Secondly, in spite of this, he begins to fall in love with her, almost imperceptibly at first but then deeply and to the point of obsession. He observes Madeleine going into the trances described by Gévigne, thus providing evidence of his friend’s story. It is not long before two things begin to happen. After that he begins to follow her as soon as she leaves her house in the morning. Gévigne arranges for him to see his wife at the opera since he has never met her. Whilst he is not in any way persuaded by Gévigne’s account of his wife’s condition and believes that it is probably just a question of another man, he nevertheless agrees to help an old friend. He had been suffering from vertigo, which prevented him from attempting to make the arrest himself, but he has never been able to suppress the suspicion that he had been guilty of cowardice. He asks him to carry out an investigation into the behaviour of his wife, who is given to dream-like states and periods of apparent absence from the material world.įlavières had resigned from the police years before because he felt responsible for the death of a colleague who had fallen from a roof during a pursuit.

Gévigne, a married man, contacts an old friend, a former policeman, after many years. Secondly, the book is better able, simply by the fact that it consists of words, to allow, or even to persuade the reader to reflect on what Madeleine appears to believe – something that is necessary if her situation is to be understood. The first is that the film didn’t try to convey anything of Paris at the time of the German invasion in 1940 – something that contributes to the pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion.

Whilst the film was regarded as possibly Hitchcock’s best, it has to be said that the book is superior. It was made famous for English and American audiences by the Hitchcock film Vertigo of 1958. This is an English translation of a book co-written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac in 1954.

Vertigo boileau narcejac