On Boileau-Narcejac's DIABOLIQUE Novel

The ace mystery writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac were catapulted into international fame when their first collaborative novel CELLE QUI N'ETAIT PLUS... (1952) was filmed by Henri-Georges Clouzot as LES DIABOLIQUES/DIABOLIQUE, 1955), starring Simone Signoret, Pierre Meurisse, and Vera Clouzot. It was said that the novel was a deliberate attempt by the two writers to create something that would entice Alfred Hitchcock to acquire the screen rights - quite brazenly too, as the novel itself makes a tantalizing passing reference to a fishing lure known as the Hitchcock. Hitchcock didn't have a chance to fall into the trap set for him, but of course, he was Johnny-On-The-Spot when the team returned in 1954 with the novel D'ENTRE LES MORTS, which the Master of Suspense would famously bring to the screen as VERTIGO (1958), presently considered the greatest film of all time in the latest SIGHT & SOUND critics' poll. I like VERTIGO very much, but I would personally consider LES DIABOLIQUES the greater film.

D'ENTRE LES MORTS was translated into English, first appearing as THE LIVING AND THE DEAD, then reissued as VERTIGO at the time of the film's release. In recent years, after long unavailability, it has reappeared in paperback as THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. Long-term readers of VIDEO WATCHDOG may remember that I wrote a two-page article for our 40th issue titled "VERTIGO Before Hitchcock" [pp. 70-71], in which I described how very different yet fundamentally similar were the novel and film - an aspect I had not previously seen covered to any degree by known Hitchcock references.

It took me long enough to do it, but my recent renewed interest in Boileau-Narcejac and Clouzot's film led me to finally getting around to reading CELLE QUI N'ETAIT PLUS..., which first appeared in the UK as THE WOMAN WHO WAS, then was retitled THE WOMAN WHO WAS NO MORE for America, and also surfaced in Australia as THE FIENDS (my favorite of the titles and the closest to LES DIABOLIQUES). Both books were translated by the same author (Geoffrey Salisbury) and they are exquisitely crafted.

We all remember the basic plot of DIABOLIQUE, right? At a French elementary school, the headmaster's wife and mistress (one of the schoolteachers) conspire to murder the man they have in common, who is a sadistic brute who makes both their lives miserable. The wife is so abused that she's a nervous wreck suffering from heart problems. Together, with the mistress taking the lead, the two women knock the man unconscious, drown him in a bathtub and conceal the body in a swimming pool that has been covered up for the season. In time, the wife begins to see evidence that the husband is not so dead after all. In the end, it turns out that the husband and mistress have faked the murder to frighten the wife to death from cardiac arrest, so they take over the school (which she owns) and collect the insurance. In reading the novel, I was surprised to find out that Boileau-Narcejac's story was, once again, quite different to the film despite also being very similar. 

The current edition.

The novel is about the husband, Fernand Ravinel, a man in early middle-age who went to law school but somehow never did anything with his education; his lack of ambition instead led him into the career of least resistance, as a salesman of sporting accessories who travels out of town by car for week-long periods, during which his young wife Mireille is left alone at home. It is Ravinel's father, a gloomy figure that haunts his imagination whom he blames for the defeatist disposition he's inherited, who was a school master. As the book opens, Ravinel is already preparing to murder Mireille with his mistress Lucienne, who is a doctor. A brief mention is made of Ravinel having a weak heart, but there is no pay-off to the detail. The murder itself takes place in the second chapter. It is as it occurs in the film, but the victim in the wife, whose body is left in the tub for two days, weighed down by two heavy iron dogs used as fireplace sentries, before her body is wrapped in a ground-sheet and carried off to be submerged in the shallows outside what Ravinel calls his lavoir - meaning the shed where he cleans up after gardening, but in French lavoir also has the relevant double meaning "to see her," which is important because - shortly after the body's disposal - Ravinel begins to see Mireille and discovers that the body has disappeared from where they left it. He never sees her, but others do - like her brother, who recalls that Mireille, since she was a child, always had a kink of wandering off, disappearing for days at a time. Ravinel then begins to receive letters and notes from the dead woman, and the novel meticulously charts his psychological disintegration as he veers from rationality to believing that Mireille is a ghost and that he can see her because this haunting is part of a preparatory pas de deux that will culminate in their embrace and his own death.

Has the novel ever been filmed in this way? I am aware of several filmings of the novel - supposedly of the novel - including John Badham's REFLECTIONS OF MURDER, a 1974 TV movie starring Tuesday Weld and Joan Hackett; Pierre Koralnik's "Les Demoniaques," a 1969 episode of the French omnibus series LA GRAND COLLECTION; Mimi Leder's HOUSE OF SECRETS (1993), another TV movie, this one with Melissa Gilbert and Bruce Boxleitner; and of course Jeremiah Chechik's feature-length remake DIABOLIQUE (1996) with Sharon Stone and Isabelle Adjani. They all credit Boileau-Narcejac yet they adhere to the script for the Clouzot film, which was the invention of Clouzot, Jérôme Géronomi, René Masson and Frédéric Grendel - now mostly forgotten by the original film's many tributes.

Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse in the classic Clouzot film LES DIABOLIQUES.

It was astounding for me to discover that the novel is so radically different to the film. Boileau-Narcejac became famous for their association with DIABOLIQUE; they must have felt like imposters when people praised them for it! And yet THE WOMAN WHO WAS NO MORE or THE FIENDS or whatever you want to call it is a superb novel. I would have to say the film is the greater creation and I understand why Clouzot probably considered the original story unfilmable as-is. So much of the novel is internalized - as my Australian paperback copy says, it's "a novel in the Simenon tradition, with all the eerie fantasy of a story by Edgar Allan Poe." It is set almost entirely inside the head of the husband (the character whom we learn least about in the film versions) and focuses mostly on the tightening vice of his ongoing internal monologue; that is aside from brief transcribed dialogues with other fleeting characters - the mistress of course, neighbors, postmen, bartenders, policemen, and the intriguing and humorous bit part of Desiré Martin, a seedy private detective formerly of the Surété (hinting at some past catastrophic failure or transgression), who tries to undertake an investigation of the missing wife. Perhaps most surprising is the book's final chapter, which gives us our first look at the relationship between Mirielle and Lucienne. Even if you've seen the film, it withholds its most unnerving surprise for the closing sentence of the book.

The novel has several engrossing sequences that have never been filmed, particularly a lengthy sequence set in a dense fog where Ravinel believes himself on the trail of his wife's ghost while at the same time being pursued by a shadowy man in squeaky shoes. Though it changes a great deal of its original story (even the names of the various characters - they could have kept at least those remnants!), the film is nevertheless an inspired analogy of how the novel goes to work on the reader; Clouzot and his team of writers found ingenious ways of externalizing its internalized landscape and ratcheting up the suspense with a subtle but meaningful alteration of the central criminal diagram, relocating its remote house settings to a public school full of children, and moving away from its looming phantasms toward the greater horror of a logical explanation.

(c) 2021 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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