Paul Roulet

Paul Roulet is a fictional character, the main antagonist in H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Shunned House".
Paul is part of the Roulet family that moved from Caude, in France, to Rhode Island in 1686. The story suggests that the family be related to Jacques Roulet of Caude, a historical figure who was convicted of being a werewolf in 1598.Social History in the Touraine--Central France, "Werewolves in the Touraine--the Case of Jacques Roulet", Jim McNeill, December 3, 2010. The family is said to have "possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity—dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror"; Paul's father, Etienne Roulet, was noted for "reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams".
But Paul, remembered as "a surly fellow" with "erratic conduct", seems to have had a worse reputation; of all the Roulets, he "was particularly a source of speculation", with "old wives" saying "that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object." So disliked was he that it's thought that he "probably provoked" a riot in the 1730s that "wiped out the family."
The story's narrator speculates that the riot set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more of them—notably the sinister Paul Roulet—which obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried by the mob, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching community[.]This perpetuation of hatred beyond death--coupled with the fact that the Shunned House sits on the land that used to be the Roulet family graveyard--is offered as the explanation for the long series of tragedies that dogged the house. The suggestion is that the "titan elbow" of the "unthinkable abnormality" buried beneath the cellar floor belonged to Paul Roulet.
==References==
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Humans