Der Graf von Charolais (1922)

Somewhere in medieval Burgundy. The old Count of Charolais is an excellent military commander, but completely impoverished. Just as peace came—the peace he had recently won through his deeds—a bullet fired from behind struck him and took his life. Yet despite his merits, the penniless man is denied a grand funeral. An old law of the land provides for this: creditors may hold a debtor’s body as a kind of pledge and refuse burial until a friend or well-wisher pays the dead man’s debts. And so the old man’s body is taken to the debtors’ tower. How did it come to this? The old Charolais had gone heavily into debt so that his soldiers and mercenaries, who were always badly paid by the state, would never have to go hungry; instead, he had paid for their provisions out of his own means. The young Charolais cannot raise the sum needed to redeem his father’s body. For him, a man who loved his father deeply, this situation is an immense torment. Rescue comes only in the form of an elderly president of the Senate. The wise man, to whom the case is referred for a decision, is impressed by the young Charolais’s spirit of self-sacrifice and hopes he has found in him the ideal son-in-law, the future husband of his daughter Désirée. The powerful statesman then pays the dead man’s debts, transfers his estate to the young Charolais, and gives him his daughter in marriage. But their happiness does not last long. One day, Désirée is wrongly suspected of adultery because of her cousin. When Charolais, her husband, learns of this, he kills the cousin. But he places his wife under the jurisdiction of her own father, who is legally obliged to sentence his own flesh and blood to death for adultery. She is to be burned alive. Désirée is already standing on the pyre when rain suddenly begins to fall, preventing the carrying out of this cruel sentence and saving her life. The people recognize this intervention of nature as God’s judgment. Charolais, who had already begun to doubt his own judgment, deeply regrets his mercilessness and takes his wife back.