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Gloire, devoir, hache: Corneille's logic of tragedy in the modern island thriller
Patrick Besson, Almost all of Corneille (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2025).
Trêve, mes tristes yeux, trêve aujourd'hui de larmes.
Corneille Attila, IV, 7 (1668), quoted in Besson.
Enough, my sad eyes – let there be a truce to tears today.
André Malraux's famous formulation that Faulkner's Sanctuary is the "intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective novel" 1, could be applied in a modified form to Patrick Besson's novel from 2025: Almost all of Corneille (cited as PTC) enacts the intrusion of French classicism into the holiday genre of the island thriller. Besson, one of the most prolific contemporary French authors, has presented a formally highly conscious work with this slim volume of around one hundred printed pages, one that juggles genre promises, fulfills them, and simultaneously constantly subverts them. The fundamental tension that sustains the novel is that between form and content: The text presents itself as light reading—a holiday novel, a cozy mystery, a satire on bourgeois vacation life—but gradually reveals the structures of a Corneillean tragedy: honor, revenge, guilt, betrayal, and the inescapable logic of violence. The narrator, Georges Charpy, reports from the first-person perspective of a self-confessed murderer, and the novel poses the question from the very first page whether there is a form of literary genre—the thriller, the comedy, the tragedy—that can give form to violence, make it bearable, or even comical. This is the real poetological point of Besson's work: Corneille is not introduced into the thriller, but rather the thriller reveals itself as what Corneille has always been – an investigation into the will to violence under the guise of honor.
Besson integrates Corneille's work not as a decorative, educational reference, but structurally—Lisa's chronological reading of the complete works creates a second timeline that runs parallel to the murder plot and reflects its moral logic, so that the question of which play Lisa is currently reading is always also a statement about the state of the plot. For literary scholars, it is particularly interesting that Besson does not merely quote Corneille's tension between "gloire" and "devoir," but asserts it as an anthropological constant that is just as effective in the modern holiday thriller as it was in the 17th-century alexandrine—a thesis that could motivate a comparative genre history of tragedy and thriller. Furthermore, the autopoetological dimension is worthwhile: when the narrator asks whether Corneille could have been the inventor of the thriller, this touches upon a serious structural question about the commonalities of a closed dramatic space, a limited number of characters, the revelation of guilt, and a moral authority—features that the classic detective story and the classic tragedy do indeed share.
The following essay explores what makes this novel more than just a skillful genre experiment, and to what extent the text supports its own thesis that Corneille may have been the inventor of the thriller.
summary of contents
The novel is structured in such a way that its content almost defies summary without revealing its effect (skip this section if you want to read Besson's book for suspense).
Georges Charpy, a middle-aged Parisian journalist who recently lost his job and now writes for another publication, travels with his Corsican wife, Colomba, and her two sons from a previous relationship to the Hotel Aiglon on the Corsican coast. There, he unexpectedly encounters his former boss—the man who fired him—who is also on vacation. The first chapter establishes this situation as the setting for a systematic humiliation: Georges defeats his enemy at swimming, tennis, chess, and table tennis, each time with Colomba's explicit encouragement, whose ethic of revenge is entirely Corsican. On the sidelines of this rivalry, Georges notices a young woman by the pool, the only one in the hotel without sunglasses: Lisa, the hotel manager's daughter, who is systematically reading Corneille's complete works in chronological order. A subtle erotic tension develops between Georges and Lisa, which Colomba strategically uses to intensify the humiliation.
On the fifth day of the vacation, immediately after Georges and Lisa share a kiss, Georges finds his former boss dead in room 404 – decapitated. Commissioner Bourbeillon, who is leading the case and whose "odiously Macronian" appearance the narrator comments on, focuses on Georges as the prime suspect and places all hotel staff under house arrest. In this enforced confinement, a new social constellation forms: Marguerite Sanderpol, the victim's widow, arrives with her two daughters; Maurice Laforêt, a Canadian lumberjack with a pronounced Quebec accent and Marguerite's lover, also appears. In addition, Vincenzo Balducci, Colomba's cousin, recently released from prison, a multiple murderer, arrives and immediately tries to seduce Lisa – successfully.
