4/04/04 –

month	title
January	Le chien jaune - The Yellow Dog
February	M. Gallet décédé - Maigret Stonewalled
March	La nuit du carrefour - Maigret at the Crossroads
April	Le charretier de la Providence - Maigret Meets a Milord
May	La tête d'un homme - A Battle of Nerves
June	Un crime en Hollande - Maigret in Holland

My first impression about the place is that it is similar to "La nuit du carrefour". It's remote from the town — Dizy is at two kilometers and a small vilage, Epernay is three more kilometers away. There are three places that play a role in the novel: the house of the lock keeper "la maison de l'éclusier, en pierres grises, avec son écriteau: Bureau de Déclarations", the bar : "Café de la Marine, qui était la seule autre construction de l'endroit", the boats: "La Providence" and the "Southern Cross".
In "La nuit du carrefour", the place is also remote and with the garage and the two houses there are three places. But after those similarities, the novel are different, the tragedy is not the same.
Simenon visited the site in 1931. He wrote an article entitled "une France inconnue ou l'aventure des deux berges" for a special issue of the weekly newspaper "Vu", n°172, 1st July 1931. [published in "Simenon : Mes apprentissages, reportages 1931-1946", Omnibus]. He traveled on his boat la "Ginette". Simenon described the life of the canal and of the bargees and boats to his readers, explaining the vocabulary used on the canal.
He wrote about Dizy : "Dizy, c'est un tout petit village, à deux kilomètres d'Epernay. Mais c'est surtout l'endroit où les bateaux quittent la Marne, pour pénétrer dans le canal".
He writes about the "Trois bistros-épiceries" selling products; about the rain: "Dizy un dimanche soir d'avril sous une pluie désespérante" and even "une accorte Bruxelloise, la marinière du bateau qui est juste au-dessus de nous". There are already lots of the elements that will appear in "le charretier de la Providence"

4/18/04 – Thanks first of all to Jerome for pointing out the similarities in setting between this book and Maigret at the Crossroads, which I had not noticed before.
In The Mystery of Georges Simenon, Fenton Bresler writes:

The peculiarly self-sealed existence of those who live by, and on, the water Simenon was later to recreate — especially in the nineteen-thirties — with his normal stylistic realism in such novels as La Maison du Canal and Le Charretier de la Providence ("Maigret Meets a Milord"), where the Parisian detective sits in a local cafe soaking up the atmosphere and inhaling "a distinctive odour, the nature of which was enough to mark the difference between this and a country cafe. It smelled of stables, harnesses, tar and groceries, oil and gas". (Bresler, pp 63-64)

Bresler continues:

Simenon brought the Ostrogoth down to an anchorage at Morsang, on the River Orge near Corbeil, just south of Paris. And there, in the summer of 1930, he wrote, on the trot, three full-length novels: M. Gallet Décédé ("Maigret Stonewalled"), Le Pendu du Saint-Pholien ("Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets") and Le Charretier de la Providence ("Maigret Meets a Milord").

"At that time I worked morning and afternoon, a chapter in each," Simenon recalls. "I said to myself: 'When it comes quicker, I won't be able to work any longer except in the morning,' and the time came when I could only work in the morning." (Bresler, p74)

