Deck chairs

I have now moved onto 'Au Rendez-Vous-des-Terres-Neuvas', set in Fécamp, where Maigret is joined by his wife, as it is supposed to be his holiday.

She spends her day on the beach on a fauteuil transatlantique with red stripes, while he spends his day snuffling around the Rendez-Vous-des-Terres-Neuvas in search of a murderer.

Eventually I arrive at the notion that she was sitting on the sort of chair that used to be supplied to the better class of passenger, those allowed on deck, on transatlantic liners, in other words a fancy phrase for a sea-side deck chair. Took me a while.

But, just to be sure that it was not some special kind of deck chair, I then go off to the dictionary noticed at reference 1, where my notion is confirmed. And where I am taken off to what seems to be some German patent site where we have a diagram of a deck chair which can be converted into a sun bed. As it happens, we used to have something not so different when I was a child, but I think the idea then was to have an easy chair which could be converted into a single bed. Wonderful thing to play with as a child, but I do not recall it ever being used as a bed.

While I am at it, I also check up on Terres-Neuvas, which I had thought was some old word for Newfoundland, despite it not fitting into the name of the café very well. Very sloppy. It turns out that Terre-Neuve is the word for Newfoundland while Terres-Neuvas is the name of the fishermen from Brittany who used to summer there for the cod fishing, which makes much more sense. Also the name of the odd street in Brittany. Also mixed up with those islands just off the south coast of Newfoundland which still belong to France. Good to be reminded that we're not the only people with colonial anachronisms in our portfolio.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/briar.html.