"Maigret's eyes met those of the boy. It was only for a second. But it was enough for them to understand that they were friends." (The Saint Fiacre Affair). Maigret remembered that at his age, he too would have liked to possess a beautiful golden missal, with the large red letters at the beginning of every verse and this memory put on the commissioner's face an expression of sweetness and complicity that didn't escape the child – behind the policeman he found a friend.

This is a situation fully revealing of Maigret's personality; his knack of understanding a stranger, even assuming his behaviour and communicating silently with him on a level beyond language, gestures and words. What Simenon identifies as instinct, and what could be called the faculty of sympathy, explains the success of this unique policeman and dominates what he refuses to call his 'method'. He prefers the word 'approach', even in terminology he dismisses the rigidity of the rule in favour of human contact.

Maigret does not disdain the technical arsenal that the forensic scientist puts at the disposal of the modern policeman, useful in the investigations of professional criminals, who he arrests with neither hesitation nor remorse. In his Memoirs he lends to Simenon these words that he could say himself:

"Professionals don't interest me. Their psychology doesn't pose any problem, they are people doing their jobs, nothing more."
"Then what interests you?"
"The others. Those who are made like you and me and who wind up, one fine day, by killing without expecting to."
"There aren't so many of those ... outside of crimes of passion."
"Those don't interest me either."

When Maigret says: "With the good people there are always problems." he means that with the unforeseeable and accidental criminals, fingerprints and cigarette ashes don't mean anything. Sometimes even the material evidence is not sufficient to sway Maigret's convictions:

"As a civil servant of the police I am obliged to draw the logical conclusions
from the material evidence."
"And as a man?"
"I wait for the moral proof." (A Man's Head)

For this proof, it is necessary to look into the surroundings of the dead man, into his material environment, his past, not into an ashtray. This knowledge of the victim can only be acquired by impregnating himself with his atmosphere and for Maigret to visit places without the least connection with those of the crime:

Maigret and the Man in the Boulevard
Louis Thouret, stockman in a factory of accessories for carnivals and fairs, has been found murdered in a dead end alley off the Grand Boulevards. Maigret, under pretext of announcing his death to the family, goes in person to his home at 27 rue des Peupliers in Juvisy. He finds a modest dwelling acquired by dint of deprivation, a distrustful and possessive wife, an impatient and frustrated daughter and scornful brothers-in-law. He pushes his curiosity, or scruples, to the point of attending the funeral of the stockman that he had never met, but who soon comes to be familiar and he acts like he was someone close to him: "He did what had to be done, soaked a sprig of boxtree in the blessed water, crossed himself, moved his lips for a moment, and crossed himself again."

The commissioner's wandering curiosity eventually starts paying off. Going to visit the factory, he discovers that it has been closed for three years, whereas Louis Thouret had claimed to be heading off to work every morning. Interrogating a workman, the accountant and the old typist, he learns that whenever they saw the stockman, he was wearing his "goose-dung" shoes, whereas he left home shod always in black. “To Maigret's eyes it was a sign; first, a sign of emancipation, he would have sworn, because during all the time he had the famous shoes on his feet, he had to consider himself a free man."

Here also, the faculty of sympathy is operating. "Were these light brown shoes something that kindled Maigret's interest in the fellow? He wouldn't admit it, even to himself, but he too, long ago, had dreamed of owning a pair of goose-dung shoes..."

Maigret in Vichy
“In the Vichy apartment where the woman in rose had been strangled, it was on the contrary the profusion of photos that represented only the victim. In each, she wore a self-satisfied look, except only one, in which there was a certain tenderness. Maigret was sure that if he knew who had taken that photo, he would have hold of the assassin.”

With his concern to identify with the victim, or those close to him, Maigret is, in every investigation, in the position of an actor condemned to constantly compose new roles from a thin canvas:

Maigret and the Nahour Case
"A policeman," he confides to his wife, "ought to live in every social sphere, to know casinos, for example, international banking, Lebanese Maronites and Moslems, foreign bistros in the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germaine, as well as young Columbians. Not to mention the Dutch language or beauty contests."

An exhausting task, but one the Commissioner would not dispense with for anything on earth – "You can assign an inspector to a precise task, but how can you order him to go over there, to sniff like a dog searching through trash cans, and to unearth, no matter how, the gold, or rather the secret..." (Maigret and the Fortune Teller.)