The second chapter escalates the plot: Vincenzo is also found decapitated. The second body throws the investigation into complete chaos; Bourbeillon arrests Georges, Marguerite, and Laforêt in succession, without being able to convict anyone. The knife—which, as is later determined, was not a saw—finally turns up under Lisa's bed, whereupon she too briefly falls under suspicion. Meanwhile, Lisa, unmoved by the grief over Vincenzo's death, continues reading: Suréna, Corneille's last tragedy, whose theme is the dissolution of a love relationship between two people who love each other.
In the end, Georges Charpy confesses in the text itself—in a brief, almost casual first-person confession—to having committed both murders: the first out of a mixture of ambition, revenge, and his wife's unspoken expectation, which drove him to fulfill the Cornelian logic of vendetta; the second out of jealousy because Vincenzo had seduced Lisa. He had placed the axe in Lisa's room after the second murder. The novel ends with Georges turning himself in to the police—apparently, as the final sentence suggests, after he has revealed the axe's location to the investigator: "I give in without vomiting. The only thing Bourbeillon is interested in is where I hid the axe before I put it under Lisa's bed in the Hotel Aiglon. That's what I'll tell him." 2 These keywords hint at the novel's central questions: What does Corneille have to do with murder? Who wields power over whom here? Who is writing, and whose story?
Thriller, Comedy, Tragedy
The text initially presents itself as a holiday novel – with a setting familiar from the conventions of the crime novel: a secluded space (an island), a limited number of characters, imposed house arrest, and an incompetent investigator. The huis-clos model of the Agatha Christie mystery is unmistakably referenced: everyone under one roof, everyone a suspect, the truth revealed at the end as a surprising revelation. At the same time, the novel subverts this model: the resolution comes not through Bourbeillon's detective work, but through the narrator's own self-incriminating confession, woven into the middle of the second chapter – "Let's put an end to the secrets: I am the murderer of my enemy, the journalist, and of my friend Vincenzo." 3 The classic detective puzzle is subverted by having the perpetrator reveal his identity without any external coercion, not as a dramatic climax, but as an almost bored observation.
At the same time, the novel contains strong comedic elements. Besson's predilection for the comic—precise characterizations, dialogues brimming with pointed humor, dissecting social observation—is omnipresent. The humiliation scenes, in which Georges systematically defeats his enemy in the swimming pool, on the tennis court, and at the chessboard, have something of boulevard theater about them: the mechanical repetition generates comedy. Gaston falling asleep while acting as a ball boy, Jean-René stopping to keep score, and Lisa simply reading Corneille—"Lisa lisait."—are instances of timing in the tradition of vaudeville, that French boulevard comedy based on precise mistaken identities, abrupt interruptions, and calculated humor. Even the Quebecois character Laforêt, whose accent becomes the recurring joke of the second part, has something of a type comedy about it. Bourbeillon, who switches from real tobacco to e-cigarettes, then back to tobacco, who conducts his interrogations by the pool and constantly finds new ways to express his helplessness, is portrayed as a comic figure of an overwhelmed official.
And yet, beneath this comedy lies the structure of tragedy. Not the Greek kind, but explicitly Corneille's. The narrator himself states, after Colomba rejects his remark that it is indeed a comedy: "She's right: it's not a comedy, but a tragedy. Like the one by Corneille that Lisa is reading." 4 The question of genre is thus also one of morality: In comedy, there are guilty parties without consequences, while in tragedy, guilt carries its own weight. PTC stages the transition between the two.
Contrasting pairs
The characters in the novel are arranged according to a clear principle: they form a system of reflections and contrasting pairs that repeatedly raises the question of honor, revenge, and desire.
