The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, July 5, 2025

Byblos: Juliet asks “what’s in a name,” but Shakespeare left it to the rest of us to more clunkily ask what’s in a book title: would it smell as sweet in translation? Georges Simenon wrote The Carter of the “Providence” in 1930, contemporary with the first of his 75 novels to star Maigret, his sullen detective. The French title is Le charretier de la “Providence,” the Providence being the barge involved in the murder of the beautiful unvirginal Mary at the center of the intrigue. I don’t know of many people who’d know or should have to know what a “carter” is, since we no longer have cart-pushers as we once did along the Erie and other canals. To speak of carters to readers today is like trying to explain the rotary phone to a 15 year old. The term carter doesn’t have the connotation of the French charretier, which has the double meaning of cart-pusher and hoodlum, I have no idea why. Or rather, perhaps we shouldn’t explore why: language’s progeny is so hereditary with prejudice, in this case our class-conscious prejudices sewer-lined to bourgeois presumptions: When my parents would yell at me when was a boy in Lebanon they’d often say, “don’t act like a charretrier,” which was really unkind name-calling–not to me (being a Catholic I deserved every punishment coming to me), but to the bellowing charretiers crisscrossing our street and from whose carts of lush and and fresh produce we’d buy days’ worth of food at a time. I’m pretty sure the carters of the Erie Canal or even of Canal Street in Manhattan were never saddled with so much contempt. That’s probably why the first American and English editions of Simenon’s book titled it The Crime at Lock 14, which Harper’s Bazaar serialized in its first three issues of 1934, or Maigret Meets a Milord, as Penguin in England called it in 1963, a title that wouldn’t fly in the United States for the same reason that “Carter” wouldn’t: neither cart-pushers nor milords be. By 2003 Penguin resorted to simply calling it more literally Lock 14, title of the first chapter and where Mary’s murdered corpse is discovered. It is more literal than the leading Italian publisher’s decision to call it Maigret is Moved (Maigret si commuove), a title that wouldn’t fly in the United States for different reasons (if emotional puns are lost to Saxon literalism in Anglo translation, they are aroused in Italian: just say commuove a few times and see if you don’t get a little stirring in il pube). The entire story takes place in four rainy days around Lock 14 at Dizy in the canal system and its horse-drawn barges. The 42 mile-canal, completed in 1846, is lateral to the Marne River the way the Intracoastal is to the American shore, allowing boats calmer passage between Vitry-le-François and Dizy but for 15 locks along the way. This is Champagne country, though not one glass is poured in Le charretier. It’s all rivers of whisky and white wine (every Simenon novel is a repressed prayer to AA). The horse-drawn industry (now romanticized by tourism) is dying. Diesel-powered boats are on horses’ tails. Simenon was just 27 that summer of 1930 as he wrote the book in a few weeks aboard his Ostrogoth, the boat he’d moored at Morsang-sur-Seine, a town the size of an American subdivision about 25 miles south of Paris whose tourism office in May and June 2025 offered what it called “immersive” tours as if hosted by Simenon. You don’t have to go that far. A Simenon book is always an immersive experience in the place he chooses for his story. The plot is really secondary. It’s about the characters, and geography is always a dominant, often deterministic character, which gets us back to the book’s title, so richly suggestive in French and to some extent in English–if it’s Lock 14 we go with: locks have their own mysticism. And we haven’t yet cracked the cover. That’s how damn good Simenon is. 

—P.T.

 

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At 4:30, the tanker’s diesel engine began to cough, but it didn’t leave until a quarter of an hour later, after the skipper had swallowed a hot toddy at the café as the doors were opened. He had barely left, and his boat was not yet on deck, when the two carters made their discovery. One of them was pulling his horses toward the towpath. The other was rummaging through the straw to find his whip when his hand came across a cold body. Impressed by the thought he recognized a human face, he took out his lantern and illuminated the corpse that would shock Dizy and disrupt the life of the canal.

–From Simenon’s Le charretier de la “Providence” (1930).

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