In Paris itself he has more and more difficulty diving into the atmosphere of the guilty or the victim. In principle a Commissioner of the Paris Justice doesn't take to the streets and bistros in search of a murderer. He is an important gentleman who spends most his time in his office, directing, like a general in his headquarters, a small army of sergeants, inspectors and technicians. "Maigret had never been able to resolve it. Like a dog on the hunt he needed to nose about in person, to scrape, to sniff odours" (My Friend Maigret.)

Maigret’s persistence annoys examining magistrates, who find his methods slow and antiquated; of no value. One day, one of them will oust him brutally from an investigation to confer it on one of his subordinates. And it is with the complicity of this detective that Maigret will pursue the case clandestinely, and will discover, according to his usual approach, the killer of Honoré Cuendet, the solitary burglar. By getting into his skin, by eating in the same small restaurant as he did, living in the hotel room that he had occupied on the eve of his death, and which served not only as his shelter, but his observatory. (Maigret and the Idle Burglar.)

We're also surprised to see the Commissioner troubling to interrogate witnesses on the scene, instead of having them brought to the Quai des Orfèvres. In that way, he puts them back in their own rooms, in the psychological puzzle that the victim had scrambled, approaches them in their own atmosphere, saving himself from the shyness, the distrust, the very hostility caused by an official cross-examination. To talk with Mlle Berthe, the half-sister of Mascouvin, the dishonest man of scruples, he invites her to lunch in a restaurant, insists on visiting her small apartment and taking her back by cab to the tourism agency where she works. But he is careful to have the car stop at the corner so as not to compromise her. (Maigret and the Fortune Teller.)

In The Friend of Madame Maigret, when he comes to interrogate the wife of Steuvels, the bookbinder, he seems much more a "heavy gentleman trying to understand" than a policeman coming to inspect the basement where someone had reportedly burned a body.

To each of these unofficial cross-examinations he always presents himself hat in hand, attentive to the opportunity of an agreeable gesture. He might stroke a cat in the hall or give cool water to the canary left in the room of a victim after his murder?

In Maigret and the Idle Burglar Maigret will let the dead man’s girlfriend keep the takings that he paid for with his life. Maigret didn't want to disappoint Cuendet's old mother who, learning of her son's death, exclaimed: "He is a good son, he won't leave me without resources." After having arrested him several times the commissioner had developed sympathy for this self-educated thief who only operated in occupied apartments, carrying away with their jewellery a little of the intimacy of the owners. He didn't like the way Cuendet had been cut down by the wealthy family that he had burglarized, who wanted to avoid a scandal – "Cuendet's death had made him depressed and angry. He was personally angry at his murderers, as if the Vaudois had been a friend, a comrade, in any case an old relation." And he was angry at them for having disfigured him, and tossed him like a dead animal beside a path in the Bois de Boulogne, onto the frozen ground where his body must have bounced.

Along with such wealthy bourgeoisie a certain category of petit bourgeoisie is excluded from his sympathy; he prefers to reserve it for the guilty, who furthermore often return it to him. In Maigret in Court, Meurant, the taciturn picture framer, incarcerated for murder, writes to Maigret from his cell to ask him to watch over his wife. In contrast in My Friend Maigret we learn that it was Maigret himself who wrote to Marcellin Pacaud, thief and pimp, to tell him that he had gotten his wife off the streets and admitted to a sanatorium. This Pacaud will vow eternal gratitude to the commissioner that he will pay for with his life, after bragging casually of being Maigret's friend.

Thieves, pimps, prostitutes, swindlers... Maigret considers them to be the victims of a society that didn't give them a chance at the beginning and didn't help them to adjust afterwards. So his indulgence and understanding are sometimes even extended to killers. If certain guilty parties are in fact victims, then there are also victims who are in fact guilty. Telling Mme Maigret of the arrest of the killer of the woman in rose in Vichy, he says simply, "I hope that he will be acquitted."

Nothing is more painful nor more discouraging to Maigret than to testify in court. Everything seems false to him from the beginning of the hearing – "human beings find themselves suddenly summarized, so to speak, in a few words, in a few sentences." He himself feels impotent of giving the reality anything more than a "schematic reflection", incapable of making them "feel the weight of things, their density, their quivering, their odour". Scholars pass a whole life studying a character from the past on which there already exists much documentation – a police commissioner has only a few weeks to encompass the personality of a man hitherto unknown. To the judge and jury there is no more – and Maigret hates this – than a few hours to decide a man's life or death; a man whom they have just discovered through the pages of a file. How could they understand him?
Besides, as Malraux said, "To judge is obviously not to understand. Because if one understood, one could no longer judge."

Extracts from the translation by Stephen Trussel of an original article by Francis Lacassin