Maigret and the Spinster by Georges Simenon Page A

it?”
    “Quite true,” agreed the girl. “Aunt Juliette treated her like a servant.”
    “What the Chief Superintendent doesn’t realize…”
    Maigret had difficulty in suppressing a smile, for there was one thing that this seething young man could not see, and that was that he himself suffered from an inferiority complex. But this sense of inferiority irked him so much that, in order to shake it off, he went to the other extreme and adopted an aggressive and defiant posture.
    “My mother was the older sister. She was forty-eight when my aunt met Boynet, who was a wealthy man. After their parents died, the two daughters lived together in Fontenay, on the income they inherited jointly. Now, what happened was this. In order to marry Boynet, my aunt had to have a dowry, so she got my mother to agree to give up her share of the inheritance. Everyone in the family knows that, and, unless he is a liar, Monfils will confirm it. So you see, it was thanks to my mother that Aunt Juliette was able to make such a good match.”
    “‘
I’ll make it up to you one day…you can rest assured that I’ll never forget…After I’m married…
”
    “Not a penny! After she was married, she looked down on her sister as being too poor to be introduced to her grand new friends, so my poor mother had to go to work in a shop in Fontenay. She married one of the supervisors in the store. He was already in poor health. And she had to go on working…”
    “Then we were born, and the most that my aunt could be persuaded to do was to stand godmother to Cécile. And do you know what she sent her for her First Communion? A hundred francs. And she with a husband who already owned at least ten apartment buildings.”
    “‘
You have nothing to fear, Emilie,
’ she wrote to my mother. ‘
If any thing should happen to you, I will take care of the children.
’ ”
    “First, my father died and, not long after, my mother. By then, Aunt Juliette was a widow, and she had recently moved to this apartment, though she occupied the whole floor in those days.”
    “It was our cousin Monfils who brought us from Fontenay…You wouldn’t remember, Berthe…you were too young.”
    “‘
Good God! How skinny they are
!’ exclaimed Aunt Juliette when she saw us. ‘
You’d think my poor sister had starved them…
’ ”
    “She was critical of everything about us, our outer clothes and underwear, our worn shoes, our manners…”
    “As for Cécile, who was nearly grown up, she treated her like a servant from the start. She wanted to send me to trade school, saying that the poor should earn a living with their hands. If I came home with a tear in my trousers, I would never hear the end of it. I was an ungrateful brat, I didn’t appreciate all that she was doing for me and my sisters…Mark her words, I would come to a wretched end…”
    “Cécile suffered in silence. The maid was fired. Why should she keep a servant, with my sister there to do all the work?…Would you like to see the sort of clothes she made us wear?”
    He went across to a cabinet and got a photograph of all three of them. Cécile was in black, as Maigret had known her, her hair unbecomingly drawn back into a tight knot; Berthe, plump as a puppy, in a dress too long for a child of her age; and Gérard, aged fourteen or fifteen, wearing a suit that had certainly not been made to measure.
    “I decided to enlist in the army, and she never sent me so much as a five-franc piece to tide me over till the end of the month…My buddies used to get parcels from home, cigarettes and things. All my life, I’ve had to look on at what other people had.”
    “How old were you when you ceased to live with your aunt?” Maigret asked, turning to the girl.
    “Sixteen,” she replied. “I applied all on my own for a job in a department store. They asked me my age, and I said I was eighteen.”
    “When I got married,” Gérard went on, “my aunt sent me a silver cake slicer…Later, when I was