December 22, 2020 • 24 mins
The Duke and Duchess de Praslin were originally a love match. But two decades—and a beautiful, young governess—led to growing tensions and resentment. When the Duchess was found murdered in her bedchamber, the police had no choice but to arrest her powerful husband. (Unrelated: Noble Blood merch is here! https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood)
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, and happy holidays. Before we get started with this episode,
I just wanted to give a quick shout out to
your miney that Noble Blood officially has merch. The link
to the merch store will be in the description of
the episode, and I also want to give a special
shout out. I'm trying something new and hopefully exciting, a
pamphlet club where if you subscribe, I send an annotated
(00:23):
script from one of my favorite Noble Blood episodes with
brand new context and information along once a month. But
the thing with this club is if you want to
get in, you gotta sign up now. Once it starts,
you can't get in. You can always get up, but
you can't get back in. That sounds like the Hotel California. Again,
Happy holidays, and thank you so much to all of
the support for Noble Blood. I hope you all stay
(00:45):
safe and healthy and keep your heads literally and metaphorically.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky listener discretion as
advised from the outside. Henriette de Luzy de port Field
(01:07):
had a lovely life. She and her husband, the Minister
Henry Field, were prominent figures in the high society of
nineteenth century New York in Massachusetts, Henriette had emigrated from
France before coming to America and working as the principal
of a female art school. Her husband, Henry, was nine
(01:28):
years her junior, and by all accounts, they were wildly
in love. They were fixtures at parties and literary soirees.
Henriette became personal friends with Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Fields
were neighbors with Nathaniel Hawthorne. One evening, the Fields were
attending a party at the Century Club in New York
(01:49):
when Henriette heard someone hissing at her from across the room. Murderous,
the voice said, murderous. It was an old man from
the Continent, Count Garski, squinting at Henriette and hissing at
her through his loose false teeth. Murderous. He called, she's
(02:09):
a murderous It was a small scandal. The elderly man
was escorted out of the club with murmurs of apology
to Mr. And Mrs Field. The party continued, but with
a strange tension in the air. The polite smiles of
things not said most people in New York didn't know
(02:31):
the rumors attached to Henriette de Lucy deport Field, the
woman once known in France as Madame Delucy, But Count
Gorsky did. There was a generation of nobles in Europe
who hadn't forgotten what had happened to the beautiful Duchess
de Proland, the only daughter of a noble family. Count
(02:53):
Gorsky hadn't forgotten the gruesome tragedy that befell her, and
there were pete that believed that Henriette de Lucy, the
woman who once worked as a governess to the Duchess's children,
got away with murder. I'm Dani Schwartz, and this is
noble blood. The Duchess was having nightmares. She had been
(03:22):
having nightmares for months, the same one every night that
the devil, wearing a red brocade suit, was appearing to
her in her bedchamber. By the time she woke up,
he was gone. She told the servants about it and
her friends. Everyone looked at her with sympathy. You're going
through a challenging time, they reminded her. It's stress and worry.
(03:47):
Things will get better soon. Recurring nightmares aside. Most people
envaded the Duchess, nown to her friends as Fanny, she
was the only daughter of a famous French general and politician,
Horace Sebastiani. Fanny's mother had died in childbirth, but she
was doated on by the rest of her family. She
(04:07):
was their beautiful, shining jewel, a bona fide heiress, niece
of the Duke of Colignier, and destined for a prominent
place in French social circles. When Fanny was seventeen in
eighteen twenty four, she married the dashing Charles Theobald, who
went on to become a chevalier Donner and the Duke
of Chasse Prelan and then a Peer of France. He
(04:30):
was from an important family, related directly to the reigning
king in France, Louis Philippe, But even more important than
that to Fanny was that it was a love match.
He was only two years older than her when they
got married, and the pair went on to have ten children,
although not all of them survived childhood. Fanny adored her husband.
(04:53):
She even tolerated them splitting their time between her family's
beautiful home in Paris and his fa his dank Ancestral
de Praulon Castle, a dreary property in Milan. The pair
had been married for over twenty three years, but that's
when things were changing between them. It started with a governess.
(05:16):
While they were staying in Paris, the Duchess hired a
new governess for her brood of children, a pretty young
woman named Henriette de Lucy. There were no complaints about
her services or her performance as a governess. The children
absolutely adored her, and they had never been better behaved.
