Mot de Maigret

This being the first word from Maigret for a while, since early October at reference 1. Must be slowing down.

I am now on the second pass of 'L'Écluse No.1', yet another tale of life and death on the canals, this time on the eastern outskirts of Paris. Or at least, what was the eastern outskirts before the second world war.

About thirty pages in we have the sentence 'Il était vulgaire and sans envergure' applied to the daughter and son-in-law of the the chief character of the story, apart, that is, from Maigret himself, a self-made man of the canal world who got his first leg-up by marrying the unappetising daughter of the owner of the canal boat he was driving.

I started on envergure with Littré, which told me that the word started life as a nautical term from the days of sail, perhaps the sail plan in general, more particularly the length of the longest yard, derived from vergue, a yard on a square-rigger. By extension the wingspan of a bird.

Larousse goes a bit further, including the wingspan of an aeroplane - and jumps sideways to people without brains or oomph being without it. Perhaps getting us a bit nearer Simenon's meaning. It also points out that vergue is a dialect variation of verge, whose meanings include the phallic one. In the context, I feel sure that this was another part of Simenon's meaning; think, for example, of Apollinaire's 'Les Onze Mille Verges'.

Dictionnaire HACHETTE juniors covers much the same ground as Larousse, but in easy read format. It would have been the best place to start, if what I wanted was a quick answer.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/libational-cups.html.