The Story My Family Carried: A Journey Through Archives, Memory, and Mystery
- Jaime Pasquier
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
When I began tracing my family tree fifteen years ago, I expected the usual mix of farmers and merchants, perhaps a minor scandal or two buried in parish records. I did not expect to find a murderer—or the conspiracy that helped him disappear.
The story begins in Paris on the morning of August 18, 1847. The Duchess of Choiseul-Praslin was found dead in her bedroom at the family’s mansion on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Forty-seven stab wounds marked her body. Her husband, Duke Charles de Choiseul-Praslin—a peer of France whose lineage stretched back six centuries to the Crusades—was the only suspect. His robe was soaked in the Duchess’s blood. A knife lay hidden in his study. Her hair was clenched in her dead hands.
Six days later, the Duke was declared dead by self-administered poison before he could stand trial. The case was closed. The monarchy exhaled in relief.
But among the descendants of a certain family in Nicaragua—my family—a different story has been passed down for generations. The Duke did not die. He escaped.
The Official Story and Its Cracks
On paper, the case is straightforward. Charles de Choiseul-Praslin murdered his wife in a jealous rage connected to the family’s former governess, Henriette Deluzy-Desportes. Arrested and confined to the Luxembourg Palace—where peers of France were afforded the dignity of gilded detention—he reportedly ingested arsenic and died before the Court of Peers could try him.
Chancellor Étienne-Denis Pasquier, one of the most powerful men in France, conducted the preliminary examination himself. The same Pasquier who had witnessed the Duke’s marriage contract decades earlier. The same Pasquier who understood, perhaps better than anyone, that a public trial would expose not one family’s disgrace but an entire system of aristocratic corruption.
Even at the time, the public doubted the official account. Rumors spread through Paris that the Duke had been spirited away, that noble families had secured the government’s cooperation in staging his death. When the funeral procession moved through the streets, a mob attacked the hearse, demanding to verify the body. The anger was so fierce that the case became one of the catalysts for the revolution that toppled Louis Philippe’s monarchy just six months later, in February 1848.
The people refused to believe the Duke was dead. They maintained that noble families had procured the government’s connivance in his escape.
History recorded these suspicions and moved on. But in the oral traditions of two Nicaraguan families—descendants of the Praslin line and of the Pasquier circle—the suspicions were not suspicions at all. They were memories.
What the Families Remember
The story preserved in my family is this: Pasquier arranged for the Duke’s staged death using laudanum—enough to simulate death without causing it. A corrupted physician signed the death certificate. Under a false name, the Duke was transported to Le Havre and put on a ship bound for the Americas. He was accompanied by a young man connected to the Pasquier household—likely Gastón d’Audiffret-Pasquier—who appears in family records under the name Fermín Pasquier.
The Duke traveled through New York and eventually reached Nicaragua, settling in the highland town of Matagalpa. There he assumed a new identity, practiced medicine using knowledge he had acquired as an intellectual pastime in France, married a local woman, and raised a second family. He lived for another thirty-five years, dying in 1882—the same year that his companion’s adoptive father, Pasquier, had long since passed away in Paris, taking the secret of the conspiracy with him.
I have spent years trying to verify this account. The documentary trail is thin, partly because William Walker’s forces burned Granada to the ground in 1856, destroying the colonial archives that would have recorded European arrivals. What survives are the oral traditions themselves—consistent across multiple branches of the family, preserved independently in different regions of Nicaragua—and the circumstantial evidence that aligns with what the historical record already suggests: that the Duke’s death was suspiciously convenient for everyone in power.
The Unequal Scales of Justice
Whether or not you accept the escape narrative as historical truth—and I wrote my novel precisely to explore that ambiguity—the documented facts alone tell a damning story about privilege and accountability.
Consider what happened to each person touched by the case. The Duke, if the official version is correct, escaped the public trial that would have exposed the rot at the heart of the aristocracy. Even his death was managed: buried at night, in secrecy, with no public reckoning. If the family version is correct, the escape was even more complete.
Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, the governess, had no such protection. Though nothing criminal was ever proven against her, she was arrested, interrogated, and publicly branded as a homewrecker. She fled to America, where she spent the rest of her life defending a reputation that powerful men had destroyed without consequence. Her only crime was being a woman of education and no fortune in a household where both qualities made her dangerous.
The Duchess herself—Fanny Sebastiani, a woman of deep feeling whose private letters revealed years of emotional torment—was reduced to an inconvenient victim. The peasantry had called her “the good lady of Praslin” for her charity. Her husband’s family needed her murder buried quickly, and the system obliged.
The children inherited a name synonymous with scandal. The servants who testified honestly about what they had seen risked their livelihoods. The investigators who built the case watched it dissolve before reaching trial.
At every turn, the machinery of justice bent toward protecting the powerful and abandoning the vulnerable. This is not a story of justice served. It is a story of privilege protecting itself.
Why This Story Still Matters
It would be comforting to treat this as a relic of the nineteenth century—a time when aristocrats openly bought impunity and monarchies shielded their own. But the architecture of that inequality has not vanished; it has only grown more sophisticated.
We still live in a world where wealth purchases better legal outcomes, where corporate executives walk away from scandals that destroy the lives of employees beneath them, where political connections can make inconvenient truths disappear. The mechanisms differ—we no longer need a chancellor to forge a death certificate—but the underlying dynamic remains the same. When you have resources and connections, even the worst actions become manageable. Without them, even innocence may not be enough.
The Praslin case crystallized this truth so vividly that it helped bring down a government. The French public understood instinctively what the case revealed: that a system willing to shield a murderer because of his bloodline was a system that had forfeited its legitimacy. Six months later, they acted on that understanding.
The Human Cost of Privilege
Behind every systemic failure are individuals who bear the weight. Henriette lost her name and dignity. The servants risked their safety to tell the truth. The children grew up marked by a legacy they had no part in creating. The Duchess died alone in a room where every surface was splattered with evidence of her desperate fight to survive—and the system’s first instinct was to manage the scandal, not to honor her suffering.
And if the family tradition is true, there is yet another layer of human cost: the Duke himself, living decades under a borrowed name, raising children who never knew his real history, carrying the knowledge of what he had done into every act of kindness he performed as a village doctor. Whether that constitutes purgatory or escape is the question at the heart of my novel—and it is a question I do not pretend to answer.
What I do know is that injustice leaves scars across generations. My own family’s story is woven through with silences and half-truths that took fifteen years of research to begin unraveling. The burning of the Granada archives ensured that some truths may never be fully recovered. What remains is oral memory—fragile, contested, and irreplaceable.
What Can We Learn?
The Praslin case is not merely a historical curiosity. It is a mirror held up to any society that claims to value equal justice while tolerating unequal outcomes. It asks us to examine whether our legal systems serve everyone or only those who can afford to work them. It challenges us to notice the Henriettes of our own time—people without power who absorb the consequences that the powerful evade.
Writing this novel forced me to sit with uncomfortable truths about my own ancestry. If the family tradition is accurate, then I am descended from a man who committed an act of terrible violence and was never held accountable for it. That is not a legacy anyone would choose. But confronting it honestly—rather than perpetuating the silence that protected him—feels like the only ethical response.
The Duchess deserves to be remembered not as a footnote to her husband’s crime but as a woman who loved deeply, suffered terribly, and fought for her life with a ferocity that the physical evidence made undeniable. Her story, and the stories of everyone the system failed that August, demand that we keep asking the hard questions about power, accountability, and who gets to walk away.
Justice should not be a privilege reserved for the few. It must be a right for all.
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