Roland and Suzanne

The relationship between Roland and Suzanne is a coercive bond built on a false promise of marriage and sustained by captivity. Roland takes Suzanne from Lyon, deceives her family, and holds her as a slave at his château for three years. Her account reveals how his personal abuse and criminal plans converge: as he prepares to relocate to Venice with the proceeds of counterfeiting, Suzanne becomes one of the people he intends to leave behind—and ultimately kills.

Deception and Captivity

Suzanne is among four women Therese encounters at Roland’s château. Though the women have been worn down by misery and hard labor, Suzanne, the youngest, retains traces of her former beauty. Roland had seized her in Lyon and sworn to her family that he would marry her. Instead, he brought her to the château, where she spent three years enslaved and subject to his violence. The contrast between the promise made to her family and the life imposed on Suzanne defines their relationship: what was presented as a future of marriage becomes prolonged confinement and abuse.

The consequences are not merely a change in Suzanne’s circumstances. Therese learns that Suzanne suffers from a cancer in her left breast and an abscess in her womb, conditions the narrative attributes to Roland’s treatment of her. Her injuries mark the accumulated damage of the captivity, while her continued presence among the women makes visible the human cost of the system Roland controls. Suzanne is not a willing partner in his schemes; she is one of their victims.

Roland’s Criminal Plans and Suzanne’s Knowledge

Suzanne also becomes the source of information about Roland’s intended escape. He is preparing to depart for Venice, but his plans depend on whether money recently sent to Spain can be converted into letters of credit usable in Italy. He avoids carrying his gold across the Alps and circulates counterfeit money in a country other than the one where he plans to settle, hoping that the geographical separation will keep his fraud from being detected. His anticipated freedom and wealth therefore rest on a precarious transaction, not on any change in his treatment of the women he holds captive.

The stakes become clearer when Roland learns that the funds have arrived and that he has secured an additional order for counterfeit coin. Suzanne and the other captives remain confined while his fortune expands. His intended retirement abroad stands in stark contrast to their continuing forced labor and insecurity. Suzanne’s information gives Therese reason to hope that Roland’s plans may fail, but his success instead prolongs the threat: his escape is becoming more certain at the very moment the women’s prospects remain unchanged.

Violence and the Threat of Separation

When Roland visits the women at work, his attention turns to Suzanne, and he treats her as an object of possession rather than as someone with whom he has any reciprocal bond. He compares her body favorably with Therese’s, then declares that Suzanne’s death is decreed. His words make explicit what the relationship has always implied: he claims the power to decide whether Suzanne lives, and his past promise of marriage offers no protection from that power.

As Roland prepares to leave, he speaks of their former union as a source of pleasure and announces that they are about to part, perhaps for a long time. Suzanne rejects this attempt to frame their history as affectionate intimacy. She calls him a monster and insists that he add neither further torment nor despair to the suffering he has inflicted. Her response distinguishes her understanding of the relationship from his self-serving language: she names his conduct as abuse and refuses to accept his sentimental account of their past.

Suzanne’s Death and the Relationship’s Meaning

Roland then turns the separation into a lethal ordeal. After further violence against Suzanne, he orders Therese to take part in a game he calls “cut-the-cord.” Therese uses a sickle to sever the cord when the stool is pulled away from beneath her, and falls safely. Roland then tells Suzanne to take her place, promising to spare her if she performs as successfully. Suzanne does not survive. Roland locks Therese in her cell afterward, and she later tells the other captives what happened; they are unsurprised, having expected that each might meet the same fate.

Suzanne’s death completes the relationship’s progression from fraudulent promise to enslavement and murder. Roland’s counterfeit fortune is eventually reported as flourishing, while Suzanne has been killed and the remaining women continue to await their own possible deaths. The contrast is central to the episode’s moral structure: wealth and escape accrue to the perpetrator, while the person he deceived bears the cost. Their relationship is therefore not a romance gone wrong but an account of how a promise of marriage is used to conceal and enable domination.