Claude Levitte

Claude Levitte, known as Big Claude, is a perfumer in occupied Saint-Malo whose talent for spotting an opportunity makes him useful to the authorities and dangerous to his neighbors. He profits from wartime shortages, admires the efficiency of German soldiers, and passes information about a stranger measuring houses to the occupiers. Later, when Reinhold von Rumpel asks after Daniel LeBlanc, Claude supplies the address that directs him to Number 4. His trajectory gives collaboration the scale of ordinary conduct: not a grand declaration, but a shopkeeper noticing what power wants to know and deciding to provide it.

Identity and Business

For a decade, Claude has run a parfumerie on rue Vauborel. It is a precarious business, prospering mainly when cod are being salted and the stones of the town begin to stink. Wartime shortages bring him a more lucrative line of work: he pays farmers near Cancale to butcher lambs and rabbits, packs the meat into his wife’s matching vinyl suitcases, and takes it by train to Paris. Some weeks, the trade earns him as much as five hundred francs. Officials along the chain expect a share, and Claude treats their demands as another practical complication to manage.

The contrast between his perfumery and his meat-running is pointed. The shop displays small bottles of floral, oriental, and fougère scents in pink, carmine, and pale blue; the illicit trade moves animal meat through a shortage economy. Claude is at home in both kinds of commerce. He neither romanticizes his business nor presents it as a matter of necessity: supply and demand provide the logic by which he turns changed conditions into profit.

Opportunity and Occupation

During an unnaturally hot October afternoon, Claude sits nearly motionless in his shop, the electric fan oscillating across his face. He periodically reaches beneath his stool for biscuits while the street outside remains empty. When German soldiers pass along rue Vauborel, he understands that he ought to resent them, yet admires their competence, manners, and purposeful movement. His judgment registers a political choice in the language of efficiency: he finds the occupiers impressive where he believes his own country has failed.

After the soldiers turn away, Claude notices a thin, beak-nosed Parisian leaving Etienne LeBlanc’s house. The man walks to the end of the street and back, measuring his steps, writing on a pad, and studying the Sajers’ house. Claude goes to the window and recognizes a possible opening. He decides that the occupation authorities will want to know about a stranger measuring buildings: what he looks like, who sponsors him, and who authorized his activity. The narrative makes the calculation explicit. To Claude, another person’s suspicious behavior is not only a danger to report; it is an opportunity to place himself on the useful side of authority.

His position as an informer is complicated by a later sighting. At the train station, Claude appears several places back in a queue; he and the locksmith recognize one another, but Claude’s gaze slides away. Weeks earlier, while the locksmith was taking measurements for a model, he had seen Claude on the ramparts pointing a camera out to sea. Madame Manec had judged him untrustworthy. Yet the scene also reduces the encounter to its outward appearance: in the station, Claude is simply a man waiting to buy a ticket. That ordinary surface is part of his effectiveness; his conduct does not announce itself as a fixed role.

Resistance and Privilege

Claude’s relationship with the resistance becomes explicit when Etienne objects to the danger of having so many women in his house, warning that people are watching. Asked who, he names the perfumer. Madame Manec dismisses the concern, but Etienne points to a material disparity: Claude’s family receives more meat, electricity, and butter than other households, and Etienne believes such advantages have been won through cooperation with the authorities. Claude himself refuses to help the resistance, saying he does not want trouble. The exchange places his caution beside the resistance’s exposure: he wishes to avoid risk, while the women’s activity makes them visible to the very neighbors who benefit from the occupation.

The difference is visible in the street as well. While the rest of the block is without electricity, lights burn in Claude’s windows. Three women spill laughing from his front door, and someone throws a shot glass from an upper window, where it spins out of sight toward rue Vauborel. The scene does not explain the women’s visit or make the glass a political act. Instead, it sets Claude’s illuminated house and apparent abundance against the darkened neighborhood, giving physical form to the unequal rewards Etienne has described.

Information Given to von Rumpel

Later, Claude speaks with Reinhold von Rumpel in the perfumery. The mixture of scents overwhelms the already unsteady von Rumpel, while Claude, described as plump and self-important, recounts that he helped authorities apprehend an outsider who had been taking measurements of buildings. He presents his action as doing what he knew was right. When von Rumpel asks where Monsieur LeBlanc lived during those months, Claude identifies the house of his uncle and points to Number 4.

The exchange completes the earlier sequence of observation and report. Claude first sees the measuring stranger and imagines what the occupation authorities would want to know; later, he supplies von Rumpel with the address associated with Daniel LeBlanc. The account gives Claude a concrete role in directing attention toward the LeBlanc household, though it does not establish every step between his information and von Rumpel’s arrival there. Claude’s importance lies in that narrow but consequential service: he turns local knowledge into access for an armed authority, while continuing to describe his conduct as sensible and proper. His perfumery, his black-market trade, the electricity in his windows, and the address he gives all belong to the same pattern of adaptation—an ability to prosper by reading power and accommodating himself to it.