The Writer As Explorer

“Soir Bleu” is told through the perspective of the beret-clad artist, Vachon. He observes his surroundings in a pessimistic manner, chiefly his model, Solange, whom he claims as his Muse. Vachon exhibits intense egotism throughout the story, boasting that Solange has ‘fallen deeply in love with his genius’ and that ‘she no longer exists except by my hand.’ The latter gives indication of an inferiority complex that only solidifies throughout the story through his controlling attitude towards Solange and territoriality against other men. 

I found his one-sided conversation with Pierrot the clown intriguing. At the beginning of the story, the first impression is that he is a self-absorbed egotist with an innate insecurity about his masculinity in regard to keeping Solange to himself. His memory of the pantomime was quite poignant and displayed a child’s vulnerability stemming from wariness of his father. As he recalls this, he is doing a self-examination, though he arrives at no great conclusion nor epiphany.

Vachon goes looking for Solange and finds her in bed with the soldier. As soon as the soldier leaves, Vachon strangles Solange, effectively reenacting the pantomime of Pierrot and Columbina in silence, vengeance, and passion. The clown actor reappears in the room and removes his face to reveal that he is in fact an apparition of Vachon’s drunkard father. By murdering the closest woman he had in his life, Vachon has repeated the cycle of violence that his father set in motion by snapping his mother’s neck, and by extension that the pantomime set in motion by planting the idea in his father’s head.
In “Soir Bleu,” it would appear that commedia dell’arte serves as a dark inspiration for crimes of passion, in particular the crimes committed by Pierrot. It banks on insecurity and dissatisfaction with life to instill the belief that perhaps, just perhaps, things could be better if one is willing to commit a transgression to ‘free themselves’. Of course, there’s also the question of whether Vachon’s father would have committed the crime anyway without watching the pantomime; however, that is not something that we will ever know.