Claude Lebel—Raoul Saint-Clair de Villauban

Claude Lebel and Raoul Saint-Clair de Villauban occupy competing positions within the investigation of a threat against the President: Lebel directs the police inquiry, while Saint-Clair watches it on behalf of the presidential secretariat and expects to expose its weaknesses. Their conflict is not a formal struggle over who holds command so much as a contest over judgment—whether the evidence warrants continued alarm, and whether the manhunt is being led by someone equal to its stakes.

Unequal institutional positions

Lebel enters the assignment as an outsider to the circle of senior officials deciding how to respond. After reading Colonel Rolland’s report in a conference room, he learns from the Minister of the Interior that the task is a directive, not a consultation: Lebel is to establish his own office, receive whatever information he needs, and draw on the resources of the organizations represented around the table. The breadth of those powers makes his appointment consequential, but it does not make him socially secure. He emerges from the briefing dazed, conscious that the other men have been assessing him and unsure why he, in particular, has been called.

Saint-Clair’s first response is to question the wisdom of entrusting the security of the head of state to a police commissaire. In his report on the meeting, he chooses his wording to register disapproval without openly challenging a decision reached by the group as a whole. He characterizes Lebel as a man trained to uncover petty criminals, and privately regards him as an unimpressive, common little man. Yet Saint-Clair also recognizes the risk of opposing the appointment outright: if asked to give specific reasons, he may have none that would justify defying the meeting’s decision.

Instead, Saint-Clair resolves to monitor the operation for the presidential secretariat and to be the first to point out any inefficiency. His report is itself part of that strategy. He types it personally, after discarding two drafts, so that no secretary need be brought into the secret and so that the document can reach the President promptly. His careful presentation of concern thus serves two purposes: it records his doubts about Lebel and positions its author to claim foresight should the inquiry fail.

Criticism and competing judgments

The Minister’s decision to hold nightly progress meetings gives Saint-Clair a regular opportunity to question Lebel. At the first meetings, his criticisms are sharpest when the investigation suffers a setback. After the DST misses Valmy at a post office, Saint-Clair calls the episode a positive chapter of inefficiency. General Guibaud rebukes him by pointing out that he could take over the operation if he wished to assume its responsibility; Saint-Clair studies his folders rather than answer the challenge. The exchange exposes the difference between supervising a failure and carrying the burden of the investigation itself.

Saint-Clair also interprets the discovery that the plot has been exposed as reason to expect the assassin to withdraw. He agrees with the Minister that the hired gun should be called off, and later argues that Marc Rodin and his associates will demand their money back and cancel the operation. Lebel does not claim certainty in the opposite direction. He points out that the police still do not know the assassin’s name, so a warning may prompt precautions—false papers or a physical disguise—rather than prevent an attempt. His position is narrower but more operational: the plot’s exposure is not proof that the killer has been identified, located, or stopped.

That distinction governs Lebel’s response to the international search as well. In his appeal to foreign police forces, he cannot present an ordinary official enquiry between two police services: the authorities do not yet know whether an offence has even entered the preparation stage. He gives only a poor description and asks colleagues to consider whether their files suggest a professional political assassin with successful killings behind him. The replies produce possibilities, not an identity. When Saint-Clair dismisses the work as mere hoping, Lebel acknowledges how incomplete it is and continues pursuing the dossiers and photographs expected from the forces that have offered suggestions.

The manhunt tests their assumptions

As the inquiry widens, the two men’s disagreement becomes a contrast between prediction and inference. Saint-Clair repeatedly treats the exposure of the plot as a reason to believe the danger has passed. Lebel instead asks what the investigation can actually establish about the assassin’s progress. After seventy-two hours, he explains that only the killer knows his timetable; the police cannot tell where they have intervened in it. The killer knows that the plot has been discovered, but may not know how much progress the police have made. Lebel therefore sees a chance of arresting an unsuspecting man once the investigators identify and locate him under his new name. The conference members find this prospect alarming, but it directly challenges Saint-Clair’s confidence that the operation must have been abandoned.

The evidence that gradually accumulates supports Lebel’s preference for testing hypotheses rather than treating them as conclusions. A renewed archive search turns up a card recording Alexander James Quentin Duggan’s entry into France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22, followed by a record of a passenger under that name leaving Paris on July 31. A hotel card near the Place de la Madeleine matches the passport number supplied from London. Lebel chooses to visit the hotel proprietor quietly rather than have the hotel raided; he learns that the man was gone by August 15 and avoids waking the other guests. These records do not by themselves settle the assassin’s identity or whereabouts, but they give the search concrete dates, documents, and locations to test.

Later, when a car is found and evidence suggests it has been transformed with paint, Lebel reasons from the likely sequence of events. If the car was already altered on the drive from Gap to Ussel, he argues, the paint was probably bought in Gap. That would mean the driver had been warned that the Duggan identity was uncovered and had moved quickly. Lebel does not claim that this proves a leak inside the conference room: information could have passed through switchboard operators, telex operators, or junior officials, one of whom might be an OAS agent. He also suspects that Valmy may be the single contact through whom the warning travelled. The uncertainty remains, but Lebel makes the distinction between what the clues support and what they cannot yet prove explicit—a discipline largely absent from Saint-Clair’s confident predictions.

The relationship’s significance

Saint-Clair’s doubts are not simply disproved by the scenes in which he criticizes Lebel. He represents a genuine institutional concern: the President’s security is at stake, and the man entrusted with the investigation must justify decisions to officials who can see only fragments of its progress. But his preferred role is to identify inefficiency after the fact, while Lebel must make decisions before certainty is available. The nightly meetings turn that difference into a recurring contest: Saint-Clair offers conclusions about what the assassin will do, and Lebel returns to the gaps in the evidence and the consequences of acting as though those conclusions were facts.

Lebel’s later realization that the assassin has been waiting for a chosen day further vindicates that caution. He asks why the man did not leave Gap immediately, adopt the identity of Pastor Jensen, and travel straight to Paris; the delay, Lebel concludes, is evidence that the killer has selected his moment. That inference redirects attention toward the President’s schedule rather than toward the assumption that the threat has simply evaporated. Meanwhile, at a cordon, a sentry reports that an apparently sick, disabled veteran was allowed through a gap in the street closure. The episode makes visible the practical vulnerability beneath arguments about security: access can depend on an ordinary officer’s reading of an apparently harmless person. Taken together, the clashes show Lebel earning authority not by matching Saint-Clair’s institutional standing, but by refusing to confuse a reassuring forecast with a demonstrated fact.