A glimpse of pre-war Paris from the latest Simenon story, written in 1955 but the Paris that he knew before decamping to the provinces for the duration, after which he was off to the US.
In a rough part of Paris, somewhere between the Gare de l'Est and La Villette, we have a block of maybe sixty slum dwellings, seven stories of it without lifts. The lady in question was a widow to tuberculosis and probably had a touch of it herself. Seven floors up and seven floors down with the shopping, the coal and all the rest of it. I used to do four or five, morning and evening, when I worked in the Treasury and that seemed quite enough of a slog.
Gloom only relieved by the discovery of a pleasant word, marmaille, a collective noun describing the swarms of children playing in the stairways. According to Littré, derived from marmot, originally a monkey.
And a bit further down we have Maigret at his wife's oeufs au lait, as I thought, a sort of egg custard, but the cooking of which looks a bit tricky to me at reference 1, despite being scored facile, as I think that it would be easy to get the texture all wrong.
Reference 1: http://cuisine.journaldesfemmes.com/recette/324813-oeufs-au-lait.
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