The Methods of Maigret ( PDFDrive )

He was happy. Or so he claimed. He would say with a disconcerting
assurance:
“You’ll see! If you stay long enough you’ll be bitten like the others. And then
you won’t go away again.”
Maigret knew that in certain of the Pacific islands white people sometimes let
themselves go like that, go native, as they say, but he didn’t know it was possible
three miles from the French coast.
When someone was mentioned to the dentist he only judged them in terms of
the extent to which they had gone native. He called it something else: he said:
Porquerollitis.
The doctor? For there was a doctor, too, whom Maigret had not yet met, and
whom Lechat had mentioned. Infected to the bone, according to the dentist.
“I presume you are friends?”
“We never see one another. We pass the time of day in the distance.”
True, the doctor had arrived with his preoccupations. He was very ill and had
only settled in the island to cure himself. He was a bachelor. He lived alone in a
poky little house with a garden full of flowers and he did his own housework.
Indoors it was very dirty. On account of his health he didn’t go out in the
evenings, even in cases of emergency, and in winter when it happened to be
really cold, which was rare, days and sometimes weeks would go by without his
white nose being seen.
“You’ll see! You’ll see!” the dentist insisted with a sarcastic smile. “Besides,
you’ve already got some idea of what it is by looking around you. Just think, it’s
the same every evening.”
And it was indeed a curious spectacle. It wasn’t quite the atmosphere of a
café, nor was it that of a drawing room. The disorder called to mind a soirée in
an artist’s studio.
Everyone knew everyone else and people didn’t stand on ceremony for each
other. The major, who came from a leading English school, was here on the
same footing as a dockside loafer like Marcellin, or as a Charlot.
From time to time someone would change places, or partners.
To start with, Monsieur Émile and Ginette had remained still and quiet at the
same table near the counter, like a long-married couple waiting for a train in a
railway station. Monsieur Émile had ordered his usual tisane, Ginette a greenish
liqueur in a minute glass.
Now and then they would exchange a word or two in low voices. Nothing