Bertrand Alizard

Bertrand Alizard is Louise’s landlord and a small-scale property owner who rents studios to people with few alternatives. His dealings with her reveal how the power to inspect a tenant’s home, demand rent, and retain a deposit can turn an ordinary tenancy into a relationship of pressure and exposure. After the murders, he becomes one of the people questioned by Captain Nina Dorval as she tries to reconstruct Louise’s life, but the search of her studio yields almost nothing.

Identity and Property Business

Alizard has spent years accumulating and renovating studios in the Paris suburbs, then renting them at exorbitant prices to tenants who have nowhere else to go. At the end of each month he visits his properties to collect rent. He may lean into a doorway or enter a tenant’s home under the pretext of checking that everything is all right, asking personal questions while the occupants wait for him to leave. He accepts the drink they eventually offer and lingers over conversation, including complaints about the back pain left by thirty years of truck driving.

His landlord’s scrutiny is backed by a practiced grasp of leverage. He prefers renting to women, whom he considers more careful and less troublesome, and favors students, single mothers, and divorced women. He avoids older tenants who might stay and stop paying because the law protects them. His business is thus shaped not only by rent but by an effort to choose tenants he believes will be easier to manage.

Louise’s Landlord

Louise came to Alizard through a recommendation from a former tenant, a nurse at Henri-Mondor Hospital who had always paid on time. He remembers Louise arriving with a sad smile, blond hair, and a lost air. She had a bundle of banknotes in her hand and told him she had been seriously ill; she had also just found work with a respectable family in Paris. Alizard had wanted to ask what had happened to her after her husband’s death and what illness she had suffered, but she ended the conversation before he could pursue those questions.

His account of their first meeting contrasts with the coercive economic terms of the tenancy. He had insisted that Louise pay two months’ rent as a deposit, explaining that people could not be trusted. By his own recollection, he had never had to return such a sum: there was always a defect, stain, or scratch that a landlord could point to. His sentimentality toward Louise did not undo this system. He had found her pretty and felt moved by her apparent gratitude, but he still held the financial security that could make a tenant’s precarious position worse.

The Confrontation at the Studio

One Thursday evening, around eight, Alizard waits for Louise in the corridor beneath a light that no longer works. He says that he has come by several times without finding her, and shines his phone screen into her face when she arrives. His manner seems to anticipate physical closeness: he leans toward her and fixes her with his gaze. Louise lets him into the studio without answering.

Once inside, he surveys the nearly empty room, running his fingers over its surfaces and inspecting the immaculate skirting boards. He expects her to explain herself, apologize for unanswered messages, or take rent money from her bag. Instead, she remains by the door and says nothing. Alizard points out the boxes in the entrance and remarks that she has begun packing; the next tenant will arrive in a month. The notice makes the imbalance plain: he speaks as the person who controls the property and its future occupants, while Louise stands silent in the home she is about to lose.

He then opens the shower cubicle and discovers that the basin has sunk and the floorboards beneath it have rotted through. Alizard dramatizes the damage, touching the blackened foam and estimating repairs at at least eight hundred euros, with more than fifteen days’ work. He invokes the two-month deposit and thinks that Louise can forget about getting it back. For a man whose business depends on finding something to charge against a deposit, the damage appears to offer a ready justification; the account does not establish what ultimately happens to the money.

Investigation and Narrative Role

After the murders, Captain Nina Dorval summons Alizard to the police headquarters at 36. He trembles in the chair while questioned, and remains in the corridor when officers search Louise’s studio. The contrast between his earlier authority in that room and his later anxious position under police scrutiny marks a reversal in who can demand answers and enter whose space.

The search finds empty drawers, clean windows, an old photograph of Stéphanie, and unopened envelopes—nothing that resolves the mystery of Louise. Dorval’s investigation ranges across landlords, former employers, doctors, neighbors, and other people who knew her, yet no one seems to have known her well. Alizard’s role is therefore revealing but limited: he can testify to the tenancy and its pressures, but neither his familiarity with Louise’s home nor his power over her housing gives him access to the hidden life the investigation seeks to understand.