Hôtel Washington

Hôtel Washington serves as a hinge between Jeanine’s life before her marriage and the inquiry into Louise Laboine’s death. It is both an address Maigret follows to reconstruct where Louise had lived and the place where Jeanine kept a potentially significant letter shortly before the wedding. The hotel’s importance lies less in any description of its rooms than in the movement of people and belongings through it: a temporary residence becomes a point of contact between two women and a clue whose meaning remains uncertain.

Residence Before the Marriage

Soon after meeting Marco Santoni, Jeanine went to live at Hôtel Washington on Rue Washington. Santoni often visited her there, and she sometimes spent a night at his apartment. By the time of the inquiry, she was the new Madame Santoni, and the hotel marked the period immediately before her marriage. Her stay also formed part of a larger sequence of addresses: Maigret hoped that tracing where she had lived before and during that period might help him identify Louise’s address.

The hotel was not Louise’s last known lodging. She had lodged for the preceding two months in a room sublet by Madame Crêmieux on Rue de Clichy. Maigret nevertheless intended to investigate Hôtel Washington as well as the Town Hall of the 8th Arrondissement, where the marriage took place. These stops offered separate routes into the past: the official record of the wedding and the address where Jeanine had stayed beforehand. The hotel thus enters the investigation as one link in an address trail, not as the place where Louise’s body was found or where her death was established.

Jeanine, Louise, and the Letter

Jeanine was staying at Hôtel Washington when the letter was in her bag for two or three days. Asked who had visited her, she named only Marco. She could not say precisely what had happened to the letter afterward; she thought she must have put it away with other papers. That uncertainty mattered because the letter’s whereabouts were not accounted for, even as the inquiry began to connect it with Louise’s death.

The hotel also anchors the movement of Jeanine’s possessions around the wedding. On the day before the ceremony, she took her things from Hôtel Washington to Marco’s flat. She left behind her toiletries and a few clothes, which the valet collected the following day. The distinction between what she moved herself and what remained for later collection gives the stay a clear endpoint while leaving open the question of what papers were still there. Jeanine’s account does not establish that the letter was at the hotel when her belongings were removed, only that it had been in her bag during her stay and that she later believed she had put it away with other papers.

Role in the Investigation

Maigret’s interest in Hôtel Washington is practical: by visiting it, he hopes to learn where Jeanine had lived before, and through that information to discover the dead girl’s address. The hotel is therefore part of the detective work of reconstructing Louise’s movements indirectly, through another person’s history. Its significance comes from the overlap between the two women’s circumstances rather than from evidence that they met there.

That overlap acquires greater weight when Jeanine asks whether Louise was killed because of the message. Maigret answers that this is quite possible, but the exchange does not confirm the letter’s contents, its final location, or a definite causal link to the murder. Hôtel Washington remains a place of partial knowledge: Jeanine’s stay and the timing of the letter are established, while its disappearance among papers and the circumstances of Louise’s death leave the suspected connection unresolved. In this way, the hotel functions as a quiet investigative junction, joining a marriage, a missing piece of correspondence, and the effort to recover the address of a woman whose life had become difficult to trace.