Uncertain Glory

For fifteen years, Inspector Marcel Bonet of the surete and Paris-based career criminal Jean Picard have been playing a game of cat and mouse, Bonet never having enough evidence to put Picard behind bars for more than six months at a time. Bonet's efforts have of late been negatively affected by the goings-on of the war. Bonet feels he knows Picard better than anyone else now, Picard who generally works off his base needs of seeking the finer things in life, including beautiful women. But in Picard being convicted for arguably his most serious crime, killing a man during a robbery - although Picard still admits to nothing - Bonet believes he can finally put Picard behind him in Picard being sentenced to death by beheading. In the two men together reading about an unknown saboteur who blew up a railway bridge and a train carrying German troops through southeast France, and the Gestapo in turn having taken one hundred men of a nearby village hostage, threatening to kill them unless the saboteur gives himself up within five days, Picard offers what he believes is a deal too irresistible for Bonet to refuse: he will give himself up to the Gestapo as the saboteur, which would save the lives of the one hundred innocent villagers, the Gestapo certain to kill the saboteur. Despite Bonet never having done anything illegal in his life, he does believe the rewards of the offer outweigh the risks, which include Picard somehow figuring out a way to escape without fulfilling his side of the bargain, and accepts the deal. The process will not be as easy as Picard walking into Gestapo headquarters as they have to come up with a story that is both credible and untraceable as being false, which means doing reconnaissance work in the village and Picard working under an assumed name. Beyond the continuation of the cat and mouse games between the two men as Picard may indeed try to renege on his end of the bargain, what happens is affected by one of the villagers, Mme. Maret, doing whatever she can to save the hundred, even sacrificing other innocents, the true saboteurs carrying out their escape plan, and Picard arguably falling truly in the love for the first time in his life, with a young innocent named Marianne who too lives in the village.