At the end we had two short stories, both just about 15 pages, one from 1959 (on the road, but not like the near contemporary road noticed at reference 2 at all) and one from 1939 (sale by candle, as mentioned by Pepys, September 3rd, 1662).
The first story is an account of walking a man into the ground by following him around Paris until he drops, falling through all the ranks of society as he goes. The second is an account of Maigret solving a murder mystery while holed up with all the participants in some run down pub in the middle of the Vendéen marshes, perhaps something like the shed illustrated. A version of the near contemporary country house murder from Agatha Christie. Both stories were quite interesting, but both suffered from the mise-en-scène being wildly improbable, which irritated me at the time of reading.
But this morning, I started to wonder why this mattered. The story loses a bit of credibility by not being situated in the real world, but that is not to say that it could not have been. Perhaps Simenon was just being lazy, was in a hurry or simply couldn't manage it in the compass of something destined to be published in the middle of a Sunday newspaper?
Is it so different from telling a fairy story, a science fiction story or a spy story, all of which play fast and loose with the truth in order to make some perfectly valid point about the human condition?
But how can one be sure that this point has any relevance to the real world? If the events as told could not possibly be translated into the real world, does the point survive? For some reason, at this point in the argument, I associated to real and imaginary numbers. The former might be more real than the latter, but the latter are still useful.
PS: we once spent a happy day in a punt in the Vendéen marshes, a punt knocked up with fairly raw slices of tree, not like the sort of fancy - and very expensive - mahogany jobs you get in the Oxbridge rivers at all. While the pole was just a bit of trimmed but not very straight bit of branch. Punts which serve well enough for holiday makers in the summer, but their real purpose was duck hunting at some other time. I might say that the owner of the punt was very impressed that I was able to drive the thing, without needing an hour or so to warm up. Sprog 1 was with us at the time, but was probably too young to remember anything about it now.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/les-memoires-de-maigret.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/on-road.html.
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