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      A Book of Remarkable Criminals, by H.B. Irving
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Project Gutenberg's A Book of Remarkable Criminals, by H. B. Irving

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: A Book of Remarkable Criminals

Author: H. B. Irving

Release Date: November 28, 2009 [EBook #446]
Last Updated: January 26, 2013

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS ***




Produced by Mike Lough, and David Widger






</pre>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      By H.B. Irving
    </h2>
    <h4>
      TO MY FRIEND <br /> <br /> E. V. LUCAS
    </h4>
    <blockquote>
      <p>
        "For violence and hurt tangle every man in their toils, and for the most
        part fall on the head of him from whom they had their rise; nor is it
        easy for one who by his act breaks the common pact of peace to lead a
        calm and quiet life."
      </p>
      <p>
        Lucretius on the Nature of Things.
      </p>
    </blockquote>
    <div class="mynote">
      <p>
        Transcriber's Note:
      </p>
      <p>
        The upper outside corner of page 15 and 16 has been torn from the
        hardcopy. The spots are marked with ?? and a best guess at missing words
        is in brackets. Footnotes have been moved from end of page to end of
        paragraph positions, sequentially numbered.
      </p>
      <br />
    </div>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      Contents
    </h2>
    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
      <tr>
        <td>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS</b> </a>
          </p>
          <br />
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_INTR"> Introduction </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> The Life of Charles Peace </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> The Career of Robert Butler </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> M. Derues </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> Dr. Castaing </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> Professor Webster </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> The Mysterious Mr. Holmes </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> The Widow Gras </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> Vitalis and Marie Boyer </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> The Fenayrou Case </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> Eyraud and Bompard </a>
          </p>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <h1>
      A BOOK OF REMARKABLE CRIMINALS
    </h1>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_INTR" id="link2H_INTR">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      Introduction
    </h2>
    <p>
      "The silent workings, and still more the explosions, of human passion
      which bring to light the darker elements of man's nature present to the
      philosophical observer considerations of intrinsic interest; while to the
      jurist, the study of human nature and human character with its infinite
      varieties, especially as affecting the connection between motive and
      action, between irregular desire or evil disposition and crime itself, is
      equally indispensable and difficult."&mdash;<i>Wills on Circumstantial
      Evidence</i>.
    </p>
    <p>
      I REMEMBER my father telling me that sitting up late one night talking
      with Tennyson, the latter remarked that he had not kept such late hours
      since a recent visit of Jowett. On that occasion the poet and the
      philosopher had talked together well into the small hours of the morning.
      My father asked Tennyson what was the subject of conversation that had so
      engrossed them. "Murders," replied Tennyson. It would have been
      interesting to have heard Tennyson and Jowett discussing such a theme. The
      fact is a tribute to the interest that crime has for many men of intellect
      and imagination. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Rob history and
      fiction of crime, how tame and colourless would be the residue! We who are
      living and enduring in the presence of one of the greatest crimes on
      record, must realise that trying as this period of the world's history is
      to those who are passing through it, in the hands of some great historian
      it may make very good reading for posterity. Perhaps we may find some
      little consolation in this fact, like the unhappy victims of famous
      freebooters such as Jack Sheppard or Charley Peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      But do not let us flatter ourselves. Do not let us, in all the pomp and
      circumstance of stately history, blind ourselves to the fact that the
      crimes of Frederick, or Napoleon, or their successors, are in essence no
      different from those of Sheppard or Peace. We must not imagine that the
      bad man who happens to offend against those particular laws which
      constitute the criminal code belongs to a peculiar or atavistic type, that
      he is a man set apart from the rest of his fellow-men by mental or
      physical peculiarities. That comforting theory of the Lombroso school has
      been exploded, and the ordinary inmates of our prisons shown to be only in
      a very slight degree below the average in mental and physical fitness of
      the normal man, a difference easily explained by the environment and
      conditions in which the ordinary criminal is bred.
    </p>
    <p>
      A certain English judge, asked as to the general characteristics of the
      prisoners tried before him, said: "They are just like other people; in
      fact, I often think that, but for different opportunities and other
      accidents, the prisoner and I might very well be in one another's places."
      "Greed, love of pleasure," writes a French judge, "lust, idleness, anger,
      hatred, revenge, these are the chief causes of crime. These passions and
      desires are shared by rich and poor alike, by the educated and uneducated.
      They are inherent in human nature; the germ is in every man."
    </p>
    <p>
      Convicts represent those wrong-doers who have taken to a particular form
      of wrong-doing punishable by law. Of the larger army of bad men they
      represent a minority, who have been found out in a peculiarly
      unsatisfactory kind of misconduct. There are many men, some lying,
      unscrupulous, dishonest, others cruel, selfish, vicious, who go through
      life without ever doing anything that brings them within the scope of the
      criminal code, for whose offences the laws of society provide no
      punishment. And so it is with some of those heroes of history who have
      been made the theme of fine writing by gifted historians.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Basil Thomson, the present head of the Criminal Investigation
      Department, has said recently that a great deal of crime is due to a
      spirit of "perverse adventure" on the part of the criminal. The same might
      be said with equal justice of the exploits of Alexander the Great and half
      the monarchs and conquerors of the world, whom we are taught in our
      childhood's days to look up to as shining examples of all that a great man
      should be. Because crimes are played on a great stage instead of a small,
      that is no reason why our moral judgment should be suspended or silenced.
      Class Machiavelli and Frederick the Great as a couple of rascals fit to
      rank with Jonathan Wild, and we are getting nearer a perception of what
      constitutes the real criminal. "If," said Frederick the Great to his
      minister, Radziwill, "there is anything to be gained by it, we will be
      honest; if deception is necessary, let us be cheats." These are the very
      sentiments of Jonathan Wild.
    </p>
    <p>
      Crime, broadly speaking, is the attempt by fraud or violence to possess
      oneself of something belonging to another, and as such the cases of it in
      history are as clear as those dealt with in criminal courts. Germany
      to-day has been guilty of a perverse and criminal adventure, the outcome
      of that false morality applied to historical transactions, of which
      Carlyle's life of Frederick is a monumental example. In that book we have
      a man whose instincts in more ways than one were those of a criminal, held
      up for our admiration, in the same way that the same writer fell into
      dithyrambic praise over a villain called Francia, a former President of
      Paraguay. A most interesting work might be written on the great criminals
      of history, and might do something towards restoring that balance of moral
      judgment in historical transactions, for the perversion of which we are
      suffering to-day.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime we must be content to study in the microcosm of ordinary
      crime those instincts, selfish, greedy, brutal which, exploited often by
      bad men in the so-called cause of nations, have wrought such havoc to the
      happiness of mankind. It is not too much to say that in every man there
      dwell the seeds of crime; whether they grow or are stifled in their growth
      by the good that is in us is a chance mysteriously determined. As children
      of nature we must not be surprised if our instincts are not all that they
      should be. "In sober truth," writes John Stuart Mill, "nearly all the
      things for which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are
      nature's everyday performances," and in another passage: "The course of
      natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by
      human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, anyone who endeavoured in his
      actions to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen
      and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men."
    </p>
    <p>
      Here is explanation enough for the presence of evil in our natures, that
      instinct to destroy which finds comparatively harmless expression in
      certain forms of taking life, which is at its worst when we fall to taking
      each other's. It is to check an inconvenient form of the expression of
      this instinct that we punish murderers with death. We must carry the
      definition of murder a step farther before we can count on peace or
      happiness in this world. We must concentrate all our strength on fighting
      criminal nature, both in ourselves and in the world around us. With the
      destructive forces of nature we are waging a perpetual struggle for our
      very existence. Why dissipate our strength by fighting among ourselves? By
      enlarging our conception of crime we move towards that end. What is
      anti-social, whether it be written in the pages of the historian or those
      of the Newgate Calendar, must in the future be regarded with equal
      abhorrence and subjected to equally sure punishment. Every professor of
      history should now and then climb down from the giddy heights of
      Thucydides and Gibbon and restore his moral balance by comparing the acts
      of some of his puppets with those of their less fortunate brethren who
      have dangled at the end of a rope. If this war is to mean anything to
      posterity, the crime against humanity must be judged in the future by the
      same rigid standard as the crime against the person.
    </p>
    <p>
      The individual criminals whose careers are given in this book have been
      chosen from among their fellows for their pre-eminence in character or
      achievement. Some of the cases, such as Butler, Castaing and Holmes, are
      new to most English readers.
    </p>
    <p>
      Charles Peace is the outstanding popular figure in nineteenth-century
      crime. He is the type of the professional criminal who makes crime a
      business and sets about it methodically and persistently to the end. Here
      is a man, possessing many of those qualities which go to make the
      successful man of action in all walks of life, driven by circumstances to
      squander them on a criminal career. Yet it is a curious circumstance that
      this determined and ruthless burglar should have suffered for what would
      be classed in France as a "crime passionel." There is more than a
      possibility that a French jury would have found extenuating circumstances in the
      murder of Dyson. The fate of Peace is only another instance of the wrecking a strong man's
      career by his passion for a woman. In Robert Butler we have the criminal by
      conviction, a conviction which finds the ground ready prepared for its
      growth in the natural laziness and idleness of the man's disposition. The
      desire to acquire things by a short cut, without taking the trouble to
      work for them honestly, is perhaps the most fruitful of all sources of
      crime. Butler, a bit of a pedant, is pleased to justify his conduct by
      reason and philosophy&mdash;he finds in the acts of unscrupulous monarchs
      an analogy to his own attitude towards life. What is good enough for
      Caesar Borgia is good enough for Robert Butler. Like Borgia he comes to
      grief; criminals succeed and criminals fail. In the case of historical
      criminals their crimes are open; we can estimate the successes and
      failures. With ordinary criminals, we know only those who fail. The
      successful, the real geniuses in crime, those whose guilt remains
      undiscovered, are for the most part unknown to us. Occasionally in society
      a man or woman is pointed out as having once murdered somebody or other,
      and at times, no doubt, with truth. But the matter can only be referred to
      clandestinely; they are gazed at with awe or curiosity, mute witnesses to
      their own achievement. Some years ago James Payn, the novelist, hazarded
      the reckoning that one person in every five hundred was an undiscovered
      murderer. This gives us all a hope, almost a certainty, that we may reckon
      one such person at least among our acquaintances.(1)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (1) The author was one of three men discussing this subject in a London
club. They were able to name six persons of their various acquaintance
who were, or had been, suspected of being successful murderers.
</pre>
    <p>
      Derues is remarkable for the extent of his social ambition, the daring and
      impudent character of his attempts to gratify it, the skill, the
      consummate hypocrisy with which he played on the credulity of honest folk,
      and his flagrant employment of that weapon known and recognised to-day in
      the most exalted spheres by the expressive name of "bluff." He is
      remarkable, too, for his mirth and high spirits, his genial buffoonery;
      the merry murderer is a rare bird.
    </p>
    <p>
      Professor Webster belongs to that order of criminal of which Eugene Aram
      and the Rev. John Selby Watson are our English examples, men of culture
      and studious habits who suddenly burst on the astonished gaze of their
      fellowmen as murderers. The exact process of mind by which these hitherto
      harmless citizens are converted into assassins is to a great extent hidden
      from us.
    </p>
    <p>
      Perhaps Webster's case is the clearest of the three. Here we have a
      selfish, self-indulgent and spendthrift gentleman who has landed himself
      in serious financial embarrassment, seeking by murder to escape from an
      importunate and relentless creditor. He has not, apparently, the moral
      courage to face the consequences of his own weakness. He forgets the
      happiness of his home, the love of those dear to him, in the desire to
      free himself from a disgrace insignificent{sic} in comparison with that
      entailed by committing the highest of all crimes. One would wish to
      believe that Webster's deed was unpremeditated, the result of a sudden
      gust of passion caused by his victim's acrimonious pursuit of his debtor.
      But there are circumstances in the case which tell powerfully against such
      a view. The character of the murderer seems curiously contradictory; both
      cunning and simplicity mark his proceedings; he makes a determined attempt
      to escape from the horrors of his situation and shows at the same time a
      curious insensibility to its real gravity. Webster was a man of refined
      tastes and seemingly gentle character, loved by those near to him, well
      liked by his friends.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mystery that surrounds the real character of Eugene Aram is greater,
      and we possess little or no means of solving it. From what motive this
      silent, arrogant man, despising his ineffectual wife, this reserved and
      moody scholar stooped to fraud and murder the facts of the case help us
      little to determine. Was it the hope of leaving the narrow surroundings of
      Knaresborough, his tiresome belongings, his own poor way of life, and
      seeking a wider field for the exercise of those gifts of scholarship which
      he undoubtedly possessed that drove him to commit fraud in company with
      Clark and Houseman, and then, with the help of the latter, murder the
      unsuspecting Clark? The fact of his humble origin makes his association
      with so low a ruffian as Houseman the less remarkable. Vanity in all
      probability played a considerable part in Aram's disposition. He would
      seem to have thought himself a superior person, above the laws that bind
      ordinary men. He showed at the end no consciousness of his guilt. Being
      something of a philosopher, he had no doubt constructed for himself a
      philosophy of life which served to justify his own actions. He was a
      deist, believing in "one almighty Being the God of Nature," to whom he
      recommended himself at the last in the event of his "having done amiss."
      He emphasised the fact that his life had been unpolluted and his morals
      irreproachable. But his views as to the murder of Clark he left
      unexpressed. He suggested as justification of it that Clark had carried on
      an intrigue with his neglected wife, but he never urged this circumstance
      in his defence, and beyond his own statement there is no evidence of such
      a connection.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Revd. John Selby Watson, headmaster of the Stockwell Grammar School,
      at the age of sixty-five killed his wife in his library one Sunday
      afternoon. Things had been going badly with the unfortunate man. After
      more than twenty-five years' service as headmaster of the school at a
      meagre salary of L400 a year, he was about to be dismissed; the number of
      scholars had been declining steadily and a change in the headmastership
      thought necessary; there was no suggestion of his receiving any kind of
      pension. The future for a man of his years was dark enough. The author of
      several learned books, painstaking, scholarly, dull, he could hope to make
      but little money from literary work. Under a cold, reserved and silent
      exterior, Selby Watson concealed a violence of temper which he sought
      diligently to repress. His wife's temper was none of the best. Worried,
      depressed, hopeless of his future, he in all probability killed his wife
      in a sudden access of rage, provoked by some taunt or reproach on her
      part, and then, instead of calling in a policeman and telling him what he
      had done, made clumsy and ineffectual efforts to conceal his crime.
      Medical opinion was divided as to his mental condition. Those doctors
      called for the prosecution could find no trace of insanity about him,
      those called for the defence said that he was suffering from melancholia.
      The unhappy man would appear hardly to have realised the gravity of his
      situation. To a friend who visited him in prison he said: "Here's a man
      who can write Latin, which the Bishop of Winchester would commend, shut up
      in a place like this." Coming from a man who had spent all his life buried
      in books and knowing little of the world the remark is not so greatly to
      be wondered at. Profound scholars are apt to be impatient of mundane
      things. Professor Webster showed a similar want of appreciation of the
      circumstances of a person charged with wilful murder. Selby Watson was
      convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The sentence was afterwards
      commuted to one of penal servitude for life, the Home Secretary of the day
      showing by his decision that, though not satisfied of the prisoner's
      insanity, he recognised certain extenuating circumstances in his guilt.(2)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (2) Selby Watson was tried at the Central Criminal Court January, 1872.
</pre>
    <p>
      In Castaing much ingenuity is shown in the conception of the crime, but
      the man is weak and timid; he is not the stuff of which the great criminal
      is made; Holmes is cast in the true mould of the instinctive murderer.
      Castaing is a man of sensibility, capable of domestic affection; Holmes
      completely insensible to all feelings of humanity. Taking life is a mere
      incident in the accomplishment of his schemes; men, women and children are
      sacrificed with equal mercilessness to the necessary end. A consummate
      liar and hypocrite, he has that strange power of fascination over others,
      women in particular, which is often independent altogether of moral or
      even physical attractiveness. We are accustomed to look for a certain
      vastness, grandeur of scale in the achievements of America. A study of
      American crime will show that it does not disappoint us in this
      expectation. The extent and audacity of the crimes of Holmes are proof of
      it.
    </p>
    <p>
      To find a counterpart in imaginative literature to the complete criminal
      of the Holmes type we must turn to the pages of Shakespeare. In the number
      of his victims, the cruelty and insensibility with which he attains his
      ends, his unblushing hypocrisy, the fascination he can exercise at will
      over others, the Richard III. of Shakespeare shows how clearly the poet
      understood the instinctive criminal of real life. The Richard of history
      was no doubt less instinctively and deliberately an assassin than the
      Richard of Shakespeare. In the former we can trace the gradual temptation
      to crime to which circumstances provoke him. The murder of the Princes,
      if, as one writer contends, it was not the work of Henry VII.&mdash;in
      which case that monarch deserves to be hailed as one of the most
      consummate criminals that ever breathed and the worthy father of a
      criminal son&mdash;was no doubt forced to a certain extent on Richard by
      the exigencies of his situation, one of those crimes to which bad men are
      driven in order to secure the fruits of other crimes. But the Richard of
      Shakespeare is no child of circumstance. He espouses deliberately a career
      of crime, as deliberately as Peace or Holmes or Butler; he sets out
      "determined to prove a villain," to be "subtle, false and treacherous," to
      employ to gain his ends "stern murder in the dir'st degree." The character
      is sometimes criticised as being overdrawn and unreal. It may not be true
      to the Richard of history, but it is very true to crime, and to the
      historical criminal of the Borgian or Prussian type, in which fraud and
      violence are made part of a deliberate system of so-called statecraft.
    </p>
    <p>
      Shakespeare got nearer to what we may term the domestic as opposed to the
      political criminal when he created Iago. In their envy and dislike of
      their fellowmen, their contempt for humanity in general, their callousness
      to the ordinary sympathies of human nature, Robert Butler, Lacenaire,
      Ruloff are witnesses to the poet's fidelity to criminal character in his
      drawing of the Ancient. But there is a weakness in the character of Iago
      regarded as a purely instinctive and malignant criminal; indeed it is a
      weakness in the consistency of the play. On two occasions Iago states
      explicitly that Othello is more than suspected of having committed
      adultery with his wife, Emilia, and that therefore he has a strong and
      justifiable motive for being revenged on the Moor. The thought of it he
      describes as "gnawing his inwards." Emilia's conversation with Desdemona
      in the last act lends some colour to the correctness of Iago's belief. If
      this belief be well-founded it must greatly modify his character as a
      purely wanton and mischievous criminal, a supreme villain, and lower
      correspondingly the character of Othello as an honourable and high-minded
      man. If it be a morbid suspicion, having no ground in fact, a mental
      obsession, then Iago becomes abnormal and consequently more or less
      irresponsible. But this suggestion of Emilia's faithlessness made in the
      early part of the play is never followed up by the dramatist, and the
      spectator is left in complete uncertainty as to whether there be any truth
      or not in Iago's suspicion. If Othello has played his Ancient false, that
      is an extenuating circumstance in the otherwise extraordinary guilt of
      Iago, and would no doubt be accorded to him as such, were he on trial
      before a French jury.
    </p>
    <p>
      The most successful, and therefore perhaps the greatest, criminal in
      Shakespeare is King Claudius of Denmark. His murder of his brother by
      pouring a deadly poison into his ear while sleeping, is so skilfully
      perpetrated as to leave no suspicion of foul play. But for a supernatural
      intervention, a contingency against which no murderer could be expected to
      have provided, the crime of Claudius would never have been discovered.
      Smiling, jovial, genial as M. Derues or Dr. Palmer, King Claudius might
      have gone down to his grave in peace as the bluff hearty man of action,
      while his introspective nephew would in all probability have ended his
      days in the cloister, regarded with amiable contempt by his bustling
      fellowmen. How Claudius got over the great difficulty of all poisoners,
      that of procuring the necessary poison without detection, we are not told;
      by what means he distilled the "juice of cursed hebenon"; how the strange
      appearance of the late King's body, which "an instant tetter" had barked
      about with "vile and loathsome crust," was explained to the multitude we
      are left to imagine. There is no real evidence to show that Queen Gertrude
      was her lover's accomplice in her husband's murder. If that had been so,
      she would no doubt have been of considerable assistance to Claudius in the
      preparation of the crime. But in the absence of more definite proof we
      must assume Claudius' murder of his brother to have been a solitary
      achievement, skilfully carried out by one whose genial good-fellowship and
      convivial habits gave the lie to any suggestion of criminality. Whatever
      may have been his inward feelings of remorse or self-reproach, Claudius
      masked them successfully from the eyes of all. Hamlet's instinctive
      dislike of his uncle was not shared by the members of the Danish court.
      The "witchcraft of his wit," his "traitorous gifts," were powerful aids to
      Claudius, not only in the seduction of his sister-in-law, but the
      perpetration of secret murder.
    </p>
    <p>
      The case of the murder of King Duncan of Scotland by Macbeth and his wife
      belongs to a different class of crime. It is a striking example of dual
      crime, four instances of which are given towards the end of this book. An
      Italian advocate, Scipio Sighele, has devoted a monograph to the subject
      of dual crime, in which he examines a number of cases in which two persons
      have jointly committed heinous crimes.(3) He finds that in couples of this
      kind there is usually an incubus and a succubus, the one who suggests the
      crime, the other on whom the suggestion works until he or she becomes the
      accomplice or instrument of the stronger will; "the one playing the
      Mephistophelian part of tempter, preaching evil, urging to crime, the
      other allowing himself to be overcome by his evil genius." In some cases
      these two roles are clearly differentiated; it is easy, as in the case of
      Iago and Othello, Cassius and Brutus, to say who prompted the crime. In
      others the guilt seems equally divided and the original suggestion of
      crime to spring from a mutual tendency towards the adoption of such an
      expedient. In Macbeth and his wife we have a perfect instance of the
      latter class. No sooner have the witches prophesied that Macbeth shall be
      a king than the "horrid image" of the suggestion to murder Duncan presents
      itself to his mind, and, on returning to his wife, he answers her question
      as to when Duncan is to leave their house by the significant remark,
      "To-morrow&mdash;as he proposes." To Lady Macbeth from the moment she has
      received her husband's letter telling of the prophecy of the weird
      sisters, murder occurs as a means of accomplishing their prediction. In
      the minds of Macbeth and his wife the suggestion of murder is originally
      an auto-suggestion, coming to them independently of each other as soon as
      they learn from the witches that Macbeth is one day to be a king. To
      Banquo a somewhat similar intimation is given, but no foul thought of
      crime suggests itself for an instant to his loyal nature. What Macbeth and
      his wife lack at first as thorough-going murderers is that complete
      insensibility to taking human life that marks the really ruthless
      assassin. Lady Macbeth has the stronger will of the two for the commission
      of the deed. It is doubtful whether without her help Macbeth would ever
      have undertaken it. But even she, when her husband hesitates to strike,
      cannot bring herself to murder the aged Duncan with her own hands because
      of his resemblance as he sleeps to her father. It is only after a deal of
      boggling and at serious risk of untimely interruption that the two
      contrive to do the murder, and plaster with blood the "surfeited grooms."
      In thus putting suspicion on the servants of Duncan the assassins
      cunningly avert suspicion from themselves, and Macbeth's killing of the
      unfortunate men in seeming indignation at the discovery of their crime is
      a master-stroke of ingenuity. "Who," he asks in a splendid burst of
      feigned horror, "can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and
      natural in a moment?" At the same time Lady Macbeth affects to swoon away
      in the presence of so awful a crime. For the time all suspicion of guilt,
      except in the mind of Banquo, is averted from the real murderers. But,
      like so many criminals, Macbeth finds it impossible to rest on his first
      success in crime. His sensibility grows dulled; he "forgets the taste of
      fear"; the murder of Banquo and his son is diabolically planned, and that
      is soon followed by the outrageous slaughter of the wife and children of
      Macduff. Ferri, the Italian writer on crime, describes the psychical
      condition favourable to the commission of murder as an absence of both
      moral repugnance to the crime itself and the fear of the consequences
      following it. In the murder of Duncan, it is the first of these two states
      of mind to which Macbeth and his wife have only partially attained. The
      moral repugnance stronger in the man has not been wholly lost by the
      woman. But as soon as the crime is successfully accomplished, this
      repugnance begins to wear off until the King and Queen are able calmly and
      deliberately to contemplate those further crimes necessary to their peace
      of mind. But now Macbeth, at first the more compunctious of the two, has
      become the more ruthless; the germ of crime, developed by suggestion, has
      spread through his whole being; he has begun to acquire that indifference
      to human suffering with which Richard III. and Iago were gifted from the
      first. In both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth the germ of crime was latent; they
      wanted only favourable circumstances to convert them into one of those
      criminal couples who are the more dangerous for the fact that the
      temptation to crime has come to each spontaneously and grown and been
      fostered by mutual understanding, an elective affinity for evil. Such
      couples are frequent in the history of crime. Eyraud and Bompard, Mr. and
      Mrs. Manning, Burke and Hare, the Peltzer brothers, Barre and Lebiez, are
      instances of those collaborations in crime which find their counterpart in
      history, literature, drama and business. Antoninus and Aurelius, Ferdinand
      and Isabella, the De Goncourt brothers, Besant and Rice, Gilbert and
      Sullivan, Swan and Edgar leap to the memory.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (3) "Le Crime a Deux," by Scipio Sighele (translated from the Italian),
Lyons, 1893.
</pre>
    <p>
      In the cases of Eyraud and Bompard, both man and woman are idle, vicious
      criminals by instinct. They come together, lead an abandoned life, sinking
      lower and lower in moral degradation. In the hour of need, crime presents
      itself as a simple expedient for which neither of them has any natural
      aversion. The repugnance to evil, if they ever felt it, has long since
      disappeared from their natures. The man is serious, the woman frivolous,
      but the criminal tendency in both cases is the same; each performs his or
      her part in the crime with characteristic aptitude. Mrs. Manning was a
      creature of much firmer character than her husband, a woman of strong
      passions, a redoubtable murderess. Without her dominating force Manning
      might never have committed murder. But he was a criminal before the crime,
      more than suspected as a railway official of complicity in a considerable
      train robbery; in his case the suggestion of murder involved only the
      taking of a step farther in a criminal career. Manning suffered from
      nerves almost as badly as Macbeth; after the deed he sought to drown the
      prickings of terror and remorse by heavy drinking Mrs. Manning was never
      troubled with any feelings of this kind; after the murder of O'Connor the
      gratification of her sexual passion seemed uppermost in her mind; and she
      met the consequences of her crime fearlessly. Burke and Hare were a couple
      of ruffians, tempted by what must have seemed almost fabulous wealth to
      men of their wretched poverty to commit a series of cruel murders. Hare,
      with his queer, Mephistophelian countenance, was the wickeder of the two.
      Burke became haunted as time went on and flew to drink to banish horror,
      but Hare would seem to have been free from such "compunctious visitings of
      Nature." He kept his head and turned King's evidence.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the case of the Peltzer brothers we have a man who is of good social
      position, falling desperately in love with the wife of a successful
      barrister. The wife, though unhappy in her domestic life, refuses to
      become her lover's mistress; marriage is the only way to secure her. So
      Armand Peltzer plots to murder the husband. For this purpose he calls in
      the help of a brother, a ne'er-do-well, who has left his native country
      under a cloud. He sends for this dubious person to Europe, and there
      between them they plan the murder of the inconvenient husband. Though the
      idea of the crime comes from the one brother, the other receives the idea
      without repugnance and enters wholeheartedly into the commission of the
      murder. The ascendency of the one is evident, but he knows his man, is
      sure that he will have no difficulty in securing the other's co-operation
      in his felonious purpose. Armand Peltzer should have lived in the Italy of
      the Renaissance.
    </p>
    <p>
      The crime was cunningly devised, and methodically and successfully
      accomplished. Only an over-anxiety to secure the fruits of it led to its
      detection. Barre and Lebiez are a perfect criminal couple, both young men
      of good education, trained to better things, but the one idle, greedy and
      vicious, the other cynical, indifferent, inclined at best to a lazy
      sentimentalism. Barre is a needy stockbroker at the end of his tether,
      desperate to find an expedient for raising the wind, Lebiez a medical
      student who writes morbid verses to a skull and lectures on Darwinism. To
      Barre belongs the original suggestion to murder an old woman who sells
      milk and is reputed to have savings. But his friend and former
      schoolfellow, Lebiez, accepts the suggestion placidly, and reconciles
      himself to the murder of an unnecessary old woman by the same argument as
      that used by Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment" to justify the killing
      of his victim.
    </p>
    <p>
      In all the cases here quoted the couples are essentially criminal couples.
      From whichever of the two comes the first suggestion of crime, it falls on
      soil already prepared to receive it; the response to the suggestion is
      immediate. In degree of guilt there is little or nothing to choose between
      them. But the more interesting instances of dual crime are those in which
      one innocent hitherto of crime, to whom it is morally repugnant, is
      persuaded by another to the commission of a criminal act, as Cassius
      persuades Brutus; Iago, Othello. Cassius is a criminal by instinct. Placed
      in a social position which removes him from the temptation to ordinary
      crime, circumstances combine in his case to bring out the criminal
      tendency and give it free play in the projected murder of Caesar. Sour,
      envious, unscrupulous, the suggestion to kill Caesar under the guise of
      the public weal is in reality a gratification to Cassius of his own
      ignoble instincts, and the deliberate unscrupulousness with which he seeks
      to corrupt the honourable metal, seduce the noble mind of his friend, is
      typical of the man's innate dishonesty. Cassius belongs to that particular
      type of the envious nature which Shakespeare is fond of exemplifying with
      more or less degree of villainy in such characters as Iago, Edmund, and
      Don John, of which Robert Butler, whose career is given in this book, is a
      living instance. Cassius on public grounds tempts Brutus to crime as
      subtly as on private grounds Iago tempts Othello, and with something of
      the same malicious satisfaction; the soliloquy of Cassius at the end of
      the second scene of the first act is that of a bad man and a false friend.
      Indeed, the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius after the murder of Caesar
      loses much of its sincerity and pathos unless we can forget for the moment
      the real character of Cassius. But the interest in the cases of Cassius
      and Brutus, Iago and Othello, lies not so much in the nature of the
      prompter of the crime. The instances in which an honest, honourable man is
      by force of another's suggestion converted into a criminal are
      psychologically remarkable. It is to be expected that we should look in
      the annals of real crime for confirmation of the truth to life of stories
      such as these, told in fiction or drama.
    </p>
    <p>
      The strongest influence, under which the naturally non-criminal person may
      be tempted in violation of instinct and better nature to the commission of
      a crime, is that of love or passion. Examples of this kind are frequent in
      the annals of crime. There is none more striking than that of the Widow
      Gras and Natalis Gaudry. Here a man, brave, honest, of hitherto
      irreproachable character, is tempted by a woman to commit the most cruel
      and infamous of crimes. At first he repels the suggestion; at last, when
      his senses have been excited, his passion inflamed by the cunning of the
      woman, as the jealous passion of Othello is played on and excited by Iago,
      the patriotism of Brutus artfully exploited by Cassius, he yields to the
      repeated solicitation and does a deed in every way repugnant to his normal
      character. Nothing seems so blinding in its effect on the moral sense as
      passion. It obscures all sense of humour, proportion, congruity; the
      murder of the man or woman who stands in the way of its full enjoyment
      becomes an act of inverted justice to the perpetrators; they reconcile
      themselves to it by the most perverse reasoning until they come to regard
      it as an act, in which they may justifiably invoke the help of God;
      eroticism and religion are often jumbled up together in this strange
      medley of conflicting emotions.
    </p>
    <p>
      A woman, urging her lover to the murder of her husband, writes of the
      roses that are to deck the path of the lovers as soon as the crime is
      accomplished; she sends him flowers and in the same letter asks if he has
      got the necessary cartridges. Her husband has been ill; she hopes that it
      is God helping them to the desired end; she burns a candle on the altar of
      a saint for the success of their murderous plan.(4) A jealous husband
      setting out to kill his wife carries in his pockets, beside a knife and a
      service revolver, a rosary, a medal of the Virgin and a holy image.(5)
      Marie Boyer in the blindness of her passion and jealousy believes God to
      be helping her to get rid of her mother.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (4) Case of Garnier and the woman Aveline, 1884.

     (5) Case of the Comte
de Cornulier: "Un An de Justice," Henri Varennes, 1901.
</pre>
    <p>
      A lover persuades the wife to get rid of her husband. For a whole year he
      instils the poison into her soul until she can struggle no longer against
      the obsession; he offers to do the deed, but she writes that she would
      rather suffer all the risks and consequences herself. "How many times,"
      she writes, "have I wished to go away, leave home, but it meant leaving my
      children, losing them for ever.. that made my lover jealous, he believed
      that I could not bring myself to leave my husband. But if my husband were
      out of the way then I would keep my children, and my lover would see in my
      crime a striking proof of my devotion." A curious farrago of slavish
      passion, motherly love and murder.(6)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (6) Case of Madame Weiss and the engineer Roques. If I may be permitted
the reference, there is an account of this case and that of Barre and
Lebiez in my book "French Criminals of the Nineteenth Century."
</pre>
    <p>
      There are some women such as Marie Boyer and Gabrielle Fenayrou, who may
      be described as passively criminal, chameleon-like, taking colour from
      their surroundings. By the force of a man's influence they commit a
      dreadful crime, in the one instance it is matricide, in the other the
      murder of a former lover, but neither of the women is profoundly vicious
      or criminal in her instincts. In prison they become exemplary, their crime
      a thing of the past.
    </p>
    <p>
      Gabrielle Fenayrou during her imprisonment, having won the confidence of
      the religious sisters in charge of the convicts, is appointed head of one
      of the workshops. Marie Boyer is so contrite, exemplary in her behaviour
      that she is released after fifteen years' imprisonment. In some ways,
      perhaps, these malleable types of women, "soft paste" as one authority has
      described them, "effacees" in the words of another, are the most dangerous
      material of all for the commission of crime, their obedience is so
      complete, so cold and relentless.
    </p>
    <p>
      There are cases into which no element of passion enters, in which one will
      stronger than the other can so influence, so dominate the weaker as to
      persuade the individual against his or her better inclination to an act of
      crime, just as in the relations of ordinary life we see a man or woman led
      and controlled for good or ill by one stronger than themselves. There is
      no more extraordinary instance of this than the case of Catherine Hayes,
      immortalised by Thackeray, which occurred as long ago as the year 1726.
      This singular woman by her artful insinuations, by representing her
      husband as an atheist and a murderer, persuaded a young man of the name of
      Wood, of hitherto exemplary character, to assist her in murdering him. It
      was unquestionably the sinister influence of Captain Cranstoun that later
      in the same century persuaded the respectable Miss Mary Blandy to the
      murder of her father. The assassin of an old woman in Paris recounts thus
      the arguments used by his mistress to induce him to commit the crime: "She
      began by telling me about the money and jewellery in the old woman's
      possession which could no longer be of any use to her"&mdash;the argument
      of Raskolnikoff&mdash;"I resisted, but next day she began again, pointing
      out that one killed people in war, which was not considered a crime, and
      therefore one should not be afraid to kill a miserable old woman. I urged
      that the old woman had done us no harm, and that I did not see why one
      should kill her; she reproached me for my weakness and said that, had she
      been strong enough, she would soon have done this abominable deed herself.
      'God,' she added, 'will forgive us because He knows how poor we are.'"
      When he came to do the murder, this determined woman plied her lover with
      brandy and put rouge on his cheeks lest his pallor should betray him.(7)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (7) Case of Albert and the woman Lavoitte, Paris, 1877.
</pre>
    <p>
      There are occasions when those feelings of compunction which troubled
      Macbeth and his wife are wellnigh proof against the utmost powers of
      suggestion, or, as in the case of Hubert and Prince Arthur, compel the
      criminal to desist from his enterprise.
    </p>
    <p>
      A man desires to get rid of his father and mother-in-law. By means of
      threats, reproaches and inducements he persuades another man to commit the
      crime. Taking a gun, the latter sets out to do the deed; but he realises
      the heinousness of it and turns back. "The next day," he says, "at four
      o'clock in the morning I started again. I passed the village church. At
      the sight of the place where I had celebrated my first communion I was
      filled with remorse. I knelt down and prayed to God to make me good. But
      some unknown force urged me to the crime. I started again&mdash;ten times
      I turned back, but the more I hesitated the stronger was the desire to go
      on." At length the faltering assassin arrived at the house, and in his
      painful anxiety of mind shot a servant instead of the intended victims.(8)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (8) Case of Porcher and Hardouin cited in Despine. "Psychologie
Naturelle."
</pre>
    <p>
      In a town in Austria there dwelt a happy and contented married couple,
      poor and hard-working. A charming young lady, a rich relation and an
      orphan, comes to live with them. She brings to their modest home wealth
      and comfort. But as time goes on, it is likely that the young lady will
      fall in love and marry. What then? Her hosts will have to return to their
      original poverty. The idea of how to secure to himself the advantages of
      his young kinswoman's fortune takes possession of the husband's mind. He
      revolves all manner of means, and gradually murder presents itself as the
      only way. The horrid suggestion fixes itself in his mind, and at last he
      communicates it to his wife. At first she resists, then yields to the
      temptation. The plan is ingenious. The wife is to disappear to America and
      be given out as dead. The husband will then marry his attractive
      kinswoman, persuade her to make a will in his favour, poison her and, the
      fortune secured, rejoin his wife. As if to help this cruel plan, the young
      lady has developed a sentimental affection for her relative. The wife goes
      to America, the husband marries the young lady. He commences to poison
      her, but, in the presence of her youth, beauty and affection for him,
      relents, hesitates to commit a possibly unnecessary crime. He decides to
      forget and ignore utterly his wife who is waiting patiently in America. A
      year passes. The expectant wife gets no sign of her husband's existence.
      She comes back to Europe, visits under a false name the town in which her
      faithless husband and his bride are living, discovers the truth and
      divulges the intended crime to the authorities. A sentence of penal
      servitude for life rewards this perfidious criminal.(9)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (9) Case of the Scheffer couple at Linz, cited by Sighele.
</pre>
    <p>
      Derues said to a man who was looking at a picture in the Palais de
      Justice: "Why study copies of Nature when you can look at such a
      remarkable original as I?" A judge once told the present writer that he
      did not go often to the theatre because none of the dramas which he saw on
      the stage, seemed to him equal in intensity to those of real life which
      came before him in the course of his duties. The saying that truth is
      stranger than fiction applies more forcibly to crime than to anything
      else. But the ordinary man and woman prefer to take their crime
      romanticised, as it is administered to them in novel or play. The true
      stories told in this book represent the raw material from which works of
      art have been and may be yet created. The murder of Mr. Arden of Faversham
      inspired an Elizabethan tragedy attributed by some critics to Shakespeare.
