Elle Roman Readers' Prize 2004 - Renaudot Prize 2003

A young child is found dead, murdered on the frozen banks of a small stream. It's the winter of 1917. It's the Great War. The methodical slaughter. We never see it, but it's there, like a hidden monster. Whether little girls are killed or men die by the thousands, there is nothing more tragically human.
Who killed Belle de Jour? The lonely, cold prosecutor, the little Breton deserter, or a passing marauder?
Years later, the police officer who led the investigation recounts all these interrupted lives: Belle de Jour, Lysia the teacher, the poor man's doctor who died of hunger, the ordeal of the little Breton... He writes with clumsiness, fear, and respect. He too has his secret.
The gray souls are the characters of this novel, both great and despicable. Characters of painful intensity in a society that is falling apart, with its class connivances, its cowardice, and its shame. The line between Good and Evil is at the heart of this book, a dramatic tension that grips the reader from the first pages and never weakens. Until the last line.