Poles and perches

Just finished my first reading 'Maigret et la Grande Perche', one leading figure of which is a lady no longer young, once of the street and known as 'La Grande Perche'. So what's all this about perches?

Larousse explains that meaning one is the fish, as in the English, said to be good to eat, while meaning two is various kinds of pole. Scaffold pole, the pole for a pole vault, the pole for an overhead microphone in a television studio, a hunting term for the trunk part of the antlers of a deer, the pole which connects a tram to the overhead power cable, what we in England might call the pantograph. Also an old unit of measurement, as in the poles and perches of Olde England, which older readers may remember from their days of arithmetical swatting for the 11-plus.

So is the lady a plump perch, ripe for the eating, or a pole of some sort?

Maybe Littré will settle the matter. It tells me that a perche is a timber trade term for a long straight trunk, presumably typically of a pine tree, of three to four metres in length. By extension, a grande perche is vernacular for a tall lady, straight up and down, not much in the way of bulges. Not, one might have thought, an ideal build for a lady of the street. Along the way I am reminded about taille, a word with various meanings, from tailler, originally to prune, from the Latin, but by extension to cut more generally. Including, as in the English, 'I don't like the cut of his jib'. Also where our own 'tall',  'tailor', 'tally' and 'tally stick' come from. Also reminded, I think via the antlers, about fût, the main part of a trunk of a tree, a wine barrel, the main part of a column (of a building). And futaie, an unnatural or planted forest intended to produce big, tall trees, suitable for telegraph poles and masts.

Now fully awake, closer reading of Larousse reveals the tall lady meaning, while closer reading of the original text reveals that the lady in question is both tall and thin, so the pole interpretation is clearly the right one and the fish interpretation is the wrong one.

And just to be different we talk of people being like a string bean or as being as thin as a rake. But not as thin or as tall as a pole.

Reference 1: Maigret et la Grande Perche - Simenon - 1951 - Vol.XVI of the collected works.

Reference 2: Maigret and the Burglar's Wife - Gambon & Ratcliff respectively - 1992.