Bérenger

Bérenger is an average, middle-aged citizen whose encounters with a radiant-looking district and its hidden violence expose the gulf between civic ideals and lived danger. He begins as an exuberant admirer, becomes a bereaved investigator, and finally confronts the Killer with a mixture of fury and fellow feeling. His pursuit gives him a purpose, but the play leaves that purpose under pressure from ineffective institutions, his own fear, and his conviction that even a murderer remains human.

Identity and Introduction

Bérenger is introduced as an ordinary citizen rather than a figure of established authority or exceptional status. The contrast between this unremarkable identity and the scale of the crisis he tries to address is central to his role: he is not equipped to command the police or reshape society, yet he repeatedly insists that someone must act. His responses make him a measure of the distance between public order as an idea and public safety as people experience it.

His first response to the setting is unguarded admiration. When he arrives with The Architect, Bérenger wears a grey overcoat, hat, and scarf, while The Architect is dressed for summer and carries a thick, heavy briefcase. Bérenger calls the surroundings a miracle or marvel and warmly congratulates The Architect, insisting that the achievement exceeds imagination. The encounter establishes his capacity for intense enthusiasm, but also a tendency to be absorbed by appearances: The Architect later says Bérenger was so busy admiring the surroundings that he did not attend to the warning being given him.

From Wonder to Alarm

The beautiful district Bérenger has just visited is Radiant City. He presents it to Édouard as an extraordinary discovery, emphasizing both its beauty and his own recent arrival from there. That discovery becomes inseparable from danger when he learns that a murderer has been operating in the district. On hearing that the victims include a boy and the boy’s mother, he urgently asks who committed the crimes. The Architect identifies an elusive, recurring murderer, but does not respond to the threat with Bérenger’s alarm.

Bérenger’s fear becomes physically visible. He urges The Architect to flee, runs across the stage, returns, and then circles the unmoving man as a shot is heard. The Architect takes out a cigarette and lights it. The contrast turns their different responses into a small drama of its own: Bérenger experiences the danger as immediate and bodily, while the person beside him remains composed. His panic does not make him wholly passive, however. After Dany’s death, he rises from collapse and insists that the violence cannot continue. When The Architect advises him to control himself, invokes the inevitability of death, and recommends that the investigation follow its routine course, Bérenger runs out, repeating his determination to do something.

Grief, Evidence, and Pursuit

Bérenger tells Édouard that he is shattered and inconsolable because his fiancée has been murdered. His grief is not merely reported as private sorrow: it alters his relation to the surrounding crisis, giving his demand for action a personal stake. The Architect’s call for a routine report, with no one caught in the act and suspicions remaining as before, sets the institutional response against the urgency of Bérenger’s loss. The murder is treated as another case to process; for Bérenger, it is an intolerable rupture that demands intervention.

He tries to turn that urgency into an investigation. Among the materials he identifies are the Killer’s address, identity card, photograph, and address book, which contains the names and addresses of victims. Édouard then produces a small box containing further documents, including the Killer’s private diary. Bérenger reads entries recording intended and completed killings, among them the account of an old woman with gold-rimmed spectacles being pushed into a lake. The objects make the threat concrete: suspicion now has a face, an address, a list of victims, and a written record. Bérenger responds with excitement and confidence that the evidence will allow them to catch the Killer, although Édouard’s unease complicates the apparent triumph of discovery.

Isolation and Confrontation

Bérenger’s pursuit becomes a solitary walk marked by hesitation. He starts at speed, repeatedly turns to look around, and seems close to fleeing or turning back; after effort, he continues. He looks behind him, notices the wind rising and the light fading, and worries about whether Édouard will catch up. The road seems not to bring him nearer to his destination, and the avenue appears endless. These stage directions make progress itself uncertain: he advances, but his movement is continually interrupted by fear and the sense that he is alone.

His thoughts connect his personal mission to a broader demand for civic responsibility. He condemns The police force for policing manners while failing to protect people, and resolves to speak to the Chief Superintendent. He also believes the Civil Service will protect him, even as he prepares to take risks on behalf of humanity and Dany. His stated purpose is not reward but duty. At the same time, he imagines a future in which the Killer is arrested and every city becomes radiant. The hope reaches beyond stopping one murderer, but the path toward it remains uncertain: Bérenger is not yet halfway, the light is going, and he repeatedly looks back for Édouard, whose echo is all he receives.

In the final confrontation represented here, Bérenger tries to make the Killer answer questions about society, revolution, and the universe. The Killer shrugs rather than engaging. Bérenger admits that he first wanted revenge for himself and the victims, including having the Killer arrested and sent to the guillotine. He then rejects vengeance and punishment as inadequate responses. His position turns sharply: only moments after imagining the Killer’s punishment, he says that he loved him, or almost did, because they are human beings of the same species and hatred of the Killer would implicate himself. The Killer chuckles, and Bérenger insists that human fellow feeling exists. The exchange does not establish reconciliation; it ends on Bérenger’s appeal and the Killer’s derision.

Narrative Role and Significance

Bérenger’s arc is built from reversals in perception and feeling. The district he first celebrates as an astonishing achievement becomes a place shadowed by repeated murder; the evidence that appears to promise control does not erase the danger; and the pursuit that begins in grief and anger reaches a confrontation in which he questions the adequacy of vengeance. His alternating haste and hesitation embody the strain between the wish to act and the fear of acting alone.

He is also the point of contact between individual suffering and failed public response. Dany’s murder makes the crisis intimate, the Killer’s documents give it material proof, and Bérenger’s criticism of The police force and the routine investigation identifies the gap between evidence and protection. Yet his final appeal to brotherhood resists reducing the conflict to punishment alone. The movement from marvel to alarm, from evidence to confrontation, and from vengeance to fellow feeling does not resolve the violence; it reveals how difficult it is for Bérenger to preserve both a demand for justice and a belief in shared humanity.