Nice

Nice is the remembered home from which Louise Laboine left, and the place where investigators locate her mother after her death. The novel gives the city little scenic description; its importance comes instead from the lives and departures attached to it. Nice holds the beginnings of Louise’s estrangement, while a later call from Detective Sergeant Féret turns it into a source of evidence that helps Maigret reconstruct her past.

A home remembered through deprivation

The account of Louise’s childhood in Nice is spare but pointed. She was sent to buy fish at a shop where her mother owed money and received a cool welcome there. The small errand places her inside an adult debt that she could not resolve, and marks how poverty shaped even an ordinary trip outside the home. In Maigret’s developing picture, this detail makes Louise’s childhood more than a blank interval before her arrival in Paris: it suggests an early experience of being treated differently and of having little control over the circumstances around her.

The narration later considers that Louise probably knew nothing of her father. As a small child, she must have wondered why her mother was unlike other mothers and why their life differed from the neighbors’. These are presented as probable questions, not as memories Louise directly reports. That uncertainty matters: Nice becomes the setting for an absence the investigation can only partly fill. The known facts point to a child trying to understand a family life that did not match the examples around her, without offering a fuller account of what she understood or felt at the time.

The mother’s life in and around Nice

When Féret finds Louise’s mother, she lives alone in a furnished room on Rue Greuze, near Boulevard Victor Hugo. The room places her in a specific part of Nice, but the description emphasizes her circumstances rather than the neighborhood: her dress and hat are at least ten years old. She tells Féret that she was once an artist and toured the Near East and Asia Minor under the stage name Lili France. Her answer about whether she had been married is equivocal, leaving the relationship history unclear rather than resolving it into a conventional family account.

The mother’s present routine further distinguishes her from the image of a settled household. Féret has to go to Monte Carlo to find her, at the Casino, where she is reluctant to leave before evening. He describes a pattern among regular gamblers who depend on small capital, repeatedly stake modest sums, and count on limited winnings to meet everyday expenses, including their bus fare. When the tables are full, the management sometimes pays these regulars what they would likely have won and clears them out. The detail connects the mother’s solitary life in Nice to a precarious daily economy: gambling is not presented simply as spectacle, but as a routine on which she relies.

From Nice to the investigation

Féret’s presence in Nice has its own practical history. He had worked under Maigret before requesting a transfer there because of his wife’s health. That prior professional connection allows Maigret to question him directly when a call comes in about the unidentified young woman. At first the girl is known only through the case; the name Louise Laboine emerges through the inquiry. The exchange links the Paris investigation to Nice not by coincidence alone, but through an officer already stationed there and able to pursue the family lead.

The search for the mother does not proceed as a smooth interview. Féret reaches her at the Casino, where she keeps asking to postpone speaking until she returns to Nice. Once Maigret learns she lives alone and hears how she earns her daily living, the delay acquires context: leaving the tables means interrupting a routine she treats as necessary. Féret’s eventual discovery brings several previously scattered details into one account—the mother’s room, her former stage identity, her gambling, and Louise’s childhood. Nice thus functions as an investigative node, with Monte Carlo forming part of the search for a person whose home remains in the city.

A point of departure, not a complete portrait

By the time Maigret’s team has filled in most of the gaps, the narrative can reconstruct Louise’s story from her departure from her mother in Nice to the evening she found Jeanine Armenieu at Roméo. That span gives Nice a clear place in the chronology, but not a fully narrated sequence of scenes. The city stands at one end of a journey whose intervening experiences are pieced together through testimony and investigation. The remaining uncertainty is explicit: the detectives still need to account for about two hours on the night Louise died.

Nice consequently carries both biographical and evidentiary weight. It is where Louise’s early difference from her neighbors takes shape, where her mother continues a solitary and financially precarious life, and where Féret’s inquiries recover facts unavailable in the Paris investigation alone. Yet the city does not explain Louise’s fate by itself. Its contribution is a handful of concrete, uneasy details—an unpaid fish-shop account, a mother living alone, an old dress and hat, and a daughter who leaves—through which Maigret can begin to understand how little support Louise had as she tried to find a place in the world.