Explore the real-world places that appear in Maigret's Holiday by Georges Simenon. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Les Sables-d'Olonne Seafront, Hôtel de la Plage, Port of Les Sables-d'Olonne, Local Café-Tabac, Les Sables-d'Olonne, Gare de Les Sables-d'Olonne and 8 more.
Promenade Georges Clemenceau — Maigret's holiday setting
In 'A Summer Holiday,' Maigret and his wife Madame Maigret have come to Les Sables-d'Olonne for a rare seaside vacation. Maigret sits uncomfortably on the beach, too large, too conspicuous, trying to relax in a way that does not suit him. It is here, amidst holidaymakers and parasols, that he first notices something troubling in the behavior of people around the hotel — the seeds of the crime he cannot help but investigate, even on holiday.
Les Sables-d'Olonne has been one of France's most popular Atlantic seaside resorts since the late 19th century, when the arrival of the railway opened it to Parisian tourists. Its wide sandy beach, known as La Plage, stretches for nearly three kilometers and became synonymous with summer leisure.
Les Sables-d'Olonne remains a thriving coastal resort town in the Vendée department. It is internationally famous as the finish line of the Vendée Globe solo round-the-world sailing race. The long beach promenade is busy with tourists every summer.
Visit: Les Sables-d'Olonne Beach & Promenade (landmark)
Les Sables-d'Olonne — The Maigrets' holiday hotel
The Maigrets stay at a beachfront hotel in Les Sables-d'Olonne, typical of the modest, respectable establishments that Simenon favored in his fiction. Maigret sits on the hotel terrace in the evenings with a beer, watching the other guests with his habitual slow, penetrating gaze. It is in this hotel that he becomes aware of tensions between guests — whispered conversations, anxious glances — that draw him reluctantly into a murder investigation he was supposed to leave behind in Paris.
Beachfront hotels in Les Sables-d'Olonne flourished from the Belle Époque onward, catering to the growing middle-class holiday trade from Paris and the interior. Many such establishments lined the seafront promenade, offering full board and direct access to the beach.
Several hotels still operate along the Les Sables-d'Olonne beachfront promenade, catering to summer vacationers. The Atlantic Hotel and similar establishments occupy the traditional positions facing the sea that Simenon would have known.
Quai Guiné — Fishing harbor and local life
The working port of Les Sables-d'Olonne provides the atmospheric backdrop against which Maigret conducts his discreet inquiries in 'A Summer Holiday.' He wanders here among the fishing boats and nets drying in the sun, questioning locals and observing the rhythms of a working harbor town that contrasts sharply with the leisured world of the tourist beach. The port's cafés and tabacs are where local gossip flows most freely.
Les Sables-d'Olonne has been a significant fishing port since the Middle Ages, known particularly for its sardine and tuna fishing fleets. The channel port, known as Le Chenal, divides the town from the neighboring commune of L'Île-d'Olonne and has long supported a community of fishermen and sailors.
The port remains active as both a commercial fishing harbor and a large marina for pleasure craft. The Vendée Globe race departs from and returns to this port. Quayside fish markets and seafood restaurants draw visitors year-round.
Visit: Port de Les Sables-d'Olonne (landmark)
Town center — Maigret's unofficial headquarters
As in every Maigret novel, the local café becomes the inspector's true office even on vacation. In 'A Summer Holiday,' Maigret nurses his demi of beer at the zinc counter, exchanging slow pleasantries with the barman and absorbing everything overheard around him. His seemingly idle presence here allows him to piece together the web of relationships between the holiday guests and locals at the center of the crime.
The café-tabac has been a cornerstone of French provincial and coastal life for over a century, serving simultaneously as bar, tobacconist, post agent, and community meeting place. In resort towns like Les Sables-d'Olonne, such establishments catered to both locals and summer visitors.
Numerous cafés and brasseries operate throughout Les Sables-d'Olonne's town center and along the beachfront, maintaining the traditional French café culture that Simenon so vividly evoked throughout the Maigret series.
Visit: Cafés of Les Sables-d'Olonne (restaurant)
Avenue de Gaulle — The railway connection to Paris
The railway station represents Maigret's uneasy link between his holiday world and his professional life. In 'A Summer Holiday,' the station is where departures and arrivals become significant — a suspect's movements are tracked, a telegram from Paris arrives, and ultimately Maigret must decide whether his obligations as a detective override his wife's long-awaited vacation. Madame Maigret's patient resignation is movingly evoked at these moments of departure.
