Cécile is Dead

This is likely not one of Simenon’s finest novels.
The plot is exceedingly simple: the niece, who served as a maid, kills her sick aunt when the latter refuses to give her money for her brother.
Rummaging through the drawers, she discovers old papers proving that the aunt, together with her lover, had murdered her husband fifteen years earlier.
The aunt’s former lover, who remains her business partner and lives in an adjoining flat, in turn murders Cécile to prevent her from revealing the contents of the documents she uncovered.
From the standpoint of the detective genre, the events of the novel feel predictable, and the pacing certainly fails to grip the reader.
The atmosphere (the figure of Maigret, the petty-bourgeois life) is sketched in a hurried, almost superficial manner.
The fundamental virtue of the novel lies in its style.
Even if the French language is not simple (owing to the richness of its vocabulary), it becomes readily intelligible through the sequence of clauses and words, which, even phonetically, help convey the traits of the characters, Maigret’s demeanor, and the salient aspects of the setting.
What is to be appreciated is not so much the novel as a whole, but rather certain glimpses, such as the following:

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