Colonel Saint-Clair

Colonel Saint-Clair is a Palace officer charged with matters of presidential security and public engagements, whose authority brings him into direct conflict with Claude Lebel during the secret pursuit of the Jackal. He treats Lebel’s missed opportunities as evidence of police failure; when Lebel produces a recording that exposes a leak from Saint-Clair’s own circle, the accuser becomes implicated in the breach that has compromised the investigation.

Position and investigative setting

The inquiry unfolds under strict secrecy. The Minister of the Interior gives Lebel extraordinary authority, access to information, and the resources of the agencies represented at the briefing. Lebel converts that mandate into a tightly controlled operation: Maurice Bouvier’s secretary becomes his assistant, the office receives dedicated telephone lines, and requests for support are to be treated as top priority. Later, Lebel approaches foreign police discreetly, explaining that the authorities do not yet know whether an offence has progressed beyond a tip-off or preparation. These precautions form the background to Saint-Clair’s dispute with him: the investigation is not simply a matter of pursuing a known suspect, but of acting quickly without exposing the operation or provoking a public alarm.

As the Palace officer responsible for presidential schedules and security, Saint-Clair has a particular stake in the threat to Charles de Gaulle. His position makes him an institutional counterweight to Lebel, who directs the police inquiry, and gives their disagreements more weight than an ordinary dispute over tactics. Yet the same security structure that gives Saint-Clair proximity to the operation also makes the later discovery of a leak from his private circle consequential.

Conflict with Lebel

At a conference table, Saint-Clair half-rises and accuses Lebel of having had the fugitive within reach and letting him escape. Lebel keeps his head over the dossier rather than meeting the colonel’s glare. Saint-Clair reads that posture as either shame or insolent indifference, preferring the first interpretation. The exchange establishes their unequal styles: Saint-Clair presses his case openly and personally, while Lebel refuses to grant the accusation the attention it demands.

Saint-Clair also attacks the police response after the suspect, travelling as Duggan, leaves a hotel. Lebel answers that the President’s secrecy order ruled out an immediate nationwide alert for a man named Duggan: such a move could have stirred up the press. The registration card had followed the ordinary route to regional headquarters, where officials recognized its significance only after a delay. Lebel adds that the police do not know why Duggan changed his plans, and that a premature roadside stop by a lone patrolman could have alerted a dangerous, armed fugitive. Saint-Clair snaps that the police had been gallivanting about; Lebel replies that no such activity began until after the suspect had already gone. Their argument is therefore about more than a missed interception. It exposes the tension between speed and secrecy, and between the Palace’s demand for results and the operational risks of acting on incomplete information.

The fugitive and the limits of certainty

As the investigation develops, records establish that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France from Brussels on July 22 and travelled back toward Brussels on July 31. A hotel card places him near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. The records are precise, but they do not establish where he is now. Later, after the fugitive’s car is found, Lebel orders a broad search around Ussel: officers are to question farms, roadside businesses, hotels, and isolated shelters, while keeping the press away and containing the suspect rather than approaching him if he is located.

This procedural uncertainty sharpens Saint-Clair’s challenge. He questions why a suspect who feared exposure would take the elaborate precaution of maintaining false identities. Lebel answers that the evidence already shows a capacity for disguise: Charles Calthrop could alter his height, weight, eye colour, and hair colour to become Duggan, so the police cannot assume he will not adopt another identity. Saint-Clair’s objection is not proof that he knows the fugitive’s plans; it marks the difficulty of reasoning about an adversary whose defining advantage is concealment. The pursuit depends on accumulating records, descriptions, and reports without mistaking any one of them for certainty.

Exposure and resignation

Lebel eventually argues that the Jackal has repeatedly received advance warning of police progress. The fugitive left Gap in haste, killed a woman at La Chalonnière before the net closed, and changed identity after Valmy was arrested and Lebel could not impersonate him on the telephone. On earlier occasions, the warning followed briefings at which Lebel had reported the state of the investigation. The pattern converts what might have looked like a series of inexplicable escapes into evidence of a leak.

When the Minister asks Lebel to substantiate the accusation, Lebel places a portable tape recorder on the table and plays a telephone conversation. Saint-Clair turns ashen and his hands tremble as he gathers his papers. Asked whose voice was heard, Lebel remains silent; the room’s attention shifts to the colonel. Saint-Clair then identifies the speaker as a woman who is staying with him and leaves to return to the Palace and write his resignation. The woman is Jacqueline, with whom Saint-Clair has a relationship; the connection makes his household the route through which information reached Valmy. The recording does not show Saint-Clair deliberately betraying the operation, but it reveals that the intimacy he kept close to him was also a vulnerability in the security apparatus.

Narrative role

Saint-Clair’s arc is built around reversal. He first appears as a senior official judging Lebel from the Palace’s position of authority, insisting that police errors explain the fugitive’s continued freedom. The final conference reverses that arrangement: Lebel supplies evidence, the room scrutinizes Saint-Clair, and the colonel’s own connection to the leak makes his earlier confidence untenable. His resignation closes the institutional breach without resolving it as a personal confession of intentional complicity. In the manhunt’s procedural drama, he embodies the danger of a security system whose formal controls can be undermined by private relationships—and the difference between accusing others of failure and facing evidence that one’s own circle has compromised the operation.