But that was the problem. The children adored Henriette de
(05:39):
Lucy so much that they seemed to prefer her to
their own mother. And then there was the Duchess's husband, Charles,
the Duc de Pralan. He was becoming distant, kissing the
Duchess on the cheek instead of the lips, rarely coming
to her bed, ignoring her for most of the day.
(06:00):
The pair lived in the same house like ghosts. The
Duchess would hear him making a joke to Henriette from
across the house and then listened to their laughter. She
was nearing forty, it was true, and after ten children,
her body had changed. But her husband was pulling away
from her. Her children were pulling away from her. She
(06:21):
didn't know what she could do about it. This is
when the nightmares started. Fanny insisted that her husband fire
Henriette Lucy, who by this point had been working for
their family for six years. The Duke played dumb. Was
there a problem with her service? The Duchess looked away.
(06:45):
The rumors had become a standard topic of conversation in
their social circles. Servants averted their eyes from the duchess
and hallways. Everyone knew that the Duke and Henriette were
having an affair, including the duchess. So the Duchess doubled down.
She insisted that Charles fire the governess. Charles gave a
(07:06):
miserable little laugh, my dear, he said, if she goes,
then so do I. But the humiliation had become too
much for the Duchess, and so she called her husband's
bluff fine. She replied, we'll divorce. Scandal be damned matches
for our daughters will suffer, but I don't care. I'll
take my inheritance and my money. I'll take the children.
(07:28):
The Duke backed down, all right, he said, I'll fire
her for now. Why don't you and the children go
stay at the castle and maloon and I'll stay in
Paris to fire Henriette and make the appropriate arrangements. Pleased enough,
the Duchess agreed and went to the country with the children.
But as you might have suspected, while the Duke did
(07:49):
dismiss the pretty Henriette de Lizzy, he also rented her
a luxurious apartment, and the pair of them spent a
full month together that summer while the Duchess and children
were away. But at the end of that summer in August,
the rest of the family returned to Paris on their
way to spend the fall. Indeed, when the Duchess arrived
(08:12):
back at their Paris home, she called out, but her
husband wasn't there. Odd even otter, she noticed a few
things wrong in her bed chamber. The hinges on her
bedroom door were missing. No matter, she would tell the
servant about it in the morning. Her husband returned that
(08:32):
night before supper, and he reminded Fanny that he had
fired Henriette like she had asked, that everything would be
all right from then on. That night was the last
time anyone saw the Duchess de Prelant alive. A small
(08:54):
warning to younger listeners here, it's about now that the
episode gets a little well bloody. On the morning of
August seventeenth, eighteen forty seven, around five am, strange noises
woke two of the servants in the prelaw house. Emma
le Clerk was the Duchess's personal maid. She had served
(09:18):
Fanny for over two decades since Fanny was sixteen and
newly engaged to the Duke, bright eyed over her exciting future.
That morning in August, Emma heard a crash and the
sound of a struggle. There was an echo of a
screen in the air. She and the Duke's valet, who
had also woken up, raced to Fanny's bedroom, but they
(09:41):
found that the door was locked from the inside. From
the other side of the door, they could hear soft whimpering.
The door to the Duchess's bathroom was also locked, as
was the door into the Duchess's room from the garden,
but the valet broke a pane of glass and forced
his way in, but by the time they got there,
the whimpering had stopped. Fanny, the Duchess de Proloan was dead.
(10:07):
The Duchess's bedroom had been designed as a copy of
Marie Antoinette's chamber from Versailles, with a four poster bed
on an elevated platform and furnishings in luxurious embroidered silk.
But now the entire room was splashed with blood. A
giant stain of blood spread across the bed, The chair
(10:28):
was flipped over, blood trailed all over the room, like
the duchess had been chased or tried to chase her attacker.
But whatever had happened, the two servants could see the
end result. The duchess was lying on the floor, her
head resting on a couch. She had been stabbed over
thirty times. Her skull had been bashed in, and her
(10:52):
throat was slashed. Within moments, other servants of the household
filed into the room and gasped. But strange july enough,
it was another few minutes after that before the Duke
himself appeared, even though his bedroom shared in the anti
chamber with his wife's room. Hadn't he heard anything? Why
hadn't he sent out the alarm? The doorway from the
(11:15):
Duchess's room to the anti chamber was unlocked. Oh my god,
the duke cried when he finally did come into the room.
