Nearly a year ago, just after he had finished La Femme Infidèle …, Claude Chabrol said in a television interview that he always made films about the bourgeoisie because that was the class he knew best. And the reason for that was simple: "I am one of them," he went on, "I am one myself—but I don't like them."

He's talking about a class of Frenchmen we should judge as somewhere between comfortably-off and rich. He's fascinated by their high degree of social organisation…. [On] the whole Chabrol seems inclined to view [the organisation] as a defence against the unexpected, against indignity, and against passion. In this aspect, La Femme Infidèle, set as it is in a mansion in Versailles, inescapably presents a picture of an ancien régime. It is as though Chabrol had decided that the barriers that crashed in 1789 were the most superficial...