Mysterious Things

Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret is having to consider his interviews with a married couple, each spouse coming individually and privately to him. The husband has consulted a psychiatrist.  Maigret is looking through a book on mental disorders that he has taken home with him.

***

... Neuroses ... In Adler's opinion, the starting-point of neurosis is an alarming feeling of inferiority and insecurity ... A defensive reaction against this feeling leads the patient to identify himself with an imaginary ideal ...

He repeated under his breath, thus causing his wife to raise her head: '... imaginary ideal...'.

Physical syndrome ... Neurasthenics are well known to specialists of every sort ... Without any appreciable organic lesion, they feel ill and above all worry about possible complications; they undergo innumerable consultations and examinations ... Mental syndrome... The feeling of incapacity is dominant ... Physically, the patient feels dull-witted, full of aches and pains, exhausted by the slightest effort ...

Like Maigret that very morning.  Even now, he felt dull-witted, not full of aches and pains perhaps, but....  He turned the pages, in a grumpy mood....

... Never do they consider themselves blameworthy or at fault ... Their pride is characteristic ... Even when they are not very intelligent, they often dominate their family by means of their authoritarianism and their arrogant dogmatism ...

Did that apply best to Xavier Marton, or to his wife?  And couldn't it serve to describe a quarter of the population of Paris?

Revenge psychosis ... Persecuted persecutors ....

Xavier Marton?  Madame Marton?

He went from neuroses to psychoses, from psychoses to psycho-neuroses, from hysteria to paranoia, and, like those good folk who when they immerse themselves in a medical dictionary discover that they are suffering from each illness in turn, he found under every heading symptoms which would apply just as well to the one as to the other of his two characters.

From time to time he grunted, or repeated a word or a phrase, and Madame Maigret darted anxious little glances at him.

In the end he got up, like someone who has had enough, threw the book on to the table and, opening the sideboard in the dining-room, took the bottle of prunelle and filled one of the little gilt-edged glasses.

It was a sort of protest on behalf of common sense against all this learned rubbish, a way of getting back to earth with both feetr firmly on the ground.

Pardon was right: the result of too much studying of the anomalies of human behaviour, classifying them and subdividing them, was that you ended up not knowning what a man of sound mind was like any more.

Was he one himself? After what he had just been reading, he was not so sure.

'Have you got a difficult case on?' ventured Madame Maigret, who rarely bothered about her husband's work at the Quai des Orfèvres.

He contented himself with shrugging his shoulders and growling:

'A mad business!'

A little later, after emptying his glass, he added:

'Let's go to bed.'

***

From the English translation of Robert Eglesfield published in Five Times Maigret by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1964.

 

 

It honestly doesn't make all that much difference to me: but let it be one or the other and not this state of alteration; good Heavens.  Am not quite sure why but weather like this almost always puts me in mind of Inspecteur Maigret and his goose-dung shoes.

    Not to mention the fact that he had taken to wearing light-brown shoes!

    Did those brown shoes of his have anything to do with the keen interest that Maigret was beginning to take in the fellow?  He would certainly never admit it, even to himself.  He, too, had longed at one time to own a pair of goose-dung shoes.  They had been all the rage then, like those very short fawn-colored raincoats, known at the time as bum-freezers.

    Once, early in his married life, he had made up his mind to buy a pair of light-brown shoes and had felt himself blushing as he went into the shop.  Come to think of it, the shop had been on Boulevard Saint-Martin, just opposite the Théâtre de l'Ambigu.  He had not dared to put the shoes on at first.  Then when he had finally plucked up the courage to open the package in the presence of his wife, she had looked at him and then laughed in a rather odd way.

    "You surely don't intend to wear those things?"

    He had never worn them.  It was she who had taken them back to the shop, on the pretext that they pinched his feet.

    Louis Thouret had also bought a pair of light-brown shoes, and that, in Maigret's view, was symbolic.

Now let the depth psychologists determine how the movements of the weather and a much younger scribbler's petty ambitions are related to each other; I myself have only the vaguest of ideas.

(The text is from Eileen Ellenbogen's translation of Maigret et l'homme du banc.)