Husbands and Wives

Richard Jacob

Our two book/movie combos this issue concern husbands, wives and death. In the first, a wife risks her husband’s life as well as her own on a principle. In the second, she just has her husband shot.

The Book: The Last Duel, Eric Jager. Crown Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2004 (EJ).

The Movie: The Last Duel, Ridley Scott, Director; Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Ben Affleck; Jodie Comer; Scott Free Productions (20th Century Studios), 2021.

In medieval France, rape was a capital crime (though against the husband, not the woman, his property):

Defined as forceable sexual intercourse outside of wedlock, [rape] was punishable by death. Philip de Beaumanoir, a thirteenth century authority on French law, states that the punishment for rape is the same as that for murder or treason— namely, “to be dragged through the streets and hanged.” (EJ, pp. 69 – 70)

As well, at that age, “under French law, a nobleman appealing a case to the king had the right to challenge his opponent to a judicial duel, or trial by combat.” (EJ, p. 81)

Eric Jager, Professor of English at UCLA, was attracted from his reading to the well-known (at least to history-of-duels buffs) 1386 duel to the death between Normandy noblemen Jean de Carrouges (Damon in the movie) and Jacques Le Gris (Driver) in the Paris Abbey of Saint-Martindes-Champs, before the French king Charles VI. Carrouges had accused his erstwhile friend Le Gris of raping his wife, Marguerite (Comer), when he, Carrouges, was away from his Normandy home on an errand in Paris. Le Gris denied the charges and Carrouges was unsuccessful in getting judicial justice; a challenge and the duel ensued.

Jager’s book is well researched, there being a good deal of source material, including detailed accounts by medieval historian Jean Froissart, Le Gris’ lawyer, Jon Le Coq, and others. The book and movie’s title comes from the technical fact that the duel was the last parliamentary sanctioned trial to death by combat in France; there were later less-sanctioned duels, but the practice had died out due to skepticism, even by the Pope, of the efficacy of fighting to the death to prove one’s innocence or guilt. Of 200 plus pages, the narrative progresses like a novel, but also includes a great deal of material of interest to the avid history reader. When necessary to advance the narrative, the author speculates, but is careful to delineate fact from speculation.

Without revealing spoilers, some of the particulars of the tale are as follows.

Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris were écuyers (squires), serving, in the French feudal system of the time, Count Pierre of Alençon (Affleck), a close cousin of the King. (The rank of squire (écuyer) did not necessarily indicate a young man, but rather the feudal step below that of knight (chevalier.) Carrouges was knighted for battle service before the alleged rape and Le Gris was knighted before the duel in order to satisfy the requirement that duels be held between equals.) They had as young men developed a strong friendship and Le Gris had even stood in as Godfather to Carrouge’s son by his first wife. Both the child and mother died soon afterwards of an unspecified illness and Carrouge married the winsome Marguerite de Thibouville, for economic reasons—a hefty dowry—as much or more as for physical attraction and the desire to obtain an heir to his estate. Sadly, Marguerite remained barren for the five years until the rape charge. But the pair seemed to settle in as an affectionate and loyal couple. The movie, however, portrays several incidents of discord between a heavy-handed Carrouge and a sexually unsatisfied wife. The book hints at none of this.

During this period, Count Pierre had shown favoritism to Le Gris (both being shown in the movie to share enjoyment of certain hedonis- tic activities) over Carrouge in several instances, the most egregious being related to Marguerite’s dowry and Jean’s inheritance of his father’s title. By the time of the rape incident, the relationship between the two had cooled and Carrouge had developed a jealous obsession.

The rape, which Jager reports as authentic, occurred when Marguerite was left alone while Jean went to Paris to collect some wages (the circumstances differ slightly between book and movie, as does the rape sequence itself.) Unlike most women of the age who swallowed the pain and humility of rape and stifled their objections, Marguerite reported the incident to Jean. He charged Le Gris before their liege lord, Count Pierre, without success, and a subsequent appeal to the King was undermined by the Count’s influence. Marguerite continued to swear in court to the truth of her story and the two determined to pursue the case to trial by combat, even though, by French law, the death of Jean, thereby “proving”

Le Gris’ innocence, would result in the penalty of perjury for Marguerite, which was to be burnt at the stake. (In the movie, she is portrayed as being surprised by learning of this possible outcome when it was too late. It’s difficult to believe that she was so innocent of the consequences.)

Marguerite was pregnant while testifying at the Parliament’s hearing, having conceived at about the time of the assault. Although Jean had arrived home from war to the welcoming arms of his wife shortly before then, this muddied the water and generally worked against her. (The child, a boy, was born some weeks before the duel took place on December 29.) Her testimony was met by abhorrent attitudes of the day (and still extant now, so thin is the veneer of civilization) regarding rape, women’s sexuality and conception. But she held firm in the face of a horrible death. She had been brutally raped. Both the book and the movie portray the actual duel dramatically, the book in some greater detail. But the movie does stray into areas where the book’s author limits and carefully delineates speculation. Jager’s book is a recommended good read. The movie, which received good critical reviews but bombed at the box office, is worth an evening’s diversion, if at least for its excellent visual rendition of medieval France and its customs. But read the book first, including its Appendix.

