# The Eight Strokes of the Clock — Character guide

> Key figures in The Eight Strokes of the Clock by Maurice Leblanc.

- [Prince Rénine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/prince_renine.md): Rénine drifts into the Château de la Marèze as a guest nobody can quite place, and by the time Hortense Daniel tries to flee her marriage he has already taken an interest in her predicament. He is unhurried, faintly amus
- [Hortense Daniel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/hortense_daniel.md): Hortense Daniel is bored enough to risk everything: she arranges to run off with the hapless Rossigny rather than keep fighting her uncle and aunt over a squandered dowry. Her nerve and quick tongue make her more than a 
- [Dalbrèque](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/dalbreque.md): Dalbrèque is wanted for robbing a film company's garage and for a jeweller's murder the year before, and now a woman has vanished from Le Havre in his company. What makes him unsettling is the theatrical logic of his cri
- [Jérôme Vignal](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/jerome_vignal.md): Vignal moves through the de Gorne affair as a figure whose testimony matters and whose motives are murky, entangled with a household already shadowed by suspicion. He is the kind of witness who seems helpful until you no
- [Mathias de Gorne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/mathias_de_gorne.md): Old de Gorne is the still center around which the household's suspicions and resentments revolve, and his death is the event that forces everyone else into the open. The details surrounding his end — the water bottle, th
- [Rose Andrée](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/rose_andree.md): Rose Andrée is on the verge of an American film career when she disappears, her luggage registered and her passage paid but her cabin never occupied. Her connection to the forest of Brotonne, where she once shot a pictur
- [Dutreuil](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/dutreuil.md): Gaston Dutreuil arrives at Rénine's door stammering that Jacques Aubrieux is innocent, yet offers no evidence beyond loyalty and outrage. He leads Rénine and Hortense into a Neuilly household where two weeping women have
- [Jacques Aubrieux](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/jacques_aubrieux.md): Jacques Aubrieux never appears in the room, only in the testimony of those who love him: his wife, her mother, and his oldest friend. He was an insurance-broker whose luck turned, whose cousin Guillaume was killed for si
- [Jean Louis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/jean_louis.md): Jean Louis surfaces under a cluster of identities — Vaurois, d'Imbleval — as though his own name were the least reliable thing about him. Accused of a crime he did not commit, he belongs to that recurring Leblanc figure:
- [V Thérèse](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/v_therese.md): Thérèse d'Ormeval enters the cycle as a woman whose identity is itself the puzzle — a name that connects to other names, a history that refuses to stay buried. She is bound to the d'Ormeval thread that runs through the A
- [Germaine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/germaine.md): Germaine Astaing belongs to the cycle's recurring nightmare: a person whose identity has been assumed by another, so that her own life becomes evidence in a case she never chose. Mistaken identity is not a misunderstandi
- [de Lourtier - Vaneau](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/de_lourtier_vaneau.md): De Lourtier-Vaneau represents the machinery of justice as it actually operates: methodical, credentialed, and persistently one step behind the truth. He investigates the crimes that Rénine solves, which makes him less an
- [Madame Astaing](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/madame_astaing.md): Madame d'Ormeval — Thérèse to her husband — moves through the Hôtel Hauville as one half of a couple everyone calls perfectly happy, writing letters while Jacques reads his papers in a rented cabin by the cliff. Yet her 
- [Rossigny](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/rossigny.md): Rossigny waits in the shrubbery beneath Hortense's window, catches her luggage, and agrees to meet her at the If crossroads with his car — a fat man with honourable intentions and a hopeless passion he states plainly. He
- [Pancaldi](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/pancaldi.md): A couple involved in a theatrical performance.
- [Geneviève Aymard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/genevieve_aymard.md): A woman whose past is revealed through a film.
- [Mr. Deputy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters/mr_deputy.md): A deputy involved in legal proceedings.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_eight_strokes_of_the_clock_se/characters