Agatha Christie's Poirot Episode Guide - inaf iasf bologna

Agatha Christie’s Poirot Episode Guide
The Chocolate Box
Season 5
Episode Number: 44
Season Episode: 6
Originally aired: Sunday February 21, 1993
Writer:
Agatha Christie, Douglas Watkinson
Director: Ken Grieve
Show Stars:
Hugh Fraser (Captain Arthur Hastings), Philip Jackson (Chief Inspector
James Japp), Pauline Moran (Miss Felicity Lemon), David Suchet
(Hercule Poirot)
Guest Stars: Jonathan Barlow (Jean-Louis Ferraud), Michael Beint (Coroner),
Linda Broughton (Denise), Anna Chancellor (Virginie Mesnard), Lucy
Cohu (Marianne Deroulard), Rosalie Crutchley (Madame Deroulard),
Richard Derrington (Henri), Kristen Clark (Jeanette), David de Keyser
(Gaston Beaujeu), Geoffrey Whitehead (Xavier X. Alois), Preston Lockwood
(François), Jonathan Hackett (Claude Chantelier), Mark Eden
(Boucher), James Coombes (Paul Deroulard)
Summary:
Poirot returns to Belgium for the first time since the Great War, and
there he revisits a twenty-year-old murder mystery that was never officially
solved. We flash back to an eager young detective on the Brussels
police force, working to serve a young woman who has come to him for
help. In the process, the pin the older Poirot wears is identified.
In their flat one night, the conversation between
Poirot and Hastings turns to the latter’s belief that
Poirot has never known failure in his professional career.
The little Belgian tells him that is not the case and
tells Hastings of one occasion when he did not succeed
in unravelling a crime:
The event was the death of Paul Déroulard, a French
Deputy who was living in Brussels. The time was the
strife over the separation of church and state and M.
Déroulard was a key player in these events as an anticatholic
and a potential minister. He was a widower, his
rich young wife having died from a fall downstairs some
years before. He inherited her house in Brussels and,
although abstemious in terms of drinking and smoking,
he had a reputation as a ladies man. He died suddenly
in his house from reported heart failure on the
eve of his promotion to minister of the state at a time
when Poirot was a member of the Belgian detective force.
He was taking a vacation when he received a visit from
Mademoiselle Virginie Mesnard who was a cousin of M.
Déroulard’s dead wife who was convinced that the death
was not natural. M. Déroulard’s household consisted
of four servants, his aged, but very infirm aristocratic
mother, Mademoiselle Mesnard herself, and on the night
of the death, two visitors: M. de Saint Alard, a neighbour,
and John Wilson, an English friend.
Poirot was introduced into the household under a false pretext by Mademoiselle Mesnard and
he began by investigating the meal served on the night of M. Déroulard’s death but found no
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