The Sentence No One Could Escape

Murder, Privilege, and the Impossibility of Redemption in the Praslin Affair

By Jaime Pasquier

On the morning of August 18, 1847, servants discovered the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin dead in her locked bedroom at the family’s Parisian mansion. Forty-seven stab wounds. Her throat slashed. Blood on every surface. Her husband—a duke whose lineage reached back to the Crusades—was the only suspect, his robe soaked in her blood, her hair clenched in her dead hands.

Six days later, Charles de Choiseul-Praslin was declared dead by self-administered poison in his comfortable confinement at the Luxembourg Palace. No trial. No public reckoning. A hasty burial that sparked immediate conspiracy theories. The message to ordinary French citizens was unmistakable: justice had two faces, and neither was blind.

But what the novels exploring this case understand is that the failure of justice in 1847 created a different kind of sentence—one that no death certificate or ocean crossing could commute. The questions the French courts refused to answer became questions the characters had to live with for decades.

The Aristocratic Exemption

By 1847, class privilege had thoroughly corrupted French justice. Peers of France could only be tried by fellow peers, were detained in palace apartments rather than prisons, and had their trials conducted with deference that bordered on theater. The entire system rested on the assumption that aristocrats were fundamentally different from common people—better bred, more capable of self-governance, and therefore deserving of gentler treatment when they transgressed.

The Praslin case should have broken through that shield. The victim was a duchess, a marshal’s daughter. The evidence was overwhelming—forty-seven wounds leave no room for ambiguity. Even by the generous standards aristocrats applied to their own, this demanded accountability.

Instead, Chancellor Étienne-Denis Pasquier—the king’s closest adviser, a man who had survived every regime change since the Revolution through careful political calculation—personally intervened. The Duke would die before trial. The scandal would be contained. And if the Duchess’s justice was sacrificed to preserve aristocratic privilege, that was simply how things worked.

Except by 1847, too many people had stopped accepting that explanation. The Praslin affair became the scandal that made undeniable what everyone had long suspected: the ruling class considered itself above the law and would shield a murderer before admitting its own corruption. Six months later, the monarchy fell.

The Impossibility of Escape

What makes the novels’ treatment of the escape narrative so powerful is their refusal to present exile as freedom. If Charles did survive, flee to Nicaragua, and spend decades practicing medicine under an assumed name—he didn’t escape justice. He exchanged one sentence for another.

The legal system might have been cheated, but guilt cannot be. The novels follow Charles through years of attempted redemption, showing how a man carries the weight of an unforgivable crime even when no one around him knows what he’s done. Every patient he saves doesn’t erase the Duchess. Every child he raises doesn’t bring back the children he abandoned in France. Every year that passes only adds another year of survival he didn’t deserve.

The medical practice becomes a particularly resonant form of attempted atonement. In France, Charles had studied medicine as an aristocratic pastime—the kind of intellectual hobby wealthy men pursued without ever sullying themselves with actual practice. In Nicaragua, that dabbling becomes deadly serious. His hands, which killed with savage brutality, learn to heal. But the novels refuse to simplify the moral calculus: Does saving a hundred lives balance one life taken? Is redemption real when it’s built on a lie, when the people you’re healing don’t know what you’ve done?

The Accomplice’s Dilemma

Fermín Pasquier—almost certainly Gastón d’Audiffret-Pasquier in the novels’ interpretation—faces a different but equally impossible moral position. He didn’t kill anyone. But if he orchestrated the escape to protect his adoptive father’s political career and the stability of the monarchy, what does that make him?

The novels explore how good people become accomplices to evil—not through malice but through loyalty, political calculation, and the incremental compromises that eventually constitute corruption. Gastón facilitates escape not because he approves of murder but because he approves of stability. The problem is that stability built on injustice isn’t stability at all. It’s a powder keg.

He builds a family in Nicaragua, then abandons them to return to France and claim his inheritance—repeating the very pattern of abandonment he had criticized. He lives with wealth earned through his father’s corruption, every privilege a reminder of the compromise that secured it. Can you redeem complicity? The novels suggest you cannot. You can regret it. You can refuse to repeat it. But you cannot un-facilitate an escape.

What We Owe the Dead

At the heart of these novels is a question the French courts refused to ask: What do we owe to victims when the system designed to deliver justice is itself corrupt?

The Duchess was failed by every institution that should have protected her. Marriage law trapped her in a relationship she could not escape. The police initially suspected the governess rather than the obvious perpetrator, because the idea of a duke murdering his duchess seemed more implausible than a working-class woman being the killer. The judicial system chose preservation of aristocratic dignity over accountability for aristocratic violence.

The novels honor this by refusing to center Charles’s redemption as the primary moral question. The primary question is whether her death matters—whether justice for her matters—or whether she is merely collateral damage in larger stories about political stability and personal transformation. By keeping the Duchess’s absence present throughout, the novels insist that victims don’t disappear simply because perpetrators escape. The forty-seven wounds never heal. Her death remains the fact around which everything else orbits.

Redemption Without Forgiveness

The most radical aspect of these novels is their refusal to offer redemption in any traditional sense. Charles doesn’t achieve catharsis through confession. He doesn’t find peace through good works. He doesn’t earn forgiveness through decades of service. He simply lives. Carries guilt. Does what good he can. Fails to undo what cannot be undone. Dies still wondering if it was enough.

The novels deny the comfort of redemption narratives where sufficient suffering earns absolution. They present transformation as real—Charles genuinely changes, genuinely dedicates himself to healing—while insisting that transformation doesn’t erase history. You can become a better person without becoming a good person. You can be genuinely remorseful without deserving forgiveness.

This feels particularly necessary given that the story involves real victims. The Duchess was a real woman who died violently. Her children lost their mother and their family’s honor. Henriette Deluzy was a real person whose reputation was destroyed. Offering easy redemption to their killer would insult their suffering.

Some questions don’t have answers. Some crimes can’t be atoned for. Some scales can never balance.

Living with Impossibility

Justice failed in 1847. The legal system was exposed as corrupt. The murderer escaped prosecution. These are historical facts. What the novels explore is the human cost of that failure—not only for the victims, whose cost is highest, but for everyone trapped in systems where privilege overrides justice and power means never having to answer for what you’ve done.

The novels end not with redemption achieved or justice restored, but with a question still suspended in the air: Was it enough? Can it ever be enough? The refusal to answer is itself an answer. Some acts place us forever in moral territory too complex for simple judgments. What matters—the novels insist—is that we keep asking.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne are available now.

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