      The Peltzer trial helped to inspire Paul Bourget's remarkable novel,
      "Andre Cornelis." To Italian crime we owe Shelley's "Cenci" and Browning's
      "The Ring and the Book." Mrs. Manning was the original of the maid
      Hortense in "Bleak House." Jonathan Wild, Eugene Aram, Deacon Brodie,
      Thomas Griffiths Wainewright have all been made the heroes of books or
      plays of varying merit. But it is not only in its stories that crime has
      served to inspire romance. In the investigation of crime, especially on
      the broader lines of Continental procedure, we can track to the source the
      springs of conduct and character, and come near to solving as far as is
      humanly possible the mystery of human motive. There is always and must be
      in every crime a terra incognita which, unless we could enter into the
      very soul of a man, we cannot hope to reach. Thus far may we go, no
      farther. It is rarely indeed that a man lays bare his whole soul, and even
      when he does we can never be quite sure that he is telling us all the
      truth, that he is not keeping back some vital secret. It is no doubt
      better so, and that it should be left to the writer of imagination to
      picture for us a man's inmost soul. The study of crime will help him to
      that end. It will help us also in the ethical appreciation of good and
      evil in individual conduct, about which our notions have been somewhat
      obscured by too narrow a definition of what constitutes crime. These
      themes, touched on but lightly and imperfectly in these pages, are rich in
      human interest.
    </p>
    <p>
      And so it is hardly a matter for surprise that the poet and the
      philosopher sat up late one night talking about murders.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      The Life of Charles Peace
    </h2>
    <p>
      "Charles Peace, or the Adventures of a Notorious Burglar," a large volume
      published at the time of his death, gives a full and accurate account of
      the career of Peace side by side with a story of the Family Herald type,
      of which he is made the hero. "The Life and Trial of Charles Peace"
      (Sheffield, 1879), "The Romantic Career of a Great Criminal" (by N.
      Kynaston Gaskell, London 1906), and "The Master Criminal," published
      recently in London give useful information. I have also consulted some of
      the newspapers of the time. There is a delightful sketch of Peace in Mr.
      Charles Whibley's "Book of Scoundrels."
    </p>
    <p>
      I HIS EARLY YEARS
    </p>
    <p>
      Charles Peace told a clergyman who had an interview with him in prison
      shortly before his execution that he hoped that, after he was gone, he
      would be entirely forgotten by everybody and his name never mentioned
      again.
    </p>
    <p>
      Posterity, in calling over its muster-roll of famous men, has refused to
      fulfil this pious hope, and Charley Peace stands out as the one great
      personality among English criminals of the nineteenth century. In Charley
      Peace alone is revived that good-humoured popularity which in the
      seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fell to the lot of Claude Duval, Dick
      Turpin and Jack Sheppard. But Peace has one grievance against posterity;
      he has endured one humiliation which these heroes have been spared. His
      name has been omitted from the pages of the "Dictionary of National
      Biography." From Duval, in the seventeenth, down to the Mannings, Palmer,
      Arthur Orton, Morgan and Kelly, the bushrangers, in the nineteenth
      century, many a criminal, far less notable or individual than Charley
      Peace, finds his or her place in that great record of the past
      achievements of our countrymen. Room has been denied to perhaps the
      greatest and most naturally gifted criminal England has produced, one
      whose character is all the more remarkable for its modesty, its entire
      freedom from that vanity and vaingloriousness so common among his class.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only possible reason that can be suggested for so singular an omission
      is the fact that in the strict order of alphabetical succession the
      biography of Charles Peace would have followed immediately on that of
      George Peabody. It may have been thought that the contrast was too
      glaring, that even the exigencies of national biography had no right to
      make the philanthropist Peabody rub shoulders with man's constant enemy,
      Peace. To the memory of Peace these few pages can make but poor amends for
      the supreme injustice, but, by giving a particular and authentic account
      of his career, they may serve as material for the correction of this grave
      omission should remorse overtake those responsible for so undeserved a
      slur on one of the most unruly of England's famous sons.
    </p>
    <p>
      From the literary point of view Peace was unfortunate even in the hour of
      his notoriety. In the very year of his trial and execution, the Annual
      Register, seized with a fit of respectability from which it has never
      recovered, announced that "the appetite for the strange and marvellous"
      having considerably abated since the year 1757 when the Register was first
      published, its "Chronicle," hitherto a rich mine of extraordinary and
      sensational occurrences, would become henceforth a mere diary of important
      events. Simultaneously with the curtailment of its "Chronicle," it ceased
      to give those excellent summaries of celebrated trials which for many
      years had been a feature of its volumes. The question whether "the
      appetite for the strange and marvellous" has abated in an appreciable
      degree with the passing of time and is not perhaps keener than it ever
      was, is a debatable one. But it is undeniable that the present volumes of
      the Annual Register have fallen away dismally from the variety and human
      interest of their predecessors. Of the trial and execution of Peace the
      volume for 1879 gives but the barest record.
    </p>
    <p>
      Charles Peace was not born of criminal parents. His father, John Peace,
      began work as a collier at Burton-on-Trent. Losing his leg in an accident,
      he joined Wombwell's wild beast show and soon acquired some reputation for
      his remarkable powers as a tamer of wild animals. About this time Peace
      married at Rotherham the daughter of a surgeon in the Navy. On the death
      of a favourite son to whom he had imparted successfully the secrets of his
      wonderful control over wild beasts of every kind, Mr. Peace gave up
      lion-taming and settled in Sheffield as a shoemaker.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was at Sheffield, in the county of Yorkshire, already famous in the
      annals of crime as the county of John Nevison and Eugene Aram, that Peace
      first saw the light. On May 14, 1832, there was born to John Peace in
      Sheffield a son, Charles, the youngest of his family of four. When he grew
      to boyhood Charles was sent to two schools near Sheffield, where he soon
      made himself remarkable, not as a scholar, but for his singular aptitude
      in a variety of other employments such as making paper models, taming
      cats, constructing a peep-show, and throwing up a heavy ball of shot which
      he would catch in a leather socket fixed on to his forehead.
    </p>
    <p>
      The course of many famous men's lives has been changed by what appeared at
      the time to be an unhappy accident. Who knows what may have been the
      effect on Charles Peace's subsequent career of an accident he met with in
      1846 at some rolling mills, in which he was employed? A piece of red hot
      steel entered his leg just below the knee, and after eighteen months spent
      in the Sheffield Infirmary he left it a cripple for life. About this time
      Peace's father died. Peace and his family were fond of commemorating
      events of this kind in suitable verse; the death of John Peace was
      celebrated in the following lines:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     "In peace he lived;
         In peace he died;
     Life was our desire,
         But God denied."
</pre>
    <p>
      Of the circumstances that first led Peace to the commission of crime we
      know nothing. How far enforced idleness, bad companionship, according to
      some accounts the influence of a criminally disposed mother, how far his
      own daring and adventurous temper provoked him to robbery, cannot be
      determined accurately. His first exploit was the stealing of an old
      gentleman's gold watch, but he soon passed to greater things. On October
      26, 1851, the house of a lady living in Sheffield was broken into and a
      quantity of her property stolen. Some of it was found in the possession of
      Peace, and he was arrested. Owing no doubt to a good character for honesty
      given him by his late employer Peace was let off lightly with a month's
      imprisonment.
    </p>
    <p>
      After his release Peace would seem to have devoted himself for a time to
      music, for which he had always a genuine passion. He taught himself to
      play tunes on a violin with one string, and at entertainments which he
      attended was described as "the modern Paganini." In later life when he had
      attained to wealth and prosperity the violin and the harmonium were a
      constant source of solace during long winter evenings in Greenwich and
      Peckham. But playing a one-stringed violin at fairs and public-houses
      could not be more than a relaxation to a man of Peace's active temper, who
      had once tasted what many of those who have practised it, describe as the
      fascination of that particular form of nocturnal adventure known by the
      unsympathetic name of burglary. Among the exponents of the art Peace was
      at this time known as a "portico-thief," that is to say one who contrived
      to get himself on to the portico of a house and from that point of vantage
      make his entrance into the premises. During the year 1854 the houses of a
      number of well-to-do residents in and about Sheffield were entered after
      this fashion, and much valuable property stolen. Peace was arrested, and
      with him a girl with whom he was keeping company, and his sister, Mary
      Ann, at that time Mrs. Neil. On October 20, 1854, Peace was sentenced at
      Doncaster Sessions to four years' penal servitude, and the ladies who had
      been found in possession of the stolen property to six months apiece. Mrs.
      Neil did not long survive her misfortune. She would seem to have been
      married to a brutal and drunken husband, whom Peace thrashed on more than
      one occasion for ill-treating his sister. After one of these punishments
      Neil set a bulldog on to Peace; but Peace caught the dog by the lower jaw
      and punched it into a state of coma. The death in 1859 of the unhappy Mrs.
      Neil was lamented in appropriate verse, probably the work of her brother:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     "I was so long with pain opprest
         That wore my strength away;
     It made me long for endless rest
         Which never can decay."
</pre>
    <p>
      On coming out of prison in 1858, Peace resumed his fiddling, but it was
      now no more than a musical accompaniment to burglary. This had become the
      serious business of Peace's life, to be pursued, should necessity arise,
      even to the peril of men's lives. His operations extended beyond the
      bounds of his native town. The house of a lady living in Manchester was
      broken into on the night of August 11, 1859, and a substantial booty
      carried away. This was found the following day concealed in a hole in a
      field. The police left it undisturbed and awaited the return of the
      robber. When Peace and another man arrived to carry it away, the officers
      sprang out on them. Peace, after nearly killing the officer who was trying
      to arrest him, would have made his escape, had not other policemen come to
      the rescue. For this crime Peace was sentenced to six years' penal
      servitude, in spite of a loyal act of perjury on the part of his aged
      mother, who came all the way from Sheffield to swear that he had been with
      her there on the night of the crime.
    </p>
    <p>
      He was released from prison again in 1864, and returned to Sheffield.
      Things did not prosper with him there, and he went back to Manchester. In
      1866 he was caught in the act of burglary at a house in Lower Broughton.
      He admitted that at the time he was fuddled with whisky; otherwise his
      capture would have been more difficult and dangerous. Usually a temperate
      man, Peace realised on this occasion the value of sobriety even in
      burglary, and never after allowed intemperance to interfere with his
      success. A sentence of eight years' penal servitude at Manchester Assizes
      on December 3, 1866, emphasised this wholesome lesson.
    </p>
    <p>
      Whilst serving this sentence Peace emulated Jack Sheppard in a daring
      attempt to escape from Wakefield prison. Being engaged on some repairs, he
      smuggled a small ladder into his cell. With the help of a saw made out of
      some tin, he cut a hole through the ceiling of the cell, and was about to
      get out on to the roof when a warder came in. As the latter attempted to
      seize the ladder Peace knocked him down, ran along the wall of the prison,
      fell off on the inside owing to the looseness of the bricks, slipped into
      the governor's house where he changed his clothes, and there, for an hour
      and a half, waited for an opportunity to escape. This was denied him, and
      he was recaptured in the governor's bedroom. The prisons at Millbank,
      Chatham and Gibraltar were all visited by Peace before his final release
      in 1872. At Chatham he is said to have taken part in a mutiny and been
      flogged for his pains.
    </p>
    <p>
      On his liberation from prison Peace rejoined his family in Sheffield. He
      was now a husband and father. In 1859 he had taken to wife a widow of the
      name of Hannah Ward. Mrs. Ward was already the mother of a son, Willie.
      Shortly after her marriage with Peace she gave birth to a daughter, and
      during his fourth term of imprisonment presented him with a son. Peace
      never saw this child, who died before his release. But, true to the family
      custom, on his return from prison the untimely death of little "John
      Charles" was commemorated by the printing of a funeral card in his honour,
      bearing the following sanguine verses:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     "Farewell, my dear son, by us all beloved,
     Thou art gone to dwell in the mansions above.
     In the bosom of Jesus Who sits on the throne
     Thou art anxiously waiting to welcome us home."
</pre>
    <p>
      Whether from a desire not to disappoint little John Charles, for some
      reason or other the next two or three years of Peace's career would seem
      to have been spent in an endeavour to earn an honest living by picture
      framing, a trade in which Peace, with that skill he displayed in whatever
      he turned his hand to, was remarkably proficient. In Sheffield his
      children attended the Sunday School. Though he never went to church
      himself, he was an avowed believer in both God and the devil. As he said,
      however, that he feared neither, no great reliance could be placed on the
      restraining force of such a belief to a man of Peace's daring spirit.
      There was only too good reason to fear that little John Charles' period of
      waiting would be a prolonged one.
    </p>
    <p>
      In 1875 Peace moved from Sheffield itself to the suburb of Darnall. Here
      Peace made the acquaintance&mdash;a fatal acquaintance, as it turned out&mdash;of
      a Mr. and Mrs. Dyson. Dyson was a civil engineer. He had spent some years
      in America, where, in 1866, he married.
    </p>
    <p>
      Toward the end of 1873 or the beginning of 1874, he came to England with
      his wife, and obtained a post on the North Eastern Railway. He was a tall
      man, over six feet in height, extremely thin, and gentlemanly in his
      bearing. His engagement with the North Eastern Railway terminated abruptly
      owing to Dyson's failing to appear at a station to which he had been sent
      on duty.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was believed at the time by those associated with Dyson that this
      unlooked-for dereliction of duty had its cause in domestic trouble. Since
      the year 1875, the year in which Peace came to Darnall, the domestic peace
      of Mr. Dyson had been rudely disturbed by this same ugly little
      picture-framer who lived a few doors away from the Dysons' house. Peace
      had got to know the Dysons, first as a tradesman, then as a friend. To
      what degree of intimacy he attained with Mrs. Dyson it is difficult to
      determine. In that lies the mystery of the case Mrs. Dyson is described as
      an attractive woman, "buxom and blooming"; she was dark-haired, and about
      twenty-five years of age. In an interview with the Vicar of Darnall a few
      days before his execution, Peace asserted positively that Mrs. Dyson had
      been his mistress. Mrs. Dyson as strenuously denied the fact. There was no
      question that on one occasion Peace and Mrs. Dyson had been photographed
      together, that he had given her a ring, and that he had been in the habit
      of going to music halls and public-houses with Mrs. Dyson, who was a woman
      of intemperate habits.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace had introduced Mrs. Dyson to his wife and daughter, and on one
      occasion was said to have taken her to his mother's house, much to the old
      lady's indignation. If there were not many instances of ugly men who have
      been notably successful with women, one might doubt the likelihood of Mrs.
      Dyson falling a victim to the charms of Charles Peace. But Peace, for all
      his ugliness, could be wonderfully ingratiating when he chose. According
      to Mrs. Dyson, Peace was a demon, "beyond the power of even a Shakespeare
      to paint," who persecuted her with his attentions, and, when he found them
      rejected, devoted all his malignant energies to making the lives of her
      husband and herself unbearable. According to Peace's story he was a
      slighted lover who had been treated by Mrs. Dyson with contumely and
      ingratitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      Whether to put a stop to his wife's intimacy with Peace, or to protect
      himself against the latter's wanton persecution, sometime about the end of
      June, 1876, Dyson threw over into the garden of Peace's house a card, on
      which was written: "Charles Peace is requested not to interfere with my
      family." On July 1 Peace met Mr. Dyson in the street, and tried to trip
      him up. The same night he came up to Mrs. Dyson, who was talking with some
      friends, and threatened in coarse and violent language to blow out her
      brains and those of her husband. In consequence of these incidents Mr.
      Dyson took out a summons against Peace, for whose apprehension a warrant
      was issued. To avoid the consequences of this last step Peace left Darnall
      for Hull, where he opened an eating-shop, presided over by Mrs. Peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      But he himself was not idle. From Hull he went to Manchester on business,
      and in Manchester he committed his first murder. Entering the grounds of a
      gentleman's home at Whalley Range, about midnight on August 1, he was seen
      by two policemen. One of them, Constable Cock, intercepted him as he was
      trying to escape.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace took out his revolver and warned Cock to stand back. The policeman
      came on. Peace fired, but deliberately wide of him. Cock, undismayed, drew
      out his truncheon, and made for the burglar. Peace, desperate, determined
      not to be caught, fired again, this time fatally. Cock's comrade heard the
      shots, but before he could reach the side of the dying man, Peace had made
      off. He returned to Hull, and there learned shortly after, to his intense
      relief, that two brothers, John and William Habron, living near the scene
      of the murder, had been arrested and charged with the killing of Constable
      Cock.
    </p>
    <p>
      If the Dysons thought that they had seen the last of Peace, they were soon
      to be convinced to the contrary. Peace had not forgotten his friends at
      Darnall. By some means or other he was kept informed of all their doings,
      and on one occasion was seen by Mrs. Dyson lurking near her home. To get
      away from him the Dysons determined to leave Darnall. They took a house at
      Banner Cross, another suburb of Sheffield, and on October 29 moved into
      their new home. One of the first persons Mrs. Dyson saw on arriving at
      Banner Cross was Peace himself. "You see," he said, "I am here to annoy
      you, and I'll annoy you wherever you go." Later, Peace and a friend passed
      Mr. Dyson in the street. Peace took out his revolver. "If he offers to
      come near me," said he, "I will make him stand back." But Mr. Dyson took
      no notice of Peace and passed on. He had another month to live.
    </p>
    <p>
      Whatever the other motives of Peace may have been&mdash;unreasoning
      passion, spite, jealousy, or revenge it must not be forgotten that Dyson,
      by procuring a warrant against Peace, had driven him from his home in
      Sheffield. This Peace resented bitterly. According to the statements of
      many witnesses, he was at this time in a state of constant irritation and
      excitement on the Dyson's account. He struck his daughter because she
      alluded in a way he did not like to his relations with Mrs. Dyson. Peace
      always believed in corporal chastisement as a means of keeping order at
      home. Pleasant and entertaining as he could be, he was feared. It was very
      dangerous to incur his resentment. "Be sure," said his wife, "you do
      nothing to offend our Charley, or you will suffer for it." Dyson beyond a
      doubt had offended "our Charley." But for the moment Peace was interested
      more immediately in the fate of John and William Habron, who were about to
      stand their trial for the murder of Constable Cock at Whalley Range.
    </p>
    <p>
      The trial commenced at the Manchester Assizes before Mr. Justice (now
      Lord) Lindley on Monday, November 27. John Habron was acquitted.
    </p>
    <p>
      The case against William Habron depended to a great extent on the fact
      that he, as well as his brother, had been heard to threaten to "do for"
      the murdered man, to shoot the "little bobby." Cock was a zealous young
      officer of twenty-three years of age, rather too eager perhaps in the
      discharge of his duty. In July of 1876 he had taken out summonses against
      John and William Habron, young fellows who had been several years in the
      employment of a nurseryman in Whalley Range, for being drunk and
      disorderly. On July 27 William was fined five shillings, and on August 1,
      the day of Cock's murder, John had been fined half a sovereign. Between
      these two dates the Habrons had been heard to threaten to "do for" Cock if
      he were not more careful. Other facts relied upon by the prosecution were
      that William Habron had inquired from a gunsmith the price of some
      cartridges a day or two before the murder; that two cartridge percussion
      caps had been found in the pocket of a waistcoat given to William Habron
      by his employer, who swore that they could not have been there while it
      was in his possession; that the other constable on duty with Cock stated
      that a man he had seen lurking near the house about twelve o'clock on the
      night of the murder appeared to be William Habron's age, height and
      complexion, and resembled him in general appearance; and that the boot on
      Habron's left foot, which was "wet and sludgy" at the time of his arrest,
      corresponded in certain respects with the footprints of the murderer. The
      prisoner did not help himself by an ineffective attempt to prove an alibi.
      The Judge was clearly not impressed by the strength of the case for the
      prosecution. He pointed out to the jury that neither the evidence of
      identification nor that of the footprint went very far. As to the latter,
      what evidence was there to show that it had been made on the night of the
      murder? If it had been made the day before, then the defence had proved
      that it could not have been Habron's. He called their attention to the
      facts that Habron bore a good character, that, when arrested on the night
      of the murder, he was in bed, and that no firearms had been traced to him.
      In spite, however, of the summing-up the jury convicted William Habron,
      but recommended him to mercy. The Judge without comment sentenced him to
      death. The Manchester Guardian expressed its entire concurrence with the
      verdict of the jury. "Few persons," it wrote, "will be found to dispute
      the justice of the conclusions reached." However, a few days later it
      opened its columns to a number of letters protesting against the
      unsatisfactory nature of the conviction. On December 6 a meeting of some
      forty gentlemen was held, at which it was resolved to petition Mr. Cross,
      the Home Secretary, to reconsider the sentence. Two days before the day of
      execution Habron was granted a respite, and later his sentence commuted to
      one of penal servitude for life. And so a tragic and irrevocable
      miscarriage of justice was happily averted.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace liked attending trials. The fact that in Habron's case he was the
      real murderer would seem to have made him the more eager not to miss so
      unique an experience. Accordingly he went from Hull to Manchester, and was
      present in court during the two days that the trial lasted. No sooner had
      he heard the innocent man condemned to death than he left Manchester for
      Sheffield&mdash;now for all he knew a double murderer.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is a question whether, on the night of November 28, Peace met Mrs.
      Dyson at an inn in one of the suburbs of Sheffield. In any case, the next
      morning, Wednesday, the 29th, to his mother's surprise Peace walked into
      her house. He said that he had come to Sheffield for the fair. The
      afternoon of that day Peace spent in a public-house at Ecclesall,
      entertaining the customers by playing tunes on a poker suspended from a
      piece of strong string, from which he made music by beating it with a
      short stick. The musician was rewarded by drinks. It took very little
      drink to excite Peace. There was dancing, the fun grew fast and furious,
      as the strange musician beat out tune after tune on his fantastic
      instrument.
    </p>
    <p>
      At six o'clock the same evening a thin, grey-haired, insignificant-looking
      man in an evident state of unusual excitement called to see the Rev. Mr.
      Newman, Vicar of Ecclesall, near Banner Cross. Some five weeks before,
      this insignificant-looking man had visited Mr. Newman, and made certain
      statements in regard to the character of a Mr. and Mrs. Dyson who had come
      to live in the parish. The vicar had asked for proof of these statements.
      These proofs his visitor now produced. They consisted of a number of
      calling cards and photographs, some of them alleged to be in the
      handwriting of Mrs. Dyson, and showing her intimacy with Peace. The man
      made what purported to be a confession to Mr. Newman. Dyson, he said, had
      become jealous of him, whereupon Peace had suggested to Mrs. Dyson that
      they should give her husband something to be jealous about. Out of this
      proposal their intimacy had sprung. Peace spoke of Mrs. Dyson in terms of
      forgiveness, but his wrath against Dyson was extreme. He complained
      bitterly that by taking proceedings against him, Dyson had driven him to
      break up his home and become a fugitive in the land. He should follow the
      Dysons, he said, wherever they might go; he believed that they were at
      that moment intending to take further proceedings against him. As he left,
      Peace said that he should not go and see the Dysons that night, but would
      call on a friend of his, Gregory, who lived next door to them in Banner
      Cross Terrace. It was now about a quarter to seven.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace went to Gregory's house, but his friend was not at home. The lure of
      the Dysons was irresistible. A little after eight o'clock Peace was
      watching the house from a passageway that led up to the backs of the
      houses on the terrace. He saw Mrs. Dyson come out of the back door, and go
      to an outhouse some few yards distant. He waited. As soon as she opened
      the door to come out, Mrs. Dyson found herself confronted by Peace,
      holding his revolver in his hand. "Speak," he said, "or I'll fire." Mrs.
      Dyson in terror went back. In the meantime Dyson, hearing the disturbance,
      came quickly into the yard. Peace made for the passage. Dyson followed
      him. Peace fired once, the shot striking the lintel of the passage
      doorway. Dyson undaunted, still pursued. Then Peace, according to his
      custom, fired a second time, and Dyson fell, shot through the temple. Mrs.
      Dyson, who had come into the yard again on hearing the first shot, rushed
      to her husband's side, calling out: "Murder! You villain! You have shot my
      husband." Two hours later Dyson was dead.
    </p>
    <p>
      After firing the second shot Peace had hurried down; the passage into the
      roadway. He stood there hesitating a moment, until the cries of Mrs. Dyson
      warned him of his danger. He crossed the road, climbed a wall, and made
      his way back to Sheffield. There he saw his mother and brother, told them
      that he had shot Mr. Dyson, and bade them a hasty good-bye. He then walked
      to Attercliffe Railway Station, and took a ticket for Beverley. Something
      suspicious in the manner of the booking-clerk made him change his place of
      destination. Instead of going to Beverley that night he got out of the
      train at Normanton and went on to York. He spent the remainder of the
      night in the station yard. He took the first train in the morning for
      Beverley, and from there travelled via Collingham to Hull. He went
      straight to the eating-house kept by his wife, and demanded some dinner.
      He had hardly commenced to eat it when he heard two detectives come into
      the front shop and ask his wife if a man called Charles Peace was lodging
      with her. Mrs. Peace said that that was her husband's name, but that she
      had not seen him for two months. The detectives proposed to search the
      house. Some customers in the shop told them that if they had any business
      with Mrs. Peace, they ought to go round to the side door. The polite
      susceptibility of these customers gave Peace time to slip up to a back
      room, get out on to an adjoining roof, and hide behind a chimney stack,
      where he remained until the detectives had finished an exhaustive search.
      So importunate were the officers in Hull that once again during the day
      Peace had to repeat this experience. For some three weeks, however, he
      contrived to remain in Hull. He shaved the grey beard he was wearing at
      the time of Dyson's murder, dyed his hair, put on a pair of spectacles,
      and for the first time made use of his singular power of contorting his
      features in such a way as to change altogether the character of his face.
      But the hue and cry after him was unremitting. There was a price of L100
      on his head, and the following description of him was circulated by the
      police:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Charles Peace wanted for murder on the night of the 29th inst. He is thin
      and slightly built, from fifty-five to sixty years of age. Five feet four
      inches or five feet high; grey (nearly white) hair, beard and whiskers. He
      lacks use of three fingers of left hand, walks with his legs rather wide
      apart, speaks somewhat peculiarly as though his tongue were too large for
      his mouth, and is a great boaster. He is a picture-frame maker. He
      occasionally cleans and repairs clocks and watches and sometimes deals in
      oleographs, engravings and pictures. He has been in penal servitude for
      burglary in Manchester. He has lived in Manchester, Salford, and Liverpool
      and Hull."
    </p>
    <p>
      This description was altered later and Peace's age given as forty-six. As
      a matter of fact he was only forty-four at this time, but he looked very
      much older. Peace had lost one of his fingers. He said that it had been
      shot off by a man with whom he had quarrelled, but it was believed to be
      more likely that he had himself shot it off accidentally in handling one
      of his revolvers. It was to conceal this obvious means of identification
      that Peace made himself the false arm which he was in the habit of
      wearing. This was of gutta percha, with a hole down the middle of it into
      which he passed his arm; at the end was a steel plate to which was fixed a
      hook; by means of this hook Peace could wield a fork and do other
      dexterous feats.
    </p>
    <p>
      Marked man as he was, Peace felt it dangerous to stay longer in Hull than
      he could help. During the closing days of the year 1876 and the beginning
      of 1877, Peace was perpetually on the move. He left Hull for Doncaster,
      and from there travelled to London. On arriving at King's Cross he took
      the underground railway to Paddington, and from there a train to Bristol.
      At the beginning of January he left Bristol for Bath, and from Bath, in
      the company of a sergeant of police, travelled by way of Didcot to Oxford.
      The officer had in his custody a young woman charged with stealing L40.
      Peace and the sergeant discussed the case during the journey. "He seemed a
      smart chap," said Peace in relating the circumstances, "but not smart
      enough to know me." From Oxford he went to Birmingham, where he stayed
      four or five days, then a week in Derby, and on January 9th he arrived in
      Nottingham.
    </p>
    <p>
      Here Peace found a convenient lodging at the house of one, Mrs. Adamson, a
      lady who received stolen goods and on occasion indicated or organised
      suitable opportunities for acquiring them.
    </p>
    <p>
      She lived in a low part of the town known as the Marsh. It was at her
      house that Peace met the woman who was to become his mistress and
      subsequently betray his identity to the police. Her maiden name was Susan
      Gray.
    </p>
    <p>
      She was at this time about thirty-five years of age, described as "taking"
      in appearance, of a fair complexion, and rather well educated. She had led
      a somewhat chequered married life with a gentleman named Bailey, from whom
      she continued in receipt of a weekly allowance until she passed under the
      protection of Peace. Her first meeting with her future lover took place on
      the occasion of Peace inviting Mrs. Adamson to dispose of a box of cigars
      for him, which that good woman did at a charge of something like thirty
      per cent. At first Peace gave himself out to Mrs. Bailey as a hawker, but
      before long he openly acknowledged his real character as an accomplished
      burglar. With characteristic insistence Peace declared his passion for
      Mrs. Bailey by threatening to shoot her if she did not become his. Anxious
      friends sent for her to soothe the distracted man. Peace had been drowning
      care with the help of Irish whiskey. He asked "his pet" if she were not
      glad to see him, to which the lady replied with possible sarcasm: "Oh,
      particularly, very, I like you so much." Next day Peace apologised for his
      rude behaviour of the previous evening, and so melted the heart of Mrs.
      Bailey that she consented to become his mistress, and from that moment
      discarding the name of Bailey is known to history as Mrs. Thompson.
    </p>
    <p>
      Life in Nottingham was varied pleasantly by burglaries carried out with
      the help of information supplied by Mrs. Adamson. In the June of 1877
      Peace was nearly detected in stealing, at the request of that worthy, some
      blankets, but by flourishing his revolver he contrived to get away, and,
      soon after, returned for a season to Hull. Here this hunted murderer, with
      L100 reward on his head, took rooms for Mrs. Thompson and himself at the
      house of a sergeant of police. One day Mrs. Peace, who was still keeping
      her shop in Hull, received a pencilled note saying, "I am waiting to see
      you just up Anlaby Road." She and her stepson, Willie Ward, went to the
      appointed spot, and there to their astonishment stood her husband, a
      distinguished figure in black coat and trousers, top hat, velvet
      waistcoat, with stick, kid gloves, and a pretty little fox terrier by his
      side. Peace told them of his whereabouts in the town, but did not disclose
      to them the fact that his mistress was there also. To the police sergeant
      with whom he lodged, Peace described himself as an agent. But a number of
      sensational and successful burglaries at the houses of Town Councillors
      and other well-to-do citizens of Hull revealed the presence in their midst
      of no ordinary robber. Peace had some narrow escapes, but with the help of
      his revolver, and on one occasion the pusillanimity of a policeman, he
      succeeded in getting away in safety. The bills offering a reward for his
      capture were still to be seen in the shop windows of Hull, so after a
      brief but brilliant adventure Peace and Mrs. Thompson returned to
      Nottingham.
    </p>
    <p>
      Here, as the result of further successful exploits, Peace found a reward
      of L50 offered for his capture. On one occasion the detectives came into
      the room where Peace and his mistress were in bed. After politely
      expressing his surprise at seeing "Mrs. Bailey" in such a situation, one
      of the officers asked Peace his name. He gave it as John Ward, and
      described himself as a hawker of spectacles. He refused to get up and
      dress in the presence of the detectives who were obliging enough to go
      downstairs and wait his convenience. Peace seized the opportunity to slip
      out of the house and get away to another part of the town. From there he
      sent a note to Mrs. Thompson insisting on her joining him. He soon after
      left Nottingham, paid another brief visit to Hull, but finding that his
      wife's shop was still frequented by the police, whom he designated freely
      as "a lot of fools," determined to quit the North for good and begin life
      afresh in the ampler and safer field of London.
    </p>
    <p>
      II PEACE IN LONDON
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace's career in London extended over nearly two years, but they were
      years of copious achievement. In that comparatively short space of time,
      by the exercise of that art, to his natural gifts for which he had now
      added the wholesome tonic of experience, Peace passed from a poor and
      obscure lodging in a slum in Lambeth to the state and opulence of a
      comfortable suburban residence in Peckham. These were the halcyon days of
      Peace's enterprise in life. From No. 25 Stangate Street, Lambeth, the
      dealer in musical instruments, as Peace now described himself, sallied
      forth night after night, and in Camberwell and other parts of South London
      reaped the reward of skill and vigilance in entering other people's houses
      and carrying off their property. Though in the beginning there appeared to
      be but few musical instruments in Stangate Street to justify his reputed
      business, "Mr. Thompson," as he now called himself, explained that he was
      not wholly dependent on his business, as Mrs. Thompson "had money."
    </p>
    <p>
      So successful did the business prove that at the Christmas of 1877 Peace
      invited his daughter and her betrothed to come from Hull and spend the
      festive season with him. This, in spite of the presence of Mrs. Thompson,
      they consented to do. Peace, in a top hat and grey ulster, showed them the
      sights of London, always inquiring politely of a policeman if he found
      himself in any difficulty. At the end of the visit Peace gave his consent
      to his daughter's marriage with Mr. Bolsover, and before parting gave the
      young couple some excellent advice. For more reasons than one Peace was
      anxious to unite under the same roof Mrs. Peace and Mrs. Thompson. Things
      still prospering, Peace found himself able to remove from Lambeth to Crane
      Court, Greenwich, and before long to take a couple of adjoining houses in
      Billingsgate Street in the same district. These he furnished in style. In
      one he lived with Mrs. Thompson, while Mrs. Peace and her son, Willie,
      were persuaded after some difficulty to leave Hull and come to London to
      dwell in the other.
    </p>
    <p>
      But Greenwich was not to the taste of Mrs. Thompson. To gratify her wish,
      Peace, some time in May, 1877, removed the whole party to a house, No. 5,
      East Terrace, Evelina Road, Peckham. He paid thirty pounds a year for it,
      and obtained permission to build a stable for his pony and trap. When
      asked for his references, Peace replied by inviting the agent to dine with
      him at his house in Greenwich, a proceeding that seems to have removed all
      doubt from the agent's mind as to the desirability of the tenant.
    </p>
    <p>
      This now famous house in Peckham was of the ordinary type of suburban
      villa, with basement, ground floor, and one above; there were steps up to
      the front door, and a bow window to the front sitting-room. A garden at
      the back of the house ran down to the Chatham and Dover railway line. It
      was by an entrance at the back that Peace drove his horse and trap into
      the stable which he had erected in the garden. Though all living in the
      same house, Mrs. Peace, who passed as Mrs. Ward, and her son, Willie,
      inhabited the basement, while Peace and Mrs. Thompson occupied the best
      rooms on the ground floor. The house was fitted with Venetian blinds. In
      the drawing-room stood a good walnut suite of furniture; a Turkey carpet,
      gilded mirrors, a piano, an inlaid Spanish guitar, and, by the side of an
      elegant table, the beaded slippers of the good master of the house
      completed the elegance of the apartment. Everything confirmed Mr.
      Thompson's description of himself as a gentleman of independent means with
      a taste for scientific inventions. In association with a person of the
      name of Brion, Peace did, as a fact, patent an invention for raising
      sunken vessels, and it is said that in pursuing their project, the two men
      had obtained an interview with Mr. Plimsoll at the House of Commons. In
      any case, the Patent Gazette records the following grant:
    </p>
    <p>
      "2635 Henry Fersey Brion, 22 Philip Road, Peckham Rye, London, S.E., and
      John Thompson, 5 East Terrace, Evelina Road, Peckham Rye, London, S.E.,
      for an invention for raising sunken vessels by the displacement of water
      within the vessels by air and gases."
    </p>
    <p>
      At the time of his final capture Peace was engaged on other inventions,
      among them a smoke helmet for firemen, an improved brush for washing
      railway carriages, and a form of hydraulic tank. To the anxious policeman
      who, seeing a light in Mr. Thompson's house in the small hours of the
      morning, rang the bell to warn the old gentleman of the possible presence
      of burglars, this business of scientific inventions was sufficient
      explanation.
    </p>
    <p>
      Socially Mr. Thompson became quite a figure in the neighbourhood. He
      attended regularly the Sunday evening services at the parish church, and
      it must have been a matter of anxious concern to dear Mr. Thompson that
      during his stay in Peckham the vicarage was broken into by a burglar and
      an unsuccessful attempt made to steal the communion plate which was kept
      there.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Thompson was generous in giving and punctual in paying. He had his
      eccentricities. His love of birds and animals was remarkable. Cats, dogs,
      rabbits, guinea-pigs, canaries, parrots and cockatoos all found
      hospitality under his roof. It was certainly eccentricity in Mr. Thompson
      that he should wear different coloured wigs; and that his dark complexion
      should suggest the use of walnut juice. His love of music was evinced by
      the number of violins, banjoes, guitars, and other musical instruments
      that adorned his drawing-room. Tea and music formed the staple of the
      evening entertainments which Mr. and Mrs. Thompson would give occasionally
      to friendly neighbours. Not that the pleasures of conversation were
      neglected wholly in favour of art. The host was a voluble and animated
      talker, his face and body illustrating by appropriate twists and turns the
      force of his comments. The Russo-Turkish war, then raging, was a favourite
      theme of Mr. Thompson's. He asked, as we are still asking, what
      Christianity and civilisation mean by countenancing the horrors of war. He
      considered the British Government in the highest degree guilty in
      supporting the cruel Turks, a people whose sobriety seemed to him to be
      their only virtue, against the Christian Russians. He was confident that
      our Ministers would be punished for opposing the only Power which had
      shown any sympathy with suffering races. About ten o'clock Mr. Thompson,
      whose health, he said, could not stand late hours, would bid his guests
      good night, and by half-past ten the front door of No. 5, East Terrace,
      Evelina Road, would be locked and bolted, and the house plunged in
      darkness.
    </p>
    <p>
      Not that it must be supposed that family life at No. 5, East Terrace, was
      without its jars. These were due chiefly to the drunken habits of Mrs.
      Thompson. Peace was willing to overlook his mistress' failing as long as
      it was confined to the house. But Mrs. Thompson had an unfortunate habit
      of slipping out in an intoxicated condition, and chattering with the
      neighbours. As she was the repository of many a dangerous secret the
      inconvenience of her habit was serious. Peace was not the man to hesitate
      in the face of danger. On these occasions Mrs. Thompson was followed by
      Peace or his wife, brought back home and soundly beaten. To Hannah Peace
      there must have been some satisfaction in spying on her successful rival,
      for, in her own words, Peace never refused his mistress anything; he did
      not care what she cost him in dress; "she could swim in gold if she
      liked." Mrs. Thompson herself admitted that with the exception of such
      punishment as she brought on herself by her inebriety, Peace was always
      fond of her, and treated her with great kindness. It was she to whom he
      would show with pride the proceeds of his nightly labours, to whom he
      would look for a smile when he returned home from his expeditions, haggard
      and exhausted
    </p>
    <p>
      Through all dangers and difficulties the master was busy in the practice
      of his art. Night after night, with few intervals of repose, he would
      sally forth on a plundering adventure. If the job was a distant one, he
      would take his pony and trap. Peace was devoted to his pony, Tommy, and
      great was his grief when at the end of six months' devotion to duty Tommy
      died after a few days' sickness, during which his master attended him with
      unremitting care. Tommy had been bought in Greenwich for fourteen guineas,
      part of a sum of two hundred and fifty pounds which Peace netted from a
      rich haul of silver and bank-notes taken from a house in Denmark Hill.
