The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France

The author of The Last Duel, Eric Jager (1957-Present) is a specialist in medieval literature, who earned his PhD in English at the University of Michigan. He teaches as an English professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Other books on medieval literature and history he has written include The Tempter’s Voice: Language and Fall in Medieval Literature (1993), The Book of the Heart (2000), and Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris (2014).

Marguerite was born the heiress to a Norman nobleman, Robert de Thibouville, who had disgraced his name by twice siding with the English against the French king. Despite this, for reasons not exactly known, Jean de Carrouges IV decided to marry her after the death of his first wife, Jeanne de Tilly. One chronicler described Marguerite as “’young, beautiful, good, sensible, and modest’—the last term implying that despite her beauty she was no flirt or coquette” (24).

It was Marguerite’s accusation of rape against Jacques Le Gris that triggers the main events of The Last Duel. Despite the personal risk to her honor and even life, Marguerite powerfully asserted and defended her claims against Le Gris. As Jager argues, many at the time and in the centuries to come “credited her story, the truth of which, however astounding, she repeatedly and unwaveringly maintained under oath at great risk to herself in the highest court of France” (197-198).