AFTER COMING OUT of his coma, he began by denying everything. A man dressed in black, a burglar, had shot the children and set the house on fire. Jean-Claude had been paralyzed, helpless, watching it all unfold before his eyes like a nightmare. When the examining magistrate accused him of the massacre at Clairvaux, he became indignant: “You don’t kill your father and mother, it’s God’s second commandment!” When the magistrate proved that Jean-Claude wasn’t a researcher at WHO, he said he worked as a scientific consultant for a company called South Arab United something, Quai des Bergues, Geneva. They checked; there was no South Arab United something, Quai des Bergues in Geneva, so he backpedaled and immediately concocted a different story. During seven hours of interrogation, he disputed every piece of evidence. Finally, from exhaustion, or because his lawyer convinced him that this absurd defense would harm him later on, he confessed.

PSYCHIATRISTS WERE ASSIGNED to examine him. They were struck by the precision of his statements and his constant concern with making a favorable impression. He was obviously underestimating the difficulty of giving a favorable impression when one has just murdered one’s family after having deceived and defrauded one’s relatives for eighteen long years. He was surely also having trouble separating himself from the character he had played all those years, because in an effort to win people over, he still used the same techniques that had worked for Dr. Romand: composure, a dignified gravity, an almost obsequious attention to the expectations of his interlocutor. Such control betrayed serious confusion, because in his normal state, Dr. Romand was intelligent enough to understand that prostration, incoherence, or the cries of a mortally wounded animal would have pleaded more in his favor, given the circumstances, than that worldly professional attitude. Thinking it would help, he didn’t realize he was stunning the psychiatrists by giving them a perfectly articulated narrative of his imposture, by speaking of his wife and children with no particular emotion, the way a well-mannered widower makes it a point of honor not to let his grief distress his table companions, and finally, by not showing the slightest anxiety except over the sleeping pills they were giving him, which he worried might be habit-forming—a fear the psychiatrists found “displaced.”

During subsequent interviews, although they saw him sob and show emphatic signs of misery, they couldn’t say whether he was truly suffering or not. They had the uneasy sense of observing a robot deprived of all capacity to feel but programmed to analyze exterior stimuli and adapt its reactions accordingly. Used to functioning with the “Dr. Romand” program, he had needed an adjustment period to set up a new program, “Romand the murderer,” and learn how to run it.

LUC RECEIVED A shock two weeks after the fire when he opened his mailbox and saw an envelope bearing the writing of this man more dead than alive. He opened it in terror, glanced at the contents, and sent the paper to the examining magistrate right away because he didn’t want to keep it in his house. It was an insane letter in which the prisoner complained of the grotesque suspicions hanging over his head and asked Luc to find him a good lawyer. A few days earlier, Luc would have tried to believe that the truth lay in those wavering lines and not in the impressive collection of evidence amassed by the investigators. After first reporting Jean-Claude’s denials, however, the newspapers had followed up with his confessions. By the time the letter arrived, it had lost all meaning.

When Luc came home from the burial service for Florence and the children, he sent Jean-Claude a note saying that the ceremony had been dignified and that the congregation had prayed for them and for him. He soon received another letter in which the prisoner alluded to having met “a chaplain who has greatly helped me to return to the Truth. But this reality is so horrible and difficult to bear that I’m afraid of hiding in a new imaginary world and losing a very shaky identity once more. The torment of having lost all my family and all my friends is so dreadful that I feel as though I were morally anesthetized…. Thank you for your prayers. They will help me to keep faith and bear up under this bereavement and this immense distress. I embrace you! I love you! … If you see any of Florence’s friends or family, tell them I’m sorry.”

Although he felt a rush of pity, Luc thought this piety was rather an easy refuge. On the other hand, who knows? His own faith forbade him to pass judgment. He did not answer the letter but showed it to one of Florence’s brothers, Jean-Noël Crolet. The two men discussed it at length, agreeing that Jean-Claude talked a lot about his own ordeal and hardly at all about those he had “lost.” As for the last sentence, it left Jean-Noël aghast: “What does he think? That remorse can be passed along like that? The way you’d say, Tell them hello from me?”

THE PSYCHIATRISTS SAW him again at the beginning of the summer. He was feeling chipper: he’d gotten back his glasses, which he had keenly missed in the first period of his incarceration, and a few personal effects. He volunteered the information that he had wanted to kill himself on May 1, the anniversary of his declaration of love to Florence, a date they had celebrated together every year. Determined not to botch it this time, he’d obtained what he needed to hang himself. But he’d dawdled a bit on the morning of the fateful day, long enough to learn on the radio that Pierre Bérégovoy, the former minister of finance, had just committed suicide. Disturbed at having let someone steal his thunder, seeing in this a sign that begged to be interpreted, he had put off carrying out his plan and then, after a meeting with the chaplain (an interview he calls decisive, though it was highly unlikely that a priest would have encouraged him to hang himself), he’d made a solemn resolution to abandon the idea. From that day on, he says, he “condemned himself to live” so as to dedicate his suffering to his family’s memory. While remaining, according to the psychiatrists, extremely anxious to know what others thought of him, he began a period of prayer and meditation, accompanied by long fasts to prepare himself for the Eucharist. Thinner by fifty-five pounds, he feels he has left behind the labyrinth of false appearances to live in a world that is painful but “true.” “The truth will set you free,” said Christ. And Romand: “I have never been so free; life has never been so beautiful. I am a murderer, I’m seen as the lowest possible thing in society, but that’s easier to bear than the twenty years of lies that came before.” After some fumbling, the change of programs seems to have worked. The character of the respected researcher has been replaced by the no-less-gratifying character of the serious criminal on the road to mystical redemption.