      Besides the pony and trap, Peace would take with him on these expeditions
      a violin case containing his tools; at other times they would be stuffed
      into odd pockets made for the purpose in his trousers. These tools
      consisted of ten in all&mdash;a skeleton key, two pick-locks, a
      centre-bit, gimlet, gouge, chisel, vice jemmy and knife; a portable
      ladder, a revolver and life preserver completed his equipment.
    </p>
    <p>
      The range of Peace's activities extended as far as Southampton, Portsmouth
      and Southsea; but the bulk of his work was done in Blackheath, Streatham,
      Denmark Hill, and other suburbs of South London. Many dramatic stories are
      told of his exploits, but they rest for the most part on slender
      foundation. On one occasion, in getting on to a portico, he fell, and was
      impaled on some railings, fortunately in no vital part. His career as a
      burglar in London lasted from the beginning of the year 1877 until
      October, 1878. During that time this wanted man, under the very noses of
      the police, exercised with complete success his art as a burglar, working
      alone, depending wholly on his own mental and physical gifts, disposing in
      absolute secrecy of the proceeds of his work, and living openly the life
      of a respectable and industrious old gentleman.
    </p>
    <p>
      All the while the police were busily seeking Charles Peace, the murderer
      of Mr. Dyson. Once or twice they came near to capturing him. On one
      occasion a detective who had known Peace in Yorkshire met him in
      Farringdon Road, and pursued him up the steps of Holborn Viaduct, but just
      as the officer, at the top of the steps, reached out and was on the point
      of grabbing his man, Peace with lightning agility slipped through his
      fingers and disappeared. The police never had a shadow of suspicion that
      Mr. Thompson of Peckham was Charles Peace of Sheffield. They knew the
      former only as a polite and chatty old gentleman of a scientific turn of
      mind, who drove his own pony and trap, and had a fondness for music and
      keeping pet animals.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace made the mistake of outstaying his welcome in the neighbourhood of
      South-East London. Perhaps he hardly realised the extent to which his fame
      was spreading. During the last three months of Peace's career, Blackheath
      was agog at the number of successful burglaries committed in the very
      midst of its peaceful residents. The vigilance of the local police was
      aroused, the officers on night duty were only too anxious to effect the
      capture of the mysterious criminal.
    </p>
    <p>
      About two o'clock in the morning of October 10, 1878, a police constable,
      Robinson by name, saw a light appear suddenly in a window at the back of a
      house in St. John's Park, Blackheath, the residence of a Mr. Burness. Had
      the looked-for opportunity arrived? Was the mysterious visitor, the
      disturber of the peace of Blackheath, at his burglarious employment?
      Without delay Robinson summoned to his aid two of his colleagues. One of
      them went round to the front of the house and rang the bell, the other
      waited in the road outside, while Robinson stayed in the garden at the
      back. No sooner had the bell rung than Robinson saw a man come from the
      dining-room window which opened on to the garden, and make quickly down
      the path. Robinson followed him. The man turned; "Keep back!" he said, "or
      by God I'll shoot you!" Robinson came on. The man fired three shots from a
      revolver, all of which passed close to the officer's head. Robinson made
      another rush for him, the man fired another shot. It missed its mark. The
      constable closed with his would-be assassin, and struck him in the face.
      "I'll settle you this time," cried the man, and fired a fifth shot, which
      went through Robinson's arm just above the elbow. But, in spite of his
      wound, the valiant officer held his prisoner, succeeded in flinging him to
      the ground, and catching hold of the revolver that hung round the
      burglar's wrist, hit him on the head with it. Immediately after the other
      two constables came to the help of their colleague, and the struggling
      desperado was secured.
    </p>
    <p>
      Little did the police as they searched their battered and moaning prisoner
      realise the importance of their capture. When next morning Peace appeared
      before the magistrate at Greenwich Police Court he was not described by
      name&mdash;he had refused to give any&mdash;but as a half-caste about
      sixty years of age, of repellant aspect. He was remanded for a week. The
      first clue to the identity of their prisoner was afforded by a letter
      which Peace, unable apparently to endure the loneliness and suspense of
      prison any longer, wrote to his co-inventor Mr. Brion. It is dated
      November 2, and is signed "John Ward." Peace was disturbed at the absence
      of all news from his family. Immediately after his arrest, the home in
      Peckham had been broken up. Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Peace, taking with them
      some large boxes, had gone first to the house of a sister of Mrs.
      Thompson's in Nottingham, and a day or two later Mrs. Peace had left
      Nottingham for Sheffield. There she went to a house in Hazel Road,
      occupied by her son-in-law Bolsover, a working collier.(10)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (10) Later, Mrs. Peace was arrested and charged with being in possession
of stolen property. She was taken to London and tried at the Old Bailey
before Mr. Commissioner Kerr, but acquitted on the ground of her having
acted under the compulsion of her husband.
</pre>
    <p>
      It was no doubt to get news of his family that Peace wrote to Brion. But
      the letters are sufficiently ingenious. Peace represents himself as a
      truly penitent sinner who has got himself into a most unfortunate and
      unexpected "mess" by giving way to drink. The spelling of the letters is
      exaggeratedly illiterate. He asks Mr. Brion to take pity on him and not
      despise him as "his own famery has don," to write him a letter to "hease
      his trobel hart," if possible to come and see him. Mr. Brion complied with
      the request of the mysterious "John Ward," and on arriving at Newgate
      where Peace was awaiting trial, found himself in the presence of his
      friend and colleague, Mr. Thompson.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime the police were getting hot on the scent of the identity
      of "John Ward" with the great criminal who in spite of all their efforts
      had eluded them for two years. The honour and profit of putting the police
      on the right scent were claimed by Mrs. Thompson. To her Peace had
      contrived to get a letter conveyed about the same time that he wrote to
      Mr. Brion. It is addressed to his "dearly beloved wife." He asks pardon
      for the "drunken madness" that has involved him in his present trouble,
      and gives her the names of certain witnesses whom he would wish to be
      called to prove his independent means and his dealings in musical
      instruments. It is, he writes, his first offence, and as he has "never
      been in prison before," begs her not to feel it a disgrace to come and see
      him there. But Peace was leaning on a broken reed. Loyalty does not appear
      to have been Susan Thompson's strong point. In her own words she "was not
      of the sentimental sort." The "traitress Sue," as she is called by
      chroniclers of the time, had fallen a victim to the wiles of the police.
      Since, after Peace's arrest, she had been in possession of a certain
      amount of stolen property, it was easier no doubt to persuade her to be
      frank.
    </p>
    <p>
      In any case, we find that on February 5, 1879, the day after Peace had
      been sentenced to death for the murder of Dyson, Mrs. Thompson appealed to
      the Treasury for the reward of L100 offered for Peace's conviction. She
      based her application on information which she said she had supplied to
      the police officers in charge of the case on November 5 in the previous
      year, the very day on which Peace had first written to her from Newgate.
      In reply to her letter the Treasury referred "Mrs. S. Bailey, alias
      Thompson," to the Home Office, but whether she received from that office
      the price of blood history does not relate.
    </p>
    <p>
      The police scouted the idea that any revelation of hers had assisted them
      to identify "John Ward" with Charles Peace. They said that it was
      information given them in Peckham, no doubt by Mr. Brion, who, on learning
      the deplorable character of his coadjutor, had placed himself unreservedly
      in their hands, which first set them on the track. From Peckham they went
      to Nottingham, where they no doubt came across Sue Thompson, and thence to
      Sheffield, where on November 6 they visited the house in Hazel Road,
      occupied by Mrs. Peace and her daughter, Mrs. Bolsover. There they found
      two of the boxes which Mrs. Peace had brought with her from Peckham.
      Besides stolen property, these boxes contained evidence of the identity of
      Ward with Peace. A constable who had known Peace well in Sheffield was
      sent to Newgate, and taken into the yard where the prisoners awaiting
      trial were exercising. As they passed round, the constable pointed to the
      fifth man: "That's Peace," he said, "I'd know him anywhere." The man left
      the ranks and, coming up to the constable, asked earnestly, "What do you
      want me for?" but the Governor ordered him to go on with his walk.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was as John Ward, alias Charles Peace, that Peace, on November 19,
      1878, was put on his trial for burglary and the attempted murder of Police
      Constable Robinson, at the Old Bailey before Mr. Justice Hawkins. His age
      was given in the calendar as sixty, though Peace was actually forty-six.
      The evidence against the prisoner was clear enough. All Mr. Montagu
      Williams could urge in his defence was that Peace had never intended to
      kill the officer, merely to frighten him. The jury found Peace guilty of
      attempted murder. Asked if he had anything to say why judgment should not
      be passed upon him, he addressed the Judge. He protested that he had not
      been fairly dealt with, that he never intended to kill the prosecutor,
      that the pistol was one that went off very easily, and that the last shot
      had been fired by accident. "I really did not know," he said, "that the
      pistol was loaded, and I hope, my lord, that you will have mercy on me. I
      feel that I have disgraced myself, I am not fit either to live or die. I
      am not prepared to meet my God, but still I feel that my career has been
      made to appear much worse than it really is. Oh, my lord, do have mercy on
      me; do give me one chance of repenting and of preparing to meet my God.
      Do, my lord, have mercy on me; and I assure you that you shall never
      repent it. As you hope for mercy yourself at the hands of the great God,
      do have mercy on me, and give me a chance of redeeming my character and
      preparing myself to meet my God. I pray, and beseech you to have mercy
      upon me."
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace's assumption of pitiable senility, sustained throughout the trial,
      though it imposed on Sir Henry Hawkins, failed to melt his heart. He told
      Peace that he did not believe his statement that he had fired the pistol
      merely to frighten the constable; had not Robinson guarded his head with
      his arm he would have been wounded fatally, and Peace condemned to death.
      He did not consider it necessary, he said, to make an inquiry into Peace's
      antecedents; he was a desperate burglar, and there was an end of the
      matter. Notwithstanding his age, Mr. Justice Hawkins felt it his duty to
      sentence him to penal servitude for life. The severity of the sentence was
      undoubtedly a painful surprise to Peace; to a man of sixty years of age it
      would be no doubt less terrible, but to a man of forty-six it was
      crushing.
    </p>
    <p>
      Not that Peace was fated to serve any great part of his sentence.
    </p>
    <p>
      With as little delay as possible he was to be called on to answer to the
      murder of Arthur Dyson. The buxom widow of the murdered man had been found
      in America, whither she had returned after her husband's death. She was
      quite ready to come to England to give evidence against her husband's
      murderer. On January 17, 1879, Peace was taken from Pentonville prison,
      where he was serving his sentence, and conveyed by an early morning train
      to Sheffield. There at the Town Hall he appeared before the stipendiary
      magistrate, and was charged with the murder of Arthur Dyson. When he saw
      Mrs. Dyson enter the witness box and tell her story of the crime, he must
      have realised that his case was desperate. Her cross-examination was
      adjourned to the next hearing, and Peace was taken back to London. On the
      22nd, the day of the second hearing in Sheffield, an enormous crowd had
      assembled outside the Town Hall. Inside the court an anxious and expectant
      audiience{sic}, among them Mrs. Dyson, in the words of a contemporary
      reporter, "stylish and cheerful," awaited the appearance of the
      protagonist. Great was the disappointment and eager the excitement when
      the stipendiary came into the court about a quarter past ten and stated
      that Peace had attempted to escape that morning on the journey from London
      to Sheffield, and that in consequence of his injuries the case would be
      adjourned for eight days.
    </p>
    <p>
      What had happened was this. Peace had left King's Cross by the 5.15 train
      that morning, due to arrive at Sheffield at 8.45. From the very
      commencement of the journey he had been wilful and troublesome. He kept
      making excuses for leaving the carriage whenever the train stopped. To
      obviate this nuisance the two warders, in whose charge he was, had
      provided themselves with little bags which Peace could use when he wished
      and then throw out of the window. Just after the train passed Worksop,
      Peace asked for one of the bags. When the window was lowered to allow the
      bag to be thrown away, Peace with lightning agility took a flying leap
      through it. One of the warders caught him by the left foot. Peace, hanging
      from the carriage, grasped the footboard with his hands and kept kicking
      the warder as hard as he could with his right foot. The other warder,
      unable to get to the window to help his colleague, was making vain efforts
      to stop the train by pulling the communication cord. For two miles the
      train ran on, Peace struggling desperately to escape. At last he succeeded
      in kicking off his left shoe, and dropped on to the line. The train ran on
      another mile until, with the assistance of some gentlemen in other
      carriages, the warders were able to get it pulled up. They immediately
      hurried back along the line, and there, near a place called Kineton Park,
      they found their prisoner lying in the footway, apparently unconscious and
      bleeding from a severe wound in the scalp. A slow train from Sheffield
      stopped to pick up the injured man. As he was lifted into the guard's van,
      he asked them to cover him up as he was cold. On arriving at Sheffield,
      Peace was taken to the Police Station and there made as comfortable as
      possible in one of the cells. Even then he had energy enough to be
      troublesome over taking the brandy ordered for him by the surgeon, until
      one of the officers told "Charley" they would have none of his
      hanky-panky, and he had got to take it. "All right," said Peace, "give me
      a minute," after which he swallowed contentedly a couple of gills of the
      genial spirit.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace's daring feat was not, according to his own account, a mere attempt
      to escape from the clutches of the law; it was noble and Roman in its
      purpose. This is what he told his stepson, Willie Ward: "I saw from the
      way I was guarded all the way down from London and all the way back, when
      I came for my first trial, that I could not get away from the warders, and
      I knew I could not jump from an express train without being killed. I took
      a look at Darnall as I went down and as I went back, and after I was put
      in my cell, I thought it all over. I felt that I could not get away, and
      then I made up my mind to kill myself. I got two bits of paper and pricked
      on them the words, 'Bury me at Darnall. God bless you all!' With a bit of
      black dirt that I found on the floor of my cell I wrote the same words on
      another piece of paper, and then I hid them in my clothes. My hope was
      that, when I jumped from the train I should be cut to pieces under the
      wheels. Then I should have been taken to the Duke of York (a public-house
      at Darnall) and there would have been an inquest over me. As soon as the
      inquest was over you would have claimed my body, found the pieces of
      paper, and then you would have buried me at Darnall."
    </p>
    <p>
      This statement of Peace is no doubt in the main correct. But it is
      difficult to believe that there was not present to his mind the sporting
      chance that he might not be killed in leaping from the train, in which
      event he would no doubt have done his best to get away, trusting to his
      considerable powers of ingenious disguise to elude pursuit. But such a
      chance was remote. Peace had faced boldly the possibility of a dreadful
      death.
    </p>
    <p>
      With that strain of domestic sentiment, which would appear to have been a
      marked characteristic of his family, Peace was the more ready to cheat the
      gallows in the hope of being by that means buried decently at Darnall. It
      was at Darnall that he had spent some months of comparative calm in his
      tempestuous career, and it was at Darnall that he had first met Mrs.
      Dyson. Another and more practical motive that may have urged Peace to
      attempt to injure seriously, if not kill himself, was the hope of thereby
      delaying his trial. If the magisterial investigation in Sheffield were
      completed before the end of January, Peace could be committed for trial to
      the ensuing Leeds Assizes which commenced in the first week in February.
      If he were injured too seriously, this would not be possible. Here again
      he was doomed to disappointment.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace recovered so well from the results of his adventure on the railway
      that the doctor pronounced him fit to appear for his second examination
      before the magistrate on January 30. To avoid excitement, both on the part
      of the prisoner and the public, the court sat in one of the corridors of
      the Town Hall. The scene is described as dismal, dark and cheerless. The
      proceedings took place by candlelight, and Peace, who was seated in an
      armchair, complained frequently of the cold. At other times he moaned and
      groaned and protested against the injustice with which he was being
      treated. But the absence of any audience rather dashed the effect of his
      laments.
    </p>
    <p>
      The most interesting part of the proceedings was the cross-examination of
      Mrs. Dyson by Mr. Clegg, the prisoner's solicitor.
    </p>
    <p>
      Its purpose was to show that Mrs. Dyson had been on more intimate terms
      with Peace than she was ready to admit, and that Dyson had been shot by
      Peace in the course of a struggle, in which the former had been the
      aggressor.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the first part of his task Mr. Clegg met with some success. Mrs. Dyson,
      whose memory was certainly eccentric&mdash;she could not, she said,
      remember the year in which she had been married&mdash;was obliged to admit
      that she had been in the habit of going to Peace's house, that she had
      been alone with him to public-houses and places of entertainment, and that
      she and Peace had been photographed together during the summer fair at
      Sheffield. She could not "to her knowledge" recollect having told the
      landlord of a public-house to charge her drink to Peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      A great deal of Mrs. Dyson's cross-examination turned on a bundle of
      letters that had been found near the scene of Dyson's murder on the
      morning following the crime. These letters consisted for the most part of
      notes, written in pencil on scraps of paper, purporting to have been sent
      from Mrs. Dyson to Peace. In many of them she asks for money to get drink,
      others refer to opportunities for their meetings in the absence of Dyson;
      there are kind messages to members of Peace's family, his wife and
      daughter, and urgent directions to Peace to hold his tongue and not give
      ground for suspicion as to their relations. This bundle of letters
      contained also the card which Dyson had thrown into Peace's garden
      requesting him not to interfere with his family. According to the theory
      of the defence, these letters had been written by Mrs. Dyson to Peace, and
      went to prove the intimacy of their relations. At the inquest after her
      husband's murder, Mrs. Dyson had been questioned by the coroner about
      these letters. She denied that she had ever written to Peace; in fact, she
      said, she "never did write." It was stated that Dyson himself had seen the
      letters, and declared them to be forgeries written by Peace or members of
      his family for the purpose of annoyance. Nevertheless, before the
      Sheffield magistrate Mr. Clegg thought it his duty to cross-examine Mrs.
      Dyson closely as to their authorship. He asked her to write out a passage
      from one of them: "You can give me something as a keepsake if you like,
      but I don't like to be covetous, and to take them from your wife and
      daughter. Love to all!" Mrs. Dyson refused to admit any likeness between
      what she had written and the handwriting of the letter in question.
      Another passage ran: "Will see you as soon as I possibly can. I think it
      would be easier after you move; he won't watch so. The r&mdash;g fits the
      little finger. Many thanks and love to&mdash;Jennie (Peace's daughter
      Jane). I will tell you what I thought of when I see you about arranging
      matters. Excuse this scribbling." In answer to Mr. Clegg, Mrs. Dyson
      admitted that Peace had given her a ring, which she had worn for a short
      time on her little finger.
    </p>
    <p>
      Another letter ran: "If you have a note for me, send now whilst he is out;
      but you must not venture, for he is watching, and you cannot be too
      careful. Hope your foot is better. I went to Sheffield yesterday, but I
      could not see you anywhere. Were you out? Love to Jane." Mrs. Dyson denied
      that she had known of an accident which Peace had had to his foot at this
      time. In spite of the ruling of the magistrate that Mr. Clegg had put
      forward quite enough, if true, to damage Mrs. Dyson's credibility, he
      continued to press her as to her authorship of these notes and letters,
      but Mrs. Dyson was firm in her repudiation of them. She was equally firm
      in denying that anything in the nature of a struggle had taken place
      between Peace and her husband previous to his murder.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the conclusion of Mrs. Dyson's evidence the prisoner was committed to
      take his trial at the Leeds Assizes, which commenced the week following.
      Peace, who had groaned and moaned and constantly interrupted the
      proceedings, protested his innocence, and complained that his witnesses
      had not been called. The apprehension with which this daring malefactor
      was regarded by the authorities is shown by this clandestine hearing of
      his case in a cold corridor of the Town Hall, and the rapidity with which
      his trial followed on his committal. There is an appearance almost of
      precipitation in the haste with which Peace was bustled to his doom. After
      his committal he was taken to Wakefield Prison, and a few days later to
      Armley Jail, there to await his trial.
    </p>
    <p>
      This began on February 4, and lasted one day. Mr. Justice Lopes, who had
      tried vainly to persuade the Manchester Grand Jury to throw out the bill
      in the case of the brothers Habron, was the presiding judge. Mr. Campbell
      Foster, Q.C., led for the prosecution. Peace was defended by Mr. Frank
      Lockwood, then rising into that popular success at the bar which some
      fifteen years later made him Solicitor-General, and but for his premature
      death would have raised him to even higher honours in his profession.
    </p>
    <p>
      In addressing the jury, both Mr. Campbell Foster and Mr. Lockwood took
      occasion to protest against the recklessness with which the press of the
      day, both high and low, had circulated stories and rumours about the
      interesting convict. As early as November in 1878 one leading London daily
      newspaper had said that "it was now established beyond doubt that the
      burglar captured by Police Constable Robinson was one and the same as the
      Banner Cross murderer." Since then, as the public excitement grew and the
      facts of Peace's extraordinary career came to light, the press had
      responded loyally to the demands of the greedy lovers of sensation, and
      piled fiction on fact with generous profusion. "Never," said Mr. Lockwood,
      "in the whole course of his experience&mdash;and he defied any of his
      learned friends to quote an experience&mdash;had there been such an
      attempt made on the part of those who should be most careful of all others
      to preserve the liberties of their fellowmen and to preserve the dignity
      of the tribunals of justice to determine the guilt of a man." Peace
      exclaimed "Hear, hear!" as Mr. Lockwood went on to say that "for the sake
      of snatching paltry pence from the public, these persons had wickedly
      sought to prejudice the prisoner's life." Allowing for Mr. Lockwood's zeal
      as an advocate, there can be no question that, had Peace chosen or been in
      a position to take proceedings, more than one newspaper had at this time
      laid itself open to prosecution for contempt of Court. The Times was not
      far wrong in saying that, since Muller murdered Mr. Briggs on the North
      London Railway and the poisonings of William Palmer, no criminal case had
      created such excitement as that of Charles Peace. The fact that property
      seemed to be no more sacred to him than life aggravated in a singular
      degree the resentment of a commercial people.
    </p>
    <p>
      The first witness called by the prosecution was Mrs. Dyson. She described
      how on the night of November 29, 1876, she had come out of the outhouse in
      the yard at the back of her house, and found herself confronted by Peace
      holding a revolver; how he said: "Speak, or I'll fire!" and the sequence
      of events already related up to the moment when Dyson fell, shot in the
      temple.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Lockwood commenced his cross-examination of Mrs. Dyson by endeavouring
      to get from her an admission; the most important to the defence, that
      Dyson had caught hold of Peace after the first shot had been fired, and
      that in the struggle which ensued, the revolver had gone off by accident.
      But he was not very successful. He put it to Mrs. Dyson that before the
      magistrate at Sheffield she had said: "I can't say my husband did not get
      hold of the prisoner." "Put in the little word 'try,' please," answered
      Mrs. Dyson. In spite of Mr. Lockwood's questions, she maintained that,
      though her husband may have attempted to get hold of Peace, he did not
      succeed in doing so. As she was the only witness to the shooting there was
      no one to contradict her statement.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Lockwood fared better when he came to deal with the relations of Mrs.
      Dyson with Peace previous to the crime. Mrs. Dyson admitted that in the
      spring of 1876 her husband had objected to her friendship with Peace, and
      that nevertheless, in the following summer, she and Peace had been
      photographed together at the Sheffield fair. She made a vain attempt to
      escape from such an admission by trying to shift the occasion of the
      summer fair to the previous year, 1875, but Mr. Lockwood put it to her
      that she had not come to Darnall, where she first met Peace, until the end
      of that year. Finally he drove her to say that she could not remember when
      she came to Darnall, whether in 1873, 1874, 1875, or 1876. She admitted
      that she had accepted a ring from Peace, but could not remember whether
      she had shown it to her husband. She had been perhaps twice with Peace to
      the Marquis of Waterford public-house, and once to the Star Music Hall.
      She could not swear one way or the other whether she had charged to
      Peace's account drink consumed by her at an inn in Darnall called the
      Half-way House. Confronted with a little girl and a man, whom Mr. Lockwood
      suggested she had employed to carry notes to Peace, Mrs. Dyson said that
      these were merely receipts for pictures which he had framed for her. On
      the day before her husband's murder, Mrs. Dyson was at the Stag Hotel at
      Sharrow with a little boy belonging to a neighbour. A man followed her in
      and sat beside her, and afterwards followed her out. In answer to Mr.
      Lockwood, Mrs. Dyson would "almost swear" the man was not Peace; he had
      spoken to her, but she could not remember whether she had spoken to him or
      not. She denied that this man had said to her that he would come and see
      her the next night. As the result of a parting shot Mr. Lockwood obtained
      from Mrs. Dyson a reluctant admission that she had been "slightly
      inebriated" at the Half-way House in Darnall, but had not to her knowledge
      been turned out of the house on that account. "You may not have known you
      were inebriated?" suggested Mr. Lockwood. "I always know what I am doing,"
      was Mrs. Dyson's reply, to which an unfriendly critic might have replied
      that she did not apparently know with anything like certainty what she had
      been doing during the last three or four years. In commenting on the trial
      the following day, the Times stigmatised as "feeble" the prevarications by
      which Mrs. Dyson tried to explain away her intimacy with Peace. In this
      part of his cross-examination Mr. Lockwood had made it appear at least
      highly probable that there had been a much closer relationship between
      Mrs. Dyson and Peace than the former was willing to acknowledge.
    </p>
    <p>
      The evidence of Mrs. Dyson was followed by that of five persons who had
      either seen Peace in the neighbourhood of Banner Cross Terrace on the
      night of the murder, or heard the screams and shots that accompanied it. A
      woman, Mrs. Gregory, whose house was between that of the Dysons and the
      passage in which Dyson was shot, said that she had heard the noise of the
      clogs Mrs. Dyson was wearing as she went across the yard. A minute later
      she heard a scream. She opened her back door and saw Dyson standing by his
      own. She told him to go to his wife. She then went back into her house,
      and almost directly after heard two shots, followed by another scream, but
      no sound as of any scuffling.
    </p>
    <p>
      Another witness was a labourer named Brassington. He was a stranger to
      Peace, but stated that about eight o'clock on the night of the murder a
      man came up to him outside the Banner Cross Hotel, a few yards from
      Dyson's house. He was standing under a gas lamp, and it was a bright
      moonlight night. The man asked him if he knew of any strange people who
      had come to live in the neighbourhood. Brassington answered that he did
      not. The man then produced a bundle of letters which he asked Brassington
      to read. But Brassington declined, as reading was not one of his
      accomplishments. The man then said that "he would make it a warm 'un for
      those strange folks before morning&mdash;he would shoot both of them," and
      went off in the direction of Dyson's house. Brassington swore positively
      that Peace was the stranger who had accosted him that night, and Mr.
      Lockwood failed to shake him in his evidence. Nor could Mr. Lockwood
      persuade the surgeon who was called to Dyson at the time of his death to
      admit that the marks on the nose and chin of the dead man could have been
      caused by a blow; they were merely abrasions of the skin caused by the
      wounded man falling to the ground.
    </p>
    <p>
      Evidence was then given as to threats uttered by Peace against the Dysons
      in the July of 1876, and as to his arrest at Blackheath in the October of
      1878. The revolver taken from Peace that night was produced, and it was
      shown that the rifling of the bullet extracted from Dyson's head was the
      same as that of the bullet fired from the revolver carried by Peace at the
      time of his capture.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Campbell Foster wanted to put in as evidence the card that Dyson had
      flung into Peace's garden at Darnall requesting him not to interfere with
      his family. This card had been found among the bundle of letters dropped
      by Peace near the scene of the murder. Mr. Lockwood objected to the
      admission of the card unless all the letters were admitted at the same
      time. The Judge ruled that both the card and the letters were
      inadmissible, as irrelevant to the issue; Mr. Lockwood had, he said, very
      properly cross-examined Mrs. Dyson on these letters to test her
      credibility, but he was bound by her answers and could not contradict her
      by introducing them as evidence in the case.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Lockwood in his address to the jury did his best to persuade them that
      the death of Dyson was the accidental result of a struggle between Peace
      and himself. He suggested that Mrs. Dyson had left her house that night
      for the purpose of meeting Peace, and that Dyson, who was jealous of his
      wife's intimacy with him, had gone out to find her; that Dyson, seeing
      Peace, had caught hold of him; and that the revolver had gone off
      accidentally as Dyson tried to wrest it from his adversary. He repudiated
      the suggestion of Mr. Foster that the persons he had confronted with Mrs.
      Dyson in the course of his cross-examination had been hired for a paltry
      sum to come into court and lie.
    </p>
    <p>
      Twice, both at the beginning and the end of his speech, Mr. Lockwood urged
      as a reason for the jury being tender in taking Peace's life that he was
      in such a state of wickedness as to be quite unprepared to meet death.
      Both times that his counsel put forward this curious plea, Peace raised
      his eyes to heaven and exclaimed "I am not fit to die."
    </p>
    <p>
      Mr. Justice Lopes in summing up described as an "absolute surmise" the
      theory of the accidental discharge of the pistol. He asked the jury to
      take Peace's revolver in their hands and try the trigger, so as to see for
      themselves whether it was likely to go off accidentally or not. He pointed
      out that the pistol produced might not have been the pistol used at Banner
      Cross; at the same time the bullet fired in November, 1876, bore marks
      such as would have been produced had it been fired from the pistol taken
      from Peace at Blackheath in October, 1878. He said that Mr. Lockwood had
      been perfectly justified in his attempt to discredit the evidence of Mrs.
      Dyson, but the case did not rest on her evidence alone. In her evidence as
      to the threats uttered by Peace in July, 1876, Mrs. Dyson was corroborated
      by three other witnesses. In the Judge's opinion it was clearly proved
      that no struggle or scuffle had taken place before the murder. If the
      defence, he concluded, rested on no solid foundation, then the jury must
      do their duty to the community at large and by the oath they had sworn.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was a quarter past seven when the jury retired. Ten minutes later they
      came back into court with a verdict of guilty. Asked if he had anything to
      say, Peace in a faint voice replied, "It is no use my saying anything."
      The Judge, declining very properly to aggravate the prisoner's feelings by
      "a recapitulation of any portion of the details of what I fear, I can only
      call your criminal career," passed on him sentence of death. Peace
      accepted his fate with composure.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before we proceed to describe the last days of Peace on earth, let us
      finish with the two women who had succeeded Mrs. Peace in his ardent
      affections.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few days after Peace's execution Mrs. Dyson left England for America,
      but before going she left behind her a narrative intended to contradict
      the imputations which she felt had been made against her moral character.
      An Irishwoman by birth, she said that she had gone to America when she was
      fifteen years old.
    </p>
    <p>
      There she met and married Dyson, a civil engineer on the Atlantic and
      Great Western Railway. Theirs was a rough and arduous life. But Mrs. Dyson
      was thoroughly happy in driving her husband about in a buggy among bears
      and creeks. She did not know fear and loved danger: "My husband loved me
      and I loved him, and in his company and in driving him about in this wild
      kind of fashion I derived much pleasure." However, Mr. Dyson's health
      broke down, and he was obliged to return to England. It was at Darnall
      that the fatal acquaintance with Peace began. Living next door but one to
      the Dysons, Peace took the opportunity of introducing himself, and Mr.
      Dyson "being a gentleman," took polite notice of his advances. He became a
      constant visitor at the house. But after a time Peace began to show that
      he was not the gentleman Mr. Dyson was. He disgusted the latter by
      offering to show him improper pictures and "the sights of the town" of
      Sheffield.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Dysons tried to shake off the unwelcome acquaintance, but that was
      easier said than done. By this time Peace had set his heart on making Mrs.
      Dyson leave her husband. He kept trying to persuade her to go to
      Manchester with him, where he would take a cigar or picture shop, to which
      Mrs. Dyson, in fine clothes and jewelry, should lend the charm of her
      comely presence. He offered her a sealskin jacket, yards of silk, a gold
      watch. She should, he said, live in Manchester like a lady, to which Mrs.
      Dyson replied coldly that she had always lived like one and should
      continue to do so quite independently of him. But Peace would listen to no
      refusal, however decided its tone. Dyson threw over the card into Peace's
      garden. This only served to aggravate his determination to possess himself
      of the wife. He would listen at keyholes, leer in at the window, and
      follow Mrs. Dyson wherever she went. When she was photographed at the
      fair, she found that Peace had stood behind her chair and by that means
      got himself included in the picture. At times he had threatened her with a
      revolver. On one occasion when he was more insulting than usual, Mrs.
      Dyson forgot her fear of him and gave him a thrashing. Peace threatened
      "to make her so that neither man nor woman should look at her, and then he
      would have her all to himself." It was with some purpose of this kind,
      Mrs. Dyson suggested, that Peace stole a photograph of herself out of a
      locket, intending to make some improper use of it. At last, in
      desperation, the Dysons moved to Banner Cross. From the day of their
      arrival there until the murder, Mrs. Dyson never saw Peace. She denied
      altogether having been in his company the night before the murder. The
      letters were "bare forgeries," written by Peace or members of his family
      to get her into their power.
    </p>
    <p>
      Against the advice of all her friends Mrs. Dyson had come back from
      America to give evidence against Peace. To the detective who saw her at
      Cleveland she said, "I will go back if I have to walk on my head all the
      way"; and though she little knew what she would have to go through in
      giving her evidence, she would do it again under the circumstances. "My
      opinion is," she said, "that Peace is a perfect demon&mdash;not a man. I
      am told that since he has been sentenced to death he has become a changed
      character. That I don't believe. The place to which the wicked go is not
      bad enough for him. I think its occupants, bad as they might be, are too
      good to be where he is. No matter where he goes, I am satisfied that there
      will be hell. Not even a Shakespeare could adequately paint such a man as
      he has been. My lifelong regret will be that I ever knew him."
    </p>
    <p>
      With these few earnest words Mrs. Dyson quitted the shores of England,
      hardly clearing up the mystery of her actual relations with Peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      A woman with whom Mrs. Dyson very much resented finding herself classed&mdash;inebriety
      would appear to have been their only common weakness&mdash;was Mrs.
      Thompson, the "traitress Sue." In spite of the fact that on February 5
      Mrs. Thompson had applied to the Treasury for L100, blood money due her
      for assisting the police in the identification of Peace, she was at the
      same time carrying on a friendly correspondence with her lover and making
      attempts to see him. Peace had written to her before his trial hoping she
      would not forsake him; "you have been my bosom friend, and you have
      ofttimes said you loved me, that you would die for me." He asked her to
      sell some goods which he had left with her in order to raise money for his
      defence. The traitress replied on January 27 that she had already sold
      everything and shared the proceeds with Mrs. Peace. "You are doing me
      great injustice," she wrote, "by saying that I have been out to 'work'
      with you. Do not die with such a base falsehood on your conscience, for
      you know I am young and have my living and character to redeem. I pity you
      and myself to think we should have met." After his condemnation Mrs.
      Thompson made repeated efforts to see Peace, coming to Leeds for the
      purpose. Peace wrote a letter on February 9 to his "poor Sue," asking her
      to come to the prison. But, partly at the wish of Peace's relatives and
      for reasons of their own, a permission given Mrs. Thompson by the
      authorities to visit the convict was suddenly withdrawn, and she never saw
      him again.
    </p>
    <p>
      III HIS TRIAL AND EXECUTION
    </p>
    <p>
      In the lives of those famous men who have perished on the scaffold their
      behaviour during the interval between their condemnation and their
      execution has always been the subject of curiosity and interest.
    </p>
    <p>
      It may be said at once that nothing could have been more deeply religious,
      more sincerely repentant, more Christian to all appearances than Peace's
      conduct and demeanour in the last weeks of his life. He threw himself into
      the work of atonement with the same uncompromising zeal and energy that he
      had displayed as a burglar. By his death a truly welcome and effective
      recruit was lost to the ranks of the contrite and converted sinners.
      However powerless as a controlling force&mdash;and he admitted it&mdash;his
      belief in God and the devil may have been in the past, that belief was
      assured and confident, and in the presence of death proclaimed itself with
      vigour, not in words merely, but in deeds.
    </p>
    <p>
      In obedience to the wishes of his family, Peace had refrained from seeing
      Sue Thompson. This was at some sacrifice, for he wished very much to see
      her and to the last, though he knew that she had betrayed him, sent her
      affectionate and forgiving messages. These were transmitted to Sue by Mr.
      Brion. This disingenuous gentleman was a fellow-applicant with Sue to the
      Treasury for pecuniary recognition of his efforts in bringing about the
      identification of Peace, and furnishing the police with information as to
      the convict's disposal of his stolen property. In his zeal he had even
      gone so far as to play the role of an accomplice of Peace, and by this
      means discovered a place in Petticoat Lane where the burglar got rid of
      some of his booty.
    </p>
    <p>
      After Peace's condemnation Mr. Brion visited him in Armley Jail. His
      purpose in doing so was to wring from his co-inventor an admission that
      the inventions which they had patented together were his work alone. Peace
      denied this, but offered to sell his share for L50. Brion refused the
      offer, and persisted in his assertion that Peace had got his name attached
      to the patents by undue influence, whatever that might mean. Peace, after
      wrestling with the spirit, gave way. "Very well, my friend," he said, "let
      it be as you say. I have not cheated you, Heaven knows. But I also know
      that this infamy of mine has been the cause of bringing harm to you, which
      is the last thing I should have wished to have caused to my friend." A
      deed of gift was drawn up, making over to Brion Peace's share in their
      inventions; this Peace handed to Brion as the price of the latter's
      precious forgiveness and a token of the sincerity of his colleague's
      repentance. Thus, as has often happened in this sad world, was
      disreputable genius exploited once again by smug mediocrity. Mr. Brion,
      having got all he wanted, left the prison, assuring the Governor that
      Peace's repentance was "all bunkum," and advising, with commendable
      anxiety for the public good, that the warders in the condemned cell should
      be doubled.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace had one act of atonement to discharge more urgent than displaying
      Christian forbearance towards ignoble associates. That was the righting of
      William Habron, who was now serving the third year of his life sentence
      for the murder of Constable Cock at Whalley Range. Peace sent for the
      Governor of the jail a few days before his execution and obtained from him
      the materials necessary for drawing up a plan. Peace was quite an adept at
      making plans; he had already made an excellent one of the scene of Dyson's
      murder. He now drew a plan of the place where Cock had been shot, gave a
      detailed account of how he came by his death, and made a full confession
      of his own guilt.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the confession he described how, some days before the burglary, he had,
      according to his custom, "spotted" the house at Whalley Range. In order to
      do this he always dressed himself respectably, because he had found that
      the police never suspected anyone who wore good clothes. On the night of
      the crime he passed two policemen on the road to the house. He had gone
      into the grounds and was about to begin operations when he heard a rustle
      behind him and saw a policeman, whom he recognised as one of those he had
      met in the road, enter the garden. With his well-known agility Peace
      climbed on to the wall, and dropped on to the other side, only to find
      himself almost in the arms of the second policeman. Peace warned the
      officer to stand back and fired his revolver wide of him. But, as Peace
      said, "these Manchester policemen are a very obstinate lot." The constable
      took out his truncheon. Peace fired again and killed him.
