A childhood of physical and emotional abuse often comes back to haunt one — and the rest of the world — in adulthood. One such case that went down in the annals of French history was the murder of the women of the Lancelin household by their live-in maids and sisters, Christine and Léa Papin, in 1933.

Such was the brutality of the murders that its analysis became an intellectual pursuit of the time, with some analysts believing that what transpired on that fateful February night was as symbolic of class struggle as it was of the effect which growing up in an alcoholic household had on the sisters. Nobel-winning existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, eminent psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and avant-garde dramatist Jean Genet, too, weighed in on the same.