Oh my god, in heaven, some monster has murdered. Fanny
get a doctor. The valet tried to comfort his master.
It had probably been burglars after Fanny's famously valuable jewels.
(11:38):
The duchess had a set of diamonds that had been
gifted to her mother by Napoleon and Josephine themselves. Later, however,
the police would discover that nothing was taken. It wasn't
a robbery. Alas, alas, my poor Fanny, the duke shouted
after his valet politely slipped away to get help. Would
(11:58):
monster has done the thing? The Duke threw himself onto
the blood stained bed, alas my motherless children. When the
policeman arrived, he examined the scene carefully. The room was
covered in blood, and it was also covered in strands
of the Duchess's hair that seemed to have been ripped
out of her head. The Duchess's fingernails were bloody, like
(12:22):
there had been a struggle. The bell she could have
used next to her bed to alert her servants had
had its rope cut from underneath the divan. The policeman
found a gun, but upon examining it, he found that
it hadn't been fired. Instead, the gun was covered in
blood and in Fanny's hair it looked as though it
(12:44):
had been used to bashen her head. Sir, do you
know who this weapon belongs to, the policeman asked the Duke.
I do. The Duke replied, it's mine. The duke explained
to the policeman that he actually had heard this struggle
in his wife's chamber earlier in the morning, before even
the servants came in, and he the duke had brought
(13:07):
the gun to try to fight off his wife's attacker,
but by the time he came in, the attacker was
already gone, and when he went to hug his wife's
dead body, he became covered in blood. So he had
returned back to his room to change out of his
bloody clothes so that he wouldn't frighten the children. That's
(13:27):
when he came back into the room to find the
servants there. The police didn't exactly buy it. The police
searched charles room and found the bloody handle of a dagger,
although the blade would never be found. They also found
a bloodstained bathrobe that someone had tried to wash with soap,
(13:50):
a leather sheets, and an assortment of other items that
would be unidentifiable. Because someone had thrown them into the
fire and tried to burn them. The Duke's sink was
splattered with blood. The policeman politely asked if the Duke
might undergo a physical examination. The Duke coughed and protested
(14:14):
he was a peer of the realm, but eventually he agreed,
and the police found him covered in scratches and bite marks.
The Duke was also limping, and when the policeman asked
what had happened to his leg, that's when the Duke exploded.
I have no further explanations to make to you, he said.
(14:36):
I am a peer of France and I do not
need to account for myself to police officers. Arresting a
duke would be incredibly controversial and politically dangerous for the policeman,
but he had no choice. He sent all of the
evidence he had to King Louis Philippe, who had to
sign off personally on the orders for the Duke to arrest,
(15:00):
which the King did reluctantly. The press and wealthy establishment
power slandered the policeman, but his report was so meticulous
that it was difficult to challenge him, especially once they
all found Fanny's diaries which detailed her husband's violent temper
and frequent threats. A trial, though, would be a scandal.
(15:24):
The Duke was a member of the King's court. A
trial would reflect terribly, not only on the King himself
but on all of French nobility. But with all of
this evidence, there would be no way of avoiding trial.
But with all of this evidence that the police had
seemed like there would be no way to avoid a trial,
(15:46):
or was there. Charles the Duc de Preulant was put
under house arrest and then transferred to the prison at
Luxembourg Palace, where they scrambled to put together a jury
of peers of the realm who could try such a
high ranking nobleman. Basically, the only people they could get
(16:07):
were childhood friends of the Duke. He had to be
tried in the Court of Peers, which was a court
exclusively for noblemen and pretty much known for its lenient
sentencing when it had to convict. But before the trial
took place, before any more scandal could be made of
(16:27):
the death of the Duchess de Prelance, the Duke drank
a vial of arsenic. The common people, when they heard
about his death were outraged. Had there been no guards
watching him. How did he get the poison to begin with.
