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Paris...The Maigret Forum This is not a static website. It changes almost daily. The Maigret "Forum," an open bulletin board for notices, opinions, information and discussion related to Maigret and Simenon, has become the most active feature of this site. It's where new books, websites, articles and features are first announced and displayed, and includes an indexed archive of the entire past Forum... back to 1997!
Click here for the current Forum.
Here's a recent sample -
Maigret's Colors
8/18/13 –
Maigret's Colors
by Murielle Wenger
"The streets and avenues of Paris were a veritable fireworks in the July heat and everywhere were splashes of light – they gushed from slate roofs and pink tiles, from the reds of geraniums in glass windows – they streamed from multi-colored car bodies, of blue, green, and yellow..." (La patience de Maigret) [PAT] 1. Introduction
Simenon remarked more than once how much he loved painters, particularly the impressionists, who made their colors sing, and who no doubt influenced his own literary work. In his own way, Simenon also knew how to use color... to depict an atmosphere, a landscape, or a character.
In this study I'd like to examine the use of color terms in the Maigrets, to see how the author uses them, which are used most often, for which descriptions they are reserved, how they contribute to the rendering of an atmosphere, to set a scene, and to highlight feelings and impressions.
We recognize, following Michel Pastoureau ([Dictionary of the colors of our times], Bonneton, 1999), that color is a symbolic and cultural notion, and thus linked to a given society. Historically, color in Western culture is organized primarily in a ternary mode, dating back to prehistoric times and built on the three colors, white, black and red. From the Middle Ages, and up to our time, the symbolic system of Western culture revolves around six colors: white, black, red, blue, green and yellow. These six basic colors are unique in that they do not have referents in nature, contrary to what Pastoureau calls the "half-colors", such as rose (pink), violet, or orange, terms derived by reference to an object.
For this inventory I've made of the corpus, I've considered the basic terms used (in French) to designate the colors, the adjectives "white", "black", "red", "green", "yellow", and "blue" for the six basic colors, and the other adjectives designating a color, "violet", "orange", "brown", "gray", and "pink". These eleven terms represent our range of color symbolism, also called the "color field". Note also that our vocabulary includes other terms for the different colors, corresponding to nuances within each of the eleven chromatic fields. However, as Pastoureau writes, "Absolute synonymy, as we know, does not exist. This is perhaps truer for the vocabulary of colors than for any other field in the lexicon. A word like red can't be replaced by a synonym. ... Words like garnet, carmine, vermilion, can only designate certain shades of red — they are not interchangeable with it, and even less so among themselves." And so we will also examine whether Simenon, in his texts, utilizes these shades of color, and if so, what is their frequency with regard to the use of the basic terms, and for what semantic purposes they are employed.
2. Quantitative aspect of the use of colors in the Maigrets
A first rough analysis of the corpus shows that Simenon favored, in his use of color terms, the basic system of six colors as described above, to which must be added gray. The terms "white", "black" and "red" are those which recur most often from his pen, echoing the original Western color system. (We recall, after Pastoureau, how these three colors are preferred, for example, in the tradition of storytelling. Thus, he cites Snow White, with hair black as ebony, lips red as blood, and skin as white as snow. And the fable of the fox and the crow, where the black bird drops a piece of white cheese into the mouth of the red fox.)
Simenon then uses almost equally yellow (the latter, as we shall see, often appearing as the shade "blond"), blue and gray, which take on more importance with the author than in basic system. Brown is more often used than green, clearly not a preferred part of the author's color system. We find next pink, after which occurrences of purple are rarer, and finally orange even rarer still.
We also note that if we do an analysis based on the three "periods" of the corpus, we find that the three colors of the original system (white, black, and red) remain the most frequent, regardless of the period. But for the Fayard period, the next most used color is gray, followed by yellow and blue, while in the Gallimard, green, yellow and blue are ahead of gray (Simenon's desire to "put some color" into a historically difficult time?). For the Presses de la Cité period, yellow and blue surpass gray, followed by brown and then green. And so we note a "decline" of gray as we move through the corpus, in favor of more vivid colors, and we might dare to suggest that this corresponds to a certain lightness of the atmosphere in the novels of the last two periods, in contrast to the "darker" atmosphere of the Fayard texts. This is rather parallel to what we noted with regard to the meteorological descriptions in the corpus, where we saw that Simenon tends more and more to put his character on stage during the summer, and less and less under the autumn mists. We note that this increased lightness of the atmosphere corresponds at the same time to a greater psychological depth in the plots, which tend to approach, in essence, that of the "hard novels".
