The Judge S House

The Judge's House Illustrated

In the story, a student arrives in a small town looking for a quiet place to stay while preparing for his examination. Making light of the local superstitions, he moves into an old mansion where a notorious hanging judge once lived. He is comfortably settled and engrossed in his work when, in the middle of the night, he is visited by an enormous rat with baleful eyes. As soon as the giant rat appears, other rats that infest the old house fall silent. When the great rat returns on the second night, the student begins to feel uneasy. He soon learns why the locals fear the Judge's House.

The Judges House

The Judge's House

“A writer as comfortable with reality as with fiction, with passion as with reason.” —John Le Carré Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town “A short, sprightly man appeared in the doorway, looked left and right, and went back into the passage. A moment later, the improbable happened. The little man reappeared, bent over, clinging to a long mass that he now started dragging through the mud. It must have been heavy. After four meters, he stopped to catch his breath. The front door of the house had been left open. The sea was still twenty or thirty meters away.” Maigret has been exiled from Paris to a remote province, having offended his superiors. Out of his element, he finds himself utterly bored—until a murder case arrives.