The common theory at the time was that the nobleman
imprisoning him had actually given the arsenic to the Duke
(16:50):
as a way of protecting their image, having him die
before having to be scandalous. Lee found guilty. There was
even a rumor that the King had self had sent
the Duke the poison, along with a note saying that
he should do the honorable thing. However he got it.
After Charles drank the poison, he smashed the bottle and
(17:13):
swallowed the shards of broken glass to leave no evidence.
He died six days later in excruciating agony. For those
six days, the Duke was repeatedly questioned interrogated, but he
continued to maintain his innocence. You know the awful crime
of which you are accused, the Lord Chancellor of the
(17:35):
Kingdom said at Charles's bedside. You know all of the
circumstances which have led to this accusation, and beg of you.
I implore of you, Duke, do not tell a lie.
Charles replied, I have not the strength to say anything.
It would take a long time for me to tell
you the truth. And nothing but the truth. What strength?
(17:58):
Said the Lord Chancellor, clearly frustrated. We want a yes
or no. It requires great strength of mind to be
able to say yes or no to certain questions, and
it is a strength which I do not now possess,
the Duke said. The interrogation continued that way, with the
Duke never confessing for the murder of his wife. The
(18:21):
closest the Duke came to remorse was when the Duke said, quote,
I wished to say how much I regret I cannot
see my children before I die. I implore my family
to be kind to them. Henriette de Lucy, the prey
(18:43):
Law's former governess, was also imprisoned. She was arrested and
kept for three months while she was interrogated, but there
was no evidence that she had anything to do with
the murder of the Duchess, and so the charges against
her were dismissed. No trial continued against the Duke posthumously.
(19:04):
Though his suicide had been an attempt to save face
for the peers of the realm, public opinion rose up
in a fury against the nobles. Here was a man
who faced no justice, they believed, because he was rich
and powerful nobles would rather have a murderer commit suicide
(19:25):
rather than force them to have to condemn othellow elite.
And that's if the Duke did kill himself. There were
also rumors that the Duke managed to get away, that
with the help of his powerful friends, he was able
to fake his own death and escape to Nicaragua. One
historian in Nicaragua alleged that Charles made his way across
(19:48):
the Atlantic and lived out the rest of his life
in Matagalpa, marrying another woman, fathering five children, growing out
a beard to disguise his appearance, and keeping away from
any French frigates containing people that might recognize him. The
escape is actually a real possibility. There is even a
paper trail, but a little more likely if a lot
(20:12):
less exciting a servant probably stole some of the Duke's
clothing and money and papers so that he could start
a new life in Central America. As for Henriette, she
escaped the scandal by moving to New York, where she
became the principal of a girls school and married a
prominent minister. When Henriette died, she was old and beloved
(20:37):
by the literary community. Two of her casket bearers were
the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant and Peter Cooper
of Cooper Union. The day of her funeral was marked
by the famous diarist George Templeton Strong, who wrote, quote
died Mrs Henry Field. I knew her at one time
(20:57):
quite well, and she was universally like being uncommonly clever
and cultivated. Her plainness made it incredible that the Duke
d'aprell law should have been in love with her. A
more glowing legacy, or at least a more romantic one,
would come later. Henriette's grand niece became a writer named
(21:20):
Rachel Field, and she wrote a novel based on her
great aunt's life called All This and Heaven Too. It's
a romantic story about a governess falling in love with
a duke in a miserable marriage, who then must kill
himself in order to protect his true love from the
other nobles blaming her for the duchess's murder. It was
(21:42):
made into a film starring Betty Davis and Charles Boyer.
It really is all about perspective. When he tried to
decide who the heroes are in any given story, that's
(22:03):
the story of the murder of the Duchess de Prelan,
but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear
a little bit more about the skeletons lurking in the
Duke's closet. It was months later that the children of
(22:25):
the Duke and Duchess de Prela were clearing out their
father's rooms at their parents home when they found a
hidden trunk. It was stuck underneath a few shirts at
the back of their father's closet. Inside the trunk was
a bright red costume that they had never seen before.
