The Last Duel Why Le Gris Was Innocent and Carrouges Knew It

Hey there everyone! Welcome back to Movie Soapbox, the little corner of the internet that only you and I and that guy sleeping in the corner over there know about. This is the place where we find underappreciated films, historically murky films, films that the algorithm would never in a million years surface for you, and we make sense of them. Today we are doing a deep dive on The Last Duel, a movie so architecturally strange and so genuinely committed to a seven-hundred-year-old cold case that even Ridley Scott seems unsure whether he made a courtroom thriller or a history lecture with a sword fight stapled to the end.

Before we go any further, understand that everything from this point on is deep inside the movie, deep inside the historical record it draws from, and deep inside the question of whether a man hanged for rape in fourteenth-century France actually did it. If you haven’t seen the film and you want to go in clean, close this tab, watch it, come back. I’ll be here. For the rest of you, we are going all the way in.

The Last Dual Movie Deep Dive Walkthrough

So. Ridley Scott made a movie that barely anyone saw, that Ridley Scott himself blamed on millennials and their phones, that grossed somewhere around thirty million dollars against a budget that was reportedly north of a hundred million, and that got genuinely excellent reviews from critics who were baffled that a prestige medieval rape-trial drama somehow got a theatrical release in October of 2021 against a horror sequel and a James Bond film. And the thing that nobody wants to sit with, the thing the film itself gestures at and then sort of backs away from in its final frames, is that the man who died on that field, Jacques Le Gris, may well have been innocent. Not probably innocent. Not sympathetically innocent. Actually, alibi-supported, witness-corroborated, pattern-of-fabrication innocent. And the man who killed him may have used his own wife as the instrument of a revenge plot that had been cooking for years.

You want to know what a script note surviving looks like in a finished film? Watch the third act of The Last Duel. The Rashomon structure, three accounts of the same events told from Jean’s perspective, then Le Gris’s, then Marguerite’s, is a genuinely gutsy piece of screenwriting, and you can feel the exact moment where someone in a glass office got nervous about it. The film tips its hand in the title cards. Marguerite’s section is labeled “The Truth,” and just like that, seven hundred years of genuine historical ambiguity gets resolved by a font choice. That is a distributor flinching. The movie that the Affleck-Damon draft was probably trying to make, the one that earns the Rashomon structure, would have ended without that card, would have let the duel resolve nothing, would have left you with the same sick uncertainty that the actual historical record leaves you with. Instead, somewhere between the script and the release print, someone decided audiences needed to be told which woman to believe. That’s the reshoot scar on this film’s face, even if nothing was actually reshot. The anxiety is baked into the typography.

Now let’s actually walk through what we know.

Jean de Carrouges Had Been Planning This for Years

Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris were not just friends, they were bound at the level that medieval society treated as blood. Le Gris was the godfather to Carrouges’ son by his first wife. That is a legal and spiritual bond in fourteenth-century France, the godfather vows his life for the child’s, and Carrouges would have known exactly what it meant when he chose Le Gris for that role. Then the son died. Then the wife died. Probably plague, nothing documented. And Jean pivoted from grief straight into grievance, because what happened next was that Count Pierre, the King’s uncle and the man whose favor determined everything in that corner of Normandy, started elevating Le Gris and passing over Carrouges at every turn.

Carrouges expected to inherit his father’s captaincy of the Bellême viscountcy. He did not get it. Le Gris, meanwhile, inherited his own father’s lordship at castle Exmes AND received a newly purchased estate from the King, largely because Le Gris had made the King’s uncle a very generous loan, something in the neighborhood of six thousand gold pieces, and his star was rising accordingly. Carrouges watched all of this happen. And here is the detail that Le Gris’ defense would later surface in the actual trial record: before his first wife died, Jean had apparently tried to convince her to tell others that Le Gris had slept with her. Not raped her. Slept with her. A consensual accusation he could bring before the court. She refused, because it wasn’t true. That attempt, that early, dry-run at using a woman’s testimony to destroy Le Gris, is in the documented record. Keep that in your pocket.

Then Came Marguerite, and the Land Deal That Broke Something in Jean

Jean’s second marriage to Marguerite was a political transaction with a specific expected return. Her father was a Norman pariah, having backed the English twice over French interest, which was about the worst thing you could do in that period, and Jean was doing the family a considerable favor by marrying her at all. In exchange, he expected a specific piece of land as dowry. Lucrative land. The kind of land that would have stabilized his finances, which were not stable. Before the wedding, Marguerite’s father gave that land to the King. The King gave it to Le Gris. Le Gris, again. The same man. Every time Jean reached for something solid, Le Gris was already standing on it.

So Jean goes off to fight, gets promoted to knight in the field, and comes back to Paris to collect his pay, roughly three hundred gold coins, a week’s journey round trip. Before he leaves, he tells his mother not to leave Marguerite alone. He is specific about it. He leaves. His mother leaves anyway, takes nearly everyone from the household with her. And while Marguerite is alone, according to her account, Adam Louvel knocked at the door, Le Gris was with him, Louvel held her down with a gag and hood, and Le Gris raped her.

That is the accusation. Now here is why it doesn’t hold together.

