Roméo is the venue of the wedding reception where Louise Laboine finds Jeanine Armenieu. In the account reconstructed after Louise’s murder, it is more than a point on her route: the crowded reception brings her back into contact with someone whose life has moved on, and helps establish the course of Louise’s final days.

Setting and Occasion

The evidence identifies Roméo through a specific gathering: the wedding reception of Jeanine Armenieu and Marco Santoni. Louise reaches the venue on the evening she finds Jeanine there. The crowd of wedding guests gives the place its defining character in the narrative—not simply a named address, but a social occasion already organized around a new marriage and a changed set of relationships.

Place in Louise’s Story

The police reconstruct Louise’s story from the moment she leaves her mother in Nice to the evening she finds Jeanine at Roméo. That span makes the reception a chronological landmark: it closes a stretch of Louise’s movements and reconnects her with Jeanine after their lives have diverged. Louise’s arrival among the guests also places her, briefly, inside a gathering from which the narrative emphasizes her personal history rather than her belonging to the celebration.

The Reception in Maigret’s Reconstruction

As Maigret assembles the evidence, he imagines Louise making her way through the crowd at Roméo a month after seeing her enter Maxim’s. The contrast links two appearances in public spaces, while the later scene is specifically framed by the wedding guests and Louise’s search for Jeanine. Roméo thus becomes part of Maigret’s effort to give a human sequence to scattered testimony: the venue anchors a decisive meeting in the larger reconstruction, even as the account still leaves an unresolved interval on the night of Louise’s death.