    </p>
    <p>
      Soon after the murderer saw in the newspapers that two men had been
      arrested for the crime. "This greatly interested me," said Peace. "I
      always had a liking to be present at trials, as the public no doubt know
      by this time." So he went to Manchester Assizes and saw William Habron
      sentenced to death. "People will say," he said, "that I was a hardened
      wretch for allowing an innocent man to suffer for the crime of which I was
      guilty but what man would have given himself up under such circumstances,
      knowing as I did that I should certainly be hanged?" Peace's view of the
      question was a purely practical one: "Now that I am going to forfeit my
      own life and feel that I have nothing to gain by further secrecy, I think
      it is right in the sight of God and man to clear this innocent young man."
      It would have been more right in the sight of God and man to have done it
      before, but then Peace admitted that during all his career he had allowed
      neither God nor man to influence his actions.
    </p>
    <p>
      How many men in the situation of Peace at the time, with the certainty of
      death before him if he confessed, would have sacrificed themselves to save
      an innocent man? Cold-blooded heroism of this kind is rare in the annals
      of crime. Nor did Peace claim to have anything of the hero about him.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     "Lion-hearted I've lived,
     And when my time comes
     Lion-hearted I'll die."
</pre>
    <p>
      Though fond of repeating this piece of doggerel, Peace would have been the
      last man to have attributed to himself all those qualities associated
      symbolically with the lion.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few days before his execution Peace was visited in his prison by Mr.
      Littlewood, the Vicar of Darnall. Mr. Littlewood had known Peace a few
      years before, when he had been chaplain at Wakefield Prison. "Well, my old
      friend Peace," he said as he entered the cell, "how are you to-day?" "'I
      am very poorly, sir," replied the convict, "but I am exceedingly pleased
      to see you." Mr. Littlewood assured Peace that there was at any rate one
      person in the world who had deep sympathy with him, and that was himself.
      Peace burst into tears. He expressed a wish to unburden himself to the
      vicar, but before doing so, asked for his assurance that he believed in
      the truth and sincerity of what he was about to say to him. He said that
      he preferred to be hanged to lingering out his life in penal servitude,
      that he was grieved and repentant for his past life. "If I could undo, or
      make amends for anything I have done, I would suffer my body as I now
      stand to be cut in pieces inch by inch. I feel, sir, that I am too bad to
      live or die, and having this feeling I cannot think that either you or
      anyone else would believe me, and that is the reason why I ask you so much
      to try to be assured that you do not think I am telling lies. I call my
      God to witness that all I am saying and wish to say shall be the truth&mdash;the
      whole truth&mdash;nothing but the truth." Mr. Littlewood said that, after
      carefully watching Peace and having regard to his experience of some of
      the most hardened of criminals during his service in Wakefield Prison, he
      felt convinced that Peace was in earnest and as sincere as any man could
      be; he spoke rationally, coherently, and without excitement.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace was determined to test the extent of the reverend gentleman's faith
      in his asseverations. "Now, sir," he said, "I understand that you still
      have the impression that I stole the clock from your day-schools." Mr.
      Littlewood admitted that such was his impression. "I thought so," replied
      Peace, "and this has caused me much grief and pain, for I can assure you I
      have so much respect for you personally that I would rather have given you
      a clock and much more besides than have taken it. At the time your clock
      was stolen I had reason for suspecting that it was taken by some colliers
      whom I knew." There was a pause. Mr. Littlewood thought that Peace was
      going to give him the name of the colliers. But that was not Peace's way.
      He said sharply: "Do you now believe that I have spoken the truth in
      denying that I took your clock, and will you leave me to-day fully
      believing that I am innocent of doing that?" Mr. Littlewood looked at him
      closely and appeared to be deliberating on his reply. Peace watched him
      intently. At last Mr. Littlewood said, "Peace, I am convinced that you did
      not take the clock. I cannot believe that you dare deny it now in your
      position, if you really did." Once more Peace burst into tears, and was
      unable for some time to speak.
    </p>
    <p>
      Having recovered his self-possession, Peace turned to the serious business
      of confession. He dealt first with the murder of Dyson.
    </p>
    <p>
      He maintained that his relations with Mrs. Dyson had been of an intimate
      character. He wanted to see her on the night of the crime in order to get
      her to induce her husband to withdraw the warrant which he had procured
      against him; he was tired, he said, of being hunted about from place to
      place. He intercepted Mrs. Dyson as she crossed the yard. Instead of
      listening to him quietly Mrs. Dyson became violent and threatening in her
      language. Peace took out his revolver, and, holding it close to her head,
      warned her that he was not to be trifled with. She refused to be warned.
      Dyson, hearing the loud voices, came out of his house. Peace tried to get
      away down the passage into Banner Cross Road, but Dyson followed and
      caught hold of him. In the struggle Peace fired one barrel of his revolver
      wide. Dyson seized the hand in which Peace was holding the weapon. "Then I
      knew," said Peace, "I had not a moment to spare. I made a desperate
      effort, wrenched the arm from him and fired again. All that was in my head
      at the time was to get away. I never did intend, either there or anywhere
      else, to take a man's life; but I was determined that I should not be
      caught at that time, as the result, knowing what I had done before, would
      have been worse even than had I stayed under the warrant." If he had
      intended to murder Dyson, Peace pointed out that he would have set about
      it in quite a different and more secret way; it was as unintentional a
      thing as ever was done; Mrs. Dyson had committed the grossest perjury in
      saying that no struggle had taken place between her husband and himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is to be remembered that Peace and Mrs. Dyson were the sole witnesses
      of what took place that night between the two men. In point of credibility
      there may be little to choose between them, but Peace can claim for his
      account that it was the statement of a dying, and, to all appearances,
      sincerely repentant sinner.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace then repeated to Mr. Littlewood his confession of the killing of
      Constable Cock, and his desire that Habron should be set free.(11) As to
      this part of his career Peace indulged in some general reflections. "My
      great mistake, sir," he said, "and I can see it now as my end approaches,
      has been this&mdash;in all my career I have used ball cartridge. I can see
      now that in using ball cartridge I did wrong I ought to have used blank
      cartridge; then I would not have taken life." Peace said that he hoped he
      would meet his death like a hero. "I do not say this in any kind of
      bravado. I do not mean such a hero as some persons will understand when
      they read this. I mean such a hero as my God might wish me to be. I am
      deeply grieved for all I have done, and would atone for it to the utmost
      of my power." To Mr. Littlewood the moment seemed convenient to suggest
      that as a practical means of atonement Peace should reveal to him the
      names of the persons with whom he had disposed of the greater part of his
      stolen property. But in spite of much attempted persuasion by the reverend
      gentleman Peace explained that he was a man and meant to be a man to the
      end.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (11) William Habron was subsequently given a free pardon and L800 by way
of compensation.
</pre>
    <p>
      Earlier in their interview Peace had expressed to Mr. Littlewood a hope
      that after his execution his name would never be mentioned again, but
      before they parted he asked Mr. Littlewood, as a favour, to preach a
      sermon on him after his death to the good people of Darnall. He wished his
      career held up to them as a beacon, in order that all who saw might avoid
      his example, and so his death be of some service to society.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before Mr. Littlewood left, Peace asked him to hear him pray. Having
      requested the warders to kneel down, Peace began a prayer that lasted
      twenty minutes. He prayed for himself, his family, his victims, Mr.
      Littlewood, society generally, and all classes of the community. Mr.
      Littlewood described the prayer as earnest, fervent and fluent. At the end
      Peace asked Mr. Littlewood if he ought to see Mrs. Dyson and beg her
      forgiveness for having killed her husband. Mr. Littlewood, believing
      erroneously that Mrs. Dyson had already left the country, told Peace that
      he should direct all his attention to asking forgiveness of his Maker. At
      the close of their interview Peace was lifted into bed and, turning his
      face to the wall, wept.
    </p>
    <p>
      Tuesday, February 25, was the day fixed for the execution of Peace. As the
      time drew near, the convict's confidence in ultimate salvation increased.
      A Dr. Potter of Sheffield had declared in a sermon that "all hope of
      Peace's salvation was gone for ever." Peace replied curtly, "Well, Dr.
      Potter may think so, but I don't." Though his health had improved, Peace
      was still very feeble in body. But his soul was hopeful and undismayed. On
      the Saturday before his death his brother and sister-in-law, a nephew and
      niece visited him for the last time. He spoke with some emotion of his
      approaching end. He said he should die about eight o'clock, and that at
      four o'clock an inquest would be held on his body; he would then be thrown
      into his grave without service or sermon of any kind. He asked his
      relatives to plant a flower on a certain grave in a cemetery in Sheffield
      on the day of his execution. He was very weak, he said, but hoped he
      should have strength enough to walk to the scaffold. He sent messages to
      friends and warnings to avoid gambling and drinking. He begged his brother
      to change his manner of life and "become religious." His good counsel was
      not apparently very well received. Peace's visitors took a depressing view
      of their relative's condition. They found him "a poor, wretched, haggard
      man," and, meeting Mrs. Thompson who was waiting outside the gaol for news
      of "dear Jack," wondered how she could have taken up with such a man.
    </p>
    <p>
      When, the day before his execution, Peace was visited for the last time by
      his wife, his stepson, his daughter, Mrs. Bolsover, and her husband, he
      was in much better spirits. He asked his visitors to restrain themselves
      from displays of emotion, as he felt very happy and did not wish to be
      disturbed. He advised them to sell or exhibit for money certain works of
      art of his own devising. Among them was a design in paper for a monument
      to be placed over his grave. The design is elaborate but well and
      ingeniously executed; in the opinion of Frith, the painter, it showed "the
      true feeling of an artist." It is somewhat in the style of the Albert
      Memorial, and figures of angels are prominent in the scheme. The whole
      conception is typical of the artist's sanguine and confident assurance of
      his ultimate destiny. A model boat and a fiddle made out of a hollow
      bamboo cane he wished also to be made the means of raising money. He was
      describing with some detail the ceremony of his approaching death and
      burial when he was interrupted by a sound of hammering. Peace listened for
      a moment and then said, "That's a noise that would make some men fall on
      the floor. They are working at my own scaffold." A warder said that he was
      mistaken. "No, I am not," answered Peace, "I have not worked so long with
      wood without knowing the sound of deals; and they don't have deals inside
      a prison for anything else than scaffolds." But the noise, he said, did
      not disturb him in the least, as he was quite prepared to meet his fate.
      He would like to have seen his grave and coffin; he knew that his body
      would be treated with scant ceremony after his death. But what of that? By
      that time his soul would be in Heaven. He was pleased that one sinner who
      had seen him on his way from Pentonville to Sheffield, had written to tell
      him that the sight of the convict had brought home to him the sins of his
      own past life, and by this means he had found salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      The time had come to say good-bye for the last time. Peace asked his
      weeping relatives whether they had anything more that they wished to ask
      him. Mrs. Peace reminded him that he had promised to pray with them at the
      last. Peace, ever ready, knelt with them and prayed for half an hour. He
      then shook hands with them, prayed for and blessed each one singly, and
      himself gave way to tears as they left his presence. To his wife as she
      departed Peace gave a funeral card of his own designing. It ran:
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     In
     Memory
     of
     Charles Peace
     Who was executed in
     Armley Prison
     Tuesday February 25th,
     1879 Aged 47

     For that I don but never
     Intended.
</pre>
    <p>
      The same day there arrived in the prison one who in his own trade had
      something of the personality and assurance of the culprit he was to
      execute. William Marwood&mdash;unlike his celebrated victim, he has his
      place in the Dictionary of National Biography&mdash;is perhaps the most
      remarkable of these persons who have held at different times the office of
      public executioner. As the inventor of the "long drop," he has done a
      lasting service to humanity by enabling the death-sentence passed by the
      judge to be carried out with the minimum of possible suffering. Marwood
      took a lofty view of the office he held, and refused his assent to the
      somewhat hypocritical loathing, with which those who sanction and profit
      by his exertions are pleased to regard this servant of the law. "I am
      doing God's work," said Marwood, "according to the divine command and the
      law of the British Crown. I do it simply as a matter of duty and as a
      Christian. I sleep as soundly as a child and am never disturbed by
      phantoms. Where there is guilt there is bad sleeping, but I am conscious
      that I try to live a blameless life. Detesting idleness, I pass my vacant
      time in business (he was a shoemaker at Horncastle, in Lincolnshire) and
      work in my shoeshop near the church day after day until such time as I am
      required elsewhere. It would have been better for those I executed if they
      had preferred industry to idleness."
    </p>
    <p>
      Marwood had not the almost patriarchal air of benevolent respectability
      which his predecessor Calcraft had acquired during a short experience as a
      family butler; but as an executioner that kindly old gentleman had been a
      sad bungler in his time compared with the scientific and expeditious
      Marwood. The Horncastle shoemaker was saving, businesslike, pious and
      thoughtful. Like Peace, he had interests outside his ordinary profession.
      He had at one time propounded a scheme for the abolition of the National
      Debt, a man clearly determined to benefit his fellowmen in some way or
      other. A predilection for gin would seem to have been his only concession
      to the ordinary weakness of humanity. And now he had arrived in Armley
      Jail to exercise his happy dispatch on the greatest of the many criminals
      who passed through his hands, one who, in his own words, "met death with
      greater firmness" than any man on whom he had officiated during seven
      years of Crown employment.
    </p>
    <p>
      The day of February the 25th broke bitterly cold. Like Charles I. before
      him, Peace feared lest the extreme cold should make him appear to tremble
      on the scaffold. He had slept calmly till six o'clock in the morning. A
      great part of the two hours before the coming of the hangman Peace spent
      in letter-writing. He wrote two letters to his wife, in one of which he
      copied out some verses he had written in Woking Prison on the death of
      their little boy John. In the second he expressed his satisfaction that he
      was to die now and not linger twenty years in prison. To his daughter,
      step-son and son-in-law he wrote letters of fervent, religious exhortation
      and sent them tracts and pictures which he had secured from
      well-intentioned persons anxious about his salvation. To an old friend,
      George Goodlad, a pianist, who had apparently lived up to his name, he
      wrote: "You chose an honest industrious way through life, but I chose the
      one of dishonesty, villainy and sin"; let his fate, he said, be a warning.
    </p>
    <p>
      Peace ate a hearty breakfast and awaited the coming of the executioner
      with calm. He had been troubled with an inconvenient cough the night
      before. "I wonder," he said to one of his warders, "if Marwood could cure
      this cough of mine." He had got an idea into his head that Marwood would
      "punish" him when he came to deal with him on the scaffold, and asked to
      see the hangman a few minutes before the appointed hour. "I hope you will
      not punish me. I hope you will do your work quickly," he said to Marwood.
      "You shall not suffer pain from my hand," replied that worthy. "God bless
      you," exclaimed Peace, "I hope to meet you all in heaven. I am thankful to
      say my sins are all forgiven." And so these two pious men&mdash;on the
      morning of an execution Marwood always knelt down and asked God's blessing
      on the work he had to do&mdash;shook hands together and set about their
      business. Firmly and fearlessly Peace submitted himself to the necessary
      preparations. For one moment he faltered as the gallows came in sight, but
      recovered himself quickly.
    </p>
    <p>
      As Marwood was about to cover his face, Peace stopped him with some
      irritation of manner and said that he wished to speak to the gentlemen of
      the press who had been admitted to the ceremony. No one gainsaid him, and
      he thus addressed the reporters: "You gentlemen reporters, I wish you to
      notice the few words I am going to say. You know what my life has been. It
      has been base; but I wish you to notice, for the sake of others, how a man
      can die, as I am about to die, in fear of the Lord. Gentlemen, my heart
      says that I feel assured that my sins are forgiven me, that I am going to
      the Kingdom of Heaven, or else to the place prepared for those who rest
      until the great Judgment day. I do not think I have any enemies, but if
      there are any who would be so, I wish them well. Gentlemen, all and all, I
      wish them to come to the Kingdom of Heaven when they die, as I am going to
      die." He asked a blessing on the officials of the prison and, in
      conclusion, sent his last wishes and respects to his dear children and
      their mother. "I hope," he said, "no one will disgrace them by taunting
      them or jeering them on my account, but to have mercy upon them. God bless
      you, my dear children. Good-bye, and Heaven bless you. Amen: Oh, my Lord
      God, have mercy upon me!"
    </p>
    <p>
      After the cap had been placed over his head Peace asked twice very
      sharply, as a man who expected to be obeyed, for a drink of water. But
      this time his request was not compiled with. He died instantaneously and
      was buried in Armley Jail.
    </p>
    <p>
      Had Peace flourished in 1914 instead of 1874, his end might have been
      honourable instead of dishonourable. The war of to-day has no doubt saved
      many a man from a criminal career by turning to worthy account qualities
      which, dangerous in crime, are useful in war. Absolute fearlessness,
      agility, resource, cunning and determination; all these are admirable
      qualities in the soldier; and all these Charles Peace possessed in a
      signal degree. But fate denied him opportunity, he became a burglar and
      died on the scaffold. Years of prison life failed, as they did in those
      days, to make any impression for good on one resolute in whatever way he
      chose to go. Peace was a born fighter. A detective who knew him and had on
      one occasion come near capturing him in London, said that he was a fair
      fighter, that he always gave fair warning to those on whom he fired, and
      that, being a dead shot, the many wide shots which he fired are to be
      reckoned proofs of this. Peace maintained to the last that he had never
      intended to kill Dyson. This statement ex-detective Parrock believed, and
      that the fatal shot was fired over Peace's shoulder as he was making off.
      Though habitually sober, Peace was made intoxicated now and then by the
      drink, stood him by those whom he used to amuse with his musical tricks
      and antics in public-houses. At such times he would get fuddled and
      quarrelsome. He was in such a frame of mind on the evening of Dyson's
      murder. His visit to the Vicar of Ecclesall brought him little comfort or
      consolation. It was in this unsatisfactory frame of mind that he went to
      Dyson's house. This much the ex-detective would urge in his favour. To his
      neighbours he was an awe-inspiring but kind and sympathetic man. "If you
      want my true opinion of him," says Detective Parrock, "he was a burglar to
      the backbone but not a murderer at heart. He deserved the fate that came
      to him as little as any who in modern times have met with a like one."
      Those who are in the fighting line are always the most generous about
      their adversaries. Parrock as a potential target for Peace's revolver, may
      have erred on the side of generosity, but there is some truth in what he
      says.
    </p>
    <p>
      As Peace himself admitted, his life had been base. He was well aware that
      he had misused such gifts as nature had bestowed on him. One must go back
      to mediaeval times to find the counterpart of this daring ruffian who,
      believing in personal God and devil, refuses until the end to allow either
      to interfere with his business in life. In this respect Charles Peace
      reminds us irresistibly of our Angevin kings.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is only one criminal who vies with Charley Peace in that genial
      popular regard which makes Charles "Charley" and John "Jack," and that is
      Jack Sheppard. What Jack was to the eighteenth century, that Charley was
      to the nineteenth. And each one is in a sense typical of his period. Lecky
      has said that the eighteenth century is richer than any other in the
      romance of crime. I think it may fairly be said that in the nineteenth
      century the romance of crime ceased to be. In the eighteenth century the
      scenery and dresses, all the stage setting of crime make for romance; its
      literature is quaint and picturesque; there is something gay and debonair
      about the whole business.
    </p>
    <p>
      Sheppard is typical of all this. There is a certain charm about the
      rascal; his humour is undeniable; he is a philosopher, taking all that
      comes with easy grace, even his betrayal by his brother and others who
      should have been loyal to him. Jack Sheppard has the good-humoured
      carelessness of that most engaging of all eighteenth century malefactors,
      Deacon Brodie. It is quite otherwise with Charley Peace. There is little
      enough gay or debonair about him. Compared with Sheppard, Peace is as drab
      as the surroundings of mid-Victorian crime are drab compared with the
      picturesqueness of eighteenth century England.
    </p>
    <p>
      Crime in the nineteenth century becomes more scientific in its methods and
      in its detection also. The revolver places a more hasty, less decorous
      weapon than the old-fashioned pistol in the hands of the determined
      burglar. The literature of crime, such as it is, becomes vulgar and
      prosaic. Peace has no charm about him, no gaiety, but he has the virtues
      of his defects. He, unlike Sheppard, shuns company; he works alone, never
      depending on accomplices; a "tight cock," as Sheppard would have phrased
      it, and not relying on a like quality of tightness in his fellows.
      Sheppard is a slave to his women, Edgeworth Bess and Mrs. Maggot; Mrs.
      Peace and Sue Thompson are the slaves of Peace. Sheppard loves to stroll
      openly about the London streets in his fine suit of black, his ruffled
      shirt and his silver-hilted sword. Peace lies concealed at Peckham beneath
      the homely disguise of old Mr. Thompson. Sheppard is an imp, Peace a
      goblin. But both have that gift of personality which, in their own
      peculiar line, lifts them out from the ruck, and makes them Jack and
      Charley to those who like to know famous people by cheery nicknames.
    </p>
    <p>
      And so we must accept Charles Peace as a remarkable character, whose
      unquestioned gifts as a man of action were squandered on a criminal
      career; neither better nor worse than a great number of other persons,
      whose good fortune it has been to develop similar qualities under happier
      surroundings. There are many more complete villains than the ordinary
      criminal, who contrive to go through life without offending against the
      law. Close and scientific investigation has shown that the average
      convicted criminal differs intellectually from the normal person only in a
      slightly lower level of intelligence, a condition that may well be
      explained by the fact that the convicted criminal has been found out.
      Crime has been happily defined by a recent and most able investigator into
      the character of the criminal(12) as "an unusual act committed by a
      perfectly normal person." At the same time, according to the same
      authority, there is a type of normal person who tends to be convicted of
      crime, and he is differentiated from his fellows by defective physique and
      mental capacity and an increased possession of antisocial qualities.(13)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (12) "The English Convict," a statistical study, by Charles Goring, M.D.
His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1913.

     (13) Murderers&mdash;at least those executed for their crimes&mdash;have not for
obvious reasons been made the subject of close scientific observation.
Their mental capacity would in all probability be found to be rather
higher than that of less ambitious criminals.
</pre>
    <p>
      How does Peace answer to the definition? Though short in stature, his
      physical development left little to be desired: he was active, agile, and
      enjoyed excellent health at all times. For a man of forty-seven he had
      aged remarkably in appearance. That is probably to be accounted for by
      mental worry. With two murders on his conscience we know from Sue Thompson
      that all she learnt of his secrets was what escaped from him in his
      troubled dreams&mdash;Peace may well have shown traces of mental anxiety.
      But in all other respects Charles Peace would seem to have been physically
      fit. In intellectual capacity he was undoubtedly above the average of the
      ordinary criminal. The facts of his career, his natural gifts, speak for
      themselves. Of anti-social proclivities he no doubt possessed his share at
      the beginning, and these were aggravated, as in most cases they were in
      his day, by prison life and discipline.
    </p>
    <p>
      Judged as scientifically as is possible where the human being is
      concerned, Peace stands out physically and intellectually well above the
      average of his class, perhaps the most naturally gifted of all those who,
      without advantages of rank or education, have tried their hands at crime.
      Ordinary crime for the most part would appear to be little better than the
      last resort of the intellectually defective, and a poor game at that. The
      only interesting criminals are those worthy of something better. Peace was
      one of these. If his life may be said to point a moral, it is the very
      simple one that crime is no career for a man of brains.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      The Career of Robert Butler
    </h2>
    <p>
      There is a report of Butler's trial published in Dunedin. It gives in full
      the speeches and the cross-examination of the witnesses, but not in all
      cases the evidence-in-chief. By the kindness of a friend in New Zealand I
      obtained a copy of the depositions taken before the magistrate; with this
      I have been able to supplement the report of the trial. A collection of
      newspaper cuttings furnished me with the details of the rest of Butler's
      career.
    </p>
    <p>
      I THE DUNEDIN MURDERS
    </p>
    <p>
      On the evening of March 23, 1905, Mr. William Munday, a highly respected
      citizen of the town of Tooringa, in Queensland, was walking to the
      neighbouring town of Toowong to attend a masonic gathering. It was about
      eight o'clock, the moon shining brightly. Nearing Toowong, Mr. Munday saw
      a middle-aged man, bearded and wearing a white overcoat, step out into the
      moonlight from under the shadow of a tree. As Mr. Munday advanced, the man
      in the white coat stood directly in his way. "Out with all you have, and
      quick about it," he said. Instead of complying with this peremptory
      summons, Mr. Munday attempted to close with him. The man drew back
      quickly, whipped out a revolver, fired, and made off as fast as he could.
      The bullet, after passing through Mr. Munday's left arm, had lodged in the
      stomach. The unfortunate gentleman was taken to a neighbouring hospital
      where, within a few hours, he was dead.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime a vigorous search was made for his assailant. Late the
      same night Constable Hennessy, riding a bicycle, saw a man in a white coat
      who seemed to answer to the description of the assassin. He dismounted,
      walked up to him and asked him for a match. The man put his hand inside
      his coat. "What have you got there?" asked the constable. "I'll&mdash;soon
      show you," replied the man in the white coat, producing suddenly a large
      revolver. But Hennessy was too quick for him. Landing him one under the
      jaw, he sent him to the ground and, after a sharp struggle, secured him.
      Constable Hennessy little knew at the time that his capture in Queensland
      of the man in the white coat was almost as notable in the annals of crime
      as the affray at Blackheath on an autumn night in 1878, when Constable
      Robinson grappled successfully, wounded as he was, with Charles Peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      The man taken by Hennessy gave the name of James Wharton, and as James
      Wharton he was hanged at Brisbane. But before his death it was ascertained
      beyond doubt, though he never admitted it himself, that Wharton was none
      other than one Robert Butler, whose career as a criminal and natural
      wickedness may well rank him with Charles Peace in the hierarchy of
      scoundrels. Like Peace, Butler was, in the jargon of crime, a "hatter," a
      "lone hand," a solitary who conceived and executed his nefarious designs
      alone; like Peace, he supplemented an insignificant physique by a liberal
      employment of the revolver; like Peace, he was something of a musician,
      the day before his execution he played hymns for half an hour on the
      prison organ; like Peace, he knew when to whine when it suited his
      purpose; and like Peace, though not with the same intensity, he could be
      an uncomfortably persistent lover, when the fit was on him. Both men were
      cynics in their way and viewed their fellow-men with a measure of
      contempt. But here parallel ends. Butler was an intellectual, inferior as
      a craftsman to Peace, the essentially practical, unread, naturally gifted
      artist. Butler was a man of books. He had been schoolmaster, journalist.
      He had studied the lives of great men, and as a criminal, had devoted
      especial attention to those of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. Butler's
      defence in the Dunedin murder trial was a feat of skill quite beyond the
      power of Peace. Peace was a religious man after the fashion of the
      mediaeval tyrant, Butler an infidel. Peace, dragged into the light of a
      court of justice, cut a sorry figure; here Butler shone. Peace escaped a
      conviction for murder by letting another suffer in his place; Butler
      escaped a similar experience by the sheer ingenuity of his defence. Peace
      had the modesty and reticence of the sincere artist; Butler the loquacious
      vanity of the literary or forensic coxcomb. Lastly, and it is the supreme
      difference, Butler was a murderer by instinct and conviction, as Lacenaire
      or Ruloff; "a man's life," he said, "was of no more importance than a
      dog's; nature respects the one no more than the other, a volcanic eruption
      kills mice and men with the one hand. The divine command, 'kill, kill and
      spare not,' was intended not only for Joshua, but for men of all time; it
      is the example of our rulers, our Fredericks and Napoleons."
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler was of the true Prussian mould. "In crime," he would say, "as in
      war, no half measures. Let us follow the example of our rulers whose
      orders in war run, 'Kill, burn and sink,' and what you cannot carry away,
      destroy.'" Here is the gospel of frightfulness applied almost
      prophetically to crime. To Butler murder is a principle of warfare; to
      Peace it was never more than a desperate resort or an act the outcome of
      ungovernable passion.
    </p>
    <p>
      Ireland can claim the honour of Butler's birth. It took place at Kilkenny
      about 1845. At an early age he left his native land for Australia, and
      commenced his professional career by being sentenced under the name of
      James Wilson&mdash;the same initials as those of James Wharton of
      Queensland&mdash;to twelve months' imprisonment for vagrancy. Of the
      sixteen years he passed in Victoria he spent thirteen in prison, first for
      stealing, then in steady progression for highway robbery and burglary.
      Side by side with the practical and efficient education in crime furnished
      by the Victorian prisons of that day, Butler availed himself of the
      opportunity to educate his mind. It was during this period that he found
      inspiration and encouragement in the study of the lives of Frederick and
      Napoleon, besides acquiring a knowledge of music and shorthand.
    </p>
    <p>
      When in 1876 Butler quitted Australia for New Zealand, he was sufficiently
      accomplished to obtain employment as a schoolmaster.
    </p>
    <p>
      At Cromwell, Otago, under the name of "C. J. Donelly, Esq.," Butler opened
      a "Commercial and Preparatory Academy," and in a prospectus that recalls
      Mr. Squeers' famous advertisement of Dotheboys Hall, announced that the
      programme of the Academy would include "reading, taught as an art and upon
      the most approved principles of elocution, writing, arithmetic, euclid,
      algebra, mensuration, trigonometry, book-keeping, geography, grammar,
      spelling and dictation, composition, logic and debate, French, Latin,
      shorthand, history, music, and general lectures on astronomy, natural
      philosophy, geology, and other subjects." The simpler principles of these
      branches of learning were to be "rendered intelligible, and a firm
      foundation laid for the acquirement of future knowledge." Unfortunately a
      suspicion of theft on Butler's part cut short the fulfilment of this
      really splendid programme, and Butler left Cromwell hurriedly for the
      ampler field of Dunedin. There, less than a fortnight after his
      arrivel{sic}, he was sentenced to four years' hard labour for several
      burglaries committed in and about that city.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the 18th of February, 1880, Butler was released from prison. With that
      consummate hypocrisy which was part of the man, he had contrived to enlist
      the sympathies of the Governor of the Dunedin Jail, who gave him, on his
      departure, a suit of clothes and a small sum of money. A detective of the
      name of Bain tried to find him employment. Butler wished to adopt a
      literary career. He acted as a reporter on the Dunedin Evening Star, and
      gave satisfaction to the editor of that newspaper. An attempt to do some
      original work, in the shape of "Prison Sketches," for another newspaper,
      was less successful. Bain had arranged for the publication of the articles
      in the Sunday Advertiser, but when the time came to deliver his
      manuscript, Butler failed to appear. Bain, whose duty it was to keep an
      eye on Butler, found him in the street looking wild and haggard. He said
      that he had found the work "too much for his head," that he had torn up
      what he had written, that he had nowhere to go, and had been to the end of
      the jetty with the intention of drowning himself. Bain replied somewhat
      caustically that he thought it a pity he had not done so, as nothing would
      have given him greater joy than going to the end of the jetty and
      identifying his body. "You speak very plainly," said Butler. "Yes, and
      what is more, I mean what I say," replied Bain. Butler justified Bain's
      candour by saying that if he broke out again, he would be worse than the
      most savage tiger ever let loose on the community. As a means of obviating
      such an outbreak, Butler suggested that, intellectual employment having
      failed, some form of manual labour should be found him. Bain complied with
      Butler's request, and got him a job at levelling reclaimed ground in the
      neighbourhood of Dunedin. On Wednesday, March 10, Butler started work, but
      after three hours of it relinquished the effort. Bain saw Butler again in
      Dunedin on the evening of Saturday, March 13, and made an appointment to
      meet him at half-past eight that night. Butler did not keep the
      appointment. Bain searched the town for him, but he was nowhere to be
      found.
    </p>
    <p>
      About the same time Butler had some talk with another member of the
      Dunedin police force, Inspector Mallard. They discussed the crimes of
      Charles Peace and other notable artists of that kind. Butler remarked to
      Mallard how easy it would be to destroy all traces of a murder by fire,
      and asked the inspector whether if he woke up one morning to find some
      brutal murder had been committed, he would not put it down to him. "No,
      Butler," replied the inspector, "the first thing I should do would be to
      look for suspicious circumstances, and most undoubtedly, if they pointed
      to you, you would be looked after."
    </p>
    <p>
      In the early morning of this Saturday, March 13, the house of a Mr.
      Stamper, a solicitor of Dunedin, had been broken into, and some articles
      of value, among them a pair of opera glasses, stolen. The house had been
      set on fire, and burned to the ground. On the morning of the following
      day, Sunday, the 14th, Dunedin was horrified by the discovery of a far
      more terrible crime, tigerish certainly in its apparent ferocity. In a
      house in Cumberland Street, a young married couple and their little baby
      were cruelly murdered and un{sic}{an??} unsuccessful attempt made to fire
      the scene of the crime.
    </p>
    <p>
      About half-past six on Sunday morning a man of the name of Robb, a
      carpenter, on getting out of bed, noticed smoke coming from the house of a
      neighbor of his, Mr. J. M. Dewar, who occupied a small one-floored cottage
      standing by itself in Cumberland Street, a large and broad thoroughfare on
      the outskirts of the town. Dewar was a butcher by trade, a young man, some
      eighteen months married, and father of a baby girl. Robb, on seeing smoke
      coming from Dewar's house, woke his son, who was a member of the fire
      brigade. The latter got up, crossed the street, and going round to the
      back door, which he found wide open, entered the house. As he went along
      the passage that separated the two front rooms, a bedroom and
      sitting-room, he called to the inmates to get up. He received no answer,
      but as he neared the bedroom he heard a "gurgling" sound. Crawling on his
      hands and knees he reached the bedroom door, and two feet inside it his
      right hand touched something. It was the body of a woman; she was still
      alive, but in a dying condition. Robb dragged her across the passage into
      the sitting-room. He got some water, and extinguished the fire in the
      bedroom. On the bed lay the body of Dewar. To all appearances he had been
      killed in his sleep. By his side was the body of the baby, suffocated by
      the smoke. Near the bed was an axe belonging to Dewar, stained with blood.
      It was with this weapon, apparently, that Mr. and Mrs. Dewar had been
      attacked. Under the bed was a candlestick belonging also to the Dewars,
      which had been used by the murderer in setting fire to the bed. The front
      window of the sitting-room was open, there were marks of boot nails on the
      sill, and on the grass in front of the window a knife was found. An
      attempt had been made to ransack a chest of drawers in the bedroom, but
      some articles of jewellery lying in one of the drawers, and a ring on the
      dressing-table had been left untouched. As far as was known, Mr. and Mrs.
      Dewar were a perfectly happy and united couple. Dewar had been last seen
      alive about ten o'clock on the Saturday night getting off a car near his
      home. At eleven a neighbour had noticed a light in the Dewars' house.
      About five o'clock on the Sunday morning another neighbour had been
      aroused from his sleep by the sound as of something falling heavily. It
      was a wild and boisterous night. Thinking the noise might be the slamming
      of his stable door, he got up and went out to see that it was secure. He
      then noticed that a light was burning in the bedroom window of the Dewars'
      cottage.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nothing more was known of what had occurred that morning until at
      half-past six Robb saw the smoke coming from Dewars' house. Mrs. Dewar,
      who alone could have told something, never recovered consciousness and
      died on the day following the crime. Three considerable wounds sufficient
      to cause death had been inflicted on the unfortunate woman's head, and
      five of a similar character on that of her husband. At the head of the
      bed, which stood in the corner of the room, there was a large smear of
      blood on the wall just above the door; there were spots of blood all over
      the top of the bed, and some smaller ones that had to all appearances
      spurted on to the panel of the door nearest to the bed.
    </p>
    <p>
      The investigation of this shocking crime was placed in the hands of
      Detective Bain, whose duty it had been to keep an eye on Robert Butler,
      but he did not at first associate his interesting charge with the
      commission of the murder. About half-past six on Sunday evening Bain
      happened to go to a place called the Scotia Hotel, where the landlord
      informed him that one of his servants, a girl named Sarah Gillespie, was
      very anxious to see him. Her story was this: On the morning of Thursday,
      March 11, Robert Butler had come to the hotel; he was wearing a dark
      lavender check suit and carried a top coat and parcel. Butler had stayed
      in the hotel all Thursday and slept there that night. He had not slept in
      the hotel on the Friday night, and Sarah Gillespie had not seen him again
      until he came into the house about five and twenty minutes to seven on
      Sunday morning. The girl noticed that he was pale and excited, seemed
      afraid and worried, as if someone were coming after him. After giving her
      some money for the landlord, he went upstairs, fetched his top coat, a
      muffler, and his parcel. Before leaving he said he would have a pint of
      beer, as he had not breakfasted. He then left, presumably to catch an
      early train.
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler was next seen a few minutes later at a shop near the hotel, where
      he bought five tins of salmon, and about the same time a milk-boy saw him
      standing on the kerb in Cumberland Street in a stooping position, his head
      turned in the direction of Dewars' house. A little after ten the same
      night Butler entered a hotel at a place called Blueskin, some twelve miles
      distant from Dunedin. He was wearing an overcoat and a light muffler. He
      sat down at a table in the dining-room and seemed weary and sleepy.
      Someone standing at the bar said "What a shocking murder that was in
      Cumberland Street!" Butler started up, looked steadily from one to the
      other of the two men who happened to be in the room, then sat down again
      and, taking up a book, appeared to be reading. More than once he put down
      the book and kept shifting uneasily in his chair. After having some supper
      he got up, paid his reckoning, and left the hotel.
    </p>
    <p>
      At half-past three the following morning, about fifteen miles from
      Dunedin, on the road to Waikouaiti, two constables met a man whom they
      recognised as Butler from a description that had been circulated by the
      police. The constables arrested and searched him. They found on him a pair
      of opera glasses, the property of Mr. Stamper, whose house had been
      burgled and burned down on the morning of the 13th. Of this crime Butler
      acknowledged himself to be the perpetrator. Besides the opera glasses the
      constables took from Butler two tins of salmon, a purse containing four
      shillings and sixpence, a pocket knife, a box of matches, a piece of
      candle, and a revolver and cartridges. The prisoner was carrying a top
      coat, and was dressed in a dark coat and grey trousers, underneath which
      he was wearing a white shirt, an under flannel and a Rob Roy Crimean
      shirt. One of the constables noticed that there were marks of blood on his
      shirt. Another singular feature in Butler's attire was the fact that the
      outer soles of his boots had been recently removed. When last seen in
      Dunedin Butler had been wearing a moustache; he was now clean shaven.
