Tuesday, 14 February 2017

Tuesday's trivia

In the form of two C-words from Maigret - with my now having got to story 13 out of 39 and Maigret is in retirement. Apparently from around story 15 he is back in harness as if nothing has happened and the series proceeds to story 39, holding Maigret frozen in his middle years, with a flat and wife in Rue Richard Lenoir. No more aging. I think Sherlock Holmes had a similar resuscitation problem, but I forget what the Conan-Doyle solution was. I also forget what the Poirot solution to aging was - apart from the recent closing episodes making a bit of a mess of it on television.

The first C-word is 'chenil', a sort of rough shed in the park or (more modestly) garden of one's house where one keeps one's dogs, their feed and associated paraphernalia. A rich person might have two such, one for the guard dogs and one for the hunting dogs. From which, I eventually realised, comes our word 'kennel'.

The second C-word is 'carrière', a place where one digs for stone, perhaps marble or limestone. Lots of it going on on the upper Seine, to feed the buildings of Paris. Not to be confused with 'carrière', originally an enclosed race track for horses, now more usually a career, the sort of thing that a civil servant might have. Rather appropriate really. And from the first of which, I eventually realised, comes our word 'quarry'.

And thinking of the upper Seine, I note in passing Simenon's fondness for canals, their locks, boats, bars and people; for fishing ports, their locks etc; and, for watery matters generally. A large proportion of the Maigret stories so far being so set.

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