Latin Quarter

The Latin Quarter serves two sharply contrasting roles in the pursuit of The Jackal: it is part of the Paris nightscape watched from across the Seine, and later the crowded Left Bank district where he slips into a student crowd to evade detection. Its lights and movement make it both visible from a distance and difficult to search from within.

Setting and the Seine

On the night of August 22, Claude Lebel looks across the softly flowing Seine toward the Latin Quarter, where the lights are bright and laughter carries over the floodlit water. From another window, about three hundred yards away, The Jackal looks toward the building occupied by the French Judicial Police system, beside the spotlit spires of Notre-Dame de Paris. Neither man knows the other is looking across the river. As the churches of Paris ring in the date, the Quarter forms one side of an unwitting visual connection between pursuer and fugitive.

A refuge in the crowd

Later, after leaving a hotel near the station by its fire escape, The Jackal deposits a hand-grip at Gare d’Austerlitz and takes a taxi back to the Left Bank. He gets out at the corner of Boulevard Saint Michel and Rue de la Huchette, then disappears into the Latin Quarter’s mass of students and young people. The streets offer no lasting security: while eating a cheap lunch in a smoky dive, he considers where to spend the night and doubts that his current disguise will remain useful for long.

Narrative significance

The Quarter’s role turns on the difference between watching and vanishing. Across the river, its bright windows and audible life are part of a composed Parisian scene, while at street level its dense population gives The Jackal cover. The same city that brings him within sight of the police headquarters also supplies a crowd in which he can briefly become indistinguishable from those around him.