Attempted murder of Grandma Henrouille

The attempted murder of Grandma Henrouille is a bungled conspiracy disguised as a rabbit-hutch accident, and its reversal changes the balance of power within the Henrouille household. The couple’s plan depends on Grandma being blamed for approaching the hutch and on the neighborhood accepting the explanation; instead, the device explodes while Léon Robinson is preparing it, leaving Grandma alive and Robinson injured. Her discovery of the scheme turns an intended killing into an exposure of family calculation, Robinson’s hired role, and the precariousness of the couple’s control over her.

Causes and Arrangement

The plot grows out of the Henrouille couple’s effort to rid themselves of the old woman. Robinson explains to Ferdinand Bardamu that he is ostensibly building the rabbit hutch at their request, while the couple will take responsibility for the explosive “fireworks” and carry the plan through. He separates his paid work from the killing, presenting himself as the builder and the couple as the people who will decide whether to act. His account makes the arrangement less a sudden outburst than a divided piece of work, with each participant assigned a role.

Robinson itemizes what he has received: one hundred francs for the wood, two hundred and fifty for his labor, and a further thousand for the idea. He describes the payment as only a beginning and imagines the story, if properly told, as a substitute for a pension. The proposed murder is thus bound up with a scheme for making money from its aftermath: Robinson expects not only payment for arranging the device but continuing benefit from the account of what has happened. Bardamu understands the calculation, but says he does not try to dissuade Robinson, partly because Robinson might later use that intervention against him if the plan failed.

Robinson attempts to justify the intended killing by saying Grandma is already old and has little time left, so he would merely be arranging her departure. Bardamu sees the cruelty beneath this rationalization. His reflections connect the plot to a broader social pattern in which people who have endured hardship do not necessarily extend compassion to others; instead, they send someone else toward danger. That judgment does not undo the conspiracy, but places it within the book’s persistent attention to self-interest and the poor’s struggle to make survival pay.

The Plan and Its Failure

The couple and Robinson construct a scenario designed to make the old woman’s death look accidental. Because Grandma has begun leaving her shack, they intend to send her to feed the rabbits one evening. The fireworks are to be fixed to the hutch door so they will go off when she touches it. Her death would then be attributed to her disobedience: the neighborhood already regards her as mad, and the couple expect people to believe that she had been warned to stay away from the rabbits. Their plan depends not just on the device, but on a ready-made story about Grandma’s supposed unreliability.

That explanation fails before the intended victim reaches the hutch. According to Grandma’s later account, she watches Robinson from her shack as he attaches the fireworks. A rabbit moves while he is fastening them, and the device explodes prematurely, injuring Robinson in the eyes. The hutch, intended as a concealed means of killing Grandma, instead becomes the site where the plot is exposed through its maker’s own mistake. The incident is not presented as a deliberate intervention by the old woman: she watches, but the failure occurs while Robinson is connecting the device.

Bardamu arrives after the explosion. The daughter-in-law calls him in, and he encounters Grandma in the hallway, already denouncing the couple and insisting that they tried to kill her. When Bardamu asks what has happened, Grandma points him upstairs to Robinson, whom she identifies as the man who arranged the attempt. Robinson’s injury confirms that the intended device has turned against its handler, while Grandma’s account supplies the connection between the injured man and the family’s plan.

Exposure and Reversal

The daughter-in-law tries to quiet Grandma, worried that the argument will be heard in the street. She protests that she has tried to make the old woman’s life pleasant and again invokes the possibility of sending her to stay with the Sisters. Grandma rejects that explanation: she interprets the proposed placement as part of the same effort to remove her, and publicly accuses the daughter-in-law and her husband of bringing Robinson in to kill her. The failed plan therefore cannot be contained as a private accident; Grandma names the suspected arrangement and identifies Robinson to Bardamu.

Grandma says she had met Robinson in Bardamu’s waiting room and had distrusted him from the beginning. She recalls that he had made a proposal to kill the daughter-in-law as well, and understands his approach to the family as part of a pattern of paid offers. Her account links the present attempt to an earlier encounter and shows that, although the couple took her for an easy target, she had been watching their association with Robinson. She presents that suspicion as the reason she is still alive.

The explosion also reverses the old woman’s condition within the household. Before the attempt, she had been confined for years at the back of a deteriorating garden; after it, the narrator says the failed murder has revived her. Her victory gives her leverage over the daughter-in-law, and she takes pleasure in knowing that the latter will have to live with the exposed plot. Grandma insists on recounting every detail to Bardamu, turning the episode into both an accusation and a performance of survival. The couple’s plan aimed to remove her from the household; its failure gives her a renewed public voice within it.

Consequences and Significance

The failure leaves the original conspiracy exposed without making the household’s underlying hostility disappear. The daughter-in-law seems more frustrated that the scheme has misfired than shaken in her convictions, while Grandma is less consumed by indignation than her loud denunciations suggest. Her performance is partly strategic: she wants Bardamu to hear the full account, and she relishes the power the event has given her over the woman who meant to be rid of her. The aftermath is consequently not reconciliation but a changed contest in which the intended victim can now accuse and torment her would-be killers.

The episode’s central reversal is stark: a device prepared to exploit Grandma’s reputation for madness instead provides her with evidence and an audience. The couple’s plan relies on others accepting a convenient explanation, but the actual sequence—Robinson preparing the device, its premature explosion, and Grandma’s account to Bardamu—makes the deception legible. Robinson’s expectation that the affair could become a profitable story is also overturned by the immediate consequences of the plan, even as the old woman turns the failed attempt into a story of her own.

In the novel’s bleak treatment of poverty and self-preservation, the conspiracy shows how a person can be treated as disposable and how necessity is used to excuse cruelty. Yet the episode does not leave Grandma as merely a passive victim. The attempt fails, her suspicion proves justified, and the event restores some of the force that years of confinement had diminished. Its outcome is a reversal, not a moral repair: the old woman survives with new leverage, while the family conflict remains in place.