Aymeric de Sarlac

Aymeric de Sarlac is 46 and an infantry major, a former translator at the counterespionage section. Born in a Périgord château the family sold off in parts, the son of a ruined count, he was raised for honor and conversation, not for money. He speaks of lineage like someone displaying a coat of arms and scorns the office trainees, whom he calls uniformed clerks.

He frequents the ministry's corridors out of habit, though he no longer has a function there. He lives between the family's closed-up mansion in the Marais, where the furniture is covered in sheets, and Paris's social life: operas, boulevard cafés, Sunday lunches. He likes to chat with doormen and with officers of higher rank, and gives the impression of knowing everything before everyone else.

He is tall and very thin, with a sunken, yellowish face, a hooked hawk's nose and dark, deep-set, restless eyes. He wears a dyed black mustache with long tips, thin hair combed back, a dark overcoat over a silk waistcoat and carries an ivory opera glass. He speaks with elegant sarcasm, drawls his vowels when bored and goes still when someone challenges him.

About the note, his account is that of someone who has only heard the corridors: he learned from the ministry, where everything is known before lunch, that the section already has its culprit. He came only because he was summoned, as half the General StaffGeneral Staff The body of senior officers that plans and directs an army's operations. was. He points to the Alsatian captain as the man to watch, because he keeps letters in German locked in a drawer, and thinks the captain's handwriting resembles that of the note.

Aymeric knows an indebted officer who circulates through the corridors with no function needs a good story to explain himself. When the detective accuses him of writing the note for the attaché, he asks whether the other man knows who he is speaking to and talks of calling the family's lawyer. It could be the wounded vanity of an aristocrat who won't be questioned. It could be someone who appeals to his surname to cut the conversation short. The detective will have to decide which.