Maurice Renard describes here a secret society living in a scientific counter-utopia on the fringe of the world, which aims, despite methods ranging from kidnapping to murder, at an improvement of the human race. If he does recover the vision, it is not for his personal interest, but in the service of an amoral science, for which he appears only as the instrument of an occult power devoid of any empathy. Narrative procedures In his works in general, Maurice Renard combines the marvelous, the supernatural, the anticipation and the police mystery. This short novel also testifies to this hybridization of genres, insofar as it closely associates the narrative dynamics of the police investigation with the principle of the marvelous-scientific genre, which is the exploration of the consequences that flow from scientific innovations. L'Homme truqué uses a narrative structure close to that of popular novels. Indeed, it is built around a setting identical to that of detective novels: the prologue narrates the discovery by gendarmes of a murder and of a letter written by the victim, which constitutes the body of the novel. This manuscript, left to the discretion of the readers, was supposed to accompany a scientific document taken by the murderers, which is, in all likelihood, the motive for the murder. Maurice Renard uses this process of embedded and retrospective narrative to announce the fate of the characters from the beginning of the novel. Thus, after the prologue, the novel takes the form of a narrative narrated in the first person by the main character's doctor. Maurice Renard plays with irony here by contrasting the prologue, which establishes the narrator's death, with the excipit of the narrative, in which the latter congratulates himself on still being alive, spared by the spy with whom he had fallen in love. Although the story is related to the scientific-marvel genre, through the scientific explanation of a mystery of supernatural appearance, it is above all presented as a detective story, whose stake is not so much its resolution as its unveiling. It is constructed as an investigation on two levels: on the one hand, the story must shed light on the reasons for the narrator's murder, and on the other hand, it is constructed through the investigation of the doctor who seeks to pierce the secrets of his friend Jean Lebris and his extraordinary faculties. Maurice Renard uses the principle of cascading revelations