Georges Charpy, the narrator, is at the center of the story. He is a man of letters in a double sense: a journalist who has lost his profession and thus his social identity, and a reader who—unlike Lisa—has stopped reading since his dismissal. He is jealous, self-deprecating, and violent, but in a way he doesn't even admit to himself for a long time. The tension between his feigned indifference and his real impulses is the driving force of the text. His enemy—his former boss, who remains nameless and is referred to only as "mon ennemi"—is the object of an unresolved narcissism: he is defeated, humiliated, and ultimately killed, but the text makes it clear that this enemy is also the figure in whom Georges recognizes himself, a journalist without a family, whose wife never came home.
Colomba is the true driving force of the plot, even though she herself commits no crime. Her Corsican code of honor – "It's not about money, but about honor." 5 —is the law Georges obeys without ever explicitly acknowledging it. She wears black dresses, even though she is not a widow, and her first name directly references Mérimée's heroine, the young woman who drives her brother to blood vengeance. Colomba is thus a second-degree literary figure: even in the narrative Besson writes, she is a character from another text—the Mérimée text, which her father knew when he gave her this name. Her character is therefore bound by a kind of literary predestination.
Lisa Colombani, the hotel director's daughter and a Corneille reader, is the most enigmatic character. Her age is deliberately left open – Georges estimates it to be between twelve and sixty – and this ambiguity has a poetological character: "The age of the characters in Corneille's works is not given." 6 She is the only character who neither acts nor reacts, but reads – and thus the only one who observes the text raging around her from the outside. At the same time, she is not innocent: she attracts men unintentionally (or perhaps unintentionally), and her Cornelian quotations function as commentaries on the events, which she herself does not pretend to make.
Vincenzo Balducci, the returning prisoner, is Georges' double on the other side of the law: he too kills out of jealousy and a sense of dishonor, he too desires Lisa, he too is Colomba's husband—her cousin, perhaps more. The novel suggests that Colomba may have enabled Vincenzo—without explicit instructions—to commit the first murder; in any case, he was (according to his own statement) the one who also knocked Colomba's first husband off his bicycle. This makes him Georges's doppelgänger: both killed for Colomba, one knowingly, the other confessing.
Dramaturgies
The novel is consistently written in the first-person perspective of an unreliable narrator. Georges Charpy tells his story, as he indicates in the introduction, from a prison cell – “I am writing this in a prison cell.” 7 —that is, in retrospect, from a point in time when he had already been arrested. This retrospective narrative situation lends the text a peculiar distance: the narrator knows more than he says, and he often says less than he knows. The most famous omission is the murder itself, which is initially completely absent and only woven in much later in the second chapter, almost as if in parentheses: not as a climax, but as a literary bon mot, introduced by the Dickens quote, "Make them laugh, make them cry, but above all, make them wait." 8
The narrative is divided into short sections separated by asterisks—a typographical structure that lends the text the character of a diary or loosely written record. This fragmentation serves a dramatic function: it imitates the scattered, inattentive consciousness of a vacationer and, at the same time, the circling, obsessive thoughts of someone who has committed an act and is concealing it from themselves. The alternation between concise observation, aphorism, dialogue, and meta-reflection creates a rhythm that suggests both lightness and urgency.
The novel's dialogue structure is remarkably precise. Besson writes dialogues that rarely exceed three or four lines, almost always witty, often ambiguous. They function according to the principle of stichomythia, as in Corneille: concise, parallel, clashing statements that negotiate power dynamics. A telling example is a conversation between Georges and Colomba that encapsulates the entire tension of their relationship: "—And if not? Will you cut off my head? / She turns to her left." 9 The characters talk past each other, but never by chance – there is always more in what is left out than in what is said.
The novel's media communication methods are also significant: SMS messages with Corneille quotes: "Lisa texts me: 'The source of my hatred is virtually inexhaustible.' (V, 4) That's not smart: What if the police discover this sentence?" 10WhatsApp interrogations, Bourbeillon's e-cigarette as an attribute of an investigator struggling with the modern world – all this links the logic of classical literature with the present of the digital communication society. The collision of anachronisms is deliberate: Corneille on a smartphone screen.
