The Living and the Dead

4 ideas

1. Flavières, the staged suicide, and Marseille

   Flavières, a Paris lawyer and former policeman with vertigo, is hired by his old friend Gévigne to shadow his wife Madeleine, who seems possessed by a dead ancestor who killed herself. Flavières falls in love with her. She climbs a church tower and falls while his vertigo stops him from following her up. Years later in liberated Marseille he meets Renée, who admits she impersonated Madeleine so Gévigne could throw his real wife from the tower, and Flavières ends by strangling her.

2. The disabled witness as crime instrument

   The murder works because the killer chooses a witness whose known weakness guarantees he will see the start of the event but not its end. Flavières's vertigo makes him an honest, credible observer who is certain to be absent at the decisive moment.

3. Guilt makes the observer the mark

   Flavières's shame over a colleague's fatal fall, which his vertigo prevented him from stopping, is what makes him easy to use. His need to redeem himself by saving a threatened woman draws him in and blinds him to evidence of a setup. A con aimed at someone's wound doesn't have to beat his judgment, because his wish for absolution does the persuading.

4. Idealizing the dead destroys the living

   Grief that turns the dead person into a perfect image cannot accept a living replacement on her own terms. Flavières forces Renée to dress and act as Madeleine, and he treats her real self as an obstacle. When the truth comes out, the lie wrecks the fantasy but does not end it, so he kills the actual woman rather than give up the imagined one.

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