The Methods of Maigret ( PDFDrive )

It is always ridiculous to play the Good Samaritan. He had picked her up in
the Brasserie des Ternes and had sent her off to the sanatorium. He had never
told himself he was saving a soul, that he was “snatching a girl from the gutter.”
Someone else, “who was like him,” as she had told him, had looked after her
in his turn: the doctor as the sanatorium. Had he hoped for something?
She had become what she had become. That was her affair. He had no reason
to take offense, to resent it with bitterness.
He had been hard because it had been a necessity, because that type of
women, even the least wicked of them, lie as they breathe, sometimes without
any need, without any reason. And she hadn’t told him everything yet, he was
sure. It was so true that she couldn’t get to sleep. There was something on her
mind.
Once she got up. He heard her bare feet on the floor of the room. Was she
going to come and find him? There was nothing impossible about that, and
Maigret had prepared himself mentally to hurry into his trousers, which he had
left lying on the floor.
She hadn’t come. There had been the clink of glasses. She was thirsty. Or else
she had taken a sleeping draught.
He had only drunk one glass of champagne. The rest of the time he had drunk
mostly wine, then, God knows why, anisette.
Who had ordered anisette? Oh yes! It was the dentist. A former dentist, to be
precise, whose name escaped him. Another phenomenon. There were nothing
but phenomena on the island, at the Arche, at any rate. Or perhaps was it they
who were right and the people on the other side of the water, on the mainland,
who were wrong to behave otherwise?
He must once have been very respectable, very well groomed, for he had a
dentist’s surgery in one of the smartest districts of Bordeaux, and the people of
Bordeaux are particular. He had come to Porquerolles by chance, on holiday,
and since then he had only left for a week, the time it took to go and wind up his
affairs.
He wore no collar. It was one of the Morins, a fisherman, who cut his hair
once a month. That Morin was called Morin-Coiffeur. The ex-dentist’s beard
was at least three days old and he neglected his hands; he neglected everything,
didn’t do anything except read, in a rocking chair, in the shade on his veranda.
He had married a daughter of the island who had perhaps been pretty but who
had very quickly become enormous, with the shadow of a mustache on her lip
and a strident voice.