JE LIT MAIGRET À PARIS

As I mentioned several postings ago, one of my “goals” during our time in Paris was to live up to Ernest Hemingway’s writerly example.  When he moved to Paris in December of 1921, he paid the bills as a correspondent for The Toronto Star.  So I decided to work a variation on that by doing some freelance writing.  Below is a piece that was published in The Milton Times on April 25th over the headline “Katie Conboy and Thomas O’Grady Enjoy Immersion in French Culture.”  (My original headline was “Reading Maigret à Paris.”)

Today, thirty-five years after my last French class in college, I am trying to read a novel in French.  C’est difficile!  Très difficile.

The novel I’ve chosen is by legendary and prolific author Georges Simenon.  Like most of his books (almost two hundred of them), it’s un roman policier: a police procedural.  And like most of his books, it features the savvy police detective Inspector Jules Maigret.  I bought my copy of Maigret se fâche (Maigret Gets Angry) for 2 euros at Le Marché du Livre Ancien et d’Occasion, an open-air used book fair that operates every Saturday and Sunday in a park in Paris’s 15th arrondissement: I didn’t want to make a major investment in a book I might never get through.

But I’m determined to do my best.  On our flight over on Air France, I was reading a Maigret in translation—The Hotel Majestic.  Our flight attendant, a young Parisian, complimented me on my taste and mentioned that Simenon’s writing style is much-loved by the general reader in Paris: it is literate but not too “literary.”  I thought: C’est bon!

So why did I get hung up on the very first page of the novel?  Well, the first sentence is more than sixty words long.  But even the first phrase required a dictionary: “Mme Maigret, qui écossait des petits pois dans une ombre chaude . . .”  It’s about Maigret’s wife shelling green peas in the hot shade--but I had never had prior occasion to learn the verb écosser (to shell) or to know that green peas are called petits pois.  Live and learn!

But why live and learn?  The answer is fairly simple.  Our three daughters went through the French Immersion Program in the Milton Public Schools and all went on to major in French in college.  They’ve also done study abroad programs in Senegal, Morocco, and Cameroon, each of them a Francophone country.  My wife and I were jealous!  So when we got the opportunity to spend two months in Paris, we resolved to make the most of it.

For her part, my wife is taking French language classes daily at Alliance Français, adding vocabulary and grammar to the perfect pronunciation she developed over the past year practicing with Rosetta Stone.  (By the time we left for Paris, she could say Le vélo est blanc—the bicycle is white—like a native!)  I’m trusting that some of the rust will fall off my many years of studying French . . . many years ago.  Reading a Maigret novel is one of the ways I’m trying to help that happen.

But it’s slow going.  The first page took me close to an hour to decode.  The book has 144 pages.  So far I’ve figured out that Maigret is retired.  I’m sure that the action will pick up before long and that the Inspector will find himself deep in a tangled case that will test his skills of deduction.  I hope that I’m able to stick with the novel long enough to figure out the case with him.

Since arriving in Paris, I’ve discovered that romans policiers are among the most popular forms of fiction in the bookstores.  One of the windows into another culture is the national “reading list.”  So I’ve also picked up a copy, in translation, of another popular police procedural, Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas, the nom-de-plume for historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau.  Just to add some literary density to my reading, I’ve also started The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq.

Obviously, my wife and I are not alone as Miltonians with a Francophone interest.  Lots of our neighbors have picked up the same bug from their children.  When we signed up our girls for French Immersion almost two decades ago, we imagined that we were giving them a gift to last a lifetime.  We were right.  Even if I get bogged down in the French of Maigret se fâche, I will still feel that we are now the ones enjoying that gift.  And I will continue to read Simenon’s Maigret novels in translation.