Legacy
| "The mother of errors, the stepmother of good counsel, rash cruelty occasioned this unjust duel. Afterwards everyone found out who had committed the foul rape, when someone else confessed while being condemned to death. The aforesaid lady took note of this, and thinking over the fault in her mind, after the death of her husband became a recluse and took an oath of perpetual continence." |
| Inaccurate account from the Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys. |
Due to the controversy and celebrity surrounding the case, the judicial duel between Carrouges and Le Gris was the last ever permitted by the French government and as such a well attended and infamous event, it soon attracted near-legendary status. In France the memory of the duel far outlasted its participants, primarily a result of it being recorded soon after by the contemporary chronicler Jean Froissart. Over the following century, vivid and imaginative accounts were carried in the chronicles of Jean Juvénal des Ursins and the Grandes Chroniques de France as well as by Jehan de Waurin and others, many embellishing the story with imaginative twists. The factual details of the case are unusually well recorded for a medieval trial as the records of the Parlement de Paris have survived intact and Jacques Le Gris' lawyer Jean Le Coq kept meticulous notes on the case which still exist. In addition to a clear view of proceedings these notes also contain Le Coq's own concerns about his client, whose innocence Le Coq deemed highly suspect.
Despite these records, the event entered many historical texts as an example of a great miscarriage of justice which therefore brought the tradition of trial-by-combat to an end. Several chronicles, including the "Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys" and the Chronicles of Jean Juvénal des Ursins, tell of a deathbed confession to the rape by another man. This story, which is without basis in fact, was subsequently repeated in many later sources, most notably the Encyclopædia Britannica which for many years contained a version of the tale under the entry for "Duel". This information was eventually removed in an edition printed in the 1970s.
Other sources have discussed the story in varying degrees of detail, including a section in Diderot's Encyclopédie, in the Histoire du Parlement de Paris by Voltaire and in a number of books written in the nineteenth century, including a work in the 1880s by a descendant of Jacques Le Gris in which the author attempted to prove his ancestor's innocence. In the twentieth century other authors have studied the case, the most recent being "The Last Duel" in 2004, by Eric Jager, a professor of English at UCLA. Oscar-winning film director Martin Scorsese is reportedly considering developing this book into a feature film, although this adaptation has not been confirmed.
Read more about this topic: Jean De Carrouges
Famous quotes containing the word legacy:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)