Les catilinaires

It alludes to Cicero's Catiline Orations — the four speeches delivered in 63 BC against the conspirator Catiline. Nothomb borrows the title to frame Palamède Bernardin as the silent enemy against whom no speech is effective: unlike Catiline, he provides nothing to accuse him of.

He comes every afternoon at precisely four o'clock, sits for two or three hours, eats what is offered, says almost nothing, and leaves without explanation. He never crosses a legal or conventional boundary — there is nothing to point to — yet his presence devours everything the couple built their retirement around.

He tries, in a sense — but Bernardin's impenetrability defeats social language. This is the novel's real argument: decency is a trap, and a person who does not observe social contracts can exploit indefinitely someone who does.

Not in any genre sense, but it is one of Nothomb's more genuinely frightening books. The dread is entirely realistic: Bernardin is not supernatural. He is simply a man who does not observe the invisible rules that make human coexistence livable.

Published in 1994 by Albin Michel as Nothomb's third novel, the year she also published Les combustibles.