, at certain moments, it was so striking that the lawyer was quite bothered by it.

They were both heavy, with the heaviness of people who are constantly struggling with the patient forces of nature.