In red brocade, the type of costume that someone would
(22:48):
wear two a masked ball. It was a Mephistopheles costume,
a costume to look like the devil. If rumors are
to be leaved, The Duke had put the costume on
to sneak into his wife's room at night in the
hopes of frightening her into insanity. In the century, an
(23:13):
insane wife would have been easy enough to dispose of
without having to resort to murder. Noble Blood is a
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Monkey. The show was written and hosted by Dani
Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
(23:37):
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble blood tails dot com. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and happy holidays. Before we get started with this episode,
I just wanted to give a quick shout out to
your miney that Noble Blood officially has merch. The link
to the merch store will be in the description of
the episode, and I also want to give a special
shout out. I'm trying something new and hopefully exciting, a
pamphlet club where if you subscribe, I send an annotated
(00:23):
script from one of my favorite Noble Blood episodes with
brand new context and information along once a month. But
the thing with this club is if you want to
get in, you gotta sign up now. Once it starts,
you can't get in. You can always get up, but
you can't get back in. That sounds like the Hotel California. Again,
Happy holidays, and thank you so much to all of
the support for Noble Blood. I hope you all stay
(00:45):
safe and healthy and keep your heads literally and metaphorically.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky listener discretion as
advised from the outside. Henriette de Luzy de port Field
(01:07):
had a lovely life. She and her husband, the Minister
Henry Field, were prominent figures in the high society of
nineteenth century New York in Massachusetts, Henriette had emigrated from
France before coming to America and working as the principal
of a female art school. Her husband, Henry, was nine
(01:28):
years her junior, and by all accounts, they were wildly
in love. They were fixtures at parties and literary soirees.
Henriette became personal friends with Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Fields
were neighbors with Nathaniel Hawthorne. One evening, the Fields were
attending a party at the Century Club in New York
(01:49):
when Henriette heard someone hissing at her from across the room. Murderous,
the voice said, murderous. It was an old man from
the Continent, Count Garski, squinting at Henriette and hissing at
her through his loose false teeth. Murderous. He called, she's
(02:09):
a murderous It was a small scandal. The elderly man
was escorted out of the club with murmurs of apology
to Mr. And Mrs Field. The party continued, but with
a strange tension in the air. The polite smiles of
things not said most people in New York didn't know
(02:31):
the rumors attached to Henriette de Lucy deport Field, the
woman once known in France as Madame Delucy, But Count
Gorsky did. There was a generation of nobles in Europe
who hadn't forgotten what had happened to the beautiful Duchess
de Proland, the only daughter of a noble family. Count
(02:53):
Gorsky hadn't forgotten the gruesome tragedy that befell her, and
there were pete that believed that Henriette de Lucy, the
woman who once worked as a governess to the Duchess's children,
got away with murder. I'm Dani Schwartz, and this is
noble blood. The Duchess was having nightmares. She had been
(03:22):
having nightmares for months, the same one every night that
the devil, wearing a red brocade suit, was appearing to
her in her bedchamber. By the time she woke up,
he was gone. She told the servants about it and
her friends. Everyone looked at her with sympathy. You're going
through a challenging time, they reminded her. It's stress and worry.
(03:47):
Things will get better soon. Recurring nightmares aside. Most people
envaded the Duchess, nown to her friends as Fanny, she
was the only daughter of a famous French general and politician,
Horace Sebastiani. Fanny's mother had died in childbirth, but she
was doated on by the rest of her family. She
(04:07):
was their beautiful, shining jewel, a bona fide heiress, niece
of the Duke of Colignier, and destined for a prominent
place in French social circles. When Fanny was seventeen in
eighteen twenty four, she married the dashing Charles Theobald, who
went on to become a chevalier Donner and the Duke
of Chasse Prelan and then a Peer of France. He
(04:30):
was from an important family, related directly to the reigning
king in France, Louis Philippe, But even more important than
that to Fanny was that it was a love match.
He was only two years older than her when they
got married, and the pair went on to have ten children,
although not all of them survived childhood. Fanny adored her husband.
(04:53):
She even tolerated them splitting their time between her family's
beautiful home in Paris and his fa his dank Ancestral
de Praulon Castle, a dreary property in Milan. The pair
had been married for over twenty three years, but that's
when things were changing between them. It started with a governess.
(05:16):
While they were staying in Paris, the Duchess hired a
new governess for her brood of children, a pretty young
woman named Henriette de Lucy. There were no complaints about
her services or her performance as a governess. The children
absolutely adored her, and they had never been better behaved.
