The Methods of Maigret ( PDFDrive )

It sometimes happened to him, especially in the morning, especially when he
approached the looking glass to shave. He would look at the broad face, the huge
eyes, often underlined with pouches, the thinning hair. He would become stern,
deliberately, as though to frighten himself. He would tell himself:
“That’s the Divisional Chief Inspector!”
Who would have dared not to take him seriously? Heaps of people, who did
not have easy consciences, trembled at the mention of his name. He had the
power to question them until they cried out with anguish, to put them in prison,
send them to the guillotine.
In this very island, there was now someone who, like himself, heard the
ringing of the bells, who breathed the Sabbath air, someone who was drinking in
the same room as himself the previous evening and who, in a few days, would be
shut up once and for all within four walls.
He swallowed down his cup of coffee, poured himself out another, which he
carried up to his room, and he had some difficulty in realizing that all this could
be serious: it was not so very long ago that he was wearing short trousers and
walking across his village square on chilly mornings, his finger tips numb with
cold, to go and serve Mass in the small church lit only by wax candles.
Now he was a big figure: everyone believed what he said and there was only
himself who, from time to time, had to be convinced.
Did other people have the same experience? Did Mr. Pyke, for example,
sometimes wonder how other people could take him seriously? Did he, be it ever
so rarely, have the impression that it was all a game?
Was the major anything more than an overgrown schoolboy, like the ones
there are in every class, one of those fat and sleepy boys whom the master
cannot resist making fun of?
Mr. Pyke had said a terrible thing the previous evening, shortly before the
Polyte episode. It was downstairs, at the moment when, like the evening before
and every other evening, almost everybody was gathered at the Arche. The Yard
Inspector had sat naturally at the major’s table, and at that moment, despite the
difference in age, in rotundity, they had a sort of family resemblance.
They must have been drinking late in the afternoon when Mr. Pyke had been
to see his fellow countryman at the villa. Enough to have a dulled eye and thick
tongue, but too little to lose their dignity. Not only had they been taught the
same manners at school, but later, heaven knows where, they had learned to hold
liquor in the same way.
They were not sad, but nostalgic rather, a little far away. They gave the