4/18/04 – This Maigret novel is set completely along a certain stretch of a French canal from Épernay to Vitry-le-François (both in the Marne département). In reality this canal was constructed in 1845 to run parallel to the river Marne. This river meanders considerable, so that the canal, which runs straight for many stretches, is preferable for the barge traffic. Vitry-le-François provides a junction for two further canals, the Canal de la Marne à la Saône (the Canal from the Marne to the Saône) and the Canal de la Marne à la Rhin (the Canal from the Marne to the Rhine), forming part of the canal system that stretches not only through France, but also links Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany.
In two trips, Simenon explored much of this network of canals and rivers in his first boat, the "Ginette", in 1928 and then, between 1929 and 1931 in his larger craft the "Ostrogoth".
This Maigret novel was written at Le Four à Chaux, near Morsang-sur-Seine (Seine-et-Oise – now Essonne), during the summer of 1930 on his second boat the "Ostrogoth", but the setting and atmosphere relates to his first trip in the "Ginette" in 1928.
Simenon seemed to have been fascinated by water throughout most of his life, setting some of his novels and short stories by, or on, canals, rivers, lakes and the sea. Maybe this fascination was instilled in him during his formative years in Liège, living close to the river Meuse and when the Simenon family lived in the district of Outremeuse they were living on an island formed by the Meuse and its counterpart, the Derivation de la Meuse.
One of the strengths of the novel is how well Simenon constructs the storyline into the setting of canal life made authentic from his personal experience.
In the spring of 1928, he bought the "Ginette", a boat measuring 13 feet in length by 5 feet wide, which he then fitted with a three horsepower engine. This was to carry him, his wife Tigy, their maid and cook Boule and their dog, a great Dane named Olaf, from mid-April to the end of September of 1928, through some of the rivers and canals of France. Their itinerary started in Paris and took in Épernay, Chaumont, Langes, Chalon-sur-Saône, Lyon, Marseille, Sète, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montluçon, Orléans, Montargis and then back to Paris.
During this trip, Simenon continued to write his novels and short stories under pseudonyms, so the boat had on board his typewriter and a stock of paper. Most of the other necessary equipment for this journey was towed behind in a canoe.
Later Simenon wrote several articles about this journey, commissioned by various magazines, and some of the details are used in Le Charretier de la "Providence".
Most of the photographs of canal life that illustrate these published articles were taken at a later date. In July and August 1931, Simenon, accompanied by the Czechoslovak photographer Hans Oplatka, went over the itinerary undertaken in 1928, but this time by car.
The canal in the novel from Dizy to Vitry-le-François runs for nearly 67 kilometres (about 42 miles) and has 15 locks along this stretch.
In one of his articles (in Une France inconnue ou L'Aventure entre deux berges - An unknown France or The Adventure between two banks - published in 1931 in the magazine "Vu"), Simenon writes:
'Dizy is a very small village, two kilometres from Épernay. But above all it is a place where the boats leave the Marne in order to enter the canal…
…But it is about Dizy that I wish to talk, of Dizy one April Sunday evening under appalling rain.'
At the beginning of the novel, Simenon mentions Dizy and then:
' That Sunday - it was the 4th of April - the rain had started pouring down at three o'clock in the afternoon…' and later…' The rain was falling more and more heavily…'
Again in the same article Simenon describes how in April 1928 he and his two companions in the "Ginette" were working like maniacs to reach the canal at Dizy in the same appalling rain which was making many items soaking wet including themselves. Eventually the owners of the barge just ahead of them invited them on board to shelter and dry off.
And in the article he continues:
'The rain still more abundant. As in order to dishearten us, a Decauville train goes past in a building yard and its driver takes shelter under an enormous umbrella…' - a detail he uses again in the novel:
'Everything was steaming in the rain. That was the dominant note… A hundred yards away, a little Decauville train travelled backwards and forwards across a building yard, and its driver, at the back of the miniature engine, had fixed up an umbrella under which he was standing shivering, with his shoulders hunched up.'
A few examples of the author using personal experiences, in various ways, that occurs in much of his work
(The quotes from the novel are taken from the English translation by Robert Baldick, Penguin Books, C2027, 1963).
In the book entitled "Cruising French Waterways" by Hugh McKnight (Great Britain, Adlard Coles Nautical, 1999, 3rd Edition), on page 67 is to be found: 'All the atmosphere of the pre-World War II horse boats in this location (Canal Latéral à la Marne) is admirably portrayed in Georges Simenon's 1931 novel Le Charretier de la "Providence", published in English as Maigret Meets a Milord.'
In the novel, Maigret finds himself, like Simenon, in the world of the daily working canal life among the people whose livelihood depend on the trade carried out along the network of waterways throughout France and beyond. This is in contrast with the pleasure craft, a yacht named "The Southern Cross", owned and skippered by Sir Walter Lampson (the "Milord" of the Penguin English title).
Simenon admirably portrays the differences between the two sets of lifestyles. There are those who work on the canals, the bargees, the lock keepers, café and store owners striving to keep to their daily schedules in order for the canal traffic to run as smoothly as possible, contrasted with the occasional pleasure craft with a different and more leisurely itinerary.
From the beginning, Maigret realises that few craft along the canal remain in one place for long, especially with fifteen locks to negotiate, so he resorts in following their progress by taking to the towpath on a borrowed bicycle.
Leaving much of the collection of information to Lucas, Maigret gradually discovers how tragically these two very different lifestyles are interwoven.

4/23/04 – In Simenon a Critical Biography, Stanley Eskin says that Simenon took a keen interest in the pricing and design of the early Maigrets.
He writes: "Simenon himself went running about the rue Mouffetard in search of an appropriate bum to pose for the third Maigret, Le Charretier de la "Providence".