The novel is divided into two chapters, which are structurally asymmetrical. The first, longer chapter (around 80 pages) covers the period from the arrival to the first murder and its immediate aftermath. The second, shorter chapter (around 30 pages) begins with a brief flashback to the death of Colomba's first husband—an interlude that retrospectively reveals that Vincenzo had previously acted for Colomba—and ends with the second murder, the perpetrator's self-exposure, and his surrender.
Within this structure, three narrative threads run in parallel: first, the humiliation contest between Georges and his enemy; second, the love affair and jealousy surrounding Lisa; and third, Bourbeillon's murder investigation. These three threads interact, but never in a straightforward way: the contest thread ends with the first murder, which then sets the other two in motion; the love affair motivates the second murder; and Bourbeillon's investigation doesn't end with a resolution, but rather with the perpetrator's voluntary confession.
A fourth, almost subterranean thread is Lisa's reading: she reads her way through Corneille's complete works, one piece per day, and this reading runs parallel to the novel's plot like a silent commentary. The titles and years of composition of the individual pieces are interspersed throughout the text – Clitandre (1632) The Royal Square (1637) Pumped (1644) Le menteur (1644) Rodogune (1647) Heraclius (1647) Nicomedes (1651) Suréna (1675) – and this chronological reading of the work creates a second time structure alongside the holiday period.
Aristotelian unity?
Spatial concentration is the classic framework of the crime novel: the crime scene, as an enclosed space from which there is no escape, becomes a metaphor for a moral condition. The Aiglon—the eagle, Napoleon's son, a Bonapartist patron saint—is not chosen at random: the island is Corsica, Napoleon's birthplace, and the neighboring hotels are named Bonaparte, Napoléon, and Pont d'Arcole. This toponymic inflation of Napoleonic symbolism within the novel's setting transforms the holiday resort into a kind of memorial space for French history of violence, without this ever being explicitly stated.
The unity of place is almost entirely preserved: the action takes place almost exclusively in the Hotel Aiglon and its immediate surroundings – pool, dining room, rooms, bar – with occasional excursions into the nameless coastal town, which, however, remain pointless and are quickly abandoned; the enforced house arrest by Bourbeillon further reinforces this spatial concentration and gives it an explicitly dramaturgical justification. Most interesting is the unity of the plot: Besson keeps three strands – humiliation, desire for love, murder investigation – strictly focused on a single goal, namely the question of who wielded the Hache, and resolves all three strands in a single confession; The fact that a Cornelian thriller of all things respects these Aristotelian unities, while Lisa next door is reading Corneille, who in turn fought against the dogmatic treatment of the Aristotelian rules of French classicism – as in the “Discours sur le poème dramatique” and the examinations of his plays – is one of the finest structural ironies of the novel.
The hotel's spaces are strictly hierarchical: pool (stage for competition and observation), dining room (society and social comparison), rooms (intimacy, secrecy, murder), bar (confidentiality between men), lobby (encounter and public scrutiny). Lisa barely moves within these spaces—she sits on loungers or by the pool, on the periphery of these social spaces, half in, half out. The pool, the water, which Lisa never enters. 11, is the central spatial symbol: The pool as a place of dilution, of diminishing, from which the reader withdraws.
The city, which is occasionally visited, functions as a space of contrast: The narrator laconically notes that there is a Place du Général de Gaulle there, and asks whether a city with a beach can even be considered a city. The outside is always defined negatively – as that which the hotel lacks.
The main plot spans just under two weeks, and although the second chapter includes a brief flashback to the death of Colomba's first husband, this digression remains marginal and serves more to reveal backstory than to extend the narrative timeline. The novel takes place in the summer of 2023, more precisely, between July 6 and July 18, 2023. This precise dating—Vincenzo's body is found on July 18, the first murder committed on July 6 or 7—lends the text a punctuality that contrasts with the vague, vacation-like atmosphere. At the same time, the narrative breaks open in two places: The second chapter begins with a flashback to the death of Colomba's first husband, which occurred in the Rue de Lille in Paris, thus opening up a different temporal horizon that embeds the present-day plot within a longer history of violence. Furthermore, the narrator explicitly places the writing of the novel in a different time: He mentions that he was sixty-eight years old when he wrote this "Corsican thriller" – and Corneille has Suréna, his last tragedy, written at the same age. Thus, the author's (alias Besson, born in 1956) biographical time is woven into the narrative.
