The murderer, of course, must be a stranger. His initial is revealed to the reader in the opening pages: he will be known only as “Monsieur V.” throughout. The narrator mentions two of the murderer’s legendary predecessors: the eighteenth-century brigands Cartouche and Mandrin, the latter of whom had in his time been known as both “the terror of the ferme générale [the tax collecting agency of the ancien régime]” and a “king.” And he tracks down some of Monsieur V.’s actual descendants. He mentions particularly a young man who is glimpsed reading Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie in the vicinity of Diois, some thirty kilometers or so distant. If the Algerian allusions and theme of arbitrary violence recall to us the contemporaneity of Albert Camus’s 1942 The Stranger, Nerval’s novella, published in the mid-nineteenth century at the time of his suicide, with its serial love affairs and strong contrasts of color, gives us another example of A King Alone’s own kinships.

Marie Chazottes disappears. The Ravanel son thwarts a kidnapping attempt. And the Ravanel family’s pig is strangely mutilated by a sharp instrument that has been used to carve corkscrew and serpentine shapes into its hide, the sadistic “alphabet of some unknown, barbaric language.” Next Bergues, a skilled tracker who had tried to follow the fleeing kidnapper, himself disappears. The remote situation of the village means that no one wants to venture across the winter landscape to report the crimes to the regional gendarmes—“one had to travel three leagues in solitude.” Nevertheless, a posse departs and fetches six policemen, led by their captain: Langlois. The captain organizes the village to protect itself, but the murderous attacks continue. Each crime is known only by a horrific valence between appearance (blood in the snow) and disappearance (the utterly vanished victims). Langlois has the confidence of the townspeople, but it is Frédéric who will discover the corpses and the murderer. In a heart-pounding sequence of pages, he traces him through the “silence and solemnity” of the snow-covered forests and fields to his house in Chichiliane. Soon Langlois and his fellow policemen will surround the house and lead the murderer to his fate.

The novel’s initial mystery is the motivation of the murderer. The narrator, continuing to think of the family lines of the villagers, suggests that the victims carried within their very blood a certain “liveliness and fire,” and that this “blood was very beautiful. [. . .] Let’s speak like a painter.” He adds a thought about the comparable value of the blood of sets of characters and says,