Author Website
Jaime Pasquier
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The Last Aristocrats
A Historical Novel of the Praslin Affair and the Long Exile
A Peer of France. A murdered duchess. A death that never happened.
A Sweeping Story of Guilt, Exile, and the Fragile Hope of Redemption
In the gray dawn of August 18, 1847, the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin was found in her Paris bedroom, her body bearing forty-seven wounds. Her husband, a Peer of France and heir to a name six centuries old, stood accused. But a public trial would have exposed every secret of a rotting aristocracy, and six days later the Duke was pronounced dead by his own hand. Behind the sealed coffin, the living Duke was spirited out of France under a dead man's name, in the keeping of a single young guardian, Gaston d'Audiffret-Pasquier, bound to carry the secret to the far side of the world.
The True Crime Behind the Fiction
For readers of literary historical fiction, The Last Aristocrats asks the question no court would answer: can a life spent healing ever weigh against a life taken in violence?
After the Funeral: Thirty-Five Years
What happens to a man who is supposed to be dead?
Spanning thirty-five years and two continents, from the salons of Paris to the docks of New York and, at last, the volcano country of Nicaragua, two men live under borrowed names, build new families, and leave old ones behind.
Through their story, the novel examines:
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Guilt and the long work of atonement
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Exile, borrowed names, and divided families
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The women who must decide whether to forgive them
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How the powerful protect their own while the archives burn
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But the dead cry out for the truth.
Where Documented History Meets Family Legend
The murder, the sealed coffin, and the six days between the crime and the Duke's reported death are matters of record. What happened next is not.
The novel follows the version that survived in the family: an oral tradition that the Duke did not die in 1847, and a trail of archives that neither confirms it nor closes the case. Where the record ends, the story begins.
August 18, 1847: the Duchess is found dead in Paris
Six days later: the Duke is pronounced dead
Thirty-five years: the life he lived afterward
A Note from the Author
This novel grew out of fifteen years of genealogical research into my own family's history, and out of an oral tradition that the Duke did not die in 1847. History closed the case. The archives, and my family, left it open.
Continue the Story
The Scandal That Shook the Throne tells the 1847 murder through the Duke's confession. The Last Aristocrats follows the life he lived afterward. Spanish readers can find Los últimos aristócratas and Cuarenta y Siete Puñaladas.
Secure your copy and follow the Duke from Paris to Nicaragua.
