Louise Charpentier (Crimes haute couture)

In Crimes haute couture, the France Televisions adaptation of Third Girl, Madame Louise Charpentier is the administrator of Maison Paget. She has the same name as that of a character in the original novel. In the Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie series, she is one of very few characters to use the same name as someone from the original novel, Anne Protheroe is another. The Louise in this adaptation can be considered a parallel of the original Louise in that she is also murdered in the course of the story. Louise Charpentier is portrayed by Raphaeline Goupilleau.

The parallel between the two Louises is not exact. To begin with, as an administrative assistant to Édouard Paget, the Andrew Restarick parallel, the Louise here can be considered a sort of parallel of Claudia Reece-Holland. However she has a different role in the plot from Claudia. Second, in this adaptation, Louise is not estranged from Édouard or an old flame. They are good friends and she is his loyal subordinate. Nor is she killed because she is the one who could compromise a dark secret--that role is played by a different character in this adaptation: Julie Lemon. It can be seen that the roles from the original are distributed over several characters and there is no one-to-one mapping.

In this adaptation, Louise Charpentier is a strict, no-nonsense administrator who is efficient and keeps the Maison Paget fashion house running. In a significant sideplot, she has a history of ill-treating workers. Police records show that over the past 15 years, at least 13 workers had filed complaints of assault and battery, including Julie Lemon, Arlette Lecat and Pauline Montaldo. Towards the end of the episode, she actually beats Gigi. Alice Avril comes to Gigi's defence and incites all the workers to join in a strike for better working conditions. This threatens disaster for the company which has a major show in two days. Louise cynically tells Édouard that they could just tell the workers that they accede to all their demands and then fire them all after the show. Later, Alice is injured when her scooter is sabotaged and the front wheel comes off. Alice suspects Louise did it although this is never proven.

At the end of the all important fashion show, Louise is found stabbed with a pair of scissors. Next to her is a very drunk Patricia Nollet holding a pair of scissors soaked with blood. However as noted above, this is not because Louise knew any dark secrets. It is because Édouard and Gigi's plan to implicate Patricia for the murder of Julie Lemon hit a snag when Patricia had an unexpected alibi. They therefore had to improvise Louise's killing to implicate Patricia.