The enduring fascination with Jack the Ripper mirrors the grip that the Papin sisters’ crime has on France—two maids who committed a brutal murder of their employer and her child in Le Mans during 1933. Jean Genet drew from this shocking event to create his well-known one-act play, "The Maids," while prominent French thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jacques Lacan have attempted to understand th…