by Nancy Yos

Created on: August 07, 2009

Now this is history. Keep, for the moment, kings and battles and social movements. Give me a hideous murder among the very hautest of the haute monde of Paris, on the morning of August 18th, 1847, and give it to me in the word-painting of a professional type who seems to have vanished from today's bookshelves. Stanley Loomis begins: "Only forty years separated the reign of Louis-Philippe from the ancien regime. There were many men, therefore, ... who amid the plush-covered furniture, the tasselled hangings, and the wallpaper of the 1830s could recall the fragile futilities of that other age and in their mind's eye still see that simpler furniture upon which the shepherdesses of Trianon had once disposed themselves ...."

The story of the Praslin murder was laid out for me, first, in the great old movie All This and Heaven Too. Bette Davis' diction has never been more perfect than in that film; the little-known Barbara O'Neil earned an Oscar nomination as Madame la Duchesse, a role the polar opposite of her previous work as Scarlett O'Hara's saintly mother; Charles Boyer, as Monsieur le Duc, delivers one of those lines that you want to save up and use yourself in real life. Guilty and cagey, but pure in his love for a servant, he squints into the middle distance above his rigidly set jaw and hisses at a nosy fellow aristocrat, "You make me ashemed dhat I know you."

The movie was based on Rachel Field's 1938 novel of the same name. Stanley Loomis' book was published another generation after both, but follows the course of the film surprisingly closely. Someone - novelist, filmmakers, historian, or all - has done his homework.

The story is simply dreadfully unhappy at its core. The Duc and Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin were married young, for love, and had many children. By middle age, however, things had gone hellishly wrong. The duchesse became suffocating in her worship and jealousy of her husband. He stopped sleeping with her. (The movie copes with this very adroitly. We forget that people had sex and liked it before the 1960s.) She wrote him endless letters. There was something wrong between her and the children - ill-feeling, certainly, but the duchesse also wrote of "corruption." The family ran through a string of governesses before hiring their last, Mademoiselle Henriette Deluzy. Even before she arrived, the Duc and Duchesse had actually signed an agreement that the Duchesse would not go near her own children, and that the future governess, whoever she was,

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