I look now at those old photos. My dapper, modern grandfather who forsook the sarong for a suit and pipe. My grandmother, who was born to such wealth and privilege but who, even as a child in curls and bows, never seemed to smile. Perhaps she had some sense even then of the anguish life had in store for her, what circumstance and society would demand she bear. I look at that extra boy in the family portrait, and I wonder what he thought, what he felt, what he wanted. He remains a mystery. But he’s no longer a secret.
FIELD NOTES À LA MAIGRET FROM PARIS
– Cara Black –
I BLAME MY ENTRY INTO CRIME WRITING ON INSPECTOR Maigret, the protagonist of Georges Simenon’s novels about a Parisian police inspector. Georges Simenon, originally from Belgium, first arrived in Paris as an outsider. While Agatha Christie is known all over the world as the queen of crime, Georges Simenon has sold almost as many books—between 500 and 700 million copies worldwide of his 570 books.
His Inspector Maigret novels captured my imagination. Fascination with Paris is a family trait. My uncle and my father, two brothers from Chicago with not a French vein in their bodies, were devoted Francophiles. No clue as to why, but I think French cuisine and wine were probably factors. When I was a child, my father had read me Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a nineteenth-century edition illustrated with scary woodcuts. In that story, Paris is peopled by revolutionaries, men in frock coats, and Madame Defarge knitting with a malevolent eye.
My uncle, who lived with us, had stayed on the Left Bank. “Studying art,” he claimed, but really drinking a lot of vin rouge. He’d talk about how, after a night of partying, they’d end up at five A.M. in their tuxedoes at Les Halles, Paris’s famous fresh-food market, where they’d eat onion soup next to the butchers working in their bloodstained aprons. How his teacher Georges Braque’s studio was so cold, and the artist such a tightwad, that when my uncle asked the master to put more coals in the stove because the model was turning blue, Braque gestured for him to leave and kicked him downstairs. His stories offered an earthy side to the photos I’d seen in Vogue, with slim, tousle-haired women, effortlessly chic in Chanel jackets, carrying dogs in their handbags. The glamor and the grit seemed to go hand in hand.
You always remember the first time… the first time you felt Paris. For me, it was reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, exploring the gritty side with Inspector Maigret, listening to Edith Piaf songs. The city of light exuded sensuality and a hard, visceral beauty.
I first came to Paris in a long-ago September. What I owned lay in my rucksack carried on my back. My travelmate and I woke up in the École de Médecine student dormitory somewhere in the Latin Quarter. Two medical students, who were on call all night, had given us their beds. Needless to say, they expected to share them with us the following morning. I remember that peculiar feeling of a fluffy duvet, sun pouring in the tall window, and two grinning male students greeting us with soup bowls of bitter coffee and peaches. Peaches whose sweet juice stained our chins. We thanked them, maneuvering our way out by promising to come back. Somehow, we never did.
I never forgot the actual boots-down feeling of this place. Paris comes to me with the scent of ripe Montreuil peaches, the high heels clicking over the cobbles, the dripping plane-tree branches leaving shadows on the quai, the flowing of the khaki-colored Seine. Always that shiver from cold stone inside soot-stained, centuries-old churches, relics of history and mystery under a piercing blue sky. But feeling Paris is not the same as knowing it, and I have spent my life trying to connect to this city as one of my own, à la Maigret.
That first September, wearing a déclassé flannel shirt and jeans, I haunted the cafés where famous writers wrote. Those cafés encouraged my resolve that I would write someday. But it wasn’t until years later in Paris, during another September, that I found a story. My friend Sarah took me to the Marais, then ungentrified, and showed me where her mother, at the age of fourteen, had hidden during the German occupation. Sarah’s mother’s family had been taken by the French police, and she’d lived, hidden, wearing a yellow star and going to school, until the liberation of Paris. Sadly, her family never returned.
The war had never felt close to me until that moment, standing on the narrow rue des Rosiers in front of a building where a tragedy—so many more than one in this old Jewish part of Paris—had occurred. It was the collision between the present and the past that floated in front of me as I imagined Sarah’s mother’s life. Almost as if the ghosts hovered out of reach, but there in the shadowy stone recesses of the building. I never forgot that shiver of encountering the past.
When my father heard the story of Sarah’s mother hiding in the Marais during the war, he handed me a slim crime novel by Georges Simenon and said, “Read this. It’s set in Paris.”
But it’s old-fashioned, I thought.
“It might be a way to tell this story you’re going on about,” said my father, tired of the obsession consuming me after hearing about Sarah’s family.
So my life of crime began with reading Inspector Maigret’s investigations. Could I approach understanding Parisians like an investigation, a case to crack, as in those slender Inspector Maigret novels that intrigued me? Maybe I could understand Parisians, blend in at least for a moment before I opened my mouth. Figure out the code they communicated in, discover if their flair disguised another reality. The seething passions below the surface that led to spilling blood. What better way than an investigation for someone like me—not as a voyeur but as an observer who noted details, caught a nuance, dug below the surface, always searching for motive, opportunity?
I identified with an investigator because I was always on the outside looking for a way in. And crime fiction sets Paris against a backdrop of gray, an overcast sky, and perhaps a corpse or two in the cobbled streets—discovered, of course, by Georges Simenon’s pipe-smoking Inspector Jules Maigret.
Though Maigret’s era passed long ago, it’s not all history. His “old office” in the police department at 36 Quai des Orfèvres, the Paris Préfecture (often referred to as “36”), now belongs to a trim forty-something commissaire with a laptop; gone is the charcoal-burning stove. Maigret’s unit, the Sûreté, is no more, but has been restructured and renamed the Brigade Criminelle, Paris’s elite homicide squad. From time immemorial, officers have hung bloody clothing from crime scenes to dry under the rafters in the attic at 36. This tradition hasn’t changed. Nor has the rooftop view, courteously shown to me by a member of the Brigade Criminelle. A vista with the Seine and all of Paris before us. Breathtaking. And beneath us are 36’s underground holding cells, which date from the Revolution, if not further back.
That’s become my job: to write stories about crime and murder à la parisienne, set in contemporary Paris. A way for me, an outsider, to explore and scratch that itch of curiosity.
The streets are the same as they were in Maigret’s time, but today’s Fifth Republic Paris is a blended wealth of cultural traditions from all over the world. For me, this means there are new enclaves and hidden worlds to encounter, no matter how well I think I know these cobbled streets.
To know Paris, as Edmund White and countless others have observed, one must be a flâneur, one who takes leisurely strolls through the city, letting unexpected moods wash over you and remaining open to discovery—in my case, with an eye for crime. One must take the pulse of a quartier, assessing its rhythm; know it by heart, from the lime trees flanking its boulevards to its nineteenth-century passages couverts. Only when I can feel that pulse can I start the rest of my research for a novel.