The work of Daniel de Roulet is periodically haunted by the figure of the Doppelgänger. This was the case in Double (1998), where he told how he had been put on file, and how his double, Zurich’s Peter Gasser, had seen his career as a prosecutor shattered because federal sleuths had confused the two individuals.
The imagination of the reflection returns in L’Oiselier. This novel (the term is important) takes up a series of cases which shook the Jura region in 1977 and 1978, shortly before the federal vote of September 24, 1978 by which the creation of the canton of Jura was accepted. These cases are, for the main of them, the following: on October 13, 1977, the body, shredded by a grenade, of the candidate Flükiger, who had disappeared a few days earlier during a military exercise, was found in the forest of Grandvillars (French Jura); on October 18, Hanns Martin Schleyer, patron of the German bosses (and former SS), is discovered lifeless in the trunk of a car towards Mulhouse – he had been kidnapped by the Rote Armee Fraktion; on March 2, 1978, Corporal Heusler, of the Bernese police, was shot dead in the Oiselier house, west of Porrentruy; on March 22, Alfred Amez, owner of the Café de l’Aigle in Grandfontaine, was found dead in his car, a bullet in the head, near Pouilly-en-Auxois, in Burgundy.
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