The second temporal structure is that of Lisa's reading. She reads one tragedy per day, and the work comprises thirty-one plays; if one extrapolates, she would need exactly one month. This Cornelian calendar runs parallel to the holiday calendar and lends the novel an elegant dual temporality: the time of vacation and the time of the Classical period.
Honor, revenge, jealousy
The dominant semantic field of the novel is that of the body, particularly the head. Decapitation as a motive for murder is hinted at from the beginning – “I hadn’t asked him for anything, not even a raise. […] Why did I wish him luck, without realizing how much he would need it on the night he was to be beheaded?” 12 —and the head constantly recurs as both a metaphor and a physical reality. The logic of decapitation connects the Corsican vendetta tradition with the theatricality of the Cornelian code of honor, in which the decision is made “in the head,” and with the Freudian note that the narrator interjects: “A head cannot be so easily separated from the body; Freud already stated that. Everything takes place in the head, especially sexuality.” 13 The head is therefore the seat of thought, desire, and decision-making – and its removal is not only murder, but symbolic annihilation of the will.
A second semantic field is that of color. Red appears repeatedly—the tanned, sunburned enemy is described as "red like a red fire"—and black is Colomba's color: she wears black without being a widow. Lisa, on the other hand, wears neither the color of revenge nor that of mourning. A third field is that of games: swimming, tennis, chess, table tennis, Cluedo—all these games are metaphors for the struggle between the characters. Chess is used particularly consistently: the narrator dryly notes: "Two things you should never do in a book: tell about a dream or a chess game." 14, which he then consistently adheres to.
The novel's main themes are honor, revenge, reading, and jealousy. These four themes are intricately interwoven: honor motivates revenge, reading comments on both, and jealousy causes the system to explode. Additionally, masculinity and its crisis are ever-present: Georges is infertile, has no son, was fired by his boss, and is now being goaded into revenge by his wife. He is, as he himself notes, a man without power, who regains his power through games—until the games are no longer enough.
Another theme is reading and writing itself. Lisa, as a reader character, poses the question of what reading does to a person: Does it make them better? Or does it merely make them colder, more distant, more untouchable? The narrator stopped reading when he was dismissed from his job, thereby also losing access to moral self-reflection. The irony that the reading of Corneille—the theorist of duty, of the moral choice between wanting and ought—takes place alongside the murders is the heart of the novel's poetics.
Cinna, Rodogune, Héraclius, Suréna – and Mérimée
The reference to Dickens' writer's wisdom: "Make them laugh, make them cry, but above all, make them wait." 15 This marks the moment when the narrator postpones the revelation – thus making Besson's own novelistic poetics transparent: the thriller as an artful piece of strategic concealment.
PTC is an exceptionally self-reflective text. It comments on its own construction, its genre, its tradition, and its possibilities in a way that goes beyond occasional meta-commentary. The narrator is not a naive reporter, but a writer with literary education and aesthetic curiosity. He knows what makes a novel, and he says so: “At this point in a thriller, the author has the choice of either announcing a new murder or elaborating on the first, but we don’t live in books—that’s one of the many drawbacks of existence.” 16
This passage is paradigmatic for the autopoetological dimension of the text: the narrator distinguishes between the logic of the novel and the logic of life, and claims that his story is both at once. This is Besson's program: a novel that is aware of its own constructedness and makes no problem of it, but rather a source of pleasure. The joke lies in the fact that the murderer is a better theorist of the novel than the detective.
The reference to the writing time – “It is the thirty-first play by the author from Rouen and one of the most beautiful (Suréna, 1675). Three years after Pierre had voted for his rival Racine in the Académie française. […] My age when I wrote this Corsican thriller” 17 – anchors the text in the biography of the author Besson. This entry in the dating note at the end of the novel (Paris, 11 août 2023 – 9 janvier 2024) emphasizes that the book was indeed written in the time in which it is set: an act of autobiographical embedding that places the text on the border between fiction and confession.