Les Sables-d'Olonne station was opened in 1866 as part of the Paris–Nantes–Saint-Nazaire coastal extension, transforming the town into an accessible resort for Parisians. The rail link made possible the mass middle-class tourism that characterized the town in the early twentieth century.
The station is still in operation, served by TGV and regional trains connecting Les Sables-d'Olonne to Nantes and Paris Montparnasse. Journey time to Paris is approximately three hours, making it a practical destination for Parisian holidaymakers as in Maigret's time.
Visit: Gare de Les Sables-d'Olonne (landmark)
36 Quai des Orfèvres, Paris 1er — Maigret's professional home
Though Maigret is ostensibly on holiday in 'A Summer Holiday,' the shadow of the Quai des Orfèvres hangs over the entire narrative. His colleagues back in Paris communicate via telegram and telephone. In 'Maigret and the Fortuneteller,' the Quai is Maigret's base of operations as he investigates the murder connected to a Parisian fortuneteller, convening with his trusted team of Lucas, Janvier, and Torrence in his familiar office overlooking the Seine.
The Police Judiciaire occupied the famous building at 36 Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité from 1913 until 2017. The address became so synonymous with French detective fiction and cinema that the building's name alone evokes an entire genre. It was built on the site of the former royal goldsmith's quarter.
The Police Judiciaire relocated to a new headquarters in the 13th arrondissement in 2017. The historic building at 36 Quai des Orfèvres now houses the Paris Tribunal de Commerce. Maigret fans still visit the exterior, which remains essentially unchanged.
Visit: 36 Quai des Orfèvres (exterior landmark) (historic site)
Montmartre or Right Bank — Scene of investigation in 'Maigret and the Fortuneteller'
In 'Maigret and the Fortuneteller,' the inspector investigates the world of a Parisian clairvoyante who has been receiving clients — mostly bourgeois women — in her apartment. A murder connected to this circle forces Maigret into the shadowy world of superstition, blackmail, and hidden secrets among respectable Parisian families. He interviews the fortuneteller's clients, each concealing something they would rather not have read in the cards.
Fortunetelling and clairvoyance enjoyed enormous popularity in Paris throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Montmartre in particular was associated with esoteric practitioners who catered to a clientele ranging from the working class to Parisian high society. Such figures occupied a morally and legally ambiguous position in French society.
Montmartre retains its bohemian and slightly mystical character. While commercial fortunetellers are less visible than in Simenon's era, the neighborhood's winding streets and atmospheric buildings evoke the world he described. The area is a major tourist destination centered on the Sacré-Cœur basilica.
Visit: Montmartre Historic District (historic site)
Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, Paris 11e — The Maigret family home
The Maigret apartment on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir is the emotional center of the entire series. In 'A Summer Holiday,' it is the home Madame Maigret has left behind, hopefully, for a proper vacation — something she rarely gets to enjoy due to her husband's compulsive inability to disengage from crime. The apartment represents domesticity, comfort, and Madame Maigret's patient, uncomplaining love — the human warmth that sustains the inspector through his dark investigations.
Boulevard Richard-Lenoir runs through the 11th arrondissement, a solidly bourgeois working-class neighborhood when Simenon was writing. The canal Saint-Martin runs beneath part of the boulevard, which was built over it in the 19th century. It was and remains a respectable, unpretentious Parisian address.
Boulevard Richard-Lenoir is a broad, tree-lined Parisian boulevard in the 11th arrondissement. A popular weekend market runs along its central median. The neighborhood has gentrified considerably since Simenon's time but retains a lived-in residential character.
Visit: Boulevard Richard-Lenoir (landmark)
Near Quai des Orfèvres, Paris 1er — Maigret's lunch retreat
Throughout the Maigret series, and specifically in the Paris-set 'Maigret and the Fortuneteller,' the inspector retreats to a nearby brasserie at lunchtime, ordering his customary choucroute or andouillette with a carafe of Beaujolais. These meals are meditative interludes in which Maigret turns evidence over in his mind. In 'Maigret and the Fortuneteller,' it is over one such meal that the inspector begins to understand the true motivation behind the crime connected to the fortuneteller's clientele.
The brasseries near the Palais de Justice and Quai des Orfèvres have long served the legal and police community of the Île de la Cité. Establishments like the Brasserie Dauphine — beloved by Simenon and named in several novels — became institutions feeding the machinery of French justice.
