Abstract
This article deals with one of Georges Simmon's novels and its relations to history without dealing with its contextualization in his biography or the author's opinions. Maigret and the Recalcitrant Witnesses is probed for its way of evoking a sometimes spectacular, sometimes vague and always violent hold of the past on people and places. By taking seriously the plot set in Paris and grasping the places in which the inspector moves in the story that they're part of, the idea is to clarify the murky relations with the past of the novel and its novelist.