The novel is a web of intertextual references operating on several levels. The first and most extensive is Corneille's complete works, which are chronologically revealed through Lisa's reading. The quotations – "He who is hated by everyone cannot live long." 18"Those who allow themselves to be insulted deserve to be insulted." 19"If you fear death, you are not my brother." 20 – are not treated as scholarly interludes, but as direct commentaries on the plot. Corneille thus appears as the author who has already anticipated the logic of the novel: the Corneillean tension between what one wants and what one is allowed to do is precisely what Georges is unable to resolve.
Those core dramaturgies of Corneille's that Besson most densely shapes come from Cinna (Revenge versus magnanimity, the question of whether to kill or pardon an enemy), from Rodogune (Motherly love versus ambition, two men desire the same woman), from Heraclius (misunderstood identity, the impossibility of knowing who the real culprit is – precisely Bourbeillon's problem) and from Suréna (the dissolution of a love affair between two people who want each other but cannot have each other) – and all four converge in Georges' situation: He wants to humiliate his enemy, not kill him (Cinna), but the logic of honor drives him too far; he and Vincenzo desire the same woman (Rodogune), which leads to the second murder; Bourbeillon is therefore in the dark because every character could be both perpetrator and victim (Heraclius); and Georges misses Lisa because he is too hesitant, too married, too committed to reason, while Vincenzo acts (Suréna) – so that Corneille's work in the novel does not simply serve as a reservoir of quotations, but as a dramaturgical framework that Besson fills from within with Corsican holiday blood.
The second level of reference is Mérimée. Colomba, as a name and character, explicitly quotes Mérimée's novella of the same name (1840); the narrator himself mentions this: "When I realized that Colomba was not Mérimée's Colomba, but my own, I knew that it was up to me to become her." 21 Colomba is initially a literary figure—the Mérimée-Colomba—and only by acknowledging this difference can Georges begin to adopt its logic as his own. The transition from literary model to lived revenge occurs through reading—or more precisely: through the recognition of the power that literature exerts over life.
Mérimée's Colomba is one of the classic literary texts on the Corsican "vendetta," the institutionalized family revenge in traditional Corsican society. At its heart is the young Colomba della Rebbia, who urges her brother Orso, returning from Napoleonic military service, to avenge their father's murder; she almost personifies the logic of vendetta: memory becomes duty, grief becomes a mission, familial honor demands blood. However, Prosper Mérimée is not merely interested in exotic violence from a folkloric perspective. The novel stages the clash of two legal and temporal orders: on the one hand, the archaic Corsican code of honor with its system of loyalty, silence, and counter-violence; on the other, the modern French state with its justice system, rationality, and civil reconciliation. Orso stands between these worlds—half enlightened officer, half son of a clan. The true tension of the text arises from the fact that Mérimée neither simply condemns nor romantically glorifies the vendetta. Colomba appears both admirable and terrifying: she possesses an almost ancient resolve, but her energy binds the living to an endless chain of the dead. Therefore, the novel often feels like a modern version of archaic tragedy, transplanted into the political and ethnographic reality of the 19th century.
Voltaire also appears – “Reading Corneille in his entirety is a very heavy penance.” 22 —as well as Robert Brasillach as Corneille's paradoxical biographer, Maurice Rat as philological editor, and, in passing, Racine as Corneille's rival, who triumphed through sentimentality where Corneille failed through morality. This literary history is not displayed, but casually interspersed—like conversations among insiders.
