Mignonne
I would have
thought that I had never heard of either Pierre de Ronsard, nor of
this poem, Mignonne..., but
this can't be true. I have read the book at least twice before, and
must have seen the references to it. In fact, I remember very
clearly the scene in which the inspector makes hollow claims of
erudition in reference to the reference to it, but I presume that I
was happy with hollow claims to erudition as well, and I never took
any interest in the poem or its author. Luckily, the internet makes
armchair scholars of us all, as television made us armchair athletes;
luckily, because the oblique reference is a key one. Maugham is a
little tricky here, I think, because he seems to deliberately
mischaracterize the meaning of the poem – for in the scene referred
to above, the character Maugham quotes a portion of the poem to the
inspector, a courtesy that, pointedly, the author Maugham denies his
readers. What remains unsaid is perhaps what is most at the heart of
the matter.
