However, inside this locker, there was a corpse that must have been placed there upright and slowly folded in half. It belonged to a woman about thirty years old, very blonde – dyed blonde – who was dressed in a thin, woolen, black dress. Donge did not scream. Particularly pale, he approached Ramieu's glass cage and leaned over the counter to speak to him. – Come and see… The accountant followed him.
THERE IS THE PARIS OF ABUNDANCE AND REFINED MANNERS. There is also that of melancholy mornings and exhausted couples. Prosper Donge, an employee at the Majestic Hotel, an ultra-luxurious hotel in the Élysian Fields, discovers early in the morning the body of a female guest, crammed inside one of the ninety-two metallic lockers of the staff's cloakroom. The young American woman was strangled while her husband was away on a business trip. What was she doing in the basement cloakroom?
Maigret discovers for the needs of the investigation a unique world, made of backstage and secret spaces; an upper world with its own codes and dramas and a lower world where anonymous people are employed. Great wealth mingles with uncertainty, fatigue, and the work of those who, always in the shadows, serve, observe, feel, while thinking no less… A great book by Simenon featuring Inspector Maigret, written in 1942, with precursor connections to Robert Altman's film Gosford Park and the TV series Downton Abbey.
