A Happy 200th to Simenon

First Jet-Setter: Listen for our flight call to Katmandu, will you, darling? I want to pick up a maigret. Second Jet-Setter: While you're up, will you get me a simenon?

NEITHER Franglais nor Esperanto, the words "maigret" and "simenon" are nevertheless working their way into many of the world's vocabularies. Properly, a maigret is a detective story whose hero is a Parisian police inspector by that name, but so many maigrets have been published that the word is now used to describe mystery stories in general. In a stricter sense, a simenon is any novel except a maigret by Maigret's progenitor, Belgian-born Author Georges Simenon, 66. Simenon has produced a total of 74 maigrets and 126 simenons, which have appeared in 43 languages. Last week, with the publication in French of ll y a encore des noisetiers (There Are Still Hazel Bushes), Simenon's output under his own name reached a round 200 novels. He has also written 300 other works of fiction using 19 noms de pulp.

This prodigious output has long since made the author a millionaire. Simenon's house at Epalinges, a small Swiss village near Lausanne, has 26 rooms, 21 telephones, portraits of its owner by Buffet, Vlaminck and Cocteau. But the house is more important as a mark of contentment for the Liege-born Simenon, who shares it with Second Wife Denise, their three children and a livery of servants. Previously, his restlessness pushed him for varying periods into 30 residences around the world as well as into a sloop on which he cruised through Europe. Simenon even had an American interval: five years in Connecticut during which he shared a barber with James Thurber. "How lucky you are not to have literary cafes in America," Simenon said last week. "In France, they think I'm a barbarian because I don't mix with other writers."

Simenon no longer mixes much at all. His day begins at 6 a.m. but, since he acts as his own agent, much time is taken up with voluminous correspondence with publishers in each country where his books appear. He writes in brief, intense spurts, but he is no longer quite as prolific as he was in 1928, for example, when he turned out 40 books in one year. Simenon's yearly harvest is now four, and he uses an IBM electric typewriter in place of the pencils that once lasted only three lines each before they became blunted and were tossed away. Puffing constantly on a pipe (like Maigret), Simenon begins a book by christening its characters (from a slew of international telephone books he keeps on hand for the purpose) and providing each with detailed dossiers. Maigret, for instance, is heavyset, patient as Job and frequently compassionate toward the murderers he catches. Then, in what he calls his "state of grace," Simenon's subconscious takes over and evolves a plot. Simenon takes only eight days to write each book, relentlessly crosses off the days on a calendar. Finished manuscripts are tossed aside for three weeks and then revisions quickly made. Hazel Bushes, which deals with the life and wives of a Parisian banker named Francois Perret-La-tour, is "very different from what I have done before." Where earlier books usually had a kind of bittersweet resignation as a conclusion, this one, says Simenon, "has optimism at the end."

Awaiting Judgment. Sipping Pommery champagne last week to ease a virus infection--Maigret, whose bourgeois taste runs to Vouvray, beer or sloe gin sent by his sister-in-law in Alsace, would surely disapprove--Simenon talked about his cornucopia of literature. "Personally I prefer the straight novels to the maigrets. But I don't want to just drop Maigret. So now I do the maigrets for fun, when I'm tired but want to write something." New readers keep discovering Inspector Maigret and, through him, the other books that Simenon calls his "hard" literature. But will this interest last? "The great drama of writers is that we always die without knowing whether we're a success or not. After death, there's always a period of purgatory for a writer's reputation, when it's uncertain what the final judgment will be. Maybe I'm a writer who counts, maybe not." He has, of course, already achieved a kind of immortality in adding the words maigret and simenon to the international lexicon.

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