File No. 113

Prosper Bertomy

Prosper Bertomy is the handsome, well-dressed head clerk at Fauvel's banking house, engaged to the banker's niece Madeleine and regarded as a model of probity. When three hundred and fifty thousand francs vanish from the safe he alone can open, he is arrested, and his marble-faced composure under interrogation only deepens the mystery around him. His stubborn silence about what he knows, and the shadow of some old sorrow that keeps him from confiding even in Madeleine, make him the still center of the novel's opening storm.

Marquis de Clameran

The Marquis Louis de Clameran arrives at Fauvel's bank demanding payment with a haughty insolence that stings the banker into open resentment, then returns hours later to apologize before the assembled clerks with a humility so uncharacteristic it unsettles everyone. He is a creditor, a man of rank, and a brother with a stake in the Clameran name that reaches back decades. His smooth reversal and his pointed interest in Mme. Fauvel's household mark him as a man playing a longer game than anyone in the bank realizes.

Gaston de Clameran

Gaston de Clameran loves Valentine de la Verberie across a feud between their families, a love kept secret until gossip and violence tear it into the open. Wanted for killing two men who dared speak her name, he crosses the Rhone by night and pleads with her to flee with him under a false name, invoking a bond he calls stronger than any earthly tie. Valentine's refusal, grounded in duty to her mother and her own conscience, sets the tragedy in motion whose consequences will reach a Paris bank decades later.

Mme. Fauvel

Mme. Fauvel presides over a respectable household as the wife of a wealthy Parisian banker, yet she lives under the weight of a past she has never confessed to anyone. When her son Raoul forces from her the key to the money-safe and steals three hundred and fifty thousand francs, she lets an innocent man be arrested rather than expose the truth, terrified into complicity by a threat of suicide. Her guilt and her helpless love for her son make her both victim and enabler, and her silence is the hinge on which Prosper's ruin swings.

Valentine

Valentine de la Verberie loves Gaston de Clameran with a passion that defies the feud between their families, but when he begs her to flee with him after killing two men, she refuses. Her duty to a hard, friendless mother and the voice of her own conscience hold her back, even as she confesses that stolen happiness must be paid for in bitterness. Her renunciation, and the secret she carries from that night, becomes the buried root from which the novel's present-day crime grows.

Fanferlot

Fanferlot the Squirrel, as his colleagues call him, lodges at the Archangel and turns its corridors into a surveillance post, hiding in cupboards and darting into the street in linen blouses and false whiskers. Vain, excitable, and touchy about his professional dignity, he is outraged when a messenger slips past his watch and a weeping Mme. Gypsy keeps a rendezvous he meant to control. His dogged, bumbling pursuit of the bank thief keeps the investigation moving even as his vanity keeps him from seeing what the reader can.