But that was the problem. The children adored Henriette de
(05:39):
Lucy so much that they seemed to prefer her to
their own mother. And then there was the Duchess's husband, Charles,
the Duc de Pralan. He was becoming distant, kissing the
Duchess on the cheek instead of the lips, rarely coming
to her bed, ignoring her for most of the day.
(06:00):
The pair lived in the same house like ghosts. The
Duchess would hear him making a joke to Henriette from
across the house and then listened to their laughter. She
was nearing forty, it was true, and after ten children,
her body had changed. But her husband was pulling away
from her. Her children were pulling away from her. She
(06:21):
didn't know what she could do about it. This is
when the nightmares started. Fanny insisted that her husband fire
Henriette Lucy, who by this point had been working for
their family for six years. The Duke played dumb. Was
there a problem with her service? The Duchess looked away.
(06:45):
The rumors had become a standard topic of conversation in
their social circles. Servants averted their eyes from the duchess
and hallways. Everyone knew that the Duke and Henriette were
having an affair, including the duchess. So the Duchess doubled down.
She insisted that Charles fire the governess. Charles gave a
(07:06):
miserable little laugh, my dear, he said, if she goes,
then so do I. But the humiliation had become too
much for the Duchess, and so she called her husband's
bluff fine. She replied, we'll divorce. Scandal be damned matches
for our daughters will suffer, but I don't care. I'll
take my inheritance and my money. I'll take the children.
(07:28):
The Duke backed down, all right, he said, I'll fire
her for now. Why don't you and the children go
stay at the castle and maloon and I'll stay in
Paris to fire Henriette and make the appropriate arrangements. Pleased enough,
the Duchess agreed and went to the country with the children.
But as you might have suspected, while the Duke did
(07:49):
dismiss the pretty Henriette de Lizzy, he also rented her
a luxurious apartment, and the pair of them spent a
full month together that summer while the Duchess and children
were away. But at the end of that summer in August,
the rest of the family returned to Paris on their
way to spend the fall. Indeed, when the Duchess arrived
(08:12):
back at their Paris home, she called out, but her
husband wasn't there. Odd even otter, she noticed a few
things wrong in her bed chamber. The hinges on her
bedroom door were missing. No matter, she would tell the
servant about it in the morning. Her husband returned that
(08:32):
night before supper, and he reminded Fanny that he had
fired Henriette like she had asked, that everything would be
all right from then on. That night was the last
time anyone saw the Duchess de Prelant alive. A small
(08:54):
warning to younger listeners here, it's about now that the
episode gets a little well bloody. On the morning of
August seventeenth, eighteen forty seven, around five am, strange noises
woke two of the servants in the prelaw house. Emma
le Clerk was the Duchess's personal maid. She had served
(09:18):
Fanny for over two decades since Fanny was sixteen and
newly engaged to the Duke, bright eyed over her exciting future.
That morning in August, Emma heard a crash and the
sound of a struggle. There was an echo of a
screen in the air. She and the Duke's valet, who
had also woken up, raced to Fanny's bedroom, but they
(09:41):
found that the door was locked from the inside. From
the other side of the door, they could hear soft whimpering.
The door to the Duchess's bathroom was also locked, as
was the door into the Duchess's room from the garden,
but the valet broke a pane of glass and forced
his way in, but by the time they got there,
the whimpering had stopped. Fanny, the Duchess de Proloan was dead.
(10:07):
The Duchess's bedroom had been designed as a copy of
Marie Antoinette's chamber from Versailles, with a four poster bed
on an elevated platform and furnishings in luxurious embroidered silk.
But now the entire room was splashed with blood. A
giant stain of blood spread across the bed, The chair
(10:28):
was flipped over, blood trailed all over the room, like
the duchess had been chased or tried to chase her attacker.
But whatever had happened, the two servants could see the
end result. The duchess was lying on the floor, her
head resting on a couch. She had been stabbed over
thirty times. Her skull had been bashed in, and her
(10:52):
throat was slashed. Within moments, other servants of the household
filed into the room and gasped. But strange july enough,
it was another few minutes after that before the Duke
himself appeared, even though his bedroom shared in the anti
chamber with his wife's room. Hadn't he heard anything? Why
hadn't he sent out the alarm? The doorway from the
(11:15):
Duchess's room to the anti chamber was unlocked. Oh my god,
the duke cried when he finally did come into the room.
