Maigret à l’école
One of the first 100 copies on pur fil paper (no. 83).
Written during Simenon’s “American period,” at Shadow Rock Farm (Lakeville, Connecticut) between 1 and 8 December 1953, this Maigret novel draws on precise observation of its milieu, capturing the atmosphere of a village in Charente-Maritime gripped by suspicion of “the outsider” — here the Parisian schoolteacher Joseph Gastin. It illustrates the Commissaire’s method particularly well: circumventing the adults’ code of silence by questioning the children, he patiently dismantles the reflex of communal and local hostility that shields the true culprit.
The text first appeared in pre-publication form, in six installments, in the weekly Le Moustique (nos. 1464 to 1469, 14 February–21 March 1954), illustrated by Gérald Forton, before being issued in book form shortly afterward by Presses de la Cité.