Word: loudun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Loosely based on a celebrated case in 17th century France (which Aldous Huxley skillfully described ten years ago in his historical narrative. The Devils of Loudun), this picture, set and filmed in Poland, is already celebrated throughout Europe and last year won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Its writerdirector, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, is being compared with Sweden's Ingmar Bergman. In Poland, the Communist press hailed Joan of the Angels? with expectable enthusiasm, while a Roman Catholic prelate called it "a dirty glove thrown in the face of the church." It is, more exactly, a nearly successful work...
...July morning in 1949, a police commissaire in the town of Loudun, north of Poitiers, knocked on the door of Marie Besnard, a dowdy, 52-year-old widow, and ordered her to come along. The charge: that she had poisoned with arsenic her mother, father, two husbands, father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, grandmother-in-law, two cousins, great-aunt, and two close friends. Last week, after twelve years and three trials, one of the century's most intricate murder cases-and one of the longest-came...
Exhumed & Examined. The legend of Marie Besnard began in the gossip mills of Loudun. Over the years, Marie and her husband Léon had inherited from relatives six houses, two farms, an inn and a café. Amid all this affluence, Léon invited his mistress, Loudun Postmistress Louise Pintou, to move in with him and his wife. But when it was whispered that Marie herself took a lover-a former German prisoner of war 30 years her junior-Léon apparently protested. Several days later, after becoming violently ill over lunch, Léon died; local...
...case by disproving Dr. Beroud's contention that he could tell arsenic from antimony with the naked eye. Adjourning the trial, the judge sent Marie Besnard back to "preventive detention," appointed a panel of three new experts. They spent two years re-examining the bodies brought up from Loudun's cemetery, eliminated five more corpses from the list of victims...