Another team of psychiatrists took over from the first one and formulated the same diagnosis: the narcissistic narrative is continuing in prison, thus allowing its protagonist to avoid once again the massive depression with which he has been playing hide-and-seek all his life. At the same time, he is aware that every effort at comprehension on his part is viewed as a self-serving recovery and that the dice are loaded. “He will never, ever, manage to be perceived as authentic,” the report concludes, “and he himself fears that he will never know if he is. Before, people believed everything he said; now no one believes anything anymore and he doesn’t know what to believe, because he does not have access to his own truth but reconstructs it with the aid of the interpretations held out to him by the psychiatrists, the judge, the media. Insofar as he cannot be described at present as enduring great mental pain, it would seem difficult to impose on him a psychotherapeutic treatment he has not requested, contenting himself with making small talk with a volunteer prison visitor. One can only hope that, even at the risk of a melancholic depression (which remains a definite danger), he will become able to adjust to less rigid defenses and reach a level of more ambivalence and authenticity.”

Leaving him, one of the psychiatrists said to his colleague, “If he weren’t in prison, he’d be on the TV talk shows by now!”

THE LADMIRALS RECEIVED other letters, for easter, for the children’s birthdays. The parents did not show them to their children. The letters made Luc extremely uneasy. He would read them quickly, then put them in the medical file of a fictitious patient, on the highest shelf in his office, where he went to get them for me. The last letter dates from the end of December.

“… I let my thoughts and my prayers fly freely toward you, and they will reach you in the end, here or elsewhere. In spite of all that separates us, and your ‘wounds that will never heal’ (which I understand and which are legitimate), everything that brought us together in the past will perhaps reunite us beyond all time, in the communion of the living and the dead. May Christmas, which for us Christians is the symbol of the world saved by the Word made man, made child, be for you all a source of joy. I wish you a thousand blessings.

“P.S. Perhaps I was tactless in writing you for Sophie and Jérôme’s birthdays. As I did today, I prayed before taking pen in hand, and these words have been dictated to me by a heartfelt impulse in communion with Florence, Caroline, and Antoine.”

“Thank you for the thousand blessings you wish for us. A few would do us nicely,” Luc forced himself to write back, because it was Christmas. Their correspondence ended there.

That year and the two that followed were years of mourning and preparation for the trial. The Ladmirals lived like people who have almost perished in an earthquake and can no longer take a single step without apprehension. “Terra firma,” one says—knowing that it’s a trap. Nothing is firm or dependable anymore. It took them a long time to be able to trust anyone again. The children, like many of their classmates, were seen by a psychologist, the one who had called just after Florence’s death to find out if she would be coming to evening Mass. Sophie felt guilty: if she had been there, her presence might have deterred her godfather. Cécile, however, thought he would have killed her, too, and thanked heaven her daughter hadn’t spent that night, as she had so many others, at the Romands’. Cécile would burst into sobs whenever she found, slipped into books as page markers, old postcards from their friends. She couldn’t stand dancing anymore, which she and Florence had loved so much. As for Luc, he was obsessed by the prospect of giving evidence. He was twice called before the examining magistrate in Bourg-en-Bresse. The judge seemed chilly to him at first, but he gradually warmed up, and Luc tried to make him understand that it was easy to see Romand as a monster and his friends as a bunch of ridiculously naive middle-class provincials when you knew how the story turned out, but that before then it was different. “It seems stupid to say this, but you know, he was a really nice guy. It doesn’t change what he did at all, it makes it even more appalling, but he was nice.” Despite the length of the interrogations, eight and ten hours, he came out of them racked by the anguish of having somehow missed the most important thing. He began to wake up at night to write down the memories coming back to him: a visit to Italy with Jean-Claude when they were eighteen; a conversation around a backyard barbecue; a dream that now seemed to him a premonition … His preoccupation with composing a complete and coherent account he could give on the witness stand led him gradually to reread his whole life in the light of this friendship that had vanished into an abyss, almost taking along with it everything he believed in.

His testimony was misconstrued, and this wounded him. In the press section, some even pitied the accused for having had for a best friend this smug, straitlaced guy. I later realized that he had crammed as though for an oral exam and that this exam was the most important one of his life. It had to justify his life. No wonder he was tense.

It’s over now. The man I went to see after the trial feels that he and his family have “passed through the flames and come out safely on the other side.” Traces remain, their footsteps are sometimes shaky, but they’re back on solid ground. While we were talking, Sophie came home from school and without lowering his voice he continued in her presence to speak of the man who had been her godfather. She was twelve years old; she listened to us gravely and attentively. She even piped up to add further details, and I thought it was a huge victory for this family finally to be able to speak so freely about what had hurt them so deeply.

Luc, on certain days of grace, is able to pray for the prisoner but neither to write nor to visit him. It’s a question of survival. He thinks Jean-Claude has “chosen hell on earth.” As a Christian, he is profoundly troubled by this, but Christianity, he says, makes room for mystery. He submits. He accepts not understanding everything.

He has just been elected president of the school board of Saint-Vincent.

The gray plastic bags still haunt his dreams.