Maigret's wife Louise comes from Alsace, from where she always gets a Christmas drop of the local spirit, described in most of the Maigret stories as prunelle, that is to say sloe gin.
Maigret's dates are not given and the various clues in the various stories are probably inconsistent, but let us suppose that he was born in 1900, that his wife was born at the same time and that they married when they were twenty. I leave aside the complication that I have not come across any reference to what they were doing at the time of the first world war.
However, at the time I am supposing that his wife was born, Alsace had been German again for 30 years, having been first taken by the French (in the persons of Louis XIII and Louis XIV) from the Germans something more than 200 years before that. With this part of the upper Rhine valley having first been colonised by Germans from the north a thousand years or more before that. None of this is visible in any of the Maigret stories that I have read.
Curious that Simenon choses to draw a veil over what must have been a troubled business. Perhaps as a Belgian living in France he was keen to bang the French nationalist drum, just to be on the safe side.
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