    </p>
    <p>
      The same evening a remarkable interview took place in the lock-up at
      Waikouaiti between Butler and Inspector Mallard. Mallard, who had some
      reason for suspecting Butler, bearing in mind their recent conversation,
      told the prisoner that he would be charged with the murder in Cumberland
      Street. For a few seconds, according to Mallard, the prisoner seemed
      terribly agitated and appeared to be choking. Recovering himself somewhat,
      he said, "If for that, you can get no evidence against me; and if I am
      hanged for it, I shall be an innocent man, whatever other crimes I may
      have committed." Mallard replied, "There is evidence to convict you&mdash;the
      fire was put out." Butler than{sic} said that he would ask Mallard a
      question, but, after a pause, decided not to do so. Mallard, after
      examining Butler's clothes, told him that those were not the clothes in
      which he had left the Scotia Hotel. Butler admitted it, and said he had
      thrown those away in the North East Valley. Mallard alluded to the
      disappearance of the prisoner's moustache. Butler replied that he had cut
      it off on the road. Mallard noticed then the backs of Butler's hands were
      scratched, as if by contact with bushes. Butler seemed often on the point
      of asking questions, but would then stop and say "No, I won't ask you
      anything." To the constables who had arrested him Butler remarked, "You
      ought to remember me, because I could have shot you if I had wished." When
      Mallard later in the evening visited Butler again, the prisoner who was
      then lying down said, "I want to speak to you. I want to ask the press not
      to publish my career. Give me fair play. I suppose I shall be convicted
      and you will see I can die like a man."
    </p>
    <p>
      A few days after Butler's arrest a ranger on the Town Belt, a hill
      overlooking Dunedin, found a coat, a hat and silk striped cravat, and a
      few days later a pair of trousers folded up and placed under a bush. These
      articles of clothing were identified as those which Butler had been seen
      wearing on the Saturday and Sunday morning. They were examined. There were
      a number of bloodstains on them, not one of them larger in size than a
      pea, some almost invisible. On the front of the trousers about the level
      of the groin there were blood spots on both sides. There was blood on the
      fold of the left breast of the coat and on the lining of the cuff of the
      right arm. The shirt Butler was wearing at the time of his arrest was
      examined also. There were small spots of blood, about fourteen altogether,
      on the neck and shoulder bands, the right armpit, the left sleeve, and on
      both wristbands. Besides the clothes, a salmon tin was found on the Town
      Belt, and behind a seat in the Botanical Gardens, from which a partial
      view of the Dewars' house in Cumberland Street could be obtained, two more
      salmon tins were found, all three similar to the five purchased by Butler
      on the Sunday morning, two of which had been in his possession at the time
      of his arrest.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such were the main facts of the case which Butler had to answer when, a
      few weeks later, he was put on his trial before the Supreme Court at
      Dunedin. The presiding judge was Mr. Justice Williams, afterwards Sir
      Joshua Williams and a member of the Privy Council. The Crown Prosecutor,
      Mr. Haggitt, conducted the case for the Crown, and Butler defended
      himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      II THE TRIAL OF BUTLER
    </p>
    <p>
      To a man of Butler's egregious vanity his trial was a glorious opportunity
      for displaying his intellectual gifts, such as they were. One who had
      known him in prison about this time describes him as a strange compound of
      vanity and envy, blind to his own faults and envious of the material
      advantages enjoyed by others. Self-willed and arrogant, he could bully or
      whine with equal effect. Despising men, he believed that if a man did not
      possess some requisite quality, he had only to ape it, as few would
      distinguish between the real and the sham.
    </p>
    <p>
      But with all these advantages in the struggle for life, it is certain that
      Butler's defence would have been far less effective had be{sic} been
      denied all professional aid. As a matter of fact, throughout his trial
      Butler was being advised by three distinguished members of the New Zealand
      bar, now judges of the Supreme Court, who though not appearing for him in
      court, gave him the full benefit of their assistance outside it. At the
      same time Butler carried off the thing well. Where imagination was
      required, Butler broke down; he could not write sketches of life in
      prison; that was too much for his pedestrian intellect. But given the
      facts of a case, dealing with a transaction of which he alone knew the
      real truth, and aided by the advice and guidance of trained intellects,
      Butler was unquestionably clever and shrewd enough to make the best use of
      such advantages in meeting the case against him.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thus equipped for the coming struggle, this high-browed ruffian, with his
      semi-intellectual cast of countenance, his jerky restless posturing, his
      splay-footed waddle, "like a lame Muscovy duck," in the graphic words of
      his gaol companion, stood up to plead for his life before the Supreme
      Court at Dunedin.
    </p>
    <p>
      It may be said at the outset that Butler profited greatly by the
      scrupulous fairness shown by the Crown Prosecutor. Mr. Haggitt extended to
      the prisoner a degree of consideration and forbearance, justified
      undoubtedly towards an undefended prisoner. But, as we have seen, Butler
      was not in reality undefended. At every moment of the trial he was in
      communication with his legal advisers, and being instructed by them how to
      meet the evidence given against him. Under these circumstances the
      unfailing consideration shown him by the Crown Prosecutor seems almost
      excessive. From the first moment of the trial Butler was fully alive to
      the necessities of his situation. He refrained from including in his
      challenges of the jury the gentleman who was afterwards foreman; he knew
      he was all right, he said, because he parted his hair in the middle, a
      "softy," in fact. He did not know in all probability that one gentleman on
      the jury had a rooted conviction that the murder of the Dewars was the
      work of a criminal lunatic. There was certainly nothing in Butler's
      demeanour or behaviour to suggest homicidal mania.
    </p>
    <p>
      The case against Butler rested on purely circumstantial evidence.
    </p>
    <p>
      No new facts of importance were adduced at the trial. The stealing of
      Dewar's wages, which had been paid to him on the Saturday, was the motive
      for the murder suggested by the Crown. The chief facts pointing to
      Butler's guilt were: his conversation with Mallard and Bain previous to
      the crime; his demeanour after it; his departure from Dunedin; the removal
      of his moustache and the soles of his boots; his change of clothes and the
      bloodstains found upon them, added to which was his apparent inability to
      account for his movements on the night in question.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such as the evidence was, Butler did little to shake it in
      cross-examination. His questions were many of them skilful and pointed,
      but on more than one occasion the judge intervened to save him from the
      danger common to all amateur cross-examiners, of not knowing when to stop.
      He was most successful in dealing with the medical witnesses. Butler had
      explained the bloodstains on his clothes as smears that had come from
      scratches on his hands, caused by contact with bushes. This explanation
      the medical gentlemen with good reason rejected. But they went further,
      and said that these stains might well have been caused by the spurting and
      spraying of blood on to the murderer as he struck his victims. Butler was
      able to show by the position of the bloodstains on the clothes that such
      an explanation was open to considerable doubt.
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler's speech in his defence lasted six hours, and was a creditable
      performance. Its arrangement is somewhat confused and repetitious, some
      points are over-elaborated, but on the whole he deals very successfully
      with most of the evidence given against him and exposes the unquestionable
      weakness of the Crown case. At the outset he declared that he had taken
      his innocence for his defence. "I was not willing," he said, "to leave my
      life in the hands of a stranger. I was willing to incur all the
      disadvantages which the knowledge of the law might bring upon me. I was
      willing, also, to enter on this case without any experience whatever of
      that peculiarly acquired art of cross-examination. I fear I have done
      wrong. If I had had the assistance of able counsel, much more light would
      have been thrown on this case than has been." As we have seen, Butler
      enjoyed throughout his trial the informal assistance of three of the most
      able counsel in New Zealand, so that this heroic attitude of conscious
      innocence braving all dangers loses most of its force. Without such
      assistance his danger might have been very real.
    </p>
    <p>
      A great deal of the evidence as to his conduct and demeanour at the time
      of the murder Butler met by acknowledging that it was he who had broken
      into Mr. Stamper's house on the Saturday morning, burgled it and set it on
      fire. His consciousness of guilt in this respect was, he said, quite
      sufficient to account for anything strange or furtive in his manner at
      that time. He was already known to the police; meeting Bain on the
      Saturday night, he felt more than ever sure that he was susspected{sic} of
      the robbery at Mr. Stamper's; he therefore decided to leave Dunedin as
      soon as possible. That night, he said, he spent wandering about the
      streets half drunk, taking occasional shelter from the pouring rain, until
      six o'clock on the Sunday morning, when he went to the Scotia Hotel. A
      more detailed account of his movements on the night of the Dewars' murder
      he did not, or would not, give.
    </p>
    <p>
      When he comes to the facts of the murder and his theories as to the nature
      and motive of the crime&mdash;theories which he developed at rather
      unnecessary length for the purpose of his own defence&mdash;his speech is
      interesting. It will be recollected that on the discovery of the murder, a
      knife was found on the grass outside the house. This knife was not the
      property of the Dewars. In Butler's speech he emphasised the opinion that
      this knife had been brought there by the murderer: "Horrible though it may
      be, my conclusion is that he brought it with the intention of cutting the
      throats of his victims, and that, finding they lay in rather an untoward
      position, he changed his mind, and, having carried out the object with
      which he entered the house, left the knife and, going back, brought the
      axe with which he effected his purpose. What was the purpose of the
      murderer? Was it the robbery of Dewar's paltry wages? Was it the act of a
      tiger broken loose on the community? An act of pure wanton devilry? or was
      there some more reasonable explanation of this most atrocious crime?"
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler rejected altogether the theory of ordinary theft. No thief of
      ambitious views, he said, would pitch upon the house of a poor journeyman
      butcher. The killing of the family appeared to him to be the motive: "an
      enemy hath done this." The murderer seems to have had a knowledge of the
      premises; he enters the house and does his work swiftly and promptly, and
      is gone. "We cannot know," Butler continues, "all the passages in the
      lives of the murdered man or woman. What can we know of the hundred spites
      and jealousies or other causes of malice which might have caused the
      crime? If you say some obscure quarrel, some spite or jealousy is not
      likely to have been the cause of so dreadful a murder, you cannot revert
      to the robbery theory without admitting a motive much weaker in all its
      utter needlessness and vagueness. The prominent feature of the murder,
      indeed the only feature, is its ruthless, unrelenting, determined
      vindictiveness. Every blow seemed to say, 'You shall die you shall not
      live.'"
    </p>
    <p>
      Whether Butler were the murderer of the Dewars or not, the theory that
      represented them as having been killed for the purpose of robbery has its
      weak side all the weaker if Butler, a practical and ambitious criminal,
      were the guilty man.
    </p>
    <p>
      In 1882, two years after Butler's trial, there appeared in a New Zealand
      newspaper, Society, published in Christchurch, a series of Prison
      "Portraits," written evidently by one who had himself undergone a term of
      imprisonment. One of the "Portraits" was devoted to an account of Butler.
      The writer had known Butler in prison. According to the story told him by
      Butler, the latter had arrived in Dunedin with a quantity of jewellery he
      had stolen in Australia. This jewellery he entrusted to a young woman for
      safe keeping. After serving his first term of two years' imprisonment in
      Dunedin, Butler found on his release that the young woman had married a
      man of the name of Dewar. Butler went to Mrs. Dewar and asked for the
      return of his jewellery; she refused to give it up. On the night of the
      murder he called at the house in Cumberland Street and made a last appeal
      to her, but in vain. He determined on revenge. During his visit to Mrs.
      Dewar he had had an opportunity of seeing the axe and observing the best
      way to break into the house. He watched the husband's return, and decided
      to kill him as well as his wife on the chance of obtaining his week's
      wages. With the help of the knife which he had found in the backyard of a
      hotel he opened the window. The husband he killed in his sleep, the woman
      waked with the first blow he struck her. He found the jewellery in a
      drawer rolled up in a pair of stockings. He afterwards hid it in a
      well-marked spot some half-hour before his arrest.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few years after its appearance in Society, this account of Butler was
      reproduced in an Auckland newspaper. Bain, the detective, wrote a letter
      questioning the truth of the writer's statements. He pointed out that when
      Butler first came to Dunedin he had been at liberty only a fortnight
      before serving his first term of imprisonment, very little time in which
      to make the acquaintance of a woman and dispose of the stolen jewellery.
      He asked why, if Butler had hidden the jewellery just before his arrest,
      he had not also hidden the opera-glasses which he had stolen from Mr.
      Stamper's house. Neither of these comments is very convincing. A fortnight
      seems time enough in which a man of Butler's character might get to know a
      woman and dispose of some jewellery; while, if Butler were the murderer of
      Mr. Dewar as well as the burglar who had broken into Stamper's house, it
      was part of his plan to acknowledge himself guilty of the latter crime and
      use it to justify his movements before and after the murder. Bain is more
      convincing when he states at the conclusion of his letter that he had
      known Mrs. Dewar from childhood as a "thoroughly good and true woman,"
      who, as far as he knew, had never in her life had any acquaintance with
      Butler.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the same time, the account given by Butler's fellow-prisoner, in which
      the conduct of the murdered woman is represented as constituting the
      provocation for the subsequent crime, explains one peculiar circumstance
      in connection with the tragedy, the selection of this journeyman butcher
      and his wife as the victims of the murderer. It explains the theory, urged
      so persistently by Butler in his speech to the jury, that the crime was
      the work of an enemy of the Dewars, the outcome of some hidden spite, or
      obscure quarrel; it explains the apparent ferocity of the murder, and the
      improbability of a practical thief selecting such an unprofitable couple
      as his prey. The rummaged chest of drawers and the fact that some trifling
      articles of jewellery were left untouched on the top of them, are
      consistent with an eager search by the murderer for some particular
      object. Against this theory of revenge is the fact that Butler was a
      malignant ruffian and liar in any case, that, having realised very little
      in cash by the burglary at Stamper's house, he would not be particular as
      to where he might get a few shillings more, that he had threatened to do a
      tigerish deed, and that it is characteristic of his vanity to try to
      impute to his crime a higher motive than mere greed or necessity.
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler showed himself not averse to speaking of the murder in Cumberland
      Street to at least one of those, with whom he came in contact in his later
      years. After he had left New Zealand and returned to Australia, he was
      walking in a street in Melbourne with a friend when they passed a lady
      dressed in black, carrying a baby in her arms. The baby looked at the two
      men and laughed. Butler frowned and walked rapidly away. His companion
      chaffed him, and asked whether it was the widow or the baby that he was
      afraid of. Butler was silent, but after a time asked his companion to come
      into some gardens and sit down on one of the seats, as he had something
      serious to say to him. For a while Butler sat silent. Then he asked the
      other if he had ever been in Dunedin. "Yes," was the reply. "Look here,"
      said Butler, "you are the only man I ever made any kind of confidant of.
      You are a good scholar, though I could teach you a lot." After this
      gracious compliment he went on: "I was once tried in Dunedin on the charge
      of killing a man, woman and child, and although innocent, the crime was
      nearly brought home to me. It was my own ability that pulled me through.
      Had I employed a professional advocate, I should not have been here to-day
      talking to you." After describing the murder, Butler said: "Trying to fire
      the house was unnecessary, and killing the baby was unnecessary and cruel.
      I respect no man's life, for no man respects mine. A lot of men I have
      never injured have tried to put a rope round my neck more than once. I
      hate society in general, and one or two individuals in particular. The man
      who did that murder in Dunedin has, if anything, my sympathy, but it seems
      to me he need not have killed that child." His companion was about to
      speak. Butler stopped him. "Now, don't ever ask me such a silly question
      as that," he said. "What?" asked his friend. "You were about to ask me if
      I did that deed," replied Butler, "and you know perfectly well that,
      guilty or innocent, that question would only be answered in one way." "I
      was about to ask nothing of the kind," said the other, "for you have
      already told me that you were innocent." "Good!" said Butler, "then let
      that be the end of the subject, and never refer to it again, except,
      perhaps, in your own mind, when you can, if you like, remember that I said
      the killing of the child was unnecessary and cruel."
    </p>
    <p>
      Having developed to the jury his theory of why the crime was committed,
      Butler told them that, as far as he was concerned, there were four points
      against him on which the Crown relied to prove his guilt. Firstly, there
      was the fact of his being in the neighbourhood of the crime on the Sunday
      morning; that, he said, applied to scores of other people besides himself.
      Then there was his alleged disturbed appearance and guilty demeanour. The
      evidence of that was, he contended, doubtful in any case, and referable to
      another cause; as also his leaving Dunedin in the way and at the time he
      did. He scouted the idea that murderers are compelled by some invisible
      force to betray their guilt. "The doings of men," he urged, "and their
      success are regulated by the amount of judgment that they possess, and,
      without impugning or denying the existence of Providence, I say this is a
      law that holds good in all cases, whether for evil or good. Murderers, if
      they have the sense and ability and discretion to cover up their crime,
      will escape, do escape, and have escaped. Many people, when they have
      gravely shaken their heads and said 'Murder will out,' consider they have
      done a great deal and gone a long way towards settling the question. Well,
      this, like many other stock formulas of Old World wisdom, is not true. How
      many murders are there that the world has never heard of, and never will?
      How many a murdered man, for instance, lies among the gum-trees of
      Victoria, or in the old abandoned mining-shafts on the diggings, who is
      missed by nobody, perhaps, but a pining wife at home, or helpless
      children, or an old mother? But who were their murderers? Where are they?
      God knows, perhaps, but nobody else, and nobody ever will." The fact, he
      said, that he was alleged to have walked up Cumberland Street on the
      Sunday morning and looked in the direction of the Dewars' house was,
      unless the causes of superstition and a vague and incomplete reasoning
      were to be accepted as proof, evidence rather of his innocence than his
      guilt. He had removed the soles of his boots, he said, in order to ease
      his feet in walking; the outer soles had become worn and ragged, and in
      lumps under his feet. He denied that he had told Bain, the detective, that
      he would break out as a desperate tiger let loose on the community; what
      he had said was that he was tired of living the life of a prairie dog or a
      tiger in the jungle.
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler was more successful when he came to deal with the bloodstains on
      his clothes. These, he said, were caused by the blood from the scratches
      on his hands, which had been observed at the time of his arrest. The
      doctors had rejected this theory, and said that the spots of blood had
      been impelled from the axe or from the heads of the victims as the
      murderer struck the fatal blow. Butler put on the clothes in court, and
      was successful in showing that the position and appearance of certain of
      the blood spots was not compatible with such a theory. "I think," he said,
      "I am fairly warranted in saying that the evidence of these gentlemen is,
      not to put too fine a point on it, worth just nothing at all."
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler's concluding words to the jury were brief but emphatic: "I stand in
      a terrible position. So do you. See that in your way of disposing of me
      you deliver yourselves of your responsibilities."
    </p>
    <p>
      In the exercise of his forbearance towards an undefended prisoner, Mr.
      Haggitt did not address the jury for the Crown. At four o'clock the judge
      commenced his summing-up. Mr. Justice Williams impressed on the jury that
      they must be satisfied, before they could convict the prisoner, that the
      circumstances of the crime and the prisoner's conduct were inconsistent
      with any other reasonable hypothesis than his guilt. There was little or
      no evidence that robbery was the motive of the crime. The circumstance of
      the prisoner being out all Saturday night and in the neighbourhood of the
      crime on Sunday morning only amounted to the fact that he had an
      opportunity shared by a great number of other persons of committing the
      murder. The evidence of his agitation and demeanour at the time of his
      arrest must be accepted with caution. The evidence of the blood spots was
      of crucial importance; there was nothing save this to connect him directly
      with the crime. The jury must be satisfied that the blood on the clothes
      corresponded with the blood marks which, in all probability, would be
      found on the person who committed the murder. In regard to the medical
      testimony some caution must be exercised. Where medical gentlemen had made
      observations, seen with their own eyes, the direct inference might be
      highly trustworthy, but, when they proceeded to draw further inferences,
      they might be in danger of looking at facts through the spectacles of
      theory; "we know that people do that in other things besides science&mdash;politics,
      religion, and so forth." Taking the Crown evidence, at its strongest,
      there was a missing link; did the evidence of the bloodstains supply it?
      These bloodstains were almost invisible. Could a person be reasonably
      asked to explain how they came where they did? Could they be accounted for
      in no other reasonable way than that the clothes had been worn by the
      murderer of the Dewars?
    </p>
    <p>
      In spite of a summing-up distinctly favourable to the prisoner, the jury
      were out three hours. According to one account of their proceedings, told
      to the writer, there was at first a majority of the jurymen in favour of
      conviction. But it was Saturday night; if they could not come to a
      decision they were in danger of being locked up over Sunday. For this
      reason the gentleman who held an obstinate and unshaken belief that the
      crime was the work of a homicidal maniac found an unexpected ally in a
      prominent member of a church choir who was down to sing a solo in his
      church on Sunday, and was anxious not to lose such an opportunity for
      distinction. Whatever the cause, after three hours' deliberation the jury
      returned a verdict of "Not Guilty." Later in the Session Butler pleaded
      guilty to the burglary at Mr. Stamper's house, and was sentenced to
      eighteen years' imprisonment. The severity of this sentence was not, the
      judge said, intended to mark the strong suspicion under which Butler
      laboured of being a murderer as well as a burglar.
    </p>
    <p>
      The ends of justice had been served by Butler's acquittal. But in the
      light of after events, it is perhaps unfortunate that the jury did not
      stretch a point and so save the life of Mr. Munday of Toowong. Butler
      underwent his term of imprisonment in Littleton Jail. There his reputation
      was most unenviable. He is described by a fellow prisoner as ill-tempered,
      malicious, destructive, but cowardly and treacherous. He seems to have
      done little or no work; he looked after the choir and the library, but was
      not above breaking up the one and smashing the other, if the fit seized
      him.
    </p>
    <p>
      III HIS DECLINE AND FALL
    </p>
    <p>
      In 1896 Butler was released from prison. The news of his release was
      described as falling like a bombshell among the peaceful inhabitants of
      Dunedin. In the colony of Victoria, where Butler had commenced his career,
      it was received with an apprehension that was justified by subsequent
      events. It was believed that on his release the New Zealand authorities
      had shipped Butler off to Rio. But it was not long before he made his way
      once more to Australia. From the moment of his arrival in Melbourne he was
      shadowed by the police. One or two mysterious occurrences soon led to his
      arrest. On June 5 he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment under
      the Criminal Influx Act, which makes it a penal offence for any convict to
      enter Victoria for three years after his release from prison. Not content
      with this, the authorities determined to put Butler on trial on two
      charges of burglary and one of highway robbery, committed since his return
      to the colony. To one charge of burglary, that of breaking into a
      hairdresser's shop and stealing a wig, some razors and a little money,
      Butler pleaded guilty.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the charge of highway robbery, which bore a singular resemblance to
      the final catastrophe in Queensland, he resisted to the utmost, and showed
      that his experience in the Supreme Court at Dunedin had not been lost on
      him. At half-past six one evening in a suburb of Melbourne an elderly
      gentleman found himself confronted by a bearded man, wearing a long
      overcoat and a boxer hat and flourishing a revolver, who told him abruptly
      to "turn out his pockets." The old man did ashe was told. The robber then
      asked for his watch and chain, saying "Business must be done." The old
      gentleman mildly urged that this was a dangerous business. On being
      assured that the watch was a gold one, the robber appeared willing to risk
      the danger, and departed thoroughly satisfied. The old gentleman
      afterwards identified Butler as the man who had taken his watch. Another
      elderly man swore that he had seen Butler at the time of the robbery in
      the possession of a fine gold watch, which he said had been sent him from
      home. But the watch had not been found in Butler's possession.
    </p>
    <p>
      On June 18 Butler was put on his trial in the Melbourne Criminal Court
      before Mr. Justice Holroyd, charged with robbery under arms. His
      appearance in the dock aroused very considerable interest. "It was the
      general verdict," wrote one newspaper, "that his intellectual head and
      forehead compared not unfavourably with those of the judge." He was
      decently dressed and wore pince-nez, which he used in the best
      professional manner as he referred to the various documents that lay in
      front of him. He went into the witness-box and stated that the evening of
      the crime he had spent according to his custom in the Public Library.
    </p>
    <p>
      For an hour and a half he addressed the jury. He disputed the possibility
      of his identification by his alleged victim. He was "an old gentleman of
      sedentary pursuits and not cast in the heroic mould." Such a man would be
      naturally alarmed and confused at meeting suddenly an armed robber. Now,
      under these circumstances, could his recognition of a man whose face was
      hidden by a beard, his head by a boxer hat, and his body by a long
      overcoat, be considered trustworthy? And such recognition occurring in the
      course of a chance encounter in the darkness, that fruitful mother of
      error? The elderly gentleman had described his moustache as a slight one,
      but the jury could see that it was full and overhanging. He complained
      that he had been put up for identification singly, not with other men,
      according to the usual custom; the police had said to the prosecutor: "We
      have here a man that we think robbed you, and, if he is not the man, we
      shall be disappointed," to which the prosecutor had replied: "Yes, and if
      he is not the man, I shall be disappointed too." For the elderly person
      who had stated that he had seen a gold watch in Butler's possession the
      latter had nothing but scorn. He was a "lean and slippered pantaloon in
      Shakespeare's last stage"; and he, Butler, would have been a lunatic to
      have confided in such a man.
    </p>
    <p>
      The jury acquitted Butler, adding as a rider to their verdict that there
      was not sufficient evidence of identification. The third charge against
      Butler was not proceeded with. He was put up to receive sentence for the
      burglary at the hairdresser's shop. Butler handed to the judge a written
      statement which Mr. Justice Holroyd described as a narrative that might
      have been taken from those sensational newspapers written for
      nursery-maids, and from which, he said, he could not find that Butler had
      ever done one good thing in the whole course of his life. Of that life of
      fifty years Butler had spent thirty-five in prison. The judge expressed
      his regret that a man of Butler's knowledge, information, vanity, and
      utter recklessness of what evil will do, could not be put away somewhere
      for the rest of his life, and sentenced him to fifteen years' imprisonment
      with hard labour. "An iniquitous and brutal sentence!" exclaimed the
      prisoner. After a brief altercation with the judge, who said that he could
      hardly express the scorn he felt for such a man, Butler was removed. The
      judge subsequently reduced the sentence to one of ten years. Chance or
      destiny would seem implacable in their pursuit of Mr. William Munday of
      Toowong.
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler after his trial admitted that it was he who had robbed the old
      gentleman of his watch, and described to the police the house in which it
      was hidden. When the police went there to search they found that the house
      had been pulled down, but among the debris they discovered a brown paper
      parcel containing the old gentleman's gold watch and chain, a
      five-chambered revolver, a keen-edged butcher's knife, and a mask.
    </p>
    <p>
      Butler served his term of imprisonment in Victoria, "an unmitigated
      nuisance" to his custodians. On his release in 1904, he made, as in
      Dunedin, an attempt to earn a living by his pen. He contributed some
      articles to a Melbourne evening paper on the inconveniences of prison
      discipline, but he was quite unfitted for any sustained effort as a
      journalist. According to his own account, with the little money he had
      left he made his way to Sydney, thence to Brisbane. He was half-starved,
      bewildered, despairing; in his own words, "if a psychological camera could
      have been turned on me it would have shown me like a bird fascinated by a
      serpent, fascinated and bewildered by the fate in front, behind, and
      around me." Months of suffering and privation passed, months of tramping
      hundreds of miles with occasional breakdowns, months of hunger and
      sickness; "my actions had become those of a fool; my mind and will had
      become a remnant guided or misguided by unreasoning impulse."
    </p>
    <p>
      It was under the influence of such an impulse that on March 23 Butler had
      met and shot Mr. Munday at Toowong. On May 24 he was arraigned at Brisbane
      before the Supreme Court of Queensland. But the Butler who stood in the
      dock of the Brisbane Criminal Court was very different from the Butler who
      had successfully defended himself at Dunedin and Melbourne. The spirit had
      gone out of him; it was rather as a suppliant, represented by counsel,
      that he faced the charge of murder. His attitude was one of humble and
      appropriate penitence. In a weak and nervous voice he told the story of
      his hardships since his release from his Victorian prison; he would only
      urge that the shooting of Mr. Munday was accidental, caused by Munday
      picking up a stone and attacking him. When about to be sentenced to death
      he expressed great sorrow and contrition for his crime, for the poor wife
      and children of his unfortunate victim. His life, he said, was a poor
      thing, but he would gladly give it fifty times over.
    </p>
    <p>
      The sentence of death was confirmed by the Executive on June 30. To a
      Freethought advocate who visited him shortly before his execution, Butler
      wrote a final confession of faith: "I shall have to find my way across the
      harbour bar without the aid of any pilot. In these matters I have for many
      years carried an exempt flag, and, as it has not been carried through
      caprice or ignorance, I am compelled to carry it to the last. There is an
      impassable bar of what I honestly believe to be the inexorable logic of
      philosophy and facts, history and experience of the nature of the world,
      the human race and myself, between me and the views of the communion of
      any religious organisation. So instead of the 'depart Christian soul' of
      the priest, I only hope for the comfort and satisfaction of the last
      friendly good-bye of any who cares to give it."
    </p>
    <p>
      From this positive affirmation of unbelief Butler wilted somewhat at the
      approach of death. The day before his execution he spent half an hour
      playing hymns on the church organ in the prison; and on the scaffold,
      where his agitation rendered him almost speechless, he expressed his
      sorrow for what he had done, and the hope that, if there were a heaven,
      mercy would be shown him.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      M. Derues
    </h2>
    <p>
      The last word on Derues has been said by M. Georges Claretie in his
      excellent monograph, "Derues L'Empoisonneur," Paris. 1907. There is a full
      account of the case in Vol. V. of Fouquier, "Causes Celebres."
    </p>
    <p>
      I THE CLIMBING LITTLE GROCER
    </p>
    <p>
      M. Etienne Saint-Faust de Lamotte, a provincial nobleman of ancient
      lineage and moderate health, ex-equerry to the King, desired in the year
      1774 to dispose of a property in the country, the estate of Buisson-Souef
      near Villeneuve-le-Roi, which he had purchased some ten years before out
      of money acquired by a prudent marriage.
    </p>
    <p>
      With an eye to the main chance M. de Lamotte had in 1760 ran away with the
      daughter of a wealthy citizen of Rheims, who was then staying with her
      sister in Paris. They lived together in the country for some time, and a
      son was born to them, whom the father legitimised by subsequently marrying
      the mother. For a few years M. and Mme. de Lamotte dwelt happily together
      at Buisson-Souef. But as their boy grew up they became anxious to leave
      the country and return to Paris, where M. de Lamotte hoped to be able to
      obtain for his son some position about the Court of Louis XVI. And so it
      was that in May, 1775, M. de Lamotte gave a power of attorney to his wife
      in order that she might go to Paris and negotiate for the sale of
      Buisson-Souef. The legal side of the transaction was placed in the hands
      of one Jolly, a proctor at the Chatelet in Paris.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now the proctor Jolly had a client with a great desire to acquire a place
      in the country, M. Derues de Cyrano de Bury, lord of Candeville, Herchies,
      and other places. Here was the very man to comply with the requirements of
      the de Lamottes, and such a pleasing, ready, accommodating gentleman into
      the bargain! Very delicate to all appearances, strangely pale, slight,
      fragile in build, with his beardless chin and feminine cast of feature,
      there was something cat-like in the soft insinuating smile of this
      seemingly most amiable, candid and pious of men. Always cheerful and
      optimistic, it was quite a pleasure to do business with M. Derues de
      Cyrano de Bury. The de Lamottes after one or two interviews were delighted
      with their prospective purchaser. Everything was speedily settled. M.
      Derues and his wife, a lady belonging to the distinguished family of
      Nicolai, visited Buisson-Souef. They were enchanted with what they saw,
      and their hosts were hardly less enchanted with their visitors. By the end
      of December, 1775, the purchase was concluded. M. Derues was to give
      130,000 livres (about L20,000) for the estate, the payments to be made by
      instalments, the first of 12,000 livres to be paid on the actual signing
      of the contract of sale, which, it was agreed, was to be concluded not
      later than the first of June, 1776. In the meantime, as an earnest of good
      faith, M. Derues gave Mme. de Lamotte a bill for 4,200 livres to fall due
      on April 1, 1776.
    </p>
    <p>
      What could be more satisfactory? That M. Derues was a substantial person
      there could be no doubt. Through his wife he was entitled to a sum of
      250,000 livres as her share of the property of a wealthy kinsman, one
      Despeignes-Duplessis, a country gentleman, who some four years before had
      been found murdered in his house under mysterious circumstances. The
      liquidation of the Duplessis inheritance, as soon as the law's delay could
      be overcome, would place the Derues in a position of affluence fitting a
      Cyrano de Bury and a Nicolai.
    </p>
    <p>
      At this time M. Derues was in reality far from affluent. In point of fact
      he was insolvent. Nor was his lineage, nor that of his wife, in any way
      distinguished. He had no right to call himself de Cyrano de Bury or Lord
      of Candeville. His wife's name was Nicolais, not Nicolai&mdash;a very
      important difference from the genealogical point of view. The Duplessis
      inheritance, though certainly existent, would seem to have had little more
      chance of realisation than the mythical Crawford millions of Madame
      Humbert. And yet, crippled with debt, without a penny in the world, this
      daring grocer of the Rue Beaubourg, for such was M. Derues' present
      condition in life, could cheerfully and confidently engage in a
      transaction as considerable as the purchase of a large estate for 130,000
      livres! The origin of so enterprising a gentleman is worthy of attention.
    </p>
    <p>
      Antoine Francois Derues was born at Chartres in 1744; his father was a
      corn merchant. His parents died when he was three years old. For some time
      after his birth he was assumed to be a girl; it was not until he was
      twelve years old that an operation determined his sex to be masculine.
      Apprenticed by his relatives to a grocer, Derues succeeded so well in the
      business that he was able in 1770 to set up on his own account in Paris,
      and in 1772 he married. Among the grocer's many friends and acquaintances
      this marriage created something of a sensation, for Derues let it be known
      that the lady of his choice was of noble birth and an heiress. The first
      statement was untrue. The lady was one Marie Louise Nicolais, daughter of
      a non-commissioned artillery officer, turned coachbuilder. But by
      suppressing the S at the end of her name, which Derues was careful also to
      erase in his marriage contract, the ambitious grocer was able to describe
      his wife as connected with the noble house of Nicolai, one of the most
      distinguished of the great French families.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was more truth in the statement that Mme. Derues was an heiress. A
      kinsman of her mother, Beraud by name, had become the heir to a certain
      Marquis Desprez. Beraud was the son of a small merchant. His mother had
      married a second time, the husband being the Marquis Desprez, and through
      her Beraud had inherited the Marquis' property. According to the custom of
      the time, Beraud, on coming into his inheritance, took a title from one of
      his estates and called himself thenceforth the lord of
      Despeignes-Duplessis. A rude, solitary, brutal man, devoted to sport, he
      lived alone in his castle of Candeville, hated by his neighbours, a terror
      to poachers. One day he was found lying dead in his bedroom; he had been
      shot in the chest; the assassin had escaped through an open window.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mystery of Beraud's murder was never solved. His estate of 200,000
      livres was divided among three cousins, of whom the mother of Mme. Derues
      was one. Mme. Derues herself was entitled to a third of his mother's share
      of the estate, that is, one-ninth of the whole. But in 1775 Derues
      acquired the rest of the mother's share on condition that he paid her an
      annual income of 1,200 livres. Thus on the liquidation of the Duplessis
      inheritance Mme. Derues would be entitled nominally to some 66,500 livres,
      about L11,000 in English money. But five years had passed since the death
      of Despeignes-Duplessis, and the estate was still in the slow process of
      legal settlement. If Derues were to receive the full third of the
      Duplessis inheritance&mdash;a very unlikely supposition after four years
      of liquidation&mdash;66,000 livres would not suffice to pay his ordinary
      debts quite apart from the purchase money of Buisson-Souef. His financial
      condition was in the last degree critical. Not content with the modest
      calling of a grocer, Derues had turned money-lender, a money-lender to
      spendthrift and embarrassed noblemen. Derues dearly loved a lord; he
      wanted to become one himself; it delighted him to receive dukes and
      marquises at the Rue Beaubourg, even if they came there with the avowed
      object of raising the wind. The smiling grocer, in his everlasting bonnet
      and flowered dressing-gown a la J. J. Rousseau, was ever ready to oblige
      the needy scion of a noble house. What he borrowed at moderate interest
      from his creditors he lent at enhanced interest to the quality. Duns and
      bailiffs jostled the dukes and marquises whose presence at the Rue
      Beaubourg so impressed the wondering neighbours of the facile grocer.
    </p>
    <p>
      This aristocratic money-lending proved a hopeless trade; it only plunged
      Derues deeper and deeper into the mire of financial disaster. The noblemen
      either forgot to pay while they were alive, or on their death were found
      to be insolvent. Derues was driven to ordering goods and merchandise on
      credit, and selling them at a lower price for ready money. Victims of this
      treatment began to press him seriously for their money or their goods.
      Desperately he continued to fence them off with the long expected windfall
      of the Duplessis inheritance.
    </p>
    <p>
      Paris was getting too hot for him. Gay and irrepressible as he was, the
      strain was severe. If he could only find some retreat in the country where
      he might enjoy at once refuge from his creditors and the rank and
      consequence of a country gentleman! Nothing&mdash;no fear, no
      disappointment, no disaster&mdash;could check the little grocer's ardent
      and overmastering desire to be a gentleman indeed, a landed proprietor, a
      lord or something or other. At the beginning of 1775 he had purchased a
      place near Rueil from a retired coffeehouse-keeper, paying 1,000 livres on
      account, but the non-payment of the rest of the purchase-money had
      resulted in the annulment of the contract. Undefeated, Derues only
      determined to fly the higher. Having failed to pay 9,000 livres for a
      modest estate near Rueil, he had no hesitation in pledging himself to pay
      130,000 livres for the lordly domain of Buisson-Souef. So great were his
      pride and joy on the conclusion of the latter bargain that he amused
      himself by rehearsing on paper his future style and title: "Antoine
      Francois de Cyrano Derues de Bury, Seigneur de Buisson-Souef et Valle
      Profonde." He is worthy of Thackeray's pen, this little grocer-snob, with
      his grand and ruinous acquaintance with the noble and the great, his
      spurious titles, his unwearied climbing of the social ladder.
