Agatha Christie Wiki
Advertisement

In Crimes haute couture, the France Televisions adaptation of Third Girl, Julie Lemon was an English seamstress who worked for the Maison Paget fashion house some fifteen years before the events in the episode. What she did, what happened to her in the episode and why would form the core of the main plot. Julie Lemon is portrayed by Emilie Wiest.

Midway through the episode, an unidentified woman is found stabbed to death in the streets. Marlene recognises her as someone she had interacted with briefly at a party at Maison Paget. She had also seen her talking to the designer Édouard Paget who is the Andrew Restarick parallel. Marlene didn't know her name and no one else at the fashion house could (or would) identify her.

Only much later is it discovered that she is Julie Lemon, a seamstress from Manchester who used to work for Édouard some fifteen years earlier around 1947. Around that time, she had been sketching design ideas and wanted to become a designer but Édouard rejected the idea and fired her. However he then stole her designs and built his career on them. Fifteen years later, during the time of the events in the episode, Julie comes back to Lille. This time to blackmail Édouard. In order to protect his career, Édouard murdered Julie with the help of Gigi and then conspired to pin the blame on his design assistant Patricia Nollet (the Norma Restarick parallel).

In that Julie is someone who knows a dark secret and is in a position to expose the Andrew Restarick parallel, and is then killed to preserve the secret, Julie can be considered a kind of parallel of Louise Charpentier from the original novel. There is also a character named Louise Charpentier in the adaptation but she doesn't share this attribute with the orginal Louise and plays a different role.

Advertisement