“Regarde, Narcisse, regarde dans l’eau”

“Regarde, Narcisse, regarde dans l’eau” is an old French song that Hercule Poirot hums while explaining Michael Garfield’s character and motive. Its repeated address to Narcissus, looking at his reflection and beauty, gives Poirot a concise emblem for a man whose appetite for beauty is ultimately turned inward: Michael wants money not to please a woman, but to make a garden for himself.

The song in Poirot’s explanation

Poirot introduces the song in the course of distinguishing Michael’s creative desire from the romantic attachments other people imagine around him. He describes Michael as a young man of unusual beauty, one whom women fall for easily, but says that Michael does not seek the beauty of women. What he wants is the means to exercise his own creative urge and make beauty. Poirot then calls him Narcissus and hums the old French song he remembers from many years earlier. The song does not arrive as a detached literary ornament: it follows the diagnosis and gives it an image.

The lyrics return insistently to the same act of attention. Narcissus is told to look, then to look again in the water; the refrain directs his gaze toward his own beauty. The song’s further emphasis on beauty and youth, followed by its regretful return to youth, makes that self-regard precarious as well as absorbing. Beauty is held up as an absolute, yet youth is something that cannot simply be kept. In Poirot’s argument, the song’s image of self-contemplation helps explain why Michael’s pursuit of beauty need not be an act of love toward another person.

Narcissus and Michael’s ambition

Poirot’s identification of Michael with Narcissus is pointedly about the direction of desire. Michael’s beauty attracts women, but Poirot separates their attraction from Michael’s own purpose: he wants money, and a great deal of it, to create. Poirot’s conclusion is stark: as for love, Michael loves only himself. The song’s reflected image therefore does not merely suggest vanity. It makes self-regard the organizing principle of Poirot’s account of Michael’s artistic ambition: the creator’s attention circles back to himself even when the object he imagines is a garden.

That interpretation also recasts the women’s place in Michael’s story. Rowena Drake is described as infatuated with him. Her husband has been a crippled invalid for many years; she is middle-aged but passionate, and Michael’s unusual beauty draws her into his orbit. Yet Poirot’s account does not make her the purpose of Michael’s creative project. He contrasts the beauty women see in Michael with the beauty Michael wants to make, and insists that the two do not amount to reciprocal love. The song’s solitary figure looking into water sharpens that imbalance: other people may desire Michael, while his own imagined destination remains his own creation.

From reflected beauty to the island garden

The song’s self-regarding image becomes more concrete when Poirot describes the garden Michael imagined on a Greek island. Ariadne Oliver says she cannot believe that anyone would commit murder merely to make such a garden. Poirot answers by asking her to visualize how Michael might have held the project in his mind: perhaps bare rock, shaped to contain possibilities, then cargoes of fertile earth laid over the rock, followed by plants, seeds, shrubs, and trees. The sequence moves from an austere landscape to a deliberately composed abundance. It gives substance to the creative urge Poirot has just connected with Narcissus.

Poirot offers a possible source for the idea rather than a confirmed one. Michael may have read a newspaper account of a shipping millionaire who created an island garden for the woman he loved. Poirot imagines the story being transformed in Michael’s mind: he would make a garden not for a woman, but for himself. That contrast returns the song’s inward gaze in practical form. The garden is not described as a gift whose meaning depends on a beloved recipient; in Poirot’s reconstruction, its intended audience and beneficiary are the maker. The ambition is vast and material—rock, transported earth, and successive plantings—but its center remains the self.

Olga and the limits of the romantic explanation

Poirot’s account of Michael’s self-interest also distinguishes his motive from Olga Seminoff’s hopes. He doubts that Olga could have obtained the money even if the codicil had been genuine: Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe was elderly and ill, her earlier wills had favored her relatives, and a court might have set aside a codicil on grounds of undue influence. He also doubts that Olga could have arranged the purchase of a Greek island or would have wanted to do so. Olga was attracted to Michael, Poirot says, but regarded him as a promising marriage prospect who could help her live in England; she lacked influential friends and business contacts. This is a different, practical kind of desire from Michael’s project of making beauty.

The song does not itself establish the facts of a crime or prove Poirot’s reconstruction. Its function in this exchange is interpretive: it concentrates his distinction between being desired and loving, between attraction to a beautiful man and an ambition organized around making beauty. Ariadne Oliver’s disbelief gives that interpretation resistance, while Poirot’s increasingly particular picture of the island garden gives it form. The refrain’s return to Narcissus looking into water thus resonates beyond the lyric. It becomes a way of seeing the creator, the women drawn to him, and the garden he might make—not for another person, but for himself.