Lady & the Duke, The

A FILM BY Eric Rohmer

History comes alive with verve and cold-sweat suspense!

- Lisa Nesselson, VARIETY

At the heart of The Lady and the Duke"" is a complex and passionate relationship between two people caught in a torrent of history.""

- Leslie Camhi, NEW YORK TIMES

I loved the look of this film.

- Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

If cinema had been around to capture the chaos of France in the 1790s, one imagines the result would look like something like this.

- A.O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES

Synopsis

The tale of a beautiful royalist English gentlewoman, Grace Elliott, living perilously in France during the Revolution, and her sometimes affectionate, sometimes tempestuous relationship with Philippe, Duke of Orleans, a cousin of King Louis XVI but nonetheless a supporter of revolutionary ideas. The Lady manages to persuade the Duke to rescue an outlaw, but fails to keep him from voting for the King’s execution. Grace Elliott was born into an old Scottish family in about 1760 and studied in France. She became the mistress of the Prince of Wales, later George IV, to whom she bore a daughter. Then Prince Phillipe, Duke of Orleans, noticed her and brought her back to France in 1786. Their romance was over by the time the Revolution began, but despite their political differences, they remained close friends. The film was inspired by Grace Elliott’s memoirs, Journal of My Life During the French Revolution.