On an intermedial level, there are references to British romances of the 1990s: Corneille's comedies are compared to "Love Actually," "Notting Hill," and "Four Weddings and a Funeral"—a comparison that seems absurd and yet is apt precisely because of this: in these films, too, love ultimately triumphs over all obstacles, and comedy vindicates desire. The difference with Corneille lies in the fact that in his tragedies, desire is subordinated to duty, not through moral pronouncements, but through a theatrical mechanism that instantly transforms every private emotion into a public conflict. The characters can never simply love, hate, take revenge, or forgive because every passion is immediately linked to state, dynasty, honor, or legitimacy; it is precisely from this that the peculiarly "Corneillean" tension arises, in which the characters become less psychological individuals than bearers of competing obligations. Cinna This is paradigmatically demonstrated by the fact that Auguste consolidates his power not through revenge, but through demonstrative self-overcoming: The pardon of the conspirators is not Christian clemency, but a theatrical act of sovereign grandeur, proof that the ruler is above his emotions and rules precisely for that reason. Rodogune The erotic desire of the two brothers for the same woman becomes so completely permeated by questions of power that love and succession become indistinguishable; even the mother no longer appears as a natural pole of affection, but as a monstrous strategist of dynastic power. Heraclius shifts the same problem to the level of knowledge: Because no one knows for sure who the legitimate heir or the true culprit is, the characters do not act out of inner truth, but out of loyalty to roles, titles, and symbolic orders whose reality constantly remains uncertain; duty is absolutized here precisely under conditions of radical misapprehension. And in Suréna Corneille's entire ethos ultimately transforms into melancholy: the lovers do not renounce each other because their feelings are weak, but because political loyalty, courtly obligations, and a sense of honor are stronger than personal happiness. The tragedy, therefore, arises not from the failure of their will, but from its excessive force—from the fact that the characters sacrifice themselves in the name of an idea of greatness that simultaneously ennobles and destroys them.
Besson poses the question of which logic modern life is more familiar with – and answers it through the plot: tragedy.
Duty and desire: tragedy as holiday reading
The beginning and end of the novel correspond exactly, almost symmetrically, framing the entire text and revealing its thematic logic.
The first sentence reads: “I didn’t recognize him. When he smiled, I realized who he was: my enemy with the plump lips of a badly operated whore.” 23 The beginning is one of non-recognition and delayed recognition through a sign—the smile—that reveals the other's identity. This moment inaugurates the entire epistemic structure of the novel: Who is who? Who recognizes whom? And what follows from this recognition? The first chapter immediately clarifies that the narrator is writing from the perspective of a prison cell—he already knows what has happened and invites the reader to search between the lines for what he leaves unsaid.
The last sentence reads in its full form: “I give in without vomiting. The only thing Bourbeillon is interested in is where I hid the axe before I hid it under Lisa’s bed at the Hotel Aiglon. I’ll tell him that.” 24 The ending is the surrender—the turning in one's arms, in French also "recognizing oneself"—the exact opposite of the initial failure to recognize. At the beginning, Georges recognizes the enemy; at the end, he recognizes himself as a murderer. This mirroring is elegant: the novel begins with a recognition that unleashes violence and ends with a confession that concludes violence. The "nausea" ("vomir") that the narrator demonstratively denies—"sans vomir"—is the final self-commentary: no remorse, no catharsis, merely the matter-of-fact communication of a place.
Between beginning and end lies the entire logic of a Corneille-esque thriller: honor – revenge – deed – confession. What Corneille explores as a dilemma between duty and desire takes the form of a vacation anecdote in Besson's work. This doesn't make the book any smaller or easier, but rather demonstrates that these old structures remain active beneath the surface of modern life.
PTC is a book whose title is twofold: it deals extensively with Corneille's plays without fully developing them, and in doing so, it addresses almost everything human. Patrick Besson has written a novel that, in just a few hundred pages, simultaneously employs three genres without fully satisfying any of them, which is, however, an advantage: the holiday novel is a vehicle for tragedy, tragedy is a vehicle for comedy, and comedy is a vehicle for the serious question of whether writing and reading are a means of combating violence or its secret complement.
The novel's answer is ambiguous. Lisa stops reading Corneille at the end because too much blood has been spilled—but this cessation doesn't mean Corneille is to blame. Rather, it means that life—that Corsican summer with its vendetta-driven logic—overtook the reading before it was finished. The "presque" in the title—almost all Corneille / almost all of Corneille—is therefore not merely a quantitative statement about Lisa's progress with the book. It is also a qualitative statement about the relationship between literature and life: you almost reach your goal, but life catches up with you first.