3. Semantic analysis of the use of colors in the Maigrets
In the remainder of this study, we will consider each color according to its appearance in the Maigret corpus, examining the use of the term – the concept described by the color, the objects or concepts to which is it applied, and the author's purpose in assigning it.
In general, we can say that in the Maigret corpus, the use of a color term serves to describe concepts in three semantic fields:
- description of a character, by his clothing and physical appearance (skin, hair, eyes, mustache and hair in general).
- description of an object.
- description of a landscape or scene to provide an "ambiance" for the scenes described.
3.1. Black
We can summarize the symbolic field of black as encompassing three domains. For one, everything evoking "negative" ideas (death, mourning, dirtiness, sadness, etc.). Second, in contrast, a domain of "positive" concepts (luxury, elegance). And between the two, a domain more or less "neutral", with notions of austerity and authority.
In the corpus, the use of the term "black", while associated with the description of the three semantic fields noted above, will also show certain aspects of the symbolic field of that color. This remark is equally valid for each of the colors studied, so it will not be repeated in the following text.
- We note first that for the black of eyes, hair (including beard, mustache, hair in general), this color attribute is less frequently used than others (as white, gray, brown or red) to describe this physical aspect.
If, in the Fayard period, black hair serves primarily to connote in characters their "foreignness" (for example, Anna Gorskine, with "black hair, greasy, unkempt, falling in thick strands on her neck" (Pietr le Letton) [LET], Gloria Negretti with her "shiny black hair" (Le charretier de la Providence) [PRO], or Ephraïm Graphopoulos in La danseuse du Gai-Moulin) [GAI], in the two following periods, the scope broadens. There are still the foreign characters with their black hair, like Maria, with her "long, silky black hair" (Maigret et son mort) [MOR], Dr. Bloch, with his "black, oily hair" (Maigret au Picratt's) [PIC], Pozzo, with "very black hair pulled back over the top of his head" (Maigret, Lognon et les gangsters) [LOG], Louise Sabati in Maigret a peur [PEU], or Fouad Ouéni, with his "thick black hair, black as ink" (Maigret et l'affaire Nahour) [LOG]. But we also find a gallery of characters who aren't foreigners, to whom are assigned black hair. For example, Jeanne, with "greasy black hair which hung down on both sides of his face" (Maigret se fâche) [FAC], M. Liotard in L'amie de Madame Maigret [MME], Désirée Brault in Maigret se trompe [TRO], Mme Fumal, with "hair black as ink" (Un échec de Maigret) [ECH], Mme Planchon in Maigret et le client du samedi [CLI], Mirella Jonker in Maigret et le fantôme [FAN], Aline Bauche in Maigret se défend [DEF] and La patience de Maigret [PAT]. From a symbolic point of view, this attribute of black hair gives these characters a "negative" aspect, as described above. The "black of evil" for Ouéni, M. Liotard and Mme Planchon, or the "black of sadness" for Louise Sabati or Mme Fumal...
Original French
English translationNote: See the English translation for the continuation of this "black" section. The translation is only complete through "black". Translation of the additional colors will appear soon in the Forum, color by color. The French text is complete.
A phenomenal author and his phenomenal character
Georges Simenon was by many standards the most successful author of the 20th century, and the character he created, Inspector Jules Maigret, who made him rich and famous, ranks only after Sherlock Holmes as the world's best known fictional detective. There is nothing commonplace about the life of Georges Simenon, and he and his works have been the subject of innumerable books and articles. The Maigret stories are unlike any other detective stories — the crime and the details of unraveling it are often less central to our interest than Maigret's journey through the discovery of the cast of characters... towards an understanding of man. Simenon said he was obsessed with a search for the "naked man" — man without his cultural protective coloration, and he followed his quest as much in the Maigrets as in his "hard" novels.
Steve TrusselThis site, first opened on August 29, 1996 as "Inspector Maigret," has spread in various directions from its beginning as primarily a bibliography of editions in English. The "new look" reflects various aspects of this development, but the bibliography remains a central feature.
Counting Maigret: statistics etc.For the forty-year period from 1931 through 1972, a new Inspector Maigret investigation appeared at the average rate about 2.5 per year: 75 novels and 28 short stories, 103 episodes of what has been called George Simenon's "Maigret Saga."
Full-length texts - reviews and articles about Maigret and Simenon, as well as new translations of stories, articles, (and even a novel!) which have never appeared in English.
Index to the texts and articles on various pages.
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background photo: adapted from "Two models for Maigret,
Commissaires Massu and Guillaume." [Ph. Keystone]
"Quai des Orfèvres on the Cité Island at night" [Jean-Pierre Ducatez]
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