Several traditional brasseries and bistros continue to operate near the Palais de Justice, though the area has changed with the departure of many judicial institutions. The Brasserie Dauphine, as Simenon described it, no longer exists under that name, but the dining culture he evoked survives in the surrounding streets.
Visit: Brasseries of the Île de la Cité (restaurant)
Place du Marché, Les Sables-d'Olonne — Local market scenes
Madame Maigret, even on holiday, cannot entirely relinquish her domestic habits. In 'A Summer Holiday,' she is seen at the local market selecting fish and vegetables with the same care she would bring to the shops near their Boulevard Richard-Lenoir apartment. These domestic scenes provide Simenon with opportunities to show the Maigrets' marriage — its quiet rhythms, its mutual respect — and to contrast the inspector's inner turbulence with his wife's unruffled practicality.
Open-air markets have been central to everyday life in French coastal towns for centuries. In Les Sables-d'Olonne, the covered market and surrounding market squares have long provided fresh Atlantic seafood, local produce, and regional specialties to residents and summer visitors alike.
Les Sables-d'Olonne continues to host a lively covered market (Les Halles) and regular open-air markets offering local seafood, Vendée produce, and regional products. Market days draw both locals and tourists and remain a cornerstone of town life.
Visit: Les Halles de Les Sables-d'Olonne (landmark)
Right Bank residential district — Crime scene, 'Maigret and the Fortuneteller'
In 'Maigret and the Fortuneteller,' a murder in a comfortable bourgeois apartment brings Maigret into the world of respectable Parisian society with its carefully maintained surfaces and hidden anxieties. The victim's connection to the fortuneteller — and to the circle of clients who confided their fears and secrets — forms the psychological core of the investigation. Maigret moves through these well-appointed rooms with his characteristic patience, reading the human truth behind the bourgeois décor.
The prosperous residential neighborhoods of the 16th and 17th arrondissements of Paris, characterized by Haussmann-era apartment buildings, were home to the professional middle class that Simenon dissected throughout his fiction. These areas epitomized the respectable, somewhat stifling world his inspector so often penetrated.
Paris's western arrondissements remain some of the most expensive and socially conservative residential areas in the city. The Haussmann apartment buildings Simenon described are well preserved and highly sought after. The neighborhoods retain a prosperous, slightly anonymous quality.
D'Olonne-sur-Mer hinterland — Maigret's inland inquiries
In 'A Summer Holiday,' Maigret's investigation takes him away from the beach and into the bocage country behind Les Sables-d'Olonne, where he follows the trail of a suspect into the sunbaked Vendée interior. These drives along country roads lined with hedgerows, past farms and isolated hamlets, allow Simenon to show Maigret in his true element — reading landscape and people simultaneously, piecing together lives from fragments of behavior and gossip gathered along the way.
The Vendée bocage — its characteristic landscape of small fields divided by earth banks and hedgerows — was the scene of one of the most brutal episodes of the French Revolution, the Vendée uprising of 1793–1796. In the twentieth century it remained deeply rural and Catholic, with a strong regional identity distinct from Paris.
The Vendée hinterland behind Les Sables-d'Olonne remains predominantly rural, with small villages, farming communities, and marshland. The region has seen tourism development but retains much of the agricultural character Simenon knew. The Marais poitevin wetlands are a notable natural attraction nearby.
Visit: Vendée Countryside & Marais Poitevin (park)
Place Raoul Dautry, Paris 15e — Gateway to the Atlantic coast
Gare Montparnasse is the departure point from which Maigret and his wife travel to Les Sables-d'Olonne at the beginning of 'A Summer Holiday.' For Maigret, the station represents a threshold — the crossing from his world of crime and professional obligation into the unfamiliar territory of leisure. His discomfort as he carries their holiday luggage, already regretting the cases he has left unresolved, is conveyed with Simenon's characteristic economy of detail.
Gare Montparnasse has served as Paris's gateway to Brittany, the Loire valley, and the Atlantic coast since the 19th century. The present station, rebuilt in 1990, replaced the original Montparnasse terminus, which became famous when a runaway locomotive crashed through its facade in 1895.
Gare Montparnasse is one of Paris's six major railway termini, handling TGV services to the southwest of France including Nantes, Bordeaux, and connections to Les Sables-d'Olonne. It serves over 50 million passengers annually and is a hub for Atlantic coast travel.
Visit: Gare Montparnasse (landmark)
More by Georges Simenon: Maigret locations map · All Georges Simenon books
Other nearby maps: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett locations map