Maigret et les Vieillards

This being the fourth and last story of Volume XXI. A story mainly concerned with old people with particles in their names (sometimes called ci-devants), an opportunity for Simenon, once again, to sport a bit of class envy. But also an opportunity to sport some interesting factlets and vocabulary, some of which I share in what follows.

The box tree gets two ecclesiastical mentions. Firstly, a sprig of box was put in the stoup which came with a domestic crucifix. Unable to find out what this was about. Secondly, a parson took his boxwood snuff box out from underneath his cassock. Presumably, boxwood, being hard and fine-grained, was very suitable for making small boxes.

If you were one of the chaps in France, you went to school at Stanislaus in Paris. Large, Catholic and private.

If you went in for diplomacy, you were in La Carrière. Oddly, a usage to be found in Larousse but not in Littré.

While if you fancied the army, you would probably try for the Cadre noir de Saumur. At the time Simenon was writing, a cavalry training establishment. Maybe a bit like getting into the Blues & Royals. Now mainly taken over by civilians.

A marriage blanc in France is one which is not consummated. But you need to be careful with this one because in Iran it means a marriage which has been consummated but which has not been licensed by the ecclesiastical authorities.

If a group of people 'se donner le mot' they are cooking up a story between them. In this case for the police.

The expression 'd'ores et déjà' is a long winded way of saying already, that is to say 'déjà'. Littré talks of 'ores' being an obsolete version of the particle 'or' but I don't see how that helps.

And if you are frileux you are someone who feels the cold.

While a 'vente aux enchères' is the French way of doing auctions. And their cheques have talons, that is to say heels, rather than stubs.

Lots of people in Maigret's world, and presumably in Simenon's world, seem to take sleeping pills. Perhaps the prescription drug which was fashionable at that time, before all today's prescription opiates had been invented.

However, what the story is really about is one of the chaps who commits suicide when he is getting on for eighty, for reasons to do with his love life. His devoted servant, a lady of a similar age with whom he used to sleep on an occasional basis, then shoots him a few more times to cover up the suicide so that he can have a Christian burial.

But the priest - the chap with the snuff box mentioned above, explains that all kinds of things can happen in the split second between pulling the trigger and being dead and that all things considered the church would probably have given the dead chap the benefit of the doubt anyway. He quite probably repented in that split second. No need for a cover up.

Not clear whether he would have taken the same line if he had been dealing with some low-life from Belleville, rather one of the chaps.

In any event, as far as Maigret was concerned, the servant was free to go home. No sign of any charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice or of wasting police time.

Reference 1: https://www.stanislas.fr/.

Reference 2: http://www.ifce.fr/cadre-noir/.