Inspector Maigret, urgently called to the Quai d'Orsay, goes there with Commandant Janvier.
They find Mademoiselle Larrieu in a state of shock. That very morning, she discovered the bullet-riddled body of Monsieur Berthier-Lagès, a renowned former ambassador whose maid she had been for 46 years. In the victim's apartment, Maigret and Janvier found thousands of letters. For fifty years, the diplomat had maintained a love correspondence with the Princesse de Vuynes, whose husband, by a strange coincidence, had just died. As Maigret confronts the members of both families, and Mademoiselle Larrieu's suspicious silence, he goes from surprise to surprise....