Oh my god, in heaven, some monster has murdered. Fanny
get a doctor. The valet tried to comfort his master.
It had probably been burglars after Fanny's famously valuable jewels.
(11:38):
The duchess had a set of diamonds that had been
gifted to her mother by Napoleon and Josephine themselves. Later, however,
the police would discover that nothing was taken. It wasn't
a robbery. Alas, alas, my poor Fanny, the duke shouted
after his valet politely slipped away to get help. Would
(11:58):
monster has done the thing? The Duke threw himself onto
the blood stained bed, alas my motherless children. When the
policeman arrived, he examined the scene carefully. The room was
covered in blood, and it was also covered in strands
of the Duchess's hair that seemed to have been ripped
out of her head. The Duchess's fingernails were bloody, like
(12:22):
there had been a struggle. The bell she could have
used next to her bed to alert her servants had
had its rope cut from underneath the divan. The policeman
found a gun, but upon examining it, he found that
it hadn't been fired. Instead, the gun was covered in
blood and in Fanny's hair it looked as though it
(12:44):
had been used to bashen her head. Sir, do you
know who this weapon belongs to, the policeman asked the Duke.
I do. The Duke replied, it's mine. The duke explained
to the policeman that he actually had heard this struggle
in his wife's chamber earlier in the morning, before even
the servants came in, and he the duke had brought
(13:07):
the gun to try to fight off his wife's attacker,
but by the time he came in, the attacker was
already gone, and when he went to hug his wife's
dead body, he became covered in blood. So he had
returned back to his room to change out of his
bloody clothes so that he wouldn't frighten the children. That's
(13:27):
when he came back into the room to find the
servants there. The police didn't exactly buy it. The police
searched charles room and found the bloody handle of a dagger,
although the blade would never be found. They also found
a bloodstained bathrobe that someone had tried to wash with soap,
(13:50):
a leather sheets, and an assortment of other items that
would be unidentifiable. Because someone had thrown them into the
fire and tried to burn them. The Duke's sink was
splattered with blood. The policeman politely asked if the Duke
might undergo a physical examination. The Duke coughed and protested
(14:14):
he was a peer of the realm, but eventually he agreed,
and the police found him covered in scratches and bite marks.
The Duke was also limping, and when the policeman asked
what had happened to his leg, that's when the Duke exploded.
I have no further explanations to make to you, he said.
(14:36):
I am a peer of France and I do not
need to account for myself to police officers. Arresting a
duke would be incredibly controversial and politically dangerous for the policeman,
but he had no choice. He sent all of the
evidence he had to King Louis Philippe, who had to
sign off personally on the orders for the Duke to arrest,
(15:00):
which the King did reluctantly. The press and wealthy establishment
power slandered the policeman, but his report was so meticulous
that it was difficult to challenge him, especially once they
all found Fanny's diaries which detailed her husband's violent temper
and frequent threats. A trial, though, would be a scandal.
(15:24):
The Duke was a member of the King's court. A
trial would reflect terribly, not only on the King himself
but on all of French nobility. But with all of
this evidence, there would be no way of avoiding trial.
But with all of this evidence that the police had
seemed like there would be no way to avoid a trial,
(15:46):
or was there. Charles the Duc de Preulant was put
under house arrest and then transferred to the prison at
Luxembourg Palace, where they scrambled to put together a jury
of peers of the realm who could try such a
high ranking nobleman. Basically, the only people they could get
(16:07):
were childhood friends of the Duke. He had to be
tried in the Court of Peers, which was a court
exclusively for noblemen and pretty much known for its lenient
sentencing when it had to convict. But before the trial
took place, before any more scandal could be made of
(16:27):
the death of the Duchess de Prelance, the Duke drank
a vial of arsenic. The common people, when they heard
about his death were outraged. Had there been no guards
watching him. How did he get the poison to begin with.
The common theory at the time was that the nobleman
imprisoning him had actually given the arsenic to the Duke
(16:50):
as a way of protecting their image, having him die
before having to be scandalous. Lee found guilty. There was
even a rumor that the King had self had sent
the Duke the poison, along with a note saying that
he should do the honorable thing. However he got it.
