Signé Picpus

Yesterday evening we happened to watch Rupert Davies in the ancient BBC version of Signé Picpus, a Maigret story which references 2 and 3 suggest that I have read at least twice before. I may have nodded off a bit, but we got to the end and I had not got much of a clue about what I had just seen. I was able to reconstruct the beginning and the end, but there seemed to be a large hole in the middle. So I turned up the hard copy to try and fill some of the gaps.

In the meantime, the story remains that I rather like these old adaptations, made at a time when Simenon was still around - and while the producers like to slap on the Parisian colour, the stories had not yet become the costume dramas they have become since. Just an hour long, which suits quite well these days, two hours being quite a chunk out of an evening. Someone has got around to issuing the whole lot on DVD, but at £60 or so, I have not yet fallen - although a £1 an episode, £1 for an hour's entertainment is not that bad. Less than I often pay. However, with a new smart telly on the horizon, we shall wait and see whether Britbox can do the business.

Puzzle 1. One bit they seemed to have got wrong was translating 'tanche' as roach, which I understood to be a small fish which you might catch in a  net and fry like whitebait. Whereas Collins is quite clear that a tanche is a tench, a fish which can grow to more than half a metre in length, which likes still, turbid water and which can be eaten - although is not much eaten these days. People not hungry enough. Which does not seem quite right, so checking further, I find that I was wrong about roach, which turn out to be a common river fish, ranging in size up to around half a metre, smaller than the tench but presumably quite eatable. Perhaps the BBC translator thought that tench was a mistake, that for once Simenon had been a bit careless about his river facts, and settled for roach instead.

The French for this sort of roach being a 'gardon', with Littré describing it as a small freshwater fish.

And maybe I will get to the pike of references 2 and 3 in due course.

Puzzle 2. Simeon makes quite a lot of the recreational scene on the rivers to the east of Paris, particularly the Seine and the Marne. Lots of riverside bars, al fresco dancings, restaurants, villas and hotels. The weekend scene for lots of Parisians through the middle part of the year. Lots of bridge and goings on. And this BBC adaptation evokes the sort of thing that comes to my mind rather well.

However, when I ask Bing about 'riverside hotels marne isle de france', all he seems to be able to manage is a whole load of hotel booking sites. No real attempt to parse the query, to do what I asked for at all - something that irritates me when I am looking for a hotel in this country. Google does slightly better and turns up references 4 and 5, a bit grander than the sort of thing that I had in mind, but at least the hotel is on the river, even if the river is a tributary of the Marne rather than the Marne proper. While the snap above is the right river and there are what might be weekend homes on the other side, but not much in the way of hotels and restaurants. Maybe Parisians don't do that any more.

But the puzzle is, why don't we do the river scene much at all? I suppose there is a bit out Henley way, but that is for toffs and bankers. All a bit fancy, rather than ordinary Londoners out on a beano. Maybe Hampton Court was a bit nearer the mark fifty years ago.

Is the answer all to do with the fact that we are much cooler and that we are a small island? So we tend to do seaside, with Londoners of old flocking to places like Southend, Margate and Brighton. Seaside hotels, gin palaces and piers. Met the same need, but met it in a proper English way. None of this French nonsense.

PS: while I was posting this, an email turned up from the ancient tree people at reference 6. People in whom I might take a serious interest if I lived a bit nearer. Today, inter alia, they advertise the work of a photographer called Beth Moon, also into ancient trees. But she seems to have protected her copyright very carefully, with very little in the way of good quality reproductions of her photographs having leaked out to the free part of the Internet. Not like people of her sort in this country at all, who mostly let out a good number of tasters. I think the snap above was taken from the foot of a very old Wellingtonia, or giant redwood as they have it in the US.

References

Reference 1: Signé Picpus - Simenon - 1941. Volume XI of the collected works.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/pike.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/picpus.html.

Reference 4: https://www.le-moulin-de-pommeuse.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.le-moulin-de-pommeuse.com/le-parc/. The pictures.

Reference 6: https://www.ancienttreearchive.org/.