Two Stories, One Murder: The Praslin Affair Through Opposing Lenses

Henriette Deluzy-Desportes (Bette Davis) serves as the governess to the children of the Duc de Praslin (Charles Boyer) and his wife, the duchess (Barbara O'Neil). While both the Duc de Praslin and his children adore Henriette, the duchess despises her, and is suspicious of the bond she has formed with her family. As the duchess's behavior toward Henriette grows more and more irrational, it puts into play tragic events that will change all their lives forever.

In 1938, Rachel Field published All This and Heaven Too, a bestselling novel (later adapted into a Bette Davis film) that told the story of the infamous Praslin murder case through the eyes of Henriette Deluzy, the governess caught in the scandal. Field's work presented Henriette as an innocent victim—a woman of refinement and virtue destroyed by the malicious jealousy of the Duchess and the tragic obsession of the Duke.

Nearly ninety years later, The Scandal That Shook the Throne (Cuarenta y Siete Puñaladas) tells the same story from an entirely different vantage point: that of the murderer himself, Duke Charles de Choiseul-Praslin.

The Governess as Saint vs. The Duke as Monster

Field's narrative operates within clear moral boundaries. Henriette Deluzy is unambiguously good—educated, dignified, trapped in the impossible position of the 19th-century governess. Neither servant nor family, she becomes the scapegoat for a marriage that was already decomposing from within. The Duke in Field's telling is a weak man, paralyzed by aristocratic convention, unable to save either the woman he loves or himself from the Duchess's vindictive rage.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne refuses this comfortable morality. Here, Charles is the protagonist—but not a sympathetic one. The novel opens with the brutal reality: forty-seven stab wounds marking Fanny's body, each one a testament to accumulated rage. There is no softening of this violence, no romantic gloss that transforms murder into tragic inevitability.

Yet the novel asks a more disturbing question than Field's work: Can a monster become human again?

Henriette: Destroyer or Destroyed?

In All This and Heaven Too, Henriette is definitively the latter—a woman destroyed by circumstances beyond her control, by a jealous wife and a rigid social system that offered her no protection. Field's Henriette is passive virtue incarnate, suffering nobly.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne takes a more ambiguous stance. Henriette appears not as protagonist but as catalyst—a woman whose very presence (whether innocent or calculated) ignited the powder keg of the Praslin marriage. The novel doesn't condemn her, but neither does it canonize her. She remains what she was historically: educated, dignified, and ultimately unknowable in her true intentions.

The focus instead shifts to what Charles does with his obsession. His letters to Henriette after her dismissal, his continued financial support, his visits—these are not presented as romantic devotion but as the actions of a man losing his grip on reality, on propriety, on sanity itself.

The Murder: Crime of Passion vs. Accumulated Poison

Field's narrative emphasizes the sudden eruption—a man driven to madness by an impossible situation. The murder becomes almost understandable, if not forgivable, as the tragic endpoint of unbearable domestic warfare.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne refuses this interpretation. The novel meticulously documents the slow decay of the Praslin marriage: the ten pregnancies in eighteen years, five children dead in infancy, Fanny's transformation from young bride to desperate, controlling matriarch. Charles's retreat into cold aristocratic distance. The arrival of Henriette as the match thrown into accumulated fuel.

The murder, when it comes, is not sudden passion but calculated violence. Forty-seven wounds. A throat cut to the bone. Furniture overturned. The desperate ringing of the bell. This was not a moment of madness—it was sustained, deliberate brutality.

Justice Denied: Where the Stories Converge

Ironically, both novels agree on one crucial point: justice was not served.

Field's Henriette flees to America, builds a new life, but carries the scandal forever. She is tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty without evidence.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne imagines an even darker perversion of justice: Charles escapes entirely. Through the machinations of Chancellor Pasquier (determined to prevent a trial that would expose aristocratic corruption and hasten the monarchy's collapse), the Duke fakes his death and disappears to Nicaragua.

Redemption: Possible or Impossible?

Here the two works diverge most dramatically.

Field's story offers redemption to Henriette because she was innocent. Her redemption is simply the restoration of truth—the world eventually recognizing that she was victim, not accomplice.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne asks the harder question: Can the guilty be redeemed?

Charles becomes Jorge, a rural doctor in Matagalpa. He delivers babies, treats fevers, saves lives. He marries Margarita Arauz, raises six children with tenderness born from guilt over the children he abandoned in France. For thirty-five years, he performs penance through service.

But the novel refuses easy absolution. On his deathbed, Jorge confesses everything to Margarita. Her response—"I know"—suggests she always sensed the ghosts he carried. The priest offers conditional forgiveness: "You've lived your purgatory on earth."

Yet the novel's final question remains unanswered: Is it enough?

Can hundreds of lives saved balance one life brutally taken? Can a good death erase a monstrous act? The novel deliberately leaves this unresolved, trusting readers to grapple with the moral calculus themselves.

The Duke: Two Portraits

Field's Duke is weak, trapped, ultimately pathetic—a man who murders his wife because he lacks the courage to divorce her or the strength to control her jealousy.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne's Duke is more complex and more disturbing. He is educated, intelligent, capable of genuine love for his second family. Yet he is also the man who stabbed his wife forty-seven times and then asked, "Who is the monster who did this?"

This Duke is both monster and healer, murderer and father, aristocrat and exile. He contains multitudes—and all of them are guilty.

Why Both Stories Matter

All This and Heaven Too gave voice to the voiceless—the governess caught in a scandal not of her making, whose very position in society made her vulnerable to destruction.

The Scandal That Shook the Throne forces us to sit with discomfort—to follow a murderer into exile, to watch him build a life of apparent goodness, and to ask ourselves whether transformation is possible or whether some sins are truly unforgivable.

Field's novel offers the comfort of clear morality. The Scandal That Shook the Throne offers no such comfort—only the messy, unresolved question of whether redemption can exist without justice, and whether a man can become someone else entirely while still carrying the weight of who he was.

Both novels are necessary. One reminds us that the innocent suffer in others' scandals. The other reminds us that the guilty sometimes escape—and what they do with that escape defines whether they remain monsters or become, however imperfectly, human again.

The Praslin murder case of 1847 destroyed lives, toppled a monarchy, and raised questions that neither novel—nor history itself—can fully answer. Perhaps that's why we keep returning to it, telling it from different angles, searching for meaning in the forty-seven wounds that marked not just Fanny's body but French society itself.

Note: The Scandal That Shook the Throne / Cuarenta y Siete Puñaladas is available now in both English and Spanish editions. Read both perspectives on the Praslin Affair and decide for yourself: was redemption possible for the Duke? Or do some crimes place their perpetrators forever beyond forgiveness?