Maigret et les Vieillards

Commissaire Maigret first appeared in four popular novels published under the pseudonyms Georges Sim and Christian Brulls at the very end of the 1920s. The “official cycle” would eventually comprise 75 novels, 4 collections of short stories and 28 short stories published in magazines. Fifty of these novels appeared with Presses de la Cité, whose cover designs went through four different presentations. Beginning with Maigret voyage (published in December 1957), the design was standardized: a uniform colored background featuring the author’s silhouette in profile, wearing a hat and smoking a pipe, from which smoke rings — extending onto the front cover — contain the author’s name and the title. All titles in this series were issued as numbered first editions printed on fine paper, with the deluxe and ordinary printings sharing the same printer’s colophon.

Maigret et les vieillards was one of the Maigret novels to which Simenon felt most attached: “I think it is the best of the Maigrets (…) Right after the Cannes Film Festival, I wanted to write a novel full of sunshine and tenderness. I had one in mind, for which the characters and setting were ready. Of that one, I only wrote three pages. It wasn’t a Maigret, and the heroes were in their thirties. I realized afterward that in Maigret et les vieillards, which in a way replaced that abandoned novel, I expressed the same tenderness, put in just as much sunshine, but with characters who are all between seventy-two and eighty-five years old.”