Paul Meurisse

Paul Meurisse played Luc Jardie in Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, a man who looks like a scholar withdrawn from worldly affairs and proves to be the highest leader of the Resistance; the historian Robert O. Paxton, writing for Criterion, says the character was modelled on Jean Cavaillès, a noted figure in mathematics and the philosophy of science at the Sorbonne. In Melville's Le Deuxième Souffle he was the inspector Blot, and Adrian Danks refers to him there as the wonderful Paul Meurisse. He was Michel Delassalle, headmaster of the boarding school, in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique: in Danny Peary's telling a domineering man carrying on an open affair with Nicole Horner, one of the school's teachers, and one who by Peary's reckoning has begun beating her as well.