Gaston Leblanc

Gaston Leblanc is 58 and thirty of those years were spent in uniform, first in the army, then as a museum guard. He was born in Amiens, the son of a weaver, and inherited from his father the conviction that a man is worth what he fulfills. He arrived in Paris at 28, with a pregnant wife, and has worked at the same museum for so many years that the paintings, he says, greet him by name.

He lives in a two-room apartment in a working-class rental building near the Gare du Nord, with a wall clock that runs four minutes fast and that he refuses to repair. In the living room there is a worn velvet armchair, a kettle always on the stove, and a portrait of his late wife beside the bed. The uniform hangs on a chair, brushed and buttoned, ready for the next morning.

He is a man with a red nose, a gray mustache with curled tips and thinning hair, with the deep dark circles of someone who spends his nights on duty. He wears the navy-blue uniform with brass buttons and the leather-peaked cap, and quotes the regulations by heart when anyone doubts him. He is a tired bureaucrat, honest in his own way, who clings to the uniform like the only plumb line life ever gave him.

About Monday, his account is methodical: at 7 a.m. he passed through the room and the portrait was there, smiling as always. When he came back to the room later, only the hooks remained, and his first thought was the photographer's studio, which tends to take a painting a week without leaving any paperwork. He says he makes his rounds every hour, as Article Twelve requires, and that in thirty years he has never missed a day.

Gaston is offended when the tone of a question suggests he failed, and clings even harder to the regulations. It may be the dignity of a civil servant who never had cause for complaint. It may be the rigidity of someone hiding behind a piece of paper so as not to look at something else. The detective will have to decide which.