“Tighter than a mouse’s arsehole”

“Tighter than a mouse’s arsehole” is Commissaire Valentin’s blunt description of a police cordon. The expression first marks the planned containment of Egletons; later, as the security perimeter around the Place du 18 Juin 1940 is sealed, Claude Lebel recalls Valentin’s words. Its recurrence links two operations while exposing the difference between closing off space and actually catching The Jackal.

The Egletons Cordon

After tracing The Jackal to a café in Egletons, Lebel arranged for roadblocks within a twenty-kilometre radius, expected to be in place by midday. Valentin agreed to ring the town, giving the proposed search its memorable formulation: “tighter than a mouse's arsehole”. The vulgar simile makes the scale and intended closeness of the cordon immediately legible, in language that belongs to the local policeman rather than to official procedure.

The pursuit, however, had already become a race against information travelling through ordinary channels. The Jackal reckoned that the café barman and a summoned taxi-driver would talk, allowing the police to reach the Château de la Haute Chalonnière by afternoon. He had left the château disguised as a grey-haired priest, while the authorities were looking for a blond Englishman. The cordon around Egletons could be extensive and still be directed at the wrong appearance and the wrong place.

Repeated at the Place du 18 Juin 1940

The phrase returns when the security operation around the Place du 18 Juin 1940 is described as sealed “tighter than a mouse's arsehole”. The image now accompanies a dense, layered deployment: main roads, side roads, and alleys are blocked; rooftops are watched; officers occupy station attics overlooking the forecourt; and the station’s engine sheds are also under guard. Buildings within the perimeter have been searched from basement to attic, while trains are diverted for the afternoon.

Lebel smiles at the memory of Valentin’s language, but the recollection turns sharply. Valentin had not been able to stop The Jackal either. The repeated expression therefore carries both the confidence of containment and its limit: the perimeter can be tightened, the approaches watched, and the buildings searched, yet those measures do not themselves establish that the fugitive has been found.

Function and Irony

The expression gives two otherwise separate cordons a shared verbal signature. Its comic crudeness contrasts with the scale and seriousness of the operations: first a twenty-kilometre ring around Egletons, then an intensely guarded ceremonial district awaiting Charles de Gaulle. In each setting, the phrase compresses a complicated security arrangement into an image of maximum closure.

Its second appearance also changes its force. At Egletons, it records Valentin’s determination to close in; at the Place du 18 Juin 1940, Lebel’s remembered phrase is shadowed by the knowledge that Valentin failed to stop The Jackal. The refrain thus makes the central irony concrete: a cordon may be described as impossibly tight, but The Jackal’s escape shows that the language of closure is not proof of capture.