The Alibi Nobody Wanted to Hear

Le Gris was twenty-four miles away. He had witnesses, multiple of them, who could account for his location across the entire window of time during which the attack was alleged to have occurred. Twenty-four miles in medieval France is not a casual side trip, you are changing horses, you are noticed, you are leaving tracks in a record-keeping culture that tracked the movement of horses and men of rank with some care. And this was not an ordinary case, this was the biggest legal matter in France in generations, with the King’s direct involvement. If Le Gris had made that ride, someone would have surfaced to say so. Nobody did. His alibi witnesses held.

Louvel, the alleged accomplice who supposedly held Marguerite down, reportedly confessed to nothing, not even after torture. In that era, torture was the mechanism by which you confirmed or broke an alibi, and Louvel did not break.

Le Gris’ defense also resurfaced that earlier incident, Jean’s attempt to get his first wife to falsely accuse Le Gris of sleeping with her. The quote from Eric Jager’s book is worth sitting with: “Le Gris charges that Carrouges tried to get his first wife to say that Le Gris had slept with her, which the said wife, wise and good, refused to do, since it was not in any way true.” Jean had already tried this once. He had a documented pattern. And now he had a new wife, one whose father owed him a debt she could never fully repay, one who had been left alone in the house against his explicit orders, one who would have had every reason to fear what Jean would do when he came home and found out.

Jean’s own mother-in-law, Marguerite’s mother, placed Marguerite as calm and unremarkable when she returned home around two in the afternoon of the alleged attack. And Jean’s mother-in-law also later supported that Jean, upon returning and finding Marguerite had been left alone, beat her, on the head, the face, the arm. That is not contested. The beating happened.

The Theories, Laid Out Straight

There are three serious reads on what actually happened in 1386, and anyone who tells you one of them is obviously correct is selling you something.

The Last Duel Theory Number One:

The first is that Marguerite was telling the complete truth, that Le Gris did exactly what she said he did, covered it up with a fabricated alibi, and died guilty. Her testimony was extraordinarily detailed, she named Louvel specifically as the one who knocked, described exactly how and when she was gagged, held up under hours of questioning from Parliament and from the general public with no inconsistency. That kind of specificity is hard to fake under sustained interrogation. It is the reason Parliament was never able to definitively exonerate Le Gris even with the alibi evidence sitting in front of them.

The Last Duel Theory Number Two:

The second is the mistaken identity theory, which actually has contemporary sourcing. In 1400, a monk named Michel Pintoin wrote in a royal chronicle that Le Gris’ innocence was recognized by all after the fact, when a man condemned to death for an unrelated crime confessed on the scaffold to having raped Marguerite. When Marguerite learned of this, she retreated to a convent and vowed perpetual chastity. A separate account from the 1420s names a different man making a deathbed confession to the same crime. Under this theory, Marguerite was genuinely raped, genuinely traumatized, and genuinely believed it was Le Gris, but was wrong, either because of the hood and gag that limited her visibility, or because the actual attacker knew enough about Le Gris’ appearance or reputation to impersonate him plausibly.

The Last Duel Theory Number Three:

The third theory is Jean’s fabrication, the one Le Gris’ defense was explicitly arguing, the one the historical record of Jean’s prior behavior supports most directly. Under this read, nothing happened to Marguerite that day. She was alone, Jean found out, beat her, and then told her what her story was going to be. Her detailed account is detailed because Jean had time to construct it. Louvel’s refusal to confess even under torture is consistent with a man who genuinely wasn’t there. The alibi holds because it was real.

Moviesoapbox’s Definitive Reading on the Movie The Last Duel

Jean de Carrouges manufactured a murder and used the legal machinery of fourteenth-century France to carry it out. The evidence that matters most to me is not the alibi, though the alibi is strong. It’s the dry run. The fact that Jean had already tried, with his first wife, to build a false sexual accusation against Le Gris, years before Marguerite ever entered the picture, tells you everything about his willingness to use women as instruments of his vendettas. When the opportunity came again, when his mother left Marguerite alone against his orders and he came home to find that gap in the record, a gap he may have engineered deliberately by giving his mother instructions he expected her to disobey, he took it. He had a wife who owed him everything and feared him physically. He had a grudge that went back fifteen years. He had a pattern. And he had a kingdom that would literally let God decide by combat, which meant that if you were the better fighter, the accusation was true by definition. Jean was the better fighter. Le Gris was hanged. God spoke. Except God didn’t speak. Jean de Carrouges did. And then he went on to live another decade, dying in a crusade, honored, his name cleared by the only court that mattered in medieval France, the battlefield. Le Gris got the rope. That is the outcome Jean built toward from the moment Le Gris was given his father’s land.

Read Eric Jager’s book. The film is worth watching once, the Rashomon structure is genuinely interesting even when the title card ruins it, and Jodie Comer does more with Marguerite than the script deserves. But the book is where the ambiguity lives, the real ambiguity, the kind that Parliament itself could not resolve, not the managed ambiguity of a studio film that needed to tell you who to believe before the credits rolled. Some stories don’t get resolved. Some men get hanged for crimes they didn’t commit because another man was a better swordsman and angrier. Seven hundred years later, the best we can do is name the mechanism and refuse to look away from it.

That’s what this little corner of the internet is for.