Beyond Pierre Gringiore

"There is no going back to this other person, this other place. This thing, this stranger, she is what you are now."-- Jodie Foster, The Brave One

French society has a way of sublimating disingenuity which is particular to itself, and cuts across its authorial class, reaching back before Victor Hugo, but certainly linking him in a flowering genus: Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, the genius of Stendhal, the superb Stendhal, Moliere, Proust. Yet it is linked, too, to Spanish sleepiness, the lassitude of the Spaniard's daydream themes, coupled with fervor, and the crafty shrewd Italian. Even Simenon's sparse discipline is not unaffected by it, and somehow, Bruno Cremer makes Maigret greater than the sum of gossip, realism, sliding the calculus in a great hunter's mind. No one is ever discomfited by the deception of gas, slowly bursting as a stool moves in transit. Bloating is just bloating, until it becomes the biological eruption of death, the thing which kills. Bowl blockage, cervical cancer.

For Simenon, this substitute for wasted, withered flesh is the morphine needle, and in Maigret On Trial, Maigret's Patience, the 20th century is perfected to tradition. The stories tell the battle of Maigret and Manuel Palmeri, who may be Italian, what the fuck do I know about borders being porous, and Manuel's mistress, Aline, and the novels hearken straight back to Hugo's genius in Gringiore's adventures with the Circus of Miracles. Dangerous people fake blindness and amputation to steal, to beg, and Simenon's brilliance is entirely aware of this conceit, while the Belgian production and Cremer's near perfect realization, for a bit actor, makes the novels themselves nearly unnecessary to read. Criminality and the law both exploit disability, create it, and ruthless avarice destroys and eliminates it. I am finally penetrating the coda, finally. I can begin to see, despite the alarming length of fecal discharge, my anger with overages I should be perfectly capable of avoiding. 

Violence as an argument, this will always be with us, and I'm a rare woman, like Jennifer Lopez donning Harlee like an overcoat, entranced by her own abuse, who believes in its cathartic consequences, and that's all I've ever really feared, justifiable homicide, even with its anti-climatic dissonance, and so what. Murder, the stuff of the kitchen table, humanity reverting with age to simple, reptilian responses: fight, flight, bite, tear, before the snake asphyxiates your ability to breathe.