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continued on his way, smoking his pipe, his
hands stuffed in his pockets, annoyed with himself and with the others and wondering, in short,
what he was doing there instead of being at home.
    He passed the wall enclosing the Amorelles’
garden. As he walked past the gate, he noticed a light at one of the windows. Now on his left
were dark bushes among which, a little further on, he would find the path leading to old
Jeanne’s place.
    Suddenly, there was a sharp snap followed
immediately by a faint noise on the ground a few metres ahead of him. He froze, nervous, even
though it sounded like the shot earlier, when Malik had told him about an old eccentric who
spent his evenings hunting woodpigeon.
    All was silent. But there had been someone, not
far from
him, probably on the Amorelles’
wall, someone who had shot with a rifle and who had not been firing in the air, at some
woodpigeon sitting on a branch, but towards the ground, towards Maigret as he walked past.
    He scowled, a mix of ill temper and satisfaction.
He clenched his fists, furious, and yet he felt relieved. He preferred this.
    ‘Scoundrel!’ he grumbled softly.
    There was no point in looking for his attacker,
in rushing after him as Malik had done earlier. He wouldn’t find anything in the dark and
he might trip and fall stupidly into a hole.
    He kept going, his hands still in his pockets,
his pipe between his teeth. His pace did not falter for an instant, his burly frame and
deliberately slow tread displaying his contempt.
    He reached L’Ange a few minutes later
without being used as a target again.

3. Family
Portrait in the Drawing Room
    It was 9.30 and Maigret was not up yet. For some
time now the noises from outside had been filtering in through the wide-open window – the
clucking of the hens scratching around in the muck in a courtyard, a dog’s chain rattling,
the insistent hooting of the tug-boats and the more muffled throbbing of the barge engines.
    Maigret had a hangover, and even what he would
have called a stinking hangover. Now he knew the secret of old Jeanne, the owner of
L’Ange. The previous evening when he’d got back, she’d still been in the
dining room, sitting by the clock with the copper pendulum. Malik had been right to warn him
that she would be waiting up for him. But it was probably not so much that she wanted to talk,
but to drink.
    ‘She can knock it back, all right!’
he said to himself, still half-asleep. He didn’t dare wake up too abruptly for fear of the
thumping headache he knew lay in wait for him.
    He should have realized immediately. He had known
other women like Jeanne who, after the change of life, have lost all interest in their
appearance and drag themselves around, miserable, moaning and groaning, their face shiny and
their hair greasy, complaining of every ailment under the sun.
    ‘I’d love a little drink,’
he’d said, sitting down beside her,
or rather
straddling a chair. ‘What about you, Madame Jeanne? … What can I pour
you?’
    ‘Nothing, monsieur. I’d better not
drink. Everything’s bad for me.’
    ‘A tiny liqueur?’
    ‘All right, just to keep you company
… A Kummel, then. Would you like to pour one for yourself? … The bottles are on the
shelf. My legs are very swollen this evening.’
    So Kummel was her tipple, that was all. And he
too had drunk the caraway-flavoured liqueur out of politeness. He still felt nauseous. He swore
he would never touch another drop of Kummel as long as he lived.
    How many little glasses had she surreptitiously
drained? She talked, in her complaining voice at first, and then becoming more animated. From
time to time, looking elsewhere, she would grab the bottle and pour herself a glass. Until
Maigret caught on and found himself refilling his glass every ten minutes.
    Strange evening. The maid had long since gone to
bed. The cat was curled up in Madame Jeanne’s lap, the pendulum swung to and fro behind
the glass door of the grandfather clock, and the