    </p>
    <p>
      The confiding, if willing, dupe of aristocratic impecuniosity, Derues was
      a past master of the art of duping others. From the moment of the purchase
      of Buisson-Souef all his art was employed in cajoling the trusting and
      simple de Lamottes. Legally Buisson-Souef was his from the signing of the
      agreement in December, 1775. His first payment was due in April, 1776.
      Instead of making it, Derues went down to Buisson-Souef with his little
      girl, and stayed there as the guests of the de Lamottes for six months.
      His good humour and piety won all hearts. The village priest especially
      derived great satisfaction from the society of so devout a companion. He
      entertained his good friends, the merry little man, by dressing up as a
      woman, a role his smooth face and effeminate features well fitted him to
      play. If business were alluded to, the merry gentleman railed at the delay
      and chicanery of lawyers; it was that alone that postponed the liquidation
      of the Duplessis inheritance; as soon as the lawyers could be got rid of,
      the purchase-money of his new estate would be promptly paid up. But as
      time went on and no payment was forthcoming the de Lamottes began to feel
      a little uneasy. As soon as Derues had departed in November M. de Lamotte
      decided to send his wife to Paris to make further inquiries and, if
      possible, bring their purchaser up to the scratch. Mme. de Lamotte had
      developed into a stout, indolent woman, of the Mrs. Bloss type, fond of
      staying in bed and taking heavy meals. Her son, a fat, lethargic youth of
      fourteen, accompanied his mother.
    </p>
    <p>
      On hearing of Mme. de Lamotte's contemplated visit to Paris, Derues was
      filled with alarm. If she were living free and independent in Paris she
      might find out the truth about the real state of his affairs, and then
      good-bye to Buisson-Souef and landed gentility! No, if Mme. de Lamotte
      were to come to Paris, she must come as the guest of the Derues, a
      pleasant return for the hospitality accorded to the grocer at
      Buisson-Souef. The invitation was given and readily accepted; M. de
      Lamotte still had enough confidence in and liking for the Derues to be
      glad of the opportunity of placing his wife under their roof. And so it
      was that on December 16, 1776, Mme. de Lamotte arrived at Paris and took
      up her abode at the house of the Derues in the Rue Beaubourg Her son she
      placed at a private school in a neighbouring street.
    </p>
    <p>
      To Derues there was now one pressing and immediate problem to be solved&mdash;how
      to keep Buisson-Souef as his own without paying for it? To one less
      sanguine, less daring, less impudent and desperate in his need, the
      problem would have appeared insoluble.
    </p>
    <p>
      But that was by no means the view of the cheery and resourceful grocer. He
      had a solution ready, well thought out and bearing to his mind the stamp
      of probability. He would make a fictitious payment of the purchase-money
      to Mme. de Lamotte. She would then disappear, taking her son with her. Her
      indiscretion in having been the mistress of de Lamotte before she became
      his wife, would lend colour to his story that she had gone off with a
      former lover, taking with her the money which Derues had paid her for
      Buisson-Souef. He would then produce the necessary documents proving the
      payment of the purchase-money, and Buisson-Souef would be his for good and
      all.
    </p>
    <p>
      The prime necessity to the success of this plan was the disappearance,
      willing or unwilling, of Mme. de Lamotte and her son. The former had
      settled down quite comfortably beneath the hospitable roof of the Derues,
      and under the soothing influence of her host showed little vigour in
      pressing him for the money due to herself and her husband. She had already
      spent a month in quietly enjoying Paris and the society of her friends
      when, towards the end of January, 1770, her health and that of her son
      began to fail. Mme. de Lamotte was seized with sickness and internal
      trouble. Though Derues wrote to her husband that his wife was well and
      their business was on the point of conclusion, by the 30th of January Mme.
      de Lamotte had taken to her bed, nursed and physicked by the ready Derues.
      On the 31st the servant at the Rue Beaubourg was told that she could go to
      her home at Montrouge, whither Derues had previously sent his two
      children. Mme. Derues, who was in an interesting condition, was sent out
      for an hour by her husband to do some shopping. Derues was alone with his
      patient.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the evening a friend, one Bertin, came to dine with Derues. Bertin was
      a short, hustling, credulous, breathless gentleman, always in a hurry,
      with a great belief in the abilities of M. Derues. He found the little man
      in excellent spirits. Bertin asked if he could see Mme. de Lamotte. Mme.
      Derues said that that was impossible, but that her husband had given her
      some medicine which was working splendidly. The young de Lamotte called to
      see his mother. Derues took him into her room; in the dim light the boy
      saw her sleeping, and crept out quietly for fear of disturbing her. The
      Derues and their friends sat down to dinner. Derues kept jumping up and
      running into the sick room, from which a horrible smell began to pervade
      the house. But Derues was radiant at the success of his medicine. "Was
      there ever such a nurse as I am?" he exclaimed. Bertin remarked that he
      thought it was a woman's and not a man's place to nurse a lady under such
      distressing circumstances. Derues protested that it was an occupation he
      had always liked. Next day, February 1, the servant was still at
      Montrouge; Mme. Derues was again sent out shopping; again Derues was alone
      with his patient. But she was a patient no longer; she had become a
      corpse. The highly successful medicine administered to the poor lady by
      her jolly and assiduous nurse had indeed worked wonders.
    </p>
    <p>
      Derues had bought a large leather trunk. It is possible that to Derues
      belongs the distinction of being the first murderer to put that harmless
      and necessary article of travel to a criminal use. He was engaged in his
      preparations for coffining Mme. de Lamotte, when a female creditor knocked
      insistently at the door. She would take no denial. Clad in his bonnet and
      gown, Derues was compelled to admit her. She saw the large trunk, and
      suspected a bolt on the part of her creditor. Derues reassured her; a
      lady, he said, who had been stopping with them was returning to the
      country. The creditor departed. Later in the day Derues came out of the
      house and summoned some porters. With their help the heavy trunk was taken
      to the house of a sculptor, a friend of Derues, who agreed to keep it in
      his studio until Derues could take it down to his place in the country.
      Bertin came in to dinner again that evening, and also the young de
      Lamotte. Derues was gayer than ever, laughing and joking with his guests.
      He told the boy that his mother had quite recovered and gone to Versailles
      to see about finding him some post at the Court. "We'll go and see her
      there in a day or two," he said, "I'll let you know when."
    </p>
    <p>
      On the following day a smartly dressed, dapper, but very pale little
      gentleman, giving the name of Ducoudray, hired a vacant cellar in a house
      in the Rue de la Mortellerie. He had, he said, some Spanish wine he wanted
      to store there, and three or four days later M. Ducoudray deposited in
      this cellar a large grey trunk. A few days after he employed a man to dig
      a large hole in the floor of the cellar, giving as his reason for such a
      proceeding that "there was no way of keeping wine like burying it." While
      the man worked at the job, his genial employer beguiled his labours with
      merry quips and tales, which he illustrated with delightful mimicry. The
      hole dug, the man was sent about his business. "I will bury the wine
      myself," said his employer, and on one or two occasions M. Ducoudray was
      seen by persons living in the house going in and out of his cellar, a
      lighted candle in his hand. One day the pale little gentleman was observed
      leaving the cellar, accompanied by a porter carrying a large trunk, and
      after that the dwellers in the Rue de la Mortellerie saw the pale little
      gentleman no more.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few days later M. Derues sent down to his place at Buisson-Souef a large
      trunk filled with china. It was received there by M. de Lamotte. Little
      did the trusting gentleman guess that it was in this very trunk that the
      body of his dear wife had been conveyed to its last resting place in the
      cellar of M. Ducoudray in the Rue de la Mortellerie. Nor had M.
      Mesvrel-Desvergers, importunate creditor of M. Derues, guessed the
      contents of the large trunk that he had met his debtor one day early in
      February conveying through the streets of Paris. Creditors were always
      interrupting Derues at inconvenient moments. M. Mesvrel-Desvergers had
      tapped Derues on the shoulder, reminded him forcibly of his liability
      towards him, and spoken darkly of possible imprisonment. Derues pointed to
      the trunk. It contained, he said, a sample of wine; he was going to order
      some more of it, and he would then be in a position to pay his debt. But
      the creditor, still doubting, had M. Derues followed, and ascertained that
      he had deposited his sample of wine at a house in the Rue de la
      Mortellerie.
    </p>
    <p>
      On Wednesday, February 12, a M. Beaupre of Commercy arrived at Versailles
      with his nephew, a fat boy, in reality some fourteen years of age, but
      given out as older. They hired a room at the house of a cooper named
      Pecquet. M. Beaupre was a very pale little gentleman, who seemed in
      excellent spirits, in spite of the fact that his nephew was clearly
      anything but well. Indeed, so sick and ailing did he appear to be that
      Mme. Pecquet suggested that his uncle should call in a doctor. But M.
      Beaupre said that that was quite unnecessary; he had no faith in doctors;
      he would give the boy a good purge. His illness was due, he said, to a
      venereal disorder and the drugs which he had been taking in order to cure
      it; it was a priest the boy needed rather than a doctor. On the Thursday
      and Friday the boy's condition showed little improvement; the vomiting
      continued. But on Saturday M. Beaupre declared himself as highly delighted
      with the success of his medicine. The same night the boy was dead. The
      priest, urgently sent for by his devout uncle, arrived to find a corpse.
      On the following day "Louis Anotine Beaupre, aged twenty-two and a half,"
      was buried at Versailles, his pious uncle leaving with the priest six
      livres to pay for masses for the repose of his erring nephew's soul.
    </p>
    <p>
      The same evening M. Derues who, according to his own account, had left
      Paris with the young de Lamotte in order to take the boy to his mother in
      Versailles, returned home to the Rue Beaubourg. As usual, Bertin dropped
      in to dinner. He found his host full of merriment, singing in the
      lightness of his heart. Indeed, he had reason to be pleased, for at last,
      he told his wife and his friend, Buisson-Souef was his. He had seen Mme.
      de Lamotte at Versailles and paid her the full purchase-money in good,
      sounding gold. And, best joke of all, Mme. de Lamotte had no sooner
      settled the business than she had gone off with a former lover, her son
      and her money, and would in all probability never be heard of again. The
      gay gentleman laughingly reminded his hearers that such an escapade on the
      part of Mme. de Lamotte was hardly to be wondered at, when they
      recollected that her son had been born out of wedlock.
    </p>
    <p>
      To all appearances Mme. de Lamotte had undoubtedly concluded the sale of
      Buisson-Souef to Derues and received the price of it before disappearing
      with her lover. Derues had in his possession a deed of sale signed by Mme.
      de Lamotte and acknowledging the payment to her by Derues of 100,000
      livres, which he had borrowed for that purpose from an advocate of the
      name of Duclos. As a fact the loan from Duclos to Derues was fictitious. A
      legal document proving the loan had been drawn up, but the cash which the
      notary had demanded to see before executing the document had been borrowed
      for a few hours. Duclos, a provincial advocate, had acted in good faith,
      in having been represented to him that such fictitious transactions were
      frequently used in Paris for the purpose of getting over some temporary
      financial difficulty. On the 15th of February the deed of the sale of
      Buisson-Souef had been brought by a woman to the office of a scrivener
      employed by Derues; it was already signed, but the woman asked that
      certain blanks should be filled in and that the document should be dated.
      She was told that the date should be that of the day on which the parties
      had signed it. She gave it as February 12. A few days later Derues called
      at the office and was told of the lady's visit. "Ah!" he said, "it was
      Mme. de Lamotte herself, the lady who sold me the estate."
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime Derues, through his bustling and ubiquitous friend Bertin,
      took good care that the story of Mme. de Lamotte's sale of Buisson-Souef
      and subsequent elopement should be spread sedulously abroad. By Bertin it
      was told to M. Jolly, the proctor in whose hands the de Lamottes had
      placed the sale of Buisson-Souef. It was M. Jolly who had in the first
      instance recommended to them his client Derues as a possible purchaser.
      The proctor, who knew Mme. de Lamotte to be a woman devoted to her husband
      and her home, was astonished to hear of her infidelity, more especially as
      the story told by Derues represented her as saying in very coarse terms
      how little she cared for her husband's honour. He was surprised, too, that
      she should not have consulted him about the conclusion of the business
      with Derues, and that Derues himself should have been able to find so
      considerable a sum of money as 100,000 livres. But, said M. Jolly, if he
      were satisfied that Mme. de Lamotte had taken away the money with her,
      then he would deliver up to Derues the power of attorney which M. de
      Lamotte had left with him in 1775, giving his wife authority to carry out
      the sale of Buisson-Souef. Mme. de Lamotte, being a married woman, the
      sale of the property to Derues would be legally invalid if the husband's
      power of attorney were not in the hands of the purchaser.
    </p>
    <p>
      II THE GAME OF BLUFF
    </p>
    <p>
      To Derues, on the eve of victory, the statement of Jolly in regard to the
      power of attorney was a serious reverse. He had never thought of such an
      instrument, or he would have persuaded Mme. de Lamotte to have gotten
      permission of it before her disappearance. Now he must try to get it from
      Jolly himself. On the 26th of February he once again raised from a
      friendly notary a few thousand livres on the Duplessis inheritance, and
      deposited the deed of sale of Buisson-Souef as further security. His
      pocket full of gold, he went straight to the office of Jolly. To the
      surprise of the proctor Derues announced that he had come to pay him 200
      livres which he owed him, and apologised for the delay. Taking the gold
      coins from his pockets he filled his three-cornered hat with considerably
      more than the sum due, and held it out invitingly to M. Jolly. Then he
      proceeded to tell him of his dealings with Mme. de Lamotte. She had
      offered, he said, to get the power of attorney for him, but he, trusting
      in her good faith, had said that there was no occasion for hurry; and
      then, faithless, ungrateful woman that she was, she had gone off with his
      money and left him in the lurch. "But," he added, "I trust you absolutely,
      M. Jolly, you have all my business in your hands, and I shall be a good
      client in the future. You have the power of attorney&mdash;you will give
      it to me?" and he rattled the coins in his hat. "I must have it," he went
      on, "I must have it at any price at any price," and again the coins danced
      in his hat, while his eyes looked knowingly at the proctor. M. Jolly saw
      his meaning, and his surprise turned to indignation. He told Derues
      bluntly that he did not believe his story, that until he was convinced of
      its truth he would not part with the power of attorney, and showed the
      confounded grocer the door.
    </p>
    <p>
      Derues hastened home filled with wrath, and took counsel with his friend
      Bertin. Bertin knew something of legal process; they would try whether the
      law could not be invoked to compel Jolly to surrender the power of
      attorney. Bertin went off to the Civil Lieutenant and applied for an order
      to oblige M. Jolly to give up the document in question. An order was made
      that Jolly must either surrender it into the hands of Derues or appear
      before a referee and show cause why he should not comply with the order.
      Jolly refused still to give it up or allow a copy of it to be made, and
      agreed to appear before the referee to justify his action. In the meantime
      Derues, greatly daring, had started for Buisson-Souef to try what "bluff"
      could do in this serious crisis in his adventure.
    </p>
    <p>
      At Buisson-Souef poor M. de Lamotte waited, puzzled and distressed, for
      news from his wife. On Saturday, 17th, the day after the return of Derues
      from Versailles, he heard from Mme. Derues that his wife had left Paris
      and gone with her son to Versailles. A second letter told him that she had
      completed the sale of Buisson-Souef to Derues, and was still at Versailles
      trying to obtain some post for the boy. On February 19 Mme. Derues wrote
      again expressing surprise that M. de Lamotte had not had any letter from
      his wife and asking if he had received some oysters which the Derues had
      sent him. The distracted husband was in no mood for oysters. "Do not send
      me oysters," he writes, "I am too ill with worry. I thank you for all your
      kindness to my son. I love him better than myself, and God grant he will
      be good and grateful." The only reply he received from the Derues was an
      assurance that he would see his wife again in a few days.
    </p>
    <p>
      The days passed, but Mme. de Lamotte made no sign. About four o'clock on
      the afternoon of February 28, Derues, accompanied by the parish priest of
      Villeneuvele-Roi, presented himself before M. de Lamotte at Buisson-Souef.
      For the moment M. de Lamotte was rejoiced to see the little man; at last
      he would get news of his wife. But he was disappointed. Derues could tell
      him only what he had been told already, that his wife had sold their
      estate and gone away with the money.
    </p>
    <p>
      M. de Lamotte was hardly convinced. How, he asked Derues, had he found the
      100,000 livres to buy Buisson-Souef, he who had not a halfpenny a short
      time ago? Derues replied that he had borrowed it from a friend; that there
      was no use in talking about it; the place was his now, his alone, and M.
      de Lamotte had no longer a right to be there; he was very sorry, poor dear
      gentleman, that his wife had gone off and left him without a shilling, but
      personally he would always be a friend to him and would allow him 3,000
      livres a year for the rest of his life. In the meantime, he said, he had
      already sold forty casks of the last year's vintage, and would be obliged
      if M. de Lamotte would see to their being sent off at once.
    </p>
    <p>
      By this time the anger and indignation of M. de Lamotte blazed forth. He
      told Derues that his story was a pack of lies, that he was still master at
      Buisson-Souef, and not a bottle of wine should leave it. "You are
      torturing me," he exclaimed, "I know something has happened to my wife and
      child. I am coming to Paris myself, and if it is as I fear, you shall
      answer for it with your head!" Derues, undismayed by this outburst,
      re-asserted his ownership and departed in defiant mood, leaving on the
      premises a butcher of the neighbourhood to look after his property.
    </p>
    <p>
      But things were going ill with Derues. M. de Lamotte meant to show fight;
      he would have powerful friends to back him; class against class, the
      little grocer would be no match for him. It was immediate possession of
      Buisson-Souef that Derues wanted, not lawsuits; they were expensive and
      the results uncertain. He spoke freely to his friends of the difficulties
      of the situation.
    </p>
    <p>
      What could he do? The general opinion seemed to be that some fresh news of
      Mme. de Lamotte&mdash;her reappearance, perhaps&mdash;would be the only
      effective settlement of the dispute. He had made Mme. de Lamotte
      disappear, why should he not make her reappear? He was not the man to
      stick at trifles. His powers of female impersonation, with which he had
      amused his good friends at Buisson-Souef, could now be turned to practical
      account. On March 5 he left Paris again.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the evening of March 7 a gentleman, M. Desportes of Paris, hired a room
      at the Hotel Blanc in Lyons. On the following day he went out early in the
      morning, leaving word that, should a lady whom he was expecting, call to
      see him, she was to be shown up to his room. The same morning a gentleman,
      resembling M. Desportes of Paris, bought two lady's dresses at a shop in
      Lyons.
    </p>
    <p>
      The same afternoon a lady dressed in black silk, with a hood well drawn
      over her eyes, called at the office of M. Pourra, a notary.
    </p>
    <p>
      The latter was not greatly attracted by his visitor, whose nose struck him
      as large for a woman. She said that she had spent her youth in Lyons, but
      her accent was distinctly Parisian. The lady gave her name as Madame de
      Lamotte, and asked for a power of attorney by which she could give her
      husband the interest due to her on a sum of 30,000 livres, part of the
      purchase-money of the estate of Buisson-Souef, which she had recently
      sold. As Mme. de Lamotte represented herself as having been sent to M.
      Pourra by a respectable merchant for whom he was in the habit of doing
      business, he agreed to draw up the necessary document, accepting her
      statement that she and her husband had separate estates. Mme. de Lamotte
      said that she would not have time to wait until the power of attorney was
      ready, and therefore asked M. Pourra to send it to the parish priest at
      Villeneuvele-Roi; this he promised to do. Mme. de-Lamotte had called twice
      during the day at the Hotel Blanc and asked for M. Desportes of Paris, but
      he was not at home. While Derues, alias Desportes, alias Mme. de Lamotte,
      was masquerading in Lyons, events had been moving swiftly and unfavourably
      in Paris. Sick with misgiving and anxiety, M. de Lamotte had come there to
      find, if possible, his wife and child. By a strange coincidence he
      alighted at an inn in the Rue de la Mortellerie, only a few yards from the
      wine-cellar in which the corpse of his ill-fated wife lay buried. He lost
      no time in putting his case before the Lieutenant of Police, who placed
      the affair in the hands of one of the magistrates of the Chatelet, then
      the criminal court of Paris. At first the magistrate believed that the
      case was one of fraud and that Mme. de Lamotte and her son were being kept
      somewhere in concealment by Derues. But as he investigated the
      circumstances further, the evidence of the illness of the mother and son,
      the date of the disappearance of Mme. de Lamotte, and her reputed
      signature to the deed of sale on February 12, led him to suspect that he
      was dealing with a case of murder.
    </p>
    <p>
      When Derues returned to Paris from Lyons, on March 11, he found that the
      police had already visited the house and questioned his wife, and that he
      himself was under close surveillance. A day or two later the advocate,
      Duclos, revealed to the magistrate the fictitious character of the loan of
      100,000 livres, which Derues alleged that he had paid to Mme. de Lamotte
      as the price of Buisson-Souef. When the new power of attorney purporting
      to be signed by Mme. de Lamotte arrived from Lyons, and the signature was
      compared with that on the deed of sale of Buisson-Souef to Derues, both
      were pronounced to be forgeries. Derues was arrested and lodged in the
      Prison of For l'Eveque.
    </p>
    <p>
      The approach of danger had not dashed the spirits of the little man, nor
      was he without partisans in Paris. Opinion in the city was divided as to
      the truth of his account of Mme. de Lamotte's elopement. The nobility were
      on the side of the injured de Lamotte, but the bourgeoisie accepted the
      grocer's story and made merry over the deceived husband. Interrogated,
      however, by the magistrate of the Chatelet, Derues' position became more
      difficult. Under the stress of close questioning the flimsy fabric of his
      financial statements fell to pieces like a house of cards. He had to admit
      that he had never paid Mme. de Lamotte 100,000 livres; he had paid her
      only 25,000 livres in gold; further pressed he said that the 25,000 livres
      had been made up partly in gold, partly in bills; but where the gold had
      come from, or on whom he had drawn the bills, he could not explain. Still
      his position was not desperate; and he knew it. In the absence of Mme. de
      Lamotte he could not be charged with fraud or forgery; and until her body
      was discovered, it would be impossible to charge him with murder.
    </p>
    <p>
      A month passed; Mme. Derues, who had made a belated attempt to follow her
      husband's example by impersonating Mme. de Lamotte in Paris, had been
      arrested and imprisoned in the Grand Chatelet; when, on April 18,
      information was received by the authorities which determined them to
      explore the wine-cellar in the Rue de la Mortellerie. Whether the woman
      who had let the cellar to Derues, or the creditor who had met him taking
      his cask of wine there, had informed the investigating magistrate, seems
      uncertain. In any case, the corpse of the unhappy lady was soon brought to
      light and Derues confronted with it. At first he said that he failed to
      recognise it as the remains of Mme. de Lamotte, but he soon abandoned that
      rather impossible attitude. He admitted that he had given some harmless
      medicine to Mme. de Lamotte during her illness, and then, to his horror,
      one morning had awakened to find her dead. A fear lest her husband would
      accuse him of having caused her death had led him to conceal the body, and
      also that of her son who, he now confessed, had died and been buried by
      him at Versailles. On April 23 the body of the young de Lamotte was
      exhumed. Both bodies were examined by doctors, and they declared
      themselves satisfied that mother and son had died "from a bitter and
      corrosive poison administered in some kind of drink." What the poison was
      they did not venture to state, but one of their number, in the light of
      subsequent investigation, arrived at the conclusion that Derues had used
      in both cases corrosive sublimate. How or where he had obtained the poison
      was never discovered.
    </p>
    <p>
      Justice moved swiftly in Paris in those days. The preliminary
      investigation in Derues' case was ended on April 28. Two days later his
      trial commenced before the tribunal of the Chatelet.
    </p>
    <p>
      It lasted one day. The judges had before them the depositions taken by the
      examining magistrate. Both Derues and his wife were interrogated. He
      maintained that he had not poisoned either Mme. de Lamotte or her son; his
      only crime, he said, lay in having concealed their deaths. Mme; Derues
      said: "It is Buisson-Souef that has ruined us! I always told my husband
      that he was mad to buy these properties&mdash;I am sure my husband is not
      a poisoner&mdash;I trusted my husband and believed every word he said."
      The court condemned Derues to death, but deferred judgment in his wife's
      case on the ground of her pregnancy.
    </p>
    <p>
      And now the frail, cat-like little man had to brace himself to meet a
      cruel and protracted execution. But sanguine to the last, he still hoped.
      An appeal lay from the Chatelet to the Parliament of Paris. It was heard
      on March 5. Derues was brought to the Palais de Justice. The room in which
      he waited was filled with curious spectators, who marvelled at his
      coolness and impudence. He recognised among them a Benedictine monk of his
      acquaintance. "My case," he called out to him, "will soon be over; we'll
      meet again yet and have a good time together." One visitor, wishing not to
      appear too curious, pretended to be looking at a picture. "Come, sir,"
      said Derues, "you haven't come here to see the pictures, but to see me.
      Have a good look at me. Why study copies of nature when you can look at
      such a remarkable original as I?" But there were to be no more days of
      mirth and gaiety for the jesting grocer. His appeal was rejected, and he
      was ordered for execution on the morrow.
    </p>
    <p>
      At six o'clock on the morning of May 6 Derues returned to the Palais de
      Justice, there to submit to the superfluous torments of the question
      ordinary and extraordinary. Though condemned to death, torture was to be
      applied in the hope of wringing from the prisoner some sort of confession.
      The doctors declared him too delicate to undergo the torture of pouring
      cold water into him, which his illustrious predecessor, Mme. de
      Brinvilliers, had suffered; he was to endure the less severe torture of
      the "boot."
    </p>
    <p>
      His legs were tightly encased in wood, and wedges were then hammered in
      until the flesh was crushed and the bones broken. But never a word of
      confession was wrung from the suffering creature. Four wedges constituting
      the ordinary torture he endured; at the third of the extraordinary he
      fainted away. Put in the front of a fire the warmth restored him. Again he
      was questioned, again he asserted his wife's innocence and his own.
    </p>
    <p>
      At two o'clock in the afternoon Derues was recovered sufficiently to be
      taken to Notre Dame. There, in front of the Cathedral, candle in hand and
      rope round his neck, he made the amende honorable. But as the sentence was
      read aloud to the people Derues reiterated the assertion of his innocence.
      From Notre Dame he was taken to the Hotel de Ville. A condemned man had
      the right to stop there on his way to execution, to make his will and last
      dying declarations. Derues availed himself of this opportunity to protest
      solemnly and emphatically his wife's absolute innocence of any complicity
      in whatever he had done. "I want above all," he said, "to state that my
      wife is entirely innocent. She knew nothing. I used fifty cunning devices
      to hide everything from her. I am speaking nothing but the truth, she is
      wholly innocent&mdash;as for me, I am about to die." His wife was allowed
      to see him; he enjoined her to bring up their children in the fear of God
      and love of duty, and to let them know how he had died. Once again, as he
      took up the pen to sign the record of his last words, he re-asserted her
      innocence.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of the last dreadful punishment the offending grocer was to be spared
      nothing. For an aristocrat like Mme. de Brinvilliers beheading was
      considered indignity enough. But Derues must go through with it all; he
      must be broken on the wheel and burnt alive and his ashes scattered to the
      four winds of heaven; there was to be no retentum for him, a clause
      sometimes inserted in the sentence permitting the executioner to strangle
      the broken victim before casting him on to the fire. He must endure all to
      the utmost agony the law could inflict. It was six o'clock when Derues
      arrived at the Place de Greve, crowded to its capacity, the square itself,
      the windows of the houses; places had been bought at high prices, stools,
      ladders, anything that would give a good view of the end of the now famous
      poisoner.
    </p>
    <p>
      Pale but calm, Derues faced his audience. He was stripped of all but his
      shirt; lying flat on the scaffold, his face looking up to the sky, his
      head resting on a stone, his limbs were fastened to the wheel. Then with a
      heavy bar of iron the executioner broke them one after another, and each
      time he struck a fearful cry came from the culprit. The customary three
      final blows on the stomach were inflicted, but still the little man lived.
      Alive and broken, he was thrown on to the fire. His burnt ashes, scattered
      to the winds, were picked up eagerly by the mob, reputed, as in England
      the pieces of the hangman's rope, talismans.
    </p>
    <p>
      Some two months after the execution of her husband Mme. Derues was
      delivered in the Conciergerie of a male child; it is hardly surprising, in
      face of her experiences during her pregnancy, that it was born an idiot.
      In January, 1778, the judges of the Parliament, by a majority of one,
      decided that she should remain a prisoner in the Conciergerie for another
      year, while judgment in her case was reserved. In the following August she
      was charged with having forged the signature of Mme. de Lamotte on the
      deeds of sale. In February, 1779, the two experts in handwriting to whom
      the question had been submitted decided in her favour, and the charge was
      abandoned.
    </p>
    <p>
      But Mme. Derues had a far sterner, more implacable and, be it added, more
      unscrupulous adversary than the law in M. de Lamotte.
    </p>
    <p>
      Not content with her husband's death, M. de Lamotte believed the wife to
      have been his partner in guilt, and thirsted for revenge.
    </p>
    <p>
      To accomplish it he even stooped to suborn witnesses, but the conspiracy
      was exposed, and so strong became the sympathy with the accused woman that
      a young proctor of the Parliament published a pamphlet in her defence,
      asking for an immediate inquiry into the charges made against her, charges
      that had in no instance been proved.
    </p>
    <p>
      At last, in March, 1779, the Parliament decided to finish with the affair.
      In secret session the judges met, examined once more all the documents in
      the case, listened to a report on it from one of their number,
      interrogated the now weary, hopeless prisoner, and, by a large majority,
      condemned her to a punishment that fell only just short of the supreme
      penalty. On the grounds that she had wilfully and knowingly participated
      with her husband in the fraudulent attempt to become possessed of the
      estate of Buisson-Souef, and was strongly suspected of having participated
      with him in his greater crime, she was sentenced to be publicly flogged,
      branded on both shoulders with the letter V (Voleuse) and imprisoned for
      life in the Salpetriere Prison. On March 13, in front of the Conciergerie
      Mme. Derues underwent the first part of her punishment. The same day her
      hair was cut short, and she was dressed in the uniform of the prison in
      which she was to pass the remainder of her days.
    </p>
    <p>
      Paris had just begun to forget Mme. Derues when a temporary interest
      was-excited in her fortunes by the astonishing intelligence that, two
      months after her condemnation, she had been delivered of a child in her
      new prison. Its fatherhood was never determined, and, taken from her
      mother, the child died in fifteen days. Was its birth the result of some
      passing love affair, or some act of drunken violence on the part of her
      jailors, or had the wretched woman, fearing a sentence of death, made an
      effort to avert once again the supreme penalty? History does not relate.
    </p>
    <p>
      Ten years passed. A fellow prisoner in the Salpetriere described Mme.
      Derues as "scheming, malicious, capable of anything." She was accused of
      being violent, and of wishing to revenge herself by setting fire to Paris.
      At length the Revolution broke on France, the Bastille fell, and in that
      same year an old uncle of Mme. Derues, an ex-soldier of Louis XV., living
      in Brittany, petitioned for his niece's release. He protested her
      innocence, and begged that he might take her to his home and restore her
      to her children. For three years he persisted vainly in his efforts. At
      last, in the year 1792, it seemed as if they might be crowned with
      success. He was told that the case would be re-examined; that it was
      possible that the Parliament had judged unjustly. This good news came to
      him in March. But in September of that year there took place those
      shocking massacres in the Paris prisons, which rank high among the
      atrocities of the Revolution. At four o'clock on the afternoon of
      September 4, the slaughterers visited the Salpetriere Prison, and fifth
      among their victims fell the widow of Derues.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      Dr. Castaing
    </h2>
    <p>
      There are two reports of the trial of Castaing: "Proces Complet d'Edme
      Samuel Castaing," Paris, 1823; "Affaire Castaing," Paris, 1823.
    </p>
    <p>
      I AN UNHAPPY COINCIDENCE
    </p>
    <p>
      Edme Castaing, born at Alencon in 1796, was the youngest of the three sons
      of an Inspector-General in the department of Woods and Forests. His elder
      brother had entered the same service as his father, the other brother was
      a staff-captain of engineers. Without being wealthy, the family,
      consisting of M. and Mme. Castaing and four children, was in comfortable
      circumstances. The young Edme was educated at the College of Angers&mdash;the
      Alma Mater of Barre and Lebiez&mdash;where, intelligent and hard working,
      he carried off many prizes. He decided to enter the medical profession,
      and at the age of nineteen commenced his studies at the School of Medicine
      in Paris. For two years he worked hard and well, living within the modest
      allowance made him by his father. At the end of that time this young man
      of two or three-and-twenty formed a passionate attachment for a lady, the
      widow of a judge, and the mother of three children. Of the genuine depth
      and sincerity of this passion for a woman who must have been considerably
      older than himself, there can be no doubt. Henceforth the one object in
      life to Castaing was to make money enough to relieve the comparative
      poverty of his adored mistress, and place her and her children beyond the
      reach of want. In 1821 Castaing became a duly qualified doctor, and by
      that time had added to the responsibilities of his mistress and himself by
      becoming the father of two children, whom she had brought into the world.
      The lady was exigent, and Castaing found it difficult to combine his work
      with a due regard to her claims on his society. Nor was work plentiful or
      lucrative. To add to his embarrassments Castaing, in 1818, had backed a
      bill for a friend for 600 francs. To meet it when it fell due two years
      later was impossible, and desperate were the efforts made by Castaing and
      his mother to put off the day of reckoning. His father, displeased with
      his son's conduct, would do nothing to help him. But his mother spared no
      effort to extricate him from his difficulties. She begged a highly placed
      official to plead with the insistent creditor, but all in vain. There
      seemed no hope of a further delay when suddenly, in the October of 1822,
      Castaing became the possessor of 100,000 francs. How he became possessed
      of this considerable sum of money forms part of a strange and mysterious
      story.
    </p>
    <p>
      Among the friends of Castaing were two young men of about his own age,
      Auguste and Hippolyte Ballet. Auguste, the elder, had the misfortune a few
      days after his birth to incur his mother's lasting dislike. The nurse had
      let the child fall from her arms in the mother's presence, and the shock
      had endangered Mme. Ballet's life. From that moment the mother took a
      strong aversion to her son; he was left to the charge of servants; his
      meals were taken in the kitchen. As soon as he was five years old he was
      put out to board elsewhere, while his brother Hippolyte and his sister
      were well cared for at home. The effect of this unjust neglect on the
      character of Auguste Ballet was, as may be imagined, had; he became
      indolent and dissipated. His brother Hippolyte, on the other hand, had
      justified the affectionate care bestowed on his upbringing; he had grown
      into a studious, intelligent youth of a refined and attractive
      temperament. Unhappily, early in his life he had developed consumption, a
      disease he inherited from his mother. As he grew older his health grew
      steadily worse until, in 1822, his friends were seriously alarmed at his
      condition. It became so much graver that, in the August of that year, the
      doctors recommended him to take the waters at Enghien. In September he
      returned to Paris apparently much better, but on October 2 he was seized
      with sudden illness, and three days later he was dead.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few years before the death of Hippolyte his father and mother had died
      almost at the same time. M. Ballet had left to each of his sons a fortune
      of some 260,000 francs. Though called to the bar, both Auguste and
      Hippolyte Ballet were now men of independent means. After the death of
      their parents, whatever jealousy Auguste may have felt at the unfair
      preference which his mother had shown for her younger son, had died down.
      At the time of Hippolyte's death the brothers were on good terms, though
      the more prudent Hippolyte disapproved of his elder brother's
      extravagance.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of Hippolyte Ballet Dr. Castaing had become the fast friend. Apart from
      his personal liking for Castaing, it was a source of comfort to Hippolyte,
      in his critical state of health, to have as his friend one whose medical
      knowledge was always at his service.
    </p>
    <p>
      About the middle of August, 1822, Hippolyte, on the advice of his doctors,
      went to Enghien to take the waters. There Castaing paid him frequent
      visits. He returned to Paris on September 22, and seemed to have benefited
      greatly by the cure. On Tuesday, October 1, he saw his sister, Mme.
      Martignon, and her husband; he seemed well, but said that he was having
      leeches applied to him by his friend Castaing. On the Wednesday evening
      his sister saw him again, and found him well and with a good appetite. On
      the Thursday, after a night disturbed by severe attacks of vomiting, his
      condition seemed serious. His brother-in-law, who visited him, found that
      he had taken to his bed, his face was swollen, his eyes were red. His
      sister called in the evening, but could not see him. The servants told her
      that her brother was a little better but resting, and that he did not wish
      to be disturbed; they said that Dr. Castaing had been with him all day.
    </p>
    <p>
      On Friday Castaing himself called on the Martignons, and told them that
      Hippolyte had passed a shockingly bad night. Madame Martignon insisted on
      going to nurse her brother herself, but Castaing refused positively to let
      her see him; the sight of her, he said, would be too agitating to the
      patient. Later in the day Mme. Martignon went to her brother's house. In
      order to obey Dr. Castaing's injunctions, she dressed herself in some of
      the clothes of the servant Victoire, in the hope that if she went into his
      bedroom thus disguised, Hippolyte would not recognise her. But even this
      subterfuge was forbidden by Castaing, and Mme. Martignon had to content
      herself with listening in an adjoining room for the sound of her brother's
      voice. At eight o'clock that evening the Martignons learnt that Hippolyte
      was better, but at ten o'clock they received a message that he was dying,
      and that his brother Auguste had been sent for. Mme. Martignon was
      prostrated with grief, but her husband hastened to his brother-in-law's
      house. There he found Castaing, who said that the death agony of his
      friend was so dreadful that he had not the strength to remain in the room
      with the dying man. Another doctor was sent for, but at ten o'clock the
      following morning, after protracted suffering, Hippolyte Ballet passed
      away.
    </p>
    <p>
      A post-mortem was held on his body. It was made by Drs. Segalas and
      Castaing. They stated that death was due to pleurisy aggravated by the
      consumptive condition of the deceased, which, however serious, was not of
      itself likely to have been so rapidly fatal in its consequences.
    </p>
    <p>
      Hippolyte had died, leaving a fortune of some 240,000 francs. In the
      previous September he had spoken to the notary Lebret, a former clerk of
      his father's, of his intention of making a will. He had seen that his
      brother Auguste was squandering his share of their inheritance; he told
      Lebret that whatever he might leave to Auguste should not be placed at his
      absolute disposal. To his servant Victoire, during his last illness,
      Hippolyte had spoken of a will he had made which he wished to destroy. If
      Hippolyte had made such a will, did he destroy it before his death? In any
      case, no trace of it was ever found after his death. He was presumed to
      have died intestate, and his fortune was divided, three-quarters of it
      going to his brother Auguste, the remaining quarter to his sister, Mme.
