Émilie Longuet

In Témoin muet, the French adaptation of Agatha Christie's Dumb Witness for the TV series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie, Émilie Longuet is the Emily Arundell parallel in the story. She is an unmarried elderly woman who owns "Filatures Longuet", a textile mill and employs Geneviève Ranson (the Wilhelmina Lawson parallel) as her secretary. Émilie lives in a large chateau with Geneviève. Also living there are her various relatives who are the parallels of the Arundells from the original novel. The chateau also has a dog named "Max", the titular dumb witness. Emilie is portrayed by Jacqueline Bir.

Like Emily Arundell, Émilie died some time before the events in the show and like in the original, her estate is left completely to Geneviève Ranson. Her appearances in the show are mainly in the form of flashbacks and supernatural apparitions.

There are, however, a number of distinctives in this portrayal compared with Emily Arundell. Émilie is portrayed here as cruel woman, the oldest of three sisters, whom everyone disliked. Her relatives live with her and work for her company but are more fearful of her than hoping to inherit. Like in the original, she did fall down the stairs and believed someone in the chateau is trying to kill her. She writes a letter to commissaire Laurence which is only delivered a few months after her death. She did change her will shortly after her fall, and she dies ten days after changing it. But it appears she did not tell her relatives about it (in the original,the relatives are told about the change as a means of protection). So all her relatives remained suspects because they still hoped to be named in the new will.

As Laurence's investigations show, the motive for killing Émilie (which also took place through phosphorus poisoning) was motivated out of a desire for revenge rather than money. All the other occupants of the chateau had reason to hate her. Charlotte and Louis Ségur, the Theresa and Charles parallels, blame Émilie for driving their mother, Émilie's sister, to suicide. Bella Siatidis, the Bella Tanios parallel, was the daughter of another sister of Émilie. This sister is in a lunatic asylum, and it is suggested that this is the result of Émilie's treatment also. In a flashback, we also see a scene where Émilie caught Bella's daughter Sophia Siatidis for theft. Émilie proceeds to beat Sophia severely, leading the nine year old girl to commit suicide. Lastly, even Geneviève Ranson had a motive for revenge. Years earlier, Émilie had run down and killed Geneviève's husband in a motor accident. Geneviève subsequently joined Émilie undercover as her secretary with the objective of hurting her by undermining her business affairs. It is also suggested that Émilie may have seen through Geneviève's cover and recognised her and this might have been part of the reason for leaving her estate to her.