Baptiste Rouvière

Baptiste Rouvière is 38 and has spent nine of those years as the mechanic of the inventor Évariste Coudray. Born in Dole, the son of a watchmaker, he learned to file gears before he learned to write, and it was his childhood home that taught him to hear a machine. He built all his employer's cameras, the sixteen-lens one and the single-lens one. He says every gear in the wooden box passed through his file.

He lives in a modest two-story house behind the workshop, on rue des Tonneliers, with a room upstairs, an iron stove and a rough table where he dines alone. The workshop is next door, with a treadle lathe, a bench with tools hanging on the wall, a shelf of oil cans and a glass lantern. In the bench, he keeps the drawings of a camera he imagined himself, and never showed to anyone.

He is stocky and broad-shouldered, with a square face, a thick brown mustache and short, tousled hair. He has thick hands, with calluses and grease under the nails. He wears a cotton shirt with rolled sleeves, a canvas waistcoat with a watchmaker's key in the pocket, work trousers and worn leather boots. Practical, proud of his hands, he talks about gears with passion and about his employer with a respect that creaks.

He says his employer had the ideas and he made the ideas move. He recalls the last quarrel with Évariste: the inventor said the projector's patent would be filed in London, the following Monday, in his name alone, and that after New York he would no longer need a mechanic. Baptiste shouted that without him that camera wouldn't turn a single revolution. When the detective accuses him of having done something to his employer, he answers he did nothing but wave, and asks for calm.

It could be the hurt of a craftsman who saw another man's name written on the work he made with his own hands. It could be the wounded pride of someone who has already decided what to say. The detective will have to decide which.