I share three snippets from this story, from volume XVIII of the collected works.
First, we have the word 'embobeliner', which I thought a wonderfully evocative word for the process by which a young woman might ensnare an older man. With the 'bobe' bit bringing to mind a bobbin. So we have the woman spinning her cajoling, flattering thread around the man, or perhaps winding the thread, standing for the man, onto her bobbin. This is very much the sense of the word in Littré, while the various online dictionaries reduce the word to the rather cold, rather less evocative cheat or snare.
Second, we have the word 'tisonnier'. The tool with which one 'tisonner' the 'tisons' of the fire. With the tisons being the glowing coals, the glowing, half burnt bits of wood. Also the tool, according to Littré again, which a blacksmith might uses to fish the bits of clinker and dross out of his fire. So from the one word root we have, in French, a noun for the thing, verb for the action and a noun for the tool. But while we might poke the fire with a poker, we don't poke the pokes. The chain of association has been broken.
I associate to the way one gets 'pommier' from 'pomme', and so on for the other fruits of the orchard. We must do this sort of thing in English, but the only example I can think of at the moment is adding an 'er' suffix for someone who makes or does something, so 'hatter' from 'hat' and 'manager' from 'manage'.
Third, we have an anecdote about the old ladies of Nice who take the bus to Monte Carlo every morning so that they can work their martingales on the roulette at the casino there. That is to say, suppose you need X francs a day to live. So you make a roughly even bet with a stake of X, say you bet on red on the roulette. If you win, you have made your X and so stop. If you lose, you bet 2X on the next spine. If you win, once again you have made your X, 2X less the X you lost first time around, and so stop. For this to work, you have to double every time, so if you lose again, you have to bet 4X. And so on. The idea being that, if you have enough capital, you can just carry on betting until you win. A sure fire thing. You can't lose.
The Simenon story was that there were lots of older people, mainly old ladies, who did this, making a modest but steady income. Presumably more than their capital would have earned them in a bond or in a bank. Such people mostly became obsessed with the spins of the wheel, with their whole life revolving around it, not to say with it. And sometimes, when the casino was busy and didn't want their tables cluttered up with old people, they would pay them what they might otherwise have won to go away.
While the Wikipedia story is that this is not right. From time to time our old lady will have a run of bad luck and will not have the money to make the next bet. In fact not from time to time at all, it only has to happen once and she will have been cleaned out, she will have lost all her capital. Given that the casino takes a percentage, the expected value of this strategy will always be negative and the mathematics says that there is no way to cheat the numbers. With mathematics being a lot more reliable than statistics.
So, unusually, we seem to have caught Simenon out on one of his spots of local colour. Which I have always thought trustworthy enough to use retail in conversation.
PS: in connection with statistics, I was interested to read in the Financial Times about the difficulties of counting up all the millions of foreign students alleged by the Daily Mail to stay on after their course here (if there ever was one) has ended. With one of the main ways of counting being the International Passenger Survey, with which, back in the seventies of the last century I had a close a fulfilling relationship, based on their premises in Leather Lane, or perhaps Hatton Garden. Somewhere around there. From where I associate to the occasion when I accidentally knocked out the drug sniffing dogs of Folkestone Harbour for the day by letting them smell the newspaper wrapped parcel of fish which I had bought down on the dockside. (I feel sure that I have mentioned this before, but cannot now find the post. Search fails me).
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29.
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