The Grey Wolf

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and cursing.

“The phone rang. Again. It was the fourth time in eight minutes.”

The novel’s first sentence describes Jeanne calling Armand. The single word “again” between two periods reflects how the calls repeatedly punctuate Armand’s morning and establishes a tense tone, hinting at the animosity between Jeanne and Armand.

“Using his handkerchief, stained with the little girl’s blood, Armand carefully wiped the whipped cream off his hand.”

Armand gets whipped cream on his hand while holding Charles’s hand as he dies, and his handkerchief is spotted with the blood of the young girl he saves. Armand comforts himself in this moment. Hands symbolize comfort and the ongoing presence of the dead; throughout the novel, images of hands and whipped cream remind Armand that Charles had whipped cream on his hand when he died.

“How nice it was, how peaceful, thought Reine-Marie, to live in a place where bumbling was a virtue. Even a necessity. And where lives were intertwined.”

Penny’s acknowledgments note that her Gamache books are about community and home. This is one example of the importance of the Three Pines setting to the Gamache family and the series. Reine-Marie expresses how she likes living in a place where she easily bumps into her local friends.