Just as the mystery of Jack the Ripper continues to grip the English imagination, the case of the Papin sisters of Le Mans — two maids who, in 1933, brutally slaughtered their employer and her daughter — holds a peculiar sway over the French. Jean Genet used the ghastly events as the basis for his celebrated one-act play "The Maids," while the cream of France's intelligentsia, from Jean-Paul Sartr...