      Martignon.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the day of Hippolyte's death Auguste Ballet wrote from his brother's
      house to one Prignon: "With great grief I have to tell you that I have
      just lost my brother; I write at the same time to say that I must have
      100,000 francs to-day if possible. I have the greatest need of it. Destroy
      my letter, and reply at once. M. Sandrie will, I am sure, accommodate me.
      I am at my poor brother's house, from which I am writing." Prignon did as
      he was asked, but it was two days before the stockbroker, Sandrie, could
      raise the necessary sum. On October 7 he sold out sufficient of Auguste's
      stock to realise 100,000 francs, and the following day gave Prignon an
      order on the Bank of France for that amount. The same day Prignon took the
      order to Auguste. Accompanied by Castaing and Jean, Auguste's black
      servant, Auguste and Prignon drove to the bank. There the order was
      cashed. Prignon's part of the business was at an end. He said good-bye to
      Auguste outside the bank. As the latter got into his cabriolet, carrying
      the bundle of notes, Prignon heard him say to Castaing: "There are the
      100,000 francs."
    </p>
    <p>
      Why had Auguste Ballet, after his brother's death, such urgent need of
      100,000 francs? If the statements of Auguste made to other persons are to
      be believed, he had paid the 100,000 francs which he had raised through
      Prignon to Lebret, his father's former clerk, who would seem to have acted
      as legal and financial adviser to his old master's children. According to
      Auguste's story, his sister, Mme. Martignon, had offered Lebret 80,000
      francs to preserve a copy of a will made by Hippolyte, leaving her the
      bulk of his fortune. Castaing, however, had ascertained that Lebret would
      be willing, if Auguste would outbid his sister and pay 100,000 francs, to
      destroy the will so that, Hippolyte dying intestate, Auguste would take
      the greater part of his brother's fortune. Auguste agreed to accept
      Lebret's terms, raised the necessary sum, and handed over the money to
      Castaing, who, in turn, gave it to Lebret, who had thereupon destroyed the
      copy of the will. Castaing, according to the evidence of Auguste's
      mistress, an actress of the name of Percillie, had spoken in her presence
      of having himself destroyed one copy of Hippolyte's will before his death,
      and admitted having arranged with Lebret after Hippolyte's death for the
      destruction of the other copy.
    </p>
    <p>
      How far was the story told by Auguste, and repeated in somewhat different
      shape by Castaing to other persons, true? There is no doubt that after the
      visit to the Bank of France with Prignon on October 8, Auguste and
      Castaing drove together to Lebret's office. The negro servant said that on
      arriving there one of them got out of the cab and went up to Lebret's
      house, but which of the two he would not at first say positively. Later he
      swore that it was Auguste Ballet. Whatever happened on that visit to
      Lebret's&mdash;and it was the theory of the prosecution that Castaing and
      not Auguste had gone up to the office&mdash;the same afternoon Auguste
      Ballet showed his mistress the seals of the copy of his brother's will
      which Lebret had destroyed, and told her that Lebret, all through the
      business, had refused to deal directly with him, and would only act
      through the intermediary of Castaing.
    </p>
    <p>
      Did Lebret, as a fact, receive the 100,000 francs? A close examination of
      his finances showed no trace of such a sum. Castaing, on the other hand,
      on October 10, 1822, had given a stockbroker a sum of 66,000 francs to
      invest in securities; on the 11th of the same month he had lent his mother
      30,000 francs; and on the 14th had given his mistress 4,000 francs. Of how
      this large sum of money had come to Castaing at a time when he was
      practically insolvent he gave various accounts. His final version was that
      in the will destroyed by Auguste, Hippolyte Ballet had left him an income
      for life equivalent to a capital of 100,000 francs, and that Auguste had
      given him that sum out of respect for his brother's wishes. If that
      explanation were true, it was certainly strange that shortly after his
      brother's death Auguste Ballet should have expressed surprise and
      suspicion to a friend on hearing that Castaing had been buying stock to
      the value of 8,000 francs. If he had given Castaing 100,000 francs for
      himself, there was no occasion for surprise or suspicion at his investing
      8,000. That Auguste had paid out 100,000 francs to some one in October the
      state of his finances at his death clearly proved. According to the theory
      of the prosecution, Auguste believed that he had paid that money to Lebret
      through the intermediary of Castaing, and not to Castaing himself. Hence
      his surprise at hearing that Castaing, whom he knew to be impecunious, was
      investing such a sum as 8,000 francs.
    </p>
    <p>
      No money had ever reached Lebret. His honesty and good faith were
      demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt; no copy of any will of
      Hippolyte Ballet had ever been in his possession. But Castaing had shown
      Auguste Ballet a copy of his brother's will, the seals of which Auguste
      had shown to his mistress. In all probability, and possibly at the
      instigation of Castaing, Hippolyte Ballet had made a will, leaving the
      greater part of his property to his sister. Somehow or other Castaing had
      got possession of this will. On his death Castaing had invented the story
      of Mme. Martignon's bribe to Lebret, and so persuaded Auguste to outbid
      her. He had ingeniously kept Auguste and Lebret apart by representing
      Lebret as refusing to deal direct with Auguste, and by these means had
      secured to his own use the sum of 100,000 francs, which Auguste believed
      was being paid to Lebret as the price of his alleged destruction of his
      brother's will. The plot was ingenious and successful. To Lebret and the
      Martignons Castaing said that Hippolyte had made a will in Mme.
      Martignon's favour, but had destroyed it himself some days before his
      death. The Martignons expressed themselves as glad that Hippolyte had done
      so, for they feared lest such a will should have provoked resentment
      against them on the part of Auguste. By keeping Auguste and Lebret apart,
      Castaing prevented awkward explanations. The only possible danger of
      discovery lay in Auguste's incautious admissions to his mistress and
      friends; but even had the fact of the destruction of the will come to the
      ears of the Martignons, it is unlikely that they would have taken any
      steps involving the disgrace of Auguste.
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing had enriched himself considerably by the opportune death of his
      friend Hippolyte. It might be made a matter of unfriendly comment that, on
      the first day of May preceding that sad event, Castaing had purchased ten
      grains of acetate of morphia from a chemist in Paris, and on September 18,
      less than a month before Hippolyte's death, he had purchased another ten
      grains of acetate of morphia from the same chemist. The subject of poisons
      had always been a favourite branch of Castaing's medical studies,
      especially vegetable poisons; morphia is a vegetable poison.
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing's position relative to Auguste Ballet was now a strong one. They
      were accomplices in the unlawful destruction of Hippolyte's will. Auguste
      believed it to be in his friend's power to ruin him at any time by
      revealing his dealings with Lebret. But, more than that, to Auguste, who
      believed that his 100,000 francs had gone into Lebret's pocket, Castaing
      could represent himself as so far unrewarded for his share in the
      business; Lebret had taken all the money, while he had received no
      recompense of any kind for the trouble he had taken and the risk he was
      encountering on his friend's behalf. Whatever the motive, from fear or
      gratitude, Auguste Ballet was persuaded to make a will leaving Dr. Edme
      Samuel Castaing the whole of his fortune, subject to a few trifling
      legacies. But Auguste's feelings towards his sole legatee were no longer
      cordial. To one or two of his friends he expressed his growing distaste
      for Castaing's society.
    </p>
    <p>
      Dr. Castaing can hardly have failed to observe this change. He knew
      Auguste to be reckless and extravagant with his money; he learnt that he
      had realised another 100,000 francs out of his securities, and that he
      kept the money locked up in a drawer in his desk. If Auguste's fortune
      were dissipated by extravagance, or he revoked his will, Castaing stood to
      lose heavily. As time went on Castaing felt less and less sure that he
      could place much reliance on the favourable disposition or thrift of
      Auguste. The latter had fallen in love with a new mistress; he began to
      entertain expensively; even if he should not change his mind and leave his
      money away from Castaing, there might very soon be no money to leave. At
      the end of May, 1823, Castaing consulted a cousin of his, Malassis, a
      notary's clerk, as to the validity of a will made by a sick man in favour
      of his medical attendant. He said that he had a patient gravely ill who,
      not wishing to leave his money to his sister, whom he disliked, intended
      to leave it to him. Malassis reassured him as to the validity of such a
      will, and gave him the necessary instructions for preparing it. On May 29
      Castaing sent Malassis the will of Auguste Ballet with the following note,
      "I send you the will of M. Ballets examine it and keep it as his
      representative." The will was dated December 1, 1822, and made Castaing
      sole legatee. On the same day that the will was deposited with Malassis,
      Castaing and Auguste Ballet started to-gether on a little two days' trip
      into the country. To his friends Auguste seemed in the best of health and
      spirits; so much so that his housekeeper remarked as he left how well he
      was looking, and Castaing echoed her remark, saying that he looked like a
      prince!
    </p>
    <p>
      During the afternoon the two friends visited Saint Germain, then returned
      to Paris, and at seven o'clock in the evening arrived at the Tete Noire
      Hotel at Saint Cloud, where they took a double-bedded room, Castaing
      paying five francs in advance. They spent the following day, Friday, May
      30, in walking about the neighbourhood, dined at the hotel at seven, went
      out again and returned about nine o'clock. Soon after their return
      Castaing ordered some warmed wine to be sent up to the bedroom. It was
      taken up by one of the maid-servants. Two glasses were mixed with lemon
      and sugar which Castaing had brought with him. Both the young men drank of
      the beverage. Auguste complained that it was sour, and thought that he had
      put too much lemon in it. He gave his glass to the servant to taste, who
      also found the drink sour. Shortly after she left the room and went
      upstairs to the bedside of one of her fellow-servants who was ill.
      Castaing, for no apparent reason, followed her up and stayed in the room
      for about five minutes. Auguste spent a bad night, suffering from internal
      pains, and in the morning his legs were so swollen that he could not put
      on his boots.
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing got up at four o'clock that morning and asked one of the servants
      to let him out. Two hours later he drove up in a cabriolet to the door of
      a chemist in Paris, and asked for twelve grains of tartar emetic, which he
      wanted to mix in a wash according to a prescription of Dr. Castaing. But
      he did not tell the chemist that he was Dr. Castaing himself. An hour
      later Castaing arrived at the shop of another chemist, Chevalier, with
      whom he had already some acquaintance; he had bought acetate of morphia
      from him some months before, and had discussed with him then the effects
      of vegetable poisons. On this particular morning he bought of his
      assistant thirty-six grains of acetate of morphia, paying, as a medical
      man, three francs fifty centimes for it instead of the usual price of four
      francs. Later in the morning Castaing returned to Saint Cloud, a distance
      of ten miles from Paris, and said that he had been out for a long walk. He
      found Auguste ill in bed. Castaing asked for some cold milk, which was
      taken up to the bedroom by one of the servants. Shortly after this
      Castaing went out again. During his absence Auguste was seized with
      violent pains and sickness. When Castaing returned he found his friend in
      the care of the people of the hotel. He told them to throw away the matter
      that had been vomited, as the smell was offensive, and Auguste told them
      to do as his friend directed. Castaing proposed to send for a doctor from
      Paris, but Auguste insisted that a local doctor should be called in at
      once.
    </p>
    <p>
      Accordingly Dr. Pigache of Saint Cloud was summoned. He arrived at the
      hotel about eleven o'clock. Before seeing the patient Castaing told the
      doctor that he believed him to be suffering from cholera. Pigache asked to
      see the matter vomited but was told that it had been thrown away. He
      prescribed a careful diet, lemonade and a soothing draught.
    </p>
    <p>
      Dr. Pigache returned at three o'clock, when he found that the patient had
      taken some lemonade, but, according to Castaing, had refused to take the
      draught. He called again that afternoon. Ballet was much better; he said
      that he would be quite well if he could get some sleep, and expressed a
      wish to return to Paris. Dr. Pigache dissuaded him from this and left,
      saying that he would come again in the evening. Castaing said that that
      would be unnecessary, and it was agreed that Pigache should see the
      patient again at eight o'clock the next morning. During the afternoon
      Castaing sent a letter to Paris to Jean, Auguste's negro servant, telling
      him to take the two keys of his master's desk to his cousin Malassis. But
      the negro distrusted Castaing. He knew of the will which his master had
      made in the doctor's favour. Rather than compromise himself by any
      injudicious act, he brought the keys to Saint Cloud and there handed them
      over to Castaing.
    </p>
    <p>
      When Jean arrived his master complained to him of feeling very ill. Jean
      said that he hoped he would be well enough to go back to Paris the
      following day, to which Auguste replied, "I don't think so. But if I am
      lucky enough to get away to-morrow, I shall leave fifty francs for the
      poor here." About eleven o'clock that night Castaing, in Jean's presence,
      gave the sick man a spoonful of the draught prescribed by Dr. Pigache.
      Four or five minutes later Auguste was seized with terrible convulsions,
      followed by unconsciousness. Dr. Pigache was sent for. He found Ballet
      lying on his back unconscious, his throat strained, his mouth shut and his
      eyes fixed; the pulse was weak, his body covered with cold sweat; and
      every now and then he was seized with strong convulsions. The doctor asked
      Castaing the cause of the sudden change in Ballet's condition. Castaing
      replied that it had commenced shortly after he had taken a spoonful of the
      draught which the doctor had prescribed for him. Dr. Pigache bled the
      patient and applied twenty leeches. He returned about six; Ballet was
      sinking, and Castaing appeared to be greatly upset. He told the doctor
      what an unhappy coincidence it was that he should have been present at the
      deathbeds of both Hippolyte and his brother Auguste; and that the position
      was the more distressing for him as he was the sole heir to Auguste's
      fortune. To M. Pelletan, a professor of medicine, who had been sent for to
      St. Cloud in the early hours of Sunday morning, Castaing appeared to be in
      a state of great grief and agitation; he was shedding tears. Pelletan was
      from the first impressed by the suspicious nature of the case, and pointed
      out to Castaing the awkwardness of his situation as heir to the dying man.
      "You're right," replied Castaing, "my position is dreadful, horrible. In
      my great grief I had never thought of it till now, but now you make me see
      it clearly. Do you think there will be an investigation?" Pelletan
      answered that he should be compelled to ask for a post-mortem. "Ah! You
      will be doing me the greatest service," said Castaing, "I beg you to
      insist on a post-mortem. You will be acting as a second father to me in
      doing so." The parish priest was sent for to administer extreme unction to
      the dying man. To the parish clerk who accompanied the priest Castaing
      said, "I am losing a friend of my childhood," and both priest and clerk
      went away greatly edified by the sincere sorrow and pious demeanour of the
      young doctor. About mid-day on Sunday, June 1, Auguste Ballet died.
    </p>
    <p>
      During the afternoon Castaing left the hotel for some hours, and that same
      afternoon a young man about twenty-five years of age, short and fair, left
      a letter at the house of Malassis. The letter was from Castaing and said,
      "My dear friend, Ballet has just died, but do nothing before to-morrow,
      Monday. I will see you and tell you, yes or no, whether it is time to act.
      I expect that his brother-in-law, M. Martignon, whose face is pock-marked
      and who carries a decoration, will call and see you. I have said that I
      did not know what dispositions Ballet may have made, but that before his
      death he had told me to give you two little keys which I am going to
      deliver to you myself to-morrow, Monday. I have not said that we are
      cousins, but only that I had seen you once or twice at Ballet's, with whom
      you were friendly. So say nothing till I have seen you, but whatever you
      do, don't say you are a relative of mine." When he returned to the hotel
      Castaing found Martignon, Lebret, and one or two friends of Auguste
      already assembled. It was only that morning that Martignon had received
      from Castaing any intimation of his brother-in-law's critical condition.
      From the first Castaing was regarded with suspicion; the nature of the
      illness, the secrecy maintained about it by Castaing, the coincidence of
      some of the circumstances with those of the death of Hippolyte, all
      combined to excite suspicion. Asked if Auguste had left a will Castaing
      said no; but the next day he admitted its existence, and said that it was
      in the hands of Malassis.
    </p>
    <p>
      Monday, June 2, was the day fixed for the post-mortem; it was performed in
      the hotel at Saint Cloud. Castaing was still in the hotel under
      provisional arrest. While the post-mortem was going on his agitation was
      extreme; he kept opening the door of the room in which he was confined, to
      hear if possible some news of the result. At last M. Pelletan obtained
      permission to inform him of the verdict of the doctors. It was favourable
      to Castaing; no trace of death by violence or poison had been discovered.
    </p>
    <p>
      The medical men declared death to be due to an inflammation of the
      stomach, which could be attributed to natural causes; that the
      inflammation had subsided; that it had been succeeded by cerebral
      inflammation, which frequently follows inflammation of the stomach, and
      may have been aggravated in this case by exposure to the sun or by
      over-indulgence of any kind.
    </p>
    <p>
      II THE TRIAL OF DR. CASTAING
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing expected, as a result of the doctors' report, immediate release.
      In this he was disappointed; he was placed under stricter arrest and taken
      to Paris, where a preliminary investigation commenced, lasting five
      months. During the early part of his imprisonment Castaing feigned
      insanity, going to disgusting lengths in the hope of convincing those
      about him of the reality of his madness. But after three days of futile
      effort he gave up the attempt, and turned his attention to more practical
      means of defence. In the prison at Versailles, whither he had been removed
      from Paris, he got on friendly terms with a prisoner, one Goupil, who was
      awaiting trial for some unimportant offence. To Goupil Castaing described
      the cruelty of his position and the causes that had led to his wrongful
      arrest. He admitted his unfortunate possession of the poison, and said
      that the 100,000 francs which he had invested he had inherited from an
      uncle. Through Goupil he succeeded in communicating with his mother in the
      hope that she would use her influence to stifle some of the more serious
      evidence against him. Through other prisoners he tried to get at the
      chemists from whom he had bought acetate of morphia, and persuade them to
      say that the preparation of morphia which he had purchased was harmless.
    </p>
    <p>
      The trial of Castaing commenced before the Paris Assize Court on November
      10, 1823. He was charged with the murder of Hippolyte Ballet, the
      destruction of a document containing the final dispositions of Hippolyte's
      property, and with the murder of Auguste Ballet. The three charges were to
      be tried simultaneously. The Act of Accusation in Castaing's case is a
      remarkable document, covering a hundred closely-printed pages. It is a
      well-reasoned, graphic and unfair statement of the case for the
      prosecution. It tells the whole story of the crime, and inserts everything
      that can possibly prejudice the prisoner in the eyes of the jury. As an
      example, it quotes against Castaing a letter of his mistress in which, in
      the course of some quarrel, she had written to him saying that his mother
      had said some "horrible things" (des horreurs) of him; but what those
      "horrible things" were was not revealed, nor were they ever alluded to
      again in the course of the trial, nor was his mistress called as a
      witness, though payments of money by Castaing to her formed an important
      part of the evidence against him. Again, the evidence of Goupil, his
      fellow prisoner, as to the incriminating statements made to him by
      Castaing is given in the Act of Accusation, but Goupil himself was not
      called at the trial.
    </p>
    <p>
      During the reading of the Act of Accusation by the Clerk of the Court
      Castaing listened calmly. Only when some allusion was made to his mistress
      and their children did he betray any sign of emotion. As soon as the
      actual facts of the case were set out he was all attention, making notes
      busily. He is described as rather attractive in appearance, his face long,
      his features regular, his forehead high, his hair, fair in colour, brushed
      back from the brows; he wore rather large side-whiskers. One of the
      witnesses at Saint Cloud said that Castaing looked more like a priest than
      a doctor; his downcast eyes, gentle voice, quiet and unassuming demeanour,
      lent him an air of patience and humility.
    </p>
    <p>
      The interrogatory of Castaing by the presiding judge lasted all the
      afternoon of the first day of the trial and the morning of the second. The
      opening part of it dealt with the murder of Hippolyte Ballet, and elicited
      little or nothing that was fresh. Beyond the purchase of acetate of
      morphia previous to Hippolyte's death, which Castaing reluctantly
      admitted, there was no serious evidence against him, and before the end of
      the trial the prosecution abandoned that part of the charge.
    </p>
    <p>
      Questioned by the President as to the destruction of Hippolyte Ballet's
      will, Castaing admitted that he had seen a draft of a will executed by
      Hippolyte in favour of his sister, but he denied having told Auguste that
      Lebret had in his possession a copy which he was prepared to destroy for
      100,000 francs. Asked to explain the assertion of Mlle. Percillie,
      Auguste's mistress, that statements to this effect had been made in her
      presence by both Auguste Ballet and himself, he said that it was not true;
      that he had never been to her house. "What motive," he was asked, "could
      Mlle. Percillie have for accusing you?" "She hated me," was the reply,
      "because I had tried to separate Auguste from her." Castaing denied that
      he had driven with Auguste to Lebret's office on October 8. Asked to
      explain his sudden possession of 100,000 francs at a moment when he was
      apparently without a penny, he repeated his statement that Auguste had
      given him the capital sum as an equivalent for an income of 4,000 francs
      which his brother had intended to leave him. "Why, when first asked if you
      had received anything from Auguste, did you say you had received nothing?"
      was the question.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It was a thoughtless statement," was the answer. "Why," pursued the
      President, "should you not have admitted at once a fact that went to prove
      your own good faith? If, however, this fact be true, it does not explain
      the mysterious way in which Auguste asked Prignon to raise for him 100,000
      francs; and unless those 100,000 francs were given to you, it is
      impossible to account for them. It is important to your case that you
      should give the jury a satisfactory explanation on this point." Castaing
      could only repeat his previous explanations.
    </p>
    <p>
      The interrogatory was then directed to the death of Auguste Ballet.
      Castaing said that Auguste Ballet had left him all his fortune on account
      of a disagreement with his sister. Asked why, after Auguste's death, he
      had at first denied all knowledge of the will made in his favour and
      deposited by him with Malassis, he could give no satisfactory reason.
      Coming to the facts of the alleged poisoning of Auguste Ballet, the
      President asked Castaing why, shortly after the warm wine was brought up
      on the night of May 30, he went up to the room where one of the servants
      of the hotel was lying sick. Castaing replied that he was sent for by the
      wife of the hotel-keeper. This the woman denied; she said that she did not
      even know that he was a doctor. "According to the prosecution," said the
      judge, "you left the room in order to avoid drinking your share of the
      wine." Castaing said that he had drunk half a cupful of it. The judge
      reminded him that to one of the witnesses Castaing had said that he had
      drunk only a little.
    </p>
    <p>
      A ridiculous statement made by Castaing to explain the purchase of morphia
      and antimony in Paris on May 31 was brought up against him. Shortly after
      his arrest Castaing had said that the cats and dogs about the hotel had
      made such a noise on the night of May 30 that they had disturbed the rest
      of Auguste, who, in the early morning, had asked Castaing to get some
      poison to kill them. He had accordingly gone all the way, about ten miles,
      to Paris at four in the morning to purchase antimony and morphia to kill
      cats and dogs. All the people of the hotel denied that there had been any
      such disturbance on the night in question. Castaing now said that he had
      bought the poisons at Auguste's request, partly to kill the noisy cats and
      dogs, and partly for the purpose of their making experiments on animals.
      Asked why he had not given this second reason before, he said that as
      Auguste was not a medical man it would have been damaging to his
      reputation to divulge the fact of his wishing to make unauthorised experiments
      on animals. "Why go to Paris for the poison?" asked the judge, "there was
      a chemist a few yards from the hotel. And when in Paris, why go to two
      chemists?" To all these questions Castaing's answers were such as to lead
      the President to express a doubt as to whether they were likely to
      convince the jury. Castaing was obliged to admit that he had allowed, if
      not ordered, the evacuations of the sick man to be thrown away. He stated
      that he had thrown away the morphia and antimony, which he had bought in
      Paris, in the closets of the hotel, because, owing to the concatenation of
      circumstances, he thought that he would be suspected of murder. In reply
      to a question from one of the jury, Castaing said that he had mixed the
      acetate of morphia and tartar emetic together before reaching Saint Cloud,
      but why he had done so he could not explain.
    </p>
    <p>
      The medical evidence at the trial was favourable to the accused. Orfila,
      the famous chemist of that day, said that, though the symptoms in Auguste
      Ballet's case might be attributed to poisoning by acetate of morphia or
      some other vegetable poison, at the same time they could be equally well
      attributed to sudden illness of a natural kind. The liquids, taken from
      the stomach of Ballet, had yielded on analysis no trace of poison of any
      sort. The convulsive symptoms present in Ballet's case were undoubtedly a
      characteristic result of a severe dose of acetate of morphia.(14) Castaing
      said that he had mixed the acetate of morphia and tartar emetic together,
      but in any case no trace of either poison was found in Auguste's body, and
      his illness might, from all appearances, have been occasioned by natural
      causes. Some attempt was made by the prosecution to prove that the
      apoplexy to which Hippolyte Ballet had finally succumbed, might be
      attributed to a vegetable poison; one of the doctors expressed an opinion
      favourable to that conclusion "as a man but not as a physician." But the
      evidence did not go further.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (14) It was asserted some years later by one medical authority in
Palmer's case that it might have been morphia and not strychnine that
had caused the tetanic symptoms which preceded Cook's death.
</pre>
    <p>
      To the young priest-like doctor the ordeal of his trial was a severe one.
      It lasted eight days. It was only at midday on the sixth day that the
      evidence was concluded. Not only was Castaing compelled to submit to a
      long interrogatory by the President, but, after each witness had given his
      or her evidence, the prisoner was called on to refute or explain any
      points unfavourable to him. This he did briefly, with varying success; as
      the trial went on, with increasing embarrassment. A great deal of the
      evidence given against Castaing was hearsay, and would have been
      inadmissible in an English court of justice. Statements made by Auguste to
      other persons about Castaing were freely admitted. But more serious was
      the evidence of Mlle. Percillie, Auguste's mistress. She swore that on one
      occasion in her presence Castaing had reproached Auguste with ingratitude;
      he had complained that he had destroyed one copy of Hippolyte Ballet's
      will, and for Auguste's sake had procured the destruction of the other,
      and that yet, in spite of all this, Auguste hesitated to entrust him with
      100,000 francs. Asked what he had to say to this statement Castaing denied
      its truth. He had, he said, only been in Mlle. Percillie's house once, and
      then not with Auguste Ballet. Mlle. Percillie adhered to the truth of her
      evidence, and the President left it to the jury to decide between them.
    </p>
    <p>
      A Mme. Durand, a patient of Castaing, gave some curious evidence as to a
      story told her by the young doctor. He said that a friend of his,
      suffering from lung disease, had been persuaded into making a will in his
      sister's favour. The sister had offered a bribe of 80,000 francs to her
      brother's lawyer to persuade him to make such a will, and paid one of his
      clerks 3,000 francs for drawing it up. Castaing, in his friend's interest,
      and in order to expose the fraud, invited the clerk to come and see him.
      His friend, hidden in an alcove in the room, overheard the conversation
      between Castaing and the clerk, and so learnt the details of his sister's
      intrigue. He at once destroyed the will and became reconciled with his
      brother, whom he had been about to disinherit. After his death the
      brother, out of gratitude, had given Castaing 100,000 francs.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Castaing, did you tell this story to Mme. Durand?
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing: I don't recollect.
    </p>
    <p>
      Avocat-General: But Mme. Durand says that you did.
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing: I don't recollect.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: You always say that you don't recollect; that is no answer.
      Have you, yes or no, made such a statement to Mme. Durand?
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing: I don't recollect; if I had said it, I should recollect it.
    </p>
    <p>
      Another lady whom Castaing had attended free of charge swore, with a good
      deal of reluctance, that Castaing had told her a somewhat similar story as
      accounting for his possession of 100,000 francs.
    </p>
    <p>
      Witnesses were called for the defence who spoke to the diligence and good
      conduct of Castaing as a medical student; and eighteen, whom he had
      treated free of expense, testified to his kindness and generosity. "All
      these witnesses," said the President, "speak to your generosity; but, for
      that very reason, you must have made little profit out of your profession,
      and had little opportunity for saving anything," to which Castaing
      replied: "These are not the only patients I attended; I have not called
      those who paid me for my services." At the same time Castaing found it
      impossible to prove that he had ever made a substantial living by the
      exercise of his profession.
    </p>
    <p>
      One of the medical witnesses called for the defence, M. Chaussier, had
      volunteered the remark that the absence of any trace of poison in the
      portions of Auguste Ballet's body submitted to analysis, constituted an
      absence of the corpus delicti. To this the President replied that that was
      a question of criminal law, and no concern of his. But in his speech for
      the prosecution the Avocat-General dealt with the point raised at some
      length&mdash;a point which, if it had held good as a principle of English
      law, would have secured the acquittal of so wicked a poisoner as Palmer.
      He quoted from the famous French lawyer d'Aguesseau: "The corpus delicti
      is no other thing than the delictum itself; but the proofs of the delictum
      are infinitely variable according to the nature of things; they may be
      general or special, principal or accessory, direct or indirect; in a word,
      they form that general effect (ensemble) which goes to determine the
      conviction of an honest man." If such a contention as M. Chaussier's were
      correct, said the Avocat-General, then it would be impossible in a case of
      poisoning to convict a prisoner after his victim's death, or, if his
      victim survived, to convict him of the attempt to poison. He reminded the
      jury of that paragraph in the Code of Criminal Procedure which instructed
      them as to their duties: "The Law does not ask you to give the reasons
      that have convinced you; it lays down no rules by which you are to decide
      as to the fullness or sufficiency of proof... it only asks you one
      question: 'Have you an inward conviction?'" "If," he said, "the actual
      traces of poison are a material proof of murder by poison, then a new
      paragraph must be added to the Criminal Code&mdash;'Since, however,
      vegetable poisons leave no trace, poisoning by such means may be committed
      with impunity.'" To poisoners he would say in future: "Bunglers that you
      are, don't use arsenic or any mineral poison; they leave traces; you will
      be found out. Use vegetable poisons; poison your fathers, poison your
      mothers, poison all your families, and their inheritance will be yours&mdash;fear
      nothing; you will go unpunished! You have committed murder by poisoning,
      it is true; but the corpus delicti will not be there because it can't be
      there!" This was a case, he urged, of circumstantial evidence. "We have,"
      he said, "gone through a large number of facts. Of these there is not one
      that does not go directly to the proof of poisoning, and that can only be
      explained on the supposition of poisoning; whereas, if the theory of the
      defence be admitted, all these facts, from the first to the last, become
      meaningless and absurd. They can only be refuted by arguments or
      explanations that are childish and ridiculous."
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing was defended by two advocates&mdash;Roussel, a schoolfellow of
      his, and the famous Berryer, reckoned by some the greatest French orator
      since Mirabeau. Both advocates were allowed to address the jury. Roussel
      insisted on the importance of the corpus delicti. "The delictum," he said,
      "is the effect, the guilty man merely the cause; it is useless to deal
      with the cause if the effect is uncertain," and he cited a case in which a
      woman had been sent for trial, charged with murdering her husband; the
      moral proof of her guilt seemed conclusive, when suddenly her husband
      appeared in court alive and well. The advocate made a good deal of the
      fact that the remains of the draught prescribed by Dr. Pigache, a spoonful
      of which Castaing had given to Auguste Ballet, had been analysed and
      showed no trace of poison. Against this the prosecution set the evidence
      of the chemist at Saint Cloud, who had made up the prescription. He said
      that the same day he had made up a second prescription similar to that of
      Dr. Pigache, but not made out for Auguste Ballet, which contained, in
      addition to the other ingredients, acetate of morphia. The original of
      this prescription he had given to a friend of Castaing, who had come to
      his shop and asked him for it a few days after Ballet's death. It would
      seem therefore that there had been two bottles of medicine, one of which
      containing morphia had disappeared.
    </p>
    <p>
      M. Roussel combatted the suggestion that the family of Castaing were in a
      state of indigence. He showed that his father had an income of 10,000
      francs, while his two brothers were holding good positions, one as an
      officer in the army, the other as a government official. The mistress of
      Castaing he represented as enjoying an income of 5,000 francs. He
      protested against the quantity of hearsay evidence that had been admitted
      into the case. "In England," he said, "when a witness is called, he is
      asked 'What have you seen?' If he can only testify to mere talk, and
      hearsay, he is not heard." He quoted the concluding paragraph of the will
      of Auguste Ballet as showing his friendly feeling towards Castaing: "It is
      only after careful reflection that I have made this final disposition of
      my property, in order to mark the sincere friendship which I have never
      for one moment ceased to feel for MM. Castaing, Briant and Leuchere, in
      order to recognise the faithful loyalty of my servants, and deprive M. and
      Mme. Martignon, my brother-in-law and sister, of all rights to which they
      might be legally entitled on my death, fully persuaded in soul and
      conscience that, in doing so, I am giving to each their just and proper
      due." "Is this," asked M. Roussel, "a document wrested by surprise from a
      weak man, extorted by trickery? Is he not acting in the full exercise of
      his faculties? He forgets no one, and justifies his conduct."
    </p>
    <p>
      When M. Roussel came to the incident of the noisy cats and dogs at Saint
      Cloud, he was as ingenious as the circumstances permitted: "A serious
      charge engrosses public attention; men's minds are concentrated on the
      large, broad aspects of the case; they are in a state of unnatural
      excitement. They see only the greatness, the solemnity of the accusation,
      and then, suddenly, in the midst of all that is of such tragic and
      surpassing interest, comes this trivial fact about cats and dogs. It makes
      an unfavourable impression, because it is dramatically out of keeping with
      the tragedy of the story. But we are not here to construct a drama. No,
      gentlemen, look at it merely as a trivial incident of ordinary, everyday
      life, and you will see it in its proper light." M. Roussel concluded by
      saying that Castaing's most eloquent advocate, if he could have been
      present, would have been Auguste Ballet. "If Providence had permitted him
      to enter this court, he would cry out to you, 'Save my friend's life! His
      heart is undefiled! He is innocent!'"
    </p>
    <p>
      M. Roussel concluded his speech at ten o'clock on Sunday night, November
      16. The next morning Berryer addressed the jury. His speech in defence of
      Castaing is not considered one of his most successful efforts. He gave
      personal testimony as to the taste of acetate of morphia. He said that
      with the help of his own chemist he had put a quarter of a grain of the
      acetate into a large spoonful of milk, and had found it so insupportably
      bitter to the taste that he could not keep it in his mouth. If, he
      contended, Ballet had been poisoned by tartar emetic, then twelve grains
      given in milk would have given it an insipid taste, and vomiting
      immediately after would have got rid of the poison. Later investigations
      have shown that, in cases of antimonial poisoning, vomiting does not
      necessarily get rid of all the poison, and the convulsions in which
      Auguste Ballet died are symptomatic of poisoning either by morphia or
      antimony. In conclusion, Berryer quoted the words addressed by one of the
      Kings of France to his judges: "When God has not vouchsafed clear proof of
      a crime, it is a sign that He does not wish that man should determine it,
      but leaves its judgment to a higher tribunal."
    </p>
    <p>
      The Avocat-General, in reply, made a telling answer to M. Roussel's
      attempt to minimise the importance of the cats and dogs: "He has spoken of
      the drama of life, and of its ordinary everyday incidents. If there is
      drama in this case, it is of Castaing's making. As to the ordinary
      incidents of everyday life, a man buys poison, brings it to the bedside of
      his sick friend, saying it is for experiments on cats and dogs, the friend
      dies, the other, his sole heir, after foretelling his death, takes
      possession of his keys, and proceeds to gather up the spoils&mdash;are
      these ordinary incidents of every-day life?"
    </p>
    <p>
      It was nine o'clock at night when the jury retired to consider their
      verdict. They returned into court after two hours' deliberation. They
      found the prisoner "Not Guilty" of the murder of Hippolyte Ballet,
      "Guilty" of destroying his will, and "Guilty" by seven votes to five of
      the murder of Auguste Ballet. Asked if he had anything to say before
      judgment was given, Castaing, in a very loud voice, said "No; but I shall
      know how to die, though I am the victim of ill-fortune, of fatal
      circumstance. I shall go to meet my two friends. I am accused of having
      treacherously murdered them. There is a Providence above us! If there is
      such a thing as an immortal soul, I shall see Hippolyte and Auguste Ballet
      again. This is no empty declamation; I don't ask for human pity" (raising
      his hands to heaven), "I look to God's mercy, and shall go joyfully to the
      scaffold. My conscience is clear. It will not reproach me even when I
      feel" (putting his hands to his neck). "Alas! It is easier to feel what I
      am feeling than to express what I dare not express." (In a feeble voice):
      "You have desired my death; you have it!" The judges retired to consider
      the sentence. The candles were guttering, the light of the lamps was
      beginning to fade; the aspect of the court grim and terrible. M. Roussel
      broke down and burst into tears. Castaing leant over to his old
      schoolfellow: "Courage, Roussel," he said; "you have always believed me
      innocent, and I am innocent. Embrace for me my father, my mother, my
      brothers, my child." He turned to a group of young advocates standing
      near: "And you, young people, who have listened to my trial, attend also
      my execution; I shall be as firm then as I am now. All I ask is to die
      soon. I should be ashamed to plead for mercy." The judges returned.
      Castaing was condemned to death, and ordered to pay 100,000 francs damages
      to the family of Auguste Ballet.
    </p>
    <p>
      Castaing was not ashamed to appeal to the Court of Cassation for a
      revision of his trial, but on December 4 his appeal was rejected. Two days
      later he was executed. He had attempted suicide by means of poison, which
      one of his friends had brought to him in prison, concealed inside a watch.
      His courage failed him at the last, and he met his death in a state of
      collapse.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is not often, happily, that a young man of gentle birth and good
      education is a double murderer at twenty-six. And such a soft, humble,
      insinuating young man too!&mdash;good to his mother, good to his mistress,
      fond of his children, kind to his patients.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet this gentle creature can deliberately poison his two friends.
    </p>
    <p>
      Was ever such a contradictory fellow?
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      Professor Webster
    </h2>
    <p>
      The best report of Webster's trial is that edited by Bemis. The following
      tracts in the British Museum have been consulted by the writer: "Appendix
      to the Webster Trial," Boston, 1850: "Thoughts on the Conviction of
      Webster"; "The Boston Tragedy," by W. E. Bigelow.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is not often that the gaunt spectre of murder invades the cloistered
      calm of academic life. Yet such a strange and unwonted tragedy befell
      Harvard University in the year 1849, when John W. Webster, Professor of
      Chemistry, took the life of Dr. George Parkman, a distinguished citizen of
      Boston. The scene of the crime, the old Medical School, now a Dental
      Hospital, is still standing, or was when the present writer visited Boston
      in 1907. It is a large and rather dreary red-brick, three-storied
      building, situated in the lower part of the city, flanked on its west side
      by the mud flats leading down to the Charles River. The first floor
      consists of two large rooms, separated from each other by the main
      entrance hall, which is approached by a flight of steps leading up from
      the street level. Of these two rooms, the left, as you face the building,
      is fitted up as a lecture-room. In the year 1849 it was the lecture-room
      of Professor Webster. Behind the lecture-room is a laboratory, known as
      the upper laboratory, communicating by a private staircase with the lower
      laboratory, which occupies the left wing of the ground floor. A small
      passage, entered by a door on the left-hand side of the front of the
      building, separated this lower laboratory from the dissecting-room, an
      out-house built on to the west wall of the college, but now demolished.