After Charles drank the poison, he smashed the bottle and
(17:13):
swallowed the shards of broken glass to leave no evidence.
He died six days later in excruciating agony. For those
six days, the Duke was repeatedly questioned interrogated, but he
continued to maintain his innocence. You know the awful crime
of which you are accused, the Lord Chancellor of the
(17:35):
Kingdom said at Charles's bedside. You know all of the
circumstances which have led to this accusation, and beg of you.
I implore of you, Duke, do not tell a lie.
Charles replied, I have not the strength to say anything.
It would take a long time for me to tell
you the truth. And nothing but the truth. What strength?
(17:58):
Said the Lord Chancellor, clearly frustrated. We want a yes
or no. It requires great strength of mind to be
able to say yes or no to certain questions, and
it is a strength which I do not now possess,
the Duke said. The interrogation continued that way, with the
Duke never confessing for the murder of his wife. The
(18:21):
closest the Duke came to remorse was when the Duke said, quote,
I wished to say how much I regret I cannot
see my children before I die. I implore my family
to be kind to them. Henriette de Lucy, the prey
(18:43):
Law's former governess, was also imprisoned. She was arrested and
kept for three months while she was interrogated, but there
was no evidence that she had anything to do with
the murder of the Duchess, and so the charges against
her were dismissed. No trial continued against the Duke posthumously.
(19:04):
Though his suicide had been an attempt to save face
for the peers of the realm, public opinion rose up
in a fury against the nobles. Here was a man
who faced no justice, they believed, because he was rich
and powerful nobles would rather have a murderer commit suicide
(19:25):
rather than force them to have to condemn othellow elite.
And that's if the Duke did kill himself. There were
also rumors that the Duke managed to get away, that
with the help of his powerful friends, he was able
to fake his own death and escape to Nicaragua. One
historian in Nicaragua alleged that Charles made his way across
(19:48):
the Atlantic and lived out the rest of his life
in Matagalpa, marrying another woman, fathering five children, growing out
a beard to disguise his appearance, and keeping away from
any French frigates containing people that might recognize him. The
escape is actually a real possibility. There is even a
paper trail, but a little more likely if a lot
(20:12):
less exciting a servant probably stole some of the Duke's
clothing and money and papers so that he could start
a new life in Central America. As for Henriette, she
escaped the scandal by moving to New York, where she
became the principal of a girls school and married a
prominent minister. When Henriette died, she was old and beloved
(20:37):
by the literary community. Two of her casket bearers were
the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant and Peter Cooper
of Cooper Union. The day of her funeral was marked
by the famous diarist George Templeton Strong, who wrote, quote
died Mrs Henry Field. I knew her at one time
(20:57):
quite well, and she was universally like being uncommonly clever
and cultivated. Her plainness made it incredible that the Duke
d'aprell law should have been in love with her. A
more glowing legacy, or at least a more romantic one,
would come later. Henriette's grand niece became a writer named
(21:20):
Rachel Field, and she wrote a novel based on her
great aunt's life called All This and Heaven Too. It's
a romantic story about a governess falling in love with
a duke in a miserable marriage, who then must kill
himself in order to protect his true love from the
other nobles blaming her for the duchess's murder. It was
(21:42):
made into a film starring Betty Davis and Charles Boyer.
It really is all about perspective. When he tried to
decide who the heroes are in any given story, that's
(22:03):
the story of the murder of the Duchess de Prelan,
but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear
a little bit more about the skeletons lurking in the
Duke's closet. It was months later that the children of
(22:25):
the Duke and Duchess de Prela were clearing out their
father's rooms at their parents home when they found a
hidden trunk. It was stuck underneath a few shirts at
the back of their father's closet. Inside the trunk was
a bright red costume that they had never seen before.
In red brocade, the type of costume that someone would
(22:48):
wear two a masked ball. It was a Mephistopheles costume,
a costume to look like the devil. If rumors are
to be leaved, The Duke had put the costume on
to sneak into his wife's room at night in the
hopes of frightening her into insanity. In the century, an
(23:13):
insane wife would have been easy enough to dispose of
without having to resort to murder. Noble Blood is a
production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from
Aaron Monkey. The show was written and hosted by Dani
Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
(23:37):
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble blood tails dot com. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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