The Book: House of Gucci, A True Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed. Sara Gay Forden. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 2000 (SGF)

The Movie: House of Gucci, Ridley Scott, Director; Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino; Lady Gaga; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2021.

The headline on page A4 of the New York Times, November 4, 1998, reads Former Wife Given 29 Years for Ordering Gucci Slaying.

Three and a half years earlier, on Monday, March 27, 1985, as he was entering his modest office building in Milan, Italy, Maurizio Gucci, scion of the Gucci family (Driver in the movie), was shot in the back and killed by a hired assassin. The House of Gucci—meaning the Gucci family at the time—was not the only notorious fashion dynasty, and books could be written, and probably have, about any of their histories. But they would not have attracted such attention from the reading public. Neither would have Forden’s House of Gucci, were it not for the murder of the fashion giant’s face, if no longer its director. And the book would not have spawned the eponymous movie.

And we, the reading and viewing public, would not have had both an enjoyable and informative read and a well-crafted and acted film. Which would have been a shame as far as the book is concerned, because it is a three-generational family saga deserving of an account even without the murder, which after all, was just another violent end to a tawdry husband-wife feud.

If the $10,000 cost of a leather handbag and $1,000 sneakers do not give you a sense of titillated wonder, the rise to riches in two generations of a Florentine leather craftsman’s family will still provide interest. Forden captures this as she chronicles the birth and growth of the Gucci company and fortune. The ins and outs of the fashion industry, both in the United States (i.e., New York,) Italy and elsewhere abroad are explored in fascinating detail. But Forden, a fashion industry journalist, reports, but does not delve. One might appreciate a more reflective, incisive commentary on the Gucci successes and failures, but she does cover the facts, at least one thinks so; there are no endnotes, just a bibliography. Forden lays considerable emphasis on the importance of their Florence background to the family’s success:

To understand Maurizio Gucci and the family he came from, it’s necessary to understand the Tuscan character. … Tuscans tend to be individualistic and haughty. They feel they represent the wellspring of culture and art in Italy, and they are especially proud of their role in originating the modern Italian language, thanks in large part to Dante Alighieri. Some call them the “French of Italy”—arrogant, self-sufficient, and closed to outsiders. … The rich history of the centuries-old Florentine merchant class pulsed in the Gucci veins. (SGF, pp. 10 – 11)

There is little antecedent worth mentioning to the Gucci story. Mauricio’s grandfather and the company founder, Guccio Gucci, left his father’s bankrupt hat-making business while still young and went out into the world to seek his own fortune, as it were. After an instructive several years, he returned to Florence in 1902, married Aida Calvelli and took a job with a leather firm, learning the leather craft and business that became the Gucci forté.

Aida brought a son, Ugo, to the marriage, and gave Guccio four surviving children of his own, daughter Grimalda, and sons Aldo (Pacino), Vasco and Rodolfo (Irons). “Of Guccio’s three biological sons, Aldo became the driving force behind the business.” (SGF, p. 40.) Vasco was a dutiful but mostly silent partner, and Rodolfo, although a participant and beneficiary, preferred pursuing his own mildly successful career in Hollywood as a movie actor. Grimalda is not a major player in the story.

“Uncle” Aldo had three sons by his first wife: Giorgio, Paolo (Leto) and Roberto. All three played important roles in the Gucci empire, but only Paolo is featured in the movie, his maverick actions being key to much of the third-generation hysterics.

The ill-fated Maurizio was an academic by nature, studied law and showed little interest in the family firm, but was nevertheless pressed into service in lieu of his star-struck father. He met the glamorous Patri- zia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) when he was twenty-two and she twenty-one, and immediately determined to marry her. His father was aghast:

“Be careful, Maurizio…I have received information about the girl. … I am told she is vulgar and ambitious, a social climber who has nothing in mind but money. Maurizio, she is not the girl for you.” (SGF,p. 57)

Maurizio ignored his father’s prescient advice and married Patrizia.

Rather than taking a well-cushioned back seat like the other Gucci women, Patrizia injected herself, through Maurizio, more and more into the Gucci business affairs. As their lives progressed, their relationship became increasingly strained as Patrizia imposed her will on the pliant Maurizio, until the struggle predictably ends up in his “putting on his big-boy pants,” rejecting her and taking full control of affairs himself. (By this time, he has emerged as a principal partner in the Gucci concern.) Patrizia, in exasperation, finally resorts to the ultimate solution.

The Maurizio-Patrizia soap opera consumes most of the film, but not of the book, where a great deal of space is given to the historical record of the company, the fashion world and Gucci’s international development. Aldo is in most chapters the principal personage but is only a well-acted prop in the movie. The book is worth reading if you like the genre (recent histories of the Vanderbilts and the Morgans come to mind.) And the film is in fact enjoyable and well-produced. In contrast to the Last Duel duo, reading the book is not essential to understanding the movie’s plot; it’s pretty straight-forward.