The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And hanging was the leitmotif of at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches. On the edge of a forest: a man hanging from every branch. A church steeple: beneath the rooster atop the weather vane, a human body dangled from each arm of the cross . . . below another sketch were written four lines from Villon's Ballade des Pendus. On a trip to Brussels, Maigret unwittingly causes a man's suicide, but his own remorse is overshadowed by the discovery of the sordid events that drove the desperate man to shoot himself.