By introducing Corneille into the thriller genre, Besson doesn't demonstrate that Corneille was a crime writer. He does, however, show that the modern crime novel, with its structures of suspicion, guilt, and confession, grapples with the same moral questions as 17th-century classical theater—and that these questions are not outdated, but merely disguised. The detective is no Maigret. The vacationer isn't reading beach fiction. And the narrator, who kills his enemy, isn't a criminal in the conventional sense—he's a person who has fully grasped the logic by which he lives. That is Corneille. That, too, in his laconic precision, is Besson.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- “Sanctuary, this is the intrusion of the Greek tragedy in the Roman police.” See Marie-Sophie Doudet, “Le théâtre et la course de taureaux: tragique et tragédie dans La Condition humaine d'André Malraux”, in Virtual Theatres, ed. by Sylvie Triaire and Pierre Citti, Montpellier, 2001, 99-120.>>>
- "Je me rends, sans vomir. Tout ce qui interest Bourbeillon, c'est l'endroit où je cachais la hache avant de la placer sous le lit de Lisa à l'hôtel Aiglon. Je le lui apprends.">>>
- “Finissons-en avec les mystères: l'assassin de mon ennemi le journaliste et de mon ami Vincenzo, c'est moi.”>>>
- "Elle a raison: ce n'est pas une comédie mais une tragédie. Comme cells de Corneille que Lisa lit.">>>
- “Ce n'est pas une question d'argent, mais d'honneur.”>>>
- “L'âge des personnages de Corneille n'est pas indiqué.”>>>
- “J'écris ceci dans une cellule de prison.”>>>
- “Faites-les rire, faites-les pleurer, mais surtout faites-les attendre.”>>>
- "- Sinon quoi ? Tu me couperas la tête ? / Elle se tourne sur la gauche.">>>
- “Lisa m'envoie par SMS: “La source de ma haine est trop inépuisable.” (V, 4) “Ce n'est pas prudent: et si la police tombait sur this phrase?”>>>
- “Je ne sais pas nager”>>>
- "Je lui avais rien demandé, pas même une augmentation. [...] Pourquoi lui ai-je souhaité bon courage, ignorant encore à quel point il en aurait besoin la nuit où on lui couperait la tête?">>>
- "Une tête ne se se pare pas facilement d'un corps ; c'est déjà dans Freud. Tout est dans la tête, surtout le sexe.">>>
- “Les deux choses à ne jamais faire dans un livre: raconter un rêve ou une partie d'échecs”>>>
- “Faites-les rire, faites-les pleurer, mais surtout faites-les attendre.”>>>
- “At this moment of a thriller, the author of the choice entre announcer un new meurtre ou approfondir le premier, mais nous ne vivons pas dans les livres, c'est l'un des nombreux inconvénients de l'existence.”>>>
- “C'est la trente-et-unième pièce du Rouennais et l'une des plus belles (Suréna, 1675). Three years later Pierre voted for his rival Racine at the French Academy. […] Mon âge quand je rédige ce thriller corse”>>>
- “Qui vit haï de tous ne saurait longtemps vivre.”>>>
- “Qui se laisse outrager mérite qu'on l'outrage.”>>>
- “Si vous craignez la mort, vous n'êtes point mon frère.”>>>
- “Quand j'ai compris que Colomba n'était pas la Colomba de Mérimée mais la mienne, j'ai su que c'était à moi de devenir elle.”>>>
- “Lire tout Corneille is a très rude pénitence.”>>>
- "Je ne l'ai pas reconnu. Quand il a souri, j'ai compris qui il était: mon ennemi aux lèvres pulpeuses de putain mal refaite.">>>
- "Je me rends, sans vomir. Tout ce qui interest Bourbeillon, c'est l'endroit où je cachais la hache avant de la placer sous le lit de Lisa à l'hôtel Aiglon. Je le lui apprends.">>>