      From this description it will be seen that any person, provided with the
      necessary keys, could enter the college by the side-door near the
      dissecting room on the ground floor, and pass up through the lower and
      upper laboratory into Professor Webster's lecture-room without entering
      any other part of the building. The Professor of Chemistry, by locking the
      doors of his lecture-rooms and the lower laboratory, could, if he wished,
      make himself perfectly secure against intrusion, and come and go by the
      side-door without attracting much attention. These rooms are little
      altered at the present time from their arrangement in 1849. The
      lecture-room and laboratory are used for the same purposes to-day; the
      lower laboratory, a dismal chamber, now disused and somewhat rearranged,
      is still recognisable as the scene of the Professor's chemical
      experiments.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the second floor of the hospital is a museum, once anatomical, now
      dental. One of the principal objects of interest in this museum is a
      plaster cast of the jaws of Dr. George Parkman, made by a well-known
      dentist of Boston, Dr. Keep, in the year 1846. In that year the new
      medical college was formally opened. Dr. Parkman, a wealthy and
      public-spirited citizen of Boston, had given the piece of land, on which
      the college had been erected. He had been invited to be present at the
      opening ceremony. In anticipation of being asked to make a speech on this
      occasion Dr. Parkman, whose teeth were few and far between, had himself
      fitted by Dr. Keep with a complete set of false teeth. Oliver Wendell
      Holmes, then Professor of Anatomy at Harvard, who was present at the
      opening of the college, noticed how very nice and white the doctor's teeth
      appeared to be. It was the discovery of the remains of these same
      admirable teeth three years later in the furnace in Professor Webster's
      lower laboratory that led to the conviction of Dr. Parkman's murderer. By
      a strange coincidence the doctor met his death in the very college which
      his generosity had helped to build. Though to-day the state of the college
      has declined from the medical to the dental, his memory still lives within
      its walls by the cast of his jaws preserved in the dental museum as a
      relic of a case, in which the art of dentistry did signal service to the
      cause of justice.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his lifetime Dr. Parkman was a well-known figure in the streets of
      Boston. His peculiar personal appearance and eccentric habits combined to
      make him something of a character. As he walked through the streets he
      presented a remarkable appearance. He was exceptionally tall, longer in
      the body than the legs; his lower jaw protruded some half an inch beyond
      the upper; he carried his body bent forward from the small of his back. He
      seemed to be always in a hurry; so impetuous was he that, if his horse did
      not travel fast enough to please him, he would get off its back, and,
      leaving the steed in the middle of the street, hasten on his way on foot.
      A just and generous man, he was extremely punctilious in matters of
      business, and uncompromising in his resentment of any form of falsehood or
      deceit. It was the force of his resentment in such a case that cost him
      his life.
    </p>
    <p>
      The doctor was unfailingly punctual in taking his meals. Dr. Kingsley,
      during the fourteen years he had acted as his agent, had always been able
      to make sure of finding him at home at his dinner hour, half-past two
      o'clock. But on Friday, November 23, 1849, to his surprise and that of his
      family, Dr. Parkman did not come home to dinner; and their anxiety was
      increased when the day passed, and there was still no sign of the doctor's
      return. Inquiries were made. From these it appeared that Dr. Parkman had
      been last seen alive between one and two o'clock on the Friday afternoon.
      About half-past one he had visited a grocer's shop in Bridge Street, made
      some purchases, and left behind him a paper bag containing a lettuce,
      which, he said, he would call for on his way home. Shortly before two
      o'clock he was seen by a workman, at a distance of forty or fifty feet
      from the Medical College, going in that direction. From that moment all
      certain trace of him was lost. His family knew that he had made an
      appointment for half-past one that day, but where and with whom they did
      not know. As a matter of fact, Professor John W. Webster had appointed
      that hour to receive Dr. Parkman in his lecture-room in the Medical
      College.
    </p>
    <p>
      John W. Webster was at this time Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy in
      Harvard University, a Doctor of Medicine and a Member of the American
      Academy of Arts and Sciences, the London Geological Society and the St.
      Petersburg Mineralogical Society. He was the author of several works on
      geology and chemistry, a man now close on sixty years of age. His
      countenance was genial, his manner mild and unassuming; he was clean
      shaven, wore spectacles, and looked younger than his years.
    </p>
    <p>
      Professor Webster was popular with a large circle of friends. To those who
      liked him he was a man of pleasing and attractive manners, artistic in his
      tastes&mdash;he was especially fond of music&mdash;not a very profound or
      remarkable chemist, but a pleasant social companion. His temper was hasty
      and irritable. Spoilt in his boyhood as an only child, he was self-willed
      and self-indulgent. His wife and daughters were better liked than he. By
      unfriendly criticics{sic} the Professor was thought to be selfish, fonder
      of the good things of the table and a good cigar than was consistent with
      his duty to his family or the smallness of his income. His father, a
      successful apothecary at Boston, had died in 1833, leaving John, his only
      son, a fortune of some L10,000. In rather less than ten years Webster had
      run through the whole of his inheritance. He had built himself a costly
      mansion in Cambridge, spent a large sum of money in collecting minerals,
      and delighted to exercise lavish hospitality. By living consistently
      beyond his means he found himself at length entirely dependent on his
      professional earnings. These were small. His salary as Professor was fixed
      at L240 a year;(15) the rest of his income he derived from the sale of
      tickets for his lectures at the Medical College. That income was
      insufficient to meet his wants.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (15) I have given these sums of money in their English equivalents
in order to give the reader an idea of the smallness of the sum which
brought about the tragedy.
</pre>
    <p>
      As early as 1842 he had borrowed L80 from his friend Dr. Parkman. It was
      to Parkman's good offices that he owed his appointment as a Professor at
      Harvard; they had entered the University as under-graduates in the same
      year. Up to 1847 Webster had repaid Parkman twenty pounds of his debt;
      but, in that year he found it necessary to raise a further loan of L490,
      which was subscribed by a few friends, among them Parkman himself. As a
      security for the repayment of this loan, the professor executed a mortgage
      on his valuable collection of minerals in favour of Parkman. In the April
      of 1848 the Professor's financial difficulties became so serious that he
      was threatened with an execution in his house. In this predicament he went
      to a Mr. Shaw, Dr. Parkman's brother-in-law, and begged a loan of L240,
      offering him as security a bill of sale on the collection of minerals,
      which he had already mortgaged to Parkman. Shaw accepted the security, and
      lent the money. Shaw would seem to have had a good deal of sympathy with
      Webster's embarrassments; he considered the Professor's income very
      inadequate to his position, and showed himself quite ready at a later
      period to waive his debt altogether.
    </p>
    <p>
      Dr. Parkman was a less easy-going creditor. Forbearing and patient as long
      as he was dealt with fairly, he was merciless where he thought he detected
      trickery or evasion. His forbearance and his patience were utterly
      exhausted, his anger and indignation strongly aroused, when he learnt from
      Shaw that Webster had given him as security for his debt a bill of sale on
      the collection of minerals, already mortgaged to himself. From the moment
      of the discovery of this act of dishonesty on the part of Webster, Parkman
      pursued his debtor with unrelenting severity.
    </p>
    <p>
      He threatened him with an action at law; he said openly that he was
      neither an honourable, honest, nor upright man; he tried to appropriate to
      the payment of his debt the fees for lectures which Mr. Pettee, Webster's
      agent, collected on the Professor's behalf. He even visited Webster in his
      lecture-room and sat glaring at him in the front row of seats, while the
      Professor was striving under these somewhat unfavourable conditions to
      impart instruction to his pupils&mdash;a proceeding which the Doctor's odd
      cast of features must have aggravated in no small degree.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was early in November that Parkman adopted these aggressive tactics. On
      the 19th of that month Webster and the janitor of the College, Ephraim
      Littlefield, were working in the upper laboratory. It was dark; they had
      lit candles. Webster was reading a chemical book. As he looked up from the
      book he saw Parkman standing in the doorway leading from the lecture-room.
      "Dr. Webster, are you ready for me to-night?" asked Parkman. "No," replied
      the other, "I am not ready to-night." After a little further conversation
      in regard to the mortgage, Parkman departed with the ominous remark,
      "Doctor, something must be done to-morrow."
    </p>
    <p>
      Unfortunately the Professor was not in a position to do anything. He had
      no means sufficient to meet his creditor's demands; and that creditor was
      unrelenting. On the 22nd Parkman rode into Cambridge, where Webster lived,
      to press him further, but failed to find him. Webster's patience, none too
      great at any time, was being sorely tried. To whom could he turn? What
      further resource was open to him? There was none. He determined to see his
      creditor once more. At 8 o'clock on the morning of Friday the 23rd,
      Webster called at Dr. Parkman's house and made the appointment for their
      meeting at the Medical College at half-past one, to which the Doctor had
      been seen hastening just before his disappearance. At nine o'clock the
      same morning Pettee, the agent, had called on the Professor at the College
      and paid him by cheque a balance of L28 due on his lecture tickets,
      informing him at the same time that, owing to the trouble with Dr.
      Parkman, he must decline to receive any further sums of money on his
      behalf. Webster replied that Parkman was a nervous, excitable man, subject
      to mental aberrations, but he added, "You will have no further trouble
      with Dr. Parkman, for I have settled with him." It is difficult to see how
      the Professor could have settled, or proposed to settle, with his creditor
      on that day. A balance of L28 at his bank, and the L18 which Mr. Pettee
      had paid to him that morning, represented the sum of Professor Webster's
      fortune on Friday, November 23, 1849.
    </p>
    <p>
      Since the afternoon of that day the search for the missing Parkman had
      been unremitting. On the Saturday his friends communicated with the
      police. On Sunday hand-bills were issued stating the fact of the Doctor's
      disappearance, and on Monday, the 26th, a description and the offer of a
      considerable reward for the discovery of his body were circulated both in
      and out of the city. Two days later a further reward was offered. But
      these efforts were fruitless. The only person who gave any information
      beyond that afforded by those who had seen the Doctor in the streets on
      the morning of his disappearance, was Professor Webster. About four
      o'clock on the Sunday afternoon the Professor called at the house of the
      Revd. Francis Parkman, the Doctor's brother. They were intimate friends.
      Webster had for a time attended Parkman's chapel; and Mr. Parkman had
      baptised the Professor's grand-daughter. On this Sunday afternoon Mr.
      Parkman could not help remarking Webster's peculiar manner. With a bare
      greeting and no expression of condolence with the family's distress, his
      visitor entered abruptly and nervously on the object of his errand. He had
      called, he said, to tell Mr. Parkman that he had seen his brother at the
      Medical College on Friday afternoon, that he had paid him L90 which he
      owed him, and that the Doctor had in the course of their interview taken
      out a paper and dashed his pen through it, presumably as an acknowledgment
      of the liquidation of the Professor's debt. Having communicated this
      intelligence to the somewhat astonished gentleman, Webster left him as
      abruptly as he had come.
    </p>
    <p>
      Another relative of Dr. Parkman, his nephew, Mr. Parkman Blake, in the
      course of inquiries as to his uncle's fate, thought it right to see
      Webster. Accordingly he went to the college on Monday, the 26th, about
      eleven o'clock in the morning. Though not one of his lecture days, the
      janitor Littlefield informed him that the Professor was in his room. The
      door of the lecture-room, however, was found to be locked, and it was only
      after considerable delay that Mr. Blake gained admittance. As he descended
      the steps to the floor of the lecture-room Webster, dressed in a working
      suit of blue overalls and wearing on his head a smoking cap, came in from
      the back door. Instead of advancing to greet his visitor, he stood fixed
      to the spot, and waited, as if defensively, for Mr. Blake to speak. In
      answer to Mr. Blake's questions Webster described his interview with Dr.
      Parkman on the Friday afternoon. He gave a very similar account of it to
      that he had already given to Mr. Francis Parkman. He added that at the end
      of their interview he had asked the Doctor for the return of the mortgage,
      to which the latter had replied, "I haven't it with me, but I will see it
      is properly cancelled." Mr. Blake asked Webster if he could recollect in
      what form of money it was that he had paid Dr. Parkman. Webster answered
      that he could only recollect a bill of L20 on the New Zealand Bank:
      pressed on this point, he seemed to rather avoid any further inquiries.
      Mr. Blake left him, dissatisfied with the result of his visit.
    </p>
    <p>
      One particular in Webster's statement was unquestionably strange, if not
      incredible. He had, he said, paid Parkman a sum of L90, which he had given
      him personally, and represented the Doctor as having at their interview
      promised to cancel the mortgage on the collection of minerals which
      Webster had given as security for the loan of L490 that had been
      subscribed by Parkman and four of his friends. Now L120 of this loan was
      still owing. If Webster's statement were true, Parkman had a perfect right
      to cancel Webster's personal debt to himself; but he had no right to
      cancel entirely the mortgage on the minerals, so long as money due to
      others on that mortgage was yet unpaid. Was it conceivable that one so
      strict and scrupulous in all monetary transactions as Parkman would have
      settled his own personal claim, and then sacrificed in so discreditable a
      manner the claims of others, for the satisfaction of which he had made
      himself responsible?
    </p>
    <p>
      There was yet another singular circumstance. On Saturday, the 24th, the
      day after his settlement with Parkman, Webster paid into his own account
      at the Charles River Bank the cheque for L18, lecture fees, handed over to
      him by the agent Pettee just before Dr. Parkman's visit on the Friday.
      This sum had not apparently gone towards the making up of the L90, which
      Webster said that he had paid to Parkman that day. The means by which
      Webster had been enabled to settle this debt became more mysterious than
      ever.
    </p>
    <p>
      On Tuesday, November 27, the Professor received three other visitors in
      his lecture-room. These were police officers who, in the course of their
      search for the missing man, felt it their duty to examine, however
      perfunctorily, the Medical College. With apologies to the Professor, they
      passed through his lecture room to the laboratory at the back, and from
      thence, down the private stairs, past a privy, into the lower laboratory.
      As they passed the privy one of the officers asked what place it was. "Dr.
      Webster's private lavatory," replied the janitor, who was conducting them.
      At that moment Webster's voice called them away to examine the store-room
      in the lower laboratory, and after a cursory examination the officers
      departed.
    </p>
    <p>
      The janitor, Ephraim Littlefield, did not take the opportunity afforded
      him by the visit of the police officers to impart to them the feelings of
      uneasiness; which the conduct of Professor Webster during the last three
      days had excited in his breast. There were circumstances in the
      Professor's behaviour which could not fail to attract the attention of a
      man, whose business throughout the day was to dust and sweep the College,
      light the fires and overlook generally the order and cleanliness of the
      building.
    </p>
    <p>
      Littlefield, it will be remembered, had seen Dr. Parkman on the Monday
      before his disappearance, when he visited Webster at the College, and been
      present at the interview, in the course of which the Doctor told Webster
      that "something must be done." That Monday morning Webster asked
      Littlefield a number of questions about the dissecting-room vault, which
      was situated just outside the door of the lower laboratory. He asked how
      it was built, whether a light could be put into it, and how it was reached
      for the purpose of repair. On the following Thursday, the day before
      Parkman's disappearance, the Professor told Littlefield to get him a pint
      of blood from the Massachusetts Hospital; he said that he wanted it for an
      experiment. On the morning of Friday, the day of Parkman's disappearance,
      Littlefield informed the Professor that he had been unsuccessful in his
      efforts to get the blood, as they had not been bleeding anyone lately at
      the hospital. The same morning Littlefield found to his surprise a
      sledge-hammer behind the door of the Professor's back room; he presumed
      that it had been left there by masons, and took it down to the lower
      laboratory. This sledge-hammer Littlefield never saw again. About a
      quarter to two that afternoon Littlefield, standing at the front door,
      after his dinner, saw Dr. Parkman coming towards the College. At two
      o'clock Littlefield went up to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes' room,
      immediately above Professor Webster's, to help the Doctor to clear his
      table after his lecture, which was the last delivered that day. About a
      quarter of an hour later he let Dr. Holmes out, locked the front door and
      began to clear out the stoves in the other lecture-rooms. When he reached
      Webster's he was surprised to find that both doors, that of the lecture
      room and that of the lower laboratory, were either locked or bolted. He
      could hear nothing but the running of water in one of the sinks. About
      half-past five Littlefield saw the Professor coming down the back stairs
      with a lighted candle in his hand. Webster blew out the candle and left
      the building. Late that night Littlefield again tried the Professor's
      doors; they were still fastened. The janitor was surprised at this, as he
      had never known such a thing to happen before.
    </p>
    <p>
      On Saturday, the 24th, though not lecturing that day, the Professor came
      to the College in the morning. He told Littlefield to light the stove in
      the lower laboratory. When Littlefield made to pass from the lecture-room
      into the Professor's private room at the back, and so down by the private
      stairs to the lower laboratory, the Professor stopped him and told him to
      go round by the door in front of the building. The whole of that day and
      Sunday, the Professor's doors remained fast. On Sunday evening at sunset
      Littlefield, who was talking with a friend in North Grove Street, the
      street that faces the College, was accosted by Webster. The Professor
      asked him if he recollected Parkman's visit to the College on Friday, the
      23rd, and, on his replying in the affirmative, the Professor described to
      him their interview and the repayment of his debt. Littlefield was struck
      during their conversation by the uneasiness of the Professor's bearing;
      contrary to his habit he seemed unable to look him in the face, his manner
      was confused, his face pale.
    </p>
    <p>
      During the whole of Monday, except for a visit from Mr. Parkman Blake,
      Professor Webster was again locked alone in his laboratory. Neither that
      night, nor early Tuesday morning, could Littlefield get into the
      Professor's rooms to perform his customary duties. On Tuesday the
      Professor lectured at twelve o'clock, and later received the visit of the
      police officers that has been described already. At four o'clock that
      afternoon, the Professor's bell rang. Littlefield answered it. The
      Professor asked the janitor whether he had bought his turkey for
      Thanksgiving Day, which was on the following Thursday. Littlefield said
      that he had not done so yet. Webster then handed him an order on his
      provision dealer. "Take that," he said, "and get a nice turkey; perhaps I
      shall want you to do some odd jobs for me." Littlefield thanked him, and
      said that he would be glad to do anything for him that he could. The
      janitor was the more surprised at Webster's generosity on this occasion,
      as this turkey was the first present he had received at the Professor's
      hands during the seven years he had worked in the College. Littlefield saw
      the Professor again about half-past six that evening as the latter was
      leaving the College. The janitor asked him if he wanted any more fires
      lighted in his rooms, because owing to the holidays there were to be no
      further lectures that week. Webster said that he did not, and asked
      Littlefield whether he were a freemason. The janitor said "Yes," and with
      that they parted.
    </p>
    <p>
      Littlefield was curious. The mysterious activity of the Professor of
      Chemistry seemed to him more than unusual. His perplexity was increased on
      the following day. Though on account of the holidays all work had been
      suspended at the College for the remainder of the week, Webster was again
      busy in his room early Wednesday morning. Littlefield could hear him
      moving about. In vain did the janitor look through the keyhole, bore a
      hole in the door, peep under it; all he could get was a sight of the
      Professor's feet moving about the laboratory. Perplexity gave way to
      apprehension when in the course of the afternoon Littlefield discovered
      that the outer wall of the lower laboratory was so hot that he could
      hardly bear to place his hand on it. On the outer side of this wall was a
      furnace sometimes used by the Professor in his chemical experiments. How
      came it to be so heated? The Professor had told Littlefield on Tuesday
      that he should not be requiring any fires during the remainder of the
      week.
    </p>
    <p>
      The janitor determined to resolve his suspicions. He climbed up to the
      back windows of the lower laboratory, found one of them unfastened, and
      let himself in. But, beyond evidences of the considerable fires that had
      been kept burning during the last few days, Littlefield saw nothing to
      excite peculiar attention. Still he was uneasy. Those he met in the street
      kept on telling him that Dr. Parkman would be found in the Medical
      College. He felt that he himself was beginning to be suspected of having
      some share in the mystery, whilst in his own mind he became more certain
      every day that the real solution lay within the walls of Professor
      Webster's laboratory. His attention had fixed itself particularly on the
      lavatory at the foot of the stairs connecting the upper and lower
      laboratories. This room he found to be locked and the key, a large one,
      had disappeared. He recollected that when the police officers had paid
      their visit to the college, the Professor had diverted their attention as
      they were about to inspect this room. The only method by which, unknown to
      the Professor and without breaking open the door, Littlefield could
      examine the vault of this retiring room was by going down to the basement
      floor of the college and digging a hole through the wall into the vault
      itself. This he determined to do.
    </p>
    <p>
      On Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, Littlefield commenced operations with a
      hatchet and a chisel. Progress was slow, as that evening he had been
      invited to attend a festal gathering. On Friday the janitor, before
      resuming work, acquainted two of the Professors of the college with his
      proposed investigation, and received their sanction. As Webster, however,
      was going constantly in and out of his rooms, he could make little further
      progress that day. The Professor had come into town early in the morning.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before going to the college he purchased some fish-hooks and gave orders
      for the making of a strong tin box with firm handles, a foot and a half
      square and a little more than a foot in depth; during the rest of the day
      he had been busy in his rooms until he left the college about four
      o'clock. Not till then was the watchful janitor able to resume his
      labours. Armed with a crowbar, he worked vigorously until he succeeded in
      penetrating the wall sufficiently to admit a light into the vault of the
      lavatory. The first objects which the light revealed to his eyes, were the
      pelvis of a man and two parts of a human leg.
    </p>
    <p>
      Leaving his wife in charge of the remains, Littlefield went immediately to
      the house of Professor Bigelow, and informed him of the result of his
      search. They returned to the college some twenty minutes later,
      accompanied by the City Marshal. The human remains&mdash;a pelvis, a thigh
      and a leg&mdash;were taken out of the vault, and on a further search some
      pieces of bone were removed from one of the furnaces in the lower
      laboratory. The City Marshal at once dispatched three of his officers to
      Cambridge, to the house of Professor Webster.
    </p>
    <p>
      To his immediate circle of friends and relations the conduct of the
      Professor during this eventful week had betrayed no unwonted discomposure
      or disturbance of mind. His evenings had been spent either at the house of
      friends, or at his own, playing whist, or reading Milton's "Allegro" and
      "Penseroso" to his wife and daughters. On Friday evening, about eight
      o'clock, as the Professor was saying good-bye to a friend on the steps of
      his house at Cambridge, the three police officers drove up to the door and
      asked him to accompany them to the Medical College. It was proposed, they
      said, to make a further search there that evening, and his presence was
      considered advisable. Webster assented immediately, put on his boots, his
      hat and coat, and got into the hired coach. As they drove towards the
      city, Webster spoke to the officers of Parkman's disappearance, and
      suggested that they should stop at the house of a lady who, he said, could
      give them some peculiar information on that subject. As they entered
      Boston, he remarked that they were taking the wrong direction for reaching
      the college. One of the officers replied that the driver might be "green,"
      but that he would find his way to the college in time. At length the coach
      stopped. One of the officers alighted, and invited his companions to
      follow him into the office of the Leverett Street Jail. They obeyed. The
      Professor asked what it all meant; he was informed that he must consider
      himself in custody, charged with the murder of Dr. George Parkman.
      Webster, somewhat taken aback, desired that word should be sent to his
      family, but was dissuaded from his purpose for the time being. He was
      searched, and among other articles taken from him was a key some four or
      five inches long; it was the missing lavatory key. Whilst one of the
      officers withdrew to make out a mittimus, the Professor asked one of the
      others if they had found Dr. Parkman. The officer begged him not to
      question him. "You might tell me something about it," pleaded Webster.
      "Where did they find him? Did they find the whole body? Oh, my children!
      What will they do? What will they think of me? Where did you get the
      information?" The officers asked him if anybody had access to his
      apartments but himself. "Nobody," he replied, "but the porter who makes
      the fire." Then, after a pause, he exclaimed: "That villain! I am a ruined
      man." He was walking up and down wringing his hands, when one of the
      officers saw him put one hand into his waistcoat pocket, and raise it to
      his lips. A few moments later the unhappy man was seized with violent
      spasms. He was unable to stand, and was laid down in one of the cells.
      From this distressing state he was roused shortly before eleven, to be
      taken to the college. He was quite incapable of walking, and had to be
      supported by two of the officers. He was present there while his rooms
      were searched; but his state was painful in the extreme. He asked for
      water, but trembled so convulsively that he could only snap at the tumbler
      like a dog; his limbs were rigid; tears and sweat poured down his cheeks.
      On the way back to the jail, one of the officers, moved by his condition,
      expressed his pity for him. "Do you pity me? Are you sorry for me? What
      for?" asked Webster. "To see you so excited," replied the officer. "Oh!
      that's it," said the Professor.
    </p>
    <p>
      The whole night through the prisoner lay without moving, and not until the
      following afternoon were his limbs relaxed sufficiently to allow of his
      sitting up. As his condition improved, he grew more confident. "That is no
      more Dr. Parkman's body," he said, "than mine. How in the world it came
      there I don't know," and he added: "I never liked the looks of Littlefield
      the janitor; I opposed his coming there all I could."
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime a further examination of the Professor's rooms on Saturday
      had resulted in the discovery, in a tea-chest in the lower laboratory, of
      a thorax, the left thigh of a leg, and a hunting knife embedded in tan and
      covered over with minerals; some portions of bone and teeth were found
      mixed with the slag and cinders of one of the furnaces; also some
      fish-hooks and a quantity of twine, the latter identical with a piece of
      twine that had been tied round the thigh found in the chest.
    </p>
    <p>
      Two days later the Professor furnished unwittingly some additional
      evidence against himself. On the Monday evening after his arrest he wrote
      from prison to one of his daughters the following letter:
    </p>
    <p>
      "MY DEAREST MARIANNE,&mdash;I wrote Mama yesterday; I had a good sleep
      last night, and dreamt of you all. I got my clothes off, for the first
      time, and awoke in the morning quite hungry. It was a long time before my
      first breakfast from Parker's came; and it was relished, I can assure you.
      At one o'clock I was notified that I must appear at the court room. All
      was arranged with great regard to my comfort, and went off better than I
      had anticipated.
    </p>
    <p>
      "On my return I had a bit of turkey and rice from Parker's. They send much
      more than I can eat, and I have directed the steward to distribute the
      surplus to any poor ones here.
    </p>
    <p>
      "If you will send me a small canister of tea, I can make my own. A little
      pepper I may want some day. I would send the dirty clothes, but they were
      taken to dry. Tell Mama NOT TO OPEN the little bundle I gave her the other
      day, but to keep it just as she received it. With many kisses to you all.
      Good night!&mdash;From your affectionate
    </p>
    <p>
      "FATHER."
    </p>
    <p>
      "P.S.&mdash;My tongue troubles me yet very much, and I must have bitten it
      in my distress the other night; it is painful and swollen, affecting my
      speech. Had Mama better send for Nancy? I think so; or Aunt Amelia."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Couple of coloured neck handkerchiefs, one Madras."
    </p>
    <p>
      This letter, which shows an anxiety about his personal comfort singular in
      one so tragically situated, passed through the hands of the keeper of the
      jail. He was struck by the words underlined, "NOT TO OPEN," in regard to
      the small bundle confided to Mrs. Webster. He called the attention of the
      police to this phrase. They sent immediately an officer armed with a
      search warrant to the Professor's house. He received from Mrs. Webster
      among other papers a package which, on being opened, was found to contain
      the two notes given by Webster to Parkman as acknowledgments of his
      indebtedness to him in 1842 and 1847, and a paper showing the amount of
      his debts to Parkman in 1847. There were daubs and erasures made across
      these documents, and across one was written twice over the word "paid."
      All these evidences of payments and cancellations appeared on examination
      to be in the handwriting of the Professor.
    </p>
    <p>
      After an inquest lasting nine days the coroner's jury declared the remains
      found in the college to be those of Dr. George Parkman, and that the
      deceased had met his death at the hands of Professor J. W. Webster. The
      prisoner waived his right to a magisterial investigation, and on January
      26, 1850, the Grand Jury returned a true bill. But it was not until March
      17 that the Professor's trial opened before the Supreme Court of
      Massachusetts. The proceedings were conducted with that dignity and
      propriety which we look for in the courts of that State. The principal
      features in the defence were an attempt to impugn the testimony of the
      janitor Littlefield, and to question the possibility of the identification
      of the remains of Parkman's teeth. There was a further attempt to prove
      that the deceased had been seen by a number of persons in the streets of
      Boston on the Friday afternoon, after his visit to the Medical College.
      The witness Littlefield was unshaken by a severe cross-examination. The
      very reluctance with which Dr. Keep gave his fatal evidence, and the
      support given to his conclusions by distinguished testimony told strongly
      in favour of the absolute trustworthiness of his statements. The evidence
      called to prove that the murdered man had been seen alive late on Friday
      afternoon was highly inconclusive.
    </p>
    <p>
      Contrary to the advice of his counsel, Webster addressed the jury himself.
      He complained of the conduct of his case, and enumerated various points
      that his counsel had omitted to make, which he conceived to be in his
      favour. The value of his statements may be judged by the fact that he
      called God to witness that he had not written any one of the anonymous
      letters, purporting to give a true account of the doctor's fate, which had
      been received by the police at the time of Parkman's disappearance. After
      his condemnation Webster confessed to the authorship of at least one of
      them.
    </p>
    <p>
      The jury retired at eight o'clock on the eleventh day of the trial. They
      would seem to have approached their duty in a most solemn and devout
      spirit, and it was with the greatest reluctance and after some searching
      of heart that they brought themselves to find the prisoner guilty of
      wilful murder. On hearing their verdict, the Professor sank into a seat,
      and, dropping his head, rubbed his eyes behind his spectacles as if wiping
      away tears. On the following morning the Chief Justice sentenced him to
      death after a well-meaning speech of quite unnecessary length and
      elaboration, at the conclusion of which the condemned man wept freely.
    </p>
    <p>
      A petition for a writ of error having been dismissed, the Professor in
      July addressed a petition for clemency to the Council of the State. Dr.
      Putnam, who had been attending Webster in the jail, read to the Council a
      confession which he had persuaded the prisoner to make. According to this
      statement Webster had, on the Friday afternoon, struck Parkman on the head
      with a heavy wooden stick in a wild moment of rage, induced by the violent
      taunts and threats of his creditor. Appalled by his deed, he had in panic
      locked himself in his room, and proceeded with desperate haste to
      dismember the body; he had placed it for that purpose in the sink in his
      back room, through which was running a constant stream of water that
      carried away the blood. Some portions of the body he had burnt in the
      furnace; those in the lavatory and the tea-chest he had concealed there,
      until he should have had an opportunity of getting rid of them.
    </p>
    <p>
      In this statement Professor Webster denied all premeditation. Dr. Putnam
      asked him solemnly whether he had not, immediately before the crime,
      meditated at any time on the advantages that would accrue to him from
      Parkman's death. Webster replied "Never, before God!" He had, he
      protested, no idea of doing Parkman an injury until the bitter tongue of
      the latter provoked him. "I am irritable and violent," he said, "a
      quickness and brief violence of temper has been the besetting sin of my
      life. I was an only child, much indulged, and I have never secured the
      control over my passions that I ought to have acquired early; and the
      consequence is&mdash;all this!" He denied having told Parkman that he was
      going to settle with him that afternoon, and said that he had asked him to
      come to the college with the sole object of pleading with him for further
      indulgence. He explained his convulsive seizure at the time of his arrest
      by his having taken a dose of strychnine, which he had carried in his
      pocket since the crime. In spite of these statements and the prayers of
      the unfortunate man's wife and daughters, who, until his confession to Dr.
      Putnam, had believed implicity in his innocence, the Council decided that
      the law must take its course, and fixed August 30 as the day of execution.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Professor resigned himself to his fate. He sent for Littlefield and
      his wife, and expressed his regret for any injustice he had done them:
      "All you said was true. You have misrepresented nothing." Asked by the
      sheriff whether he was to understand from some of his expressions that he
      contemplated an attempt at suicide, "Why should I?" he replied, "all the
      proceedings in my case have been just... and it is just that I should die
      upon the scaffold in accordance with that sentence." "Everybody is right,"
      he said to the keeper of the jail, "and I am wrong. And I feel that, if
      the yielding up of my life to the injured law will atone, even in part,
      for the crime I have committed, that is a consolation."
    </p>
    <p>
      In a letter to the Reverend Francis Parkman he expressed deep contrition
      for his guilt. He added one sentence which may perhaps fairly express the
      measure of premeditation that accompanied his crime. "I had never," he
      wrote, "until the two or three last interviews with your brother, felt
      towards him anything but gratitude for his many acts of kindness and
      friendship."
    </p>
    <p>
      Professor Webster met his death with fortitude and resignation. That he
      deserved his fate few will be inclined to deny. The attempt to procure
      blood, the questions about the dissecting-room vault, the appointment made
      with Parkman at the college, the statement to Pettee, all point to some
      degree of premeditation, or at least would make it appear that the murder
      of Parkman had been considered by him as a possible eventuality. His
      accusation of Littlefield deprives him of a good deal of sympathy. On the
      other hand, the age and position of Webster, the aggravating persistency
      of Parkman, his threats and denunciations, coupled with his own shortness
      of temper, make it conceivable that he may have killed his victim on a
      sudden and overmastering provocation, in which case he had better at once
      have acknowledged his crime instead of making a repulsive attempt to
      conceal it. But for the evidence of Dr. Keep he would possibly have
      escaped punishment altogether. Save for the portions of his false teeth,
      there was not sufficient evidence to identify the remains found in the
      college as those of Parkman. Without these teeth the proof of the corpus
      delicti would have been incomplete, and so afforded Webster a fair chance
      of acquittal.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      The Mysterious Mr. Holmes
    </h2>
    <p>
      "The Holmes-Pitezel Case," by F. B. Geyer, 1896; "Holmes' Own Story,"
      Philadelphia, 1895; and "Celebrated Criminal Cases of America," by T. S.
      Duke, San Francisco, are the authorities for this account of the case.
    </p>
    <p>
      I HONOUR AMONGST THIEVES
    </p>
    <p>
      In the year 1894 Mr. Smith, a carpenter, of Philadelphia, had patented a
      new saw-set. Wishing to make some money out of his invention, Mr. Smith
      was attracted by the sign:
    </p>
    <p>
      B. F. PERRY PATENTS BOUGHT AND SOLD
    </p>
    <p>
      which he saw stretched across the window of a two-storied house, 1,316
      Callowhill Street. He entered the house and made the acquaintance of Mr.
      Perry, a tall, dark, bony man, to whom he explained the merits of his
      invention. Perry listened with interest, and asked for a model. In the
      meantime he suggested that Smith should do some carpenter's work for him
      in the house. Smith agreed, and on August 22, while at work there saw a
      man enter the house and go up with Perry to a room on the second story.
    </p>
    <p>
      A few days later Smith called at Callowhill Street to ask Perry about the
      sale of the patent. He waited half an hour in the shop below, called out
      to Perry who, he thought, might be in the rooms above, received no answer
      and went away. Next day, September 4, Smith returned, found the place just
      as he had left it the day before; called Perry again, but again got no
      answer. Surprised, he went upstairs, and in the back room of the second
      story the morning sunshine, streaming through the window, showed him the
      dead body of a man, his face charred beyond recognition, lying with his
      feet to the window and his head to the door. There was evidence of some
      sort of explosion: a broken bottle that had contained an inflammable
      substance, a broken pipe filled with tobacco, and a burnt match lay by the
      side of the body.
    </p>
    <p>
      The general appearance of the dead man answered to that of B. F. Perry. A
      medical examination of the body showed that death had been sudden, that
      there had been paralysis of the involuntary muscles, and that the stomach,
      besides showing symptoms of alcoholic irritation, emitted a strong odour
      of chloroform. An inquest was held, and a verdict returned that B. F.
      Perry had died of congestion of the lungs caused by the inhalation of
      flame or chloroform. After lying in the mortuary for eleven days the body
      was buried.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime the Philadelphia branch of the Fidelity Mutual Life
      Association had received a letter from one Jephtha D. Howe, an attorney at
      St. Louis, stating that the deceased B. F. Perry was Benjamin F. Pitezel
      of that city, who had been insured in their office for a sum of ten
      thousand dollars. The insurance had been effected in Chicago in the
      November of 1893. Mr. Howe proposed to come to Philadelphia with some
      members of the Pitezel family to identify the remains. Referring to their
      Chicago branch, the insurance company found that the only person who would
      seem to have known Pitezel when in that city, was a certain H. H. Holmes,
      living at Wilmette, Illinois. They got into communication with Mr. Holmes,
      and forwarded to him a cutting from a newspaper, which stated erroneously
      that the death of B. F. Perry had taken place in Chicago.
    </p>
    <p>
      On September 18 they received a letter from Mr. Holmes, in which he
      offered what assistance he could toward the identification of B. F. Perry
      as B. F. Pitezel. He gave the name of a dentist in Chicago who would be
      able to recognise teeth which he had made for Pitezel, and himself
      furnished a description of the man, especially of a malformation of the
      knee and a warty growth on the back of the neck by which he could be
      further identified. Mr. Holmes offered, if his expenses were paid, to come
      to Chicago to view the body. Two days later he wrote again saying that he
      had seen by other papers that Perry's death had taken place in
      Philadelphia and not in Chicago, and that as he had to be in Baltimore in
      a day or two, he would run over to Philadelphia and visit the office of
      the Fidelity Life Association.
    </p>
    <p>
      On September 20 the assiduous Mr. Holmes called at the office of the
      Association in Philadelphia, inquired anxiously about the nature and cause
      of Perry's death, gave again a description of him and, on learning that
      Mr. Howe, the attorney from St. Louis, was about to come to Philadelphia
      to represent the widow, Mrs. Pitezel, and complete the identification,
      said that he would return to give the company any further help he could in
      the matter. The following day Mr. Jephtha D. Howe, attorney of St. Louis,
      arrived in Philadelphia, accompanied by Alice Pitezel, a daughter of the
      deceased. Howe explained that Pitezel had taken the name of Perry owing to
      financial difficulties. The company said that they accepted the fact that
      Perry and Pitezel were one and the same man, but were not convinced that
      the body was Pitezel's body. The visit of Holmes was mentioned. Howe said
      that he did not know Mr. Holmes, but would be willing to meet him. At this
      moment Holmes arrived at the office. He was introduced to Howe as a
      stranger, and recognised as a friend by Alice Pitezel, a shy, awkward girl
      of fourteen or fifteen years of age. It was then arranged that all the
      parties should meet again next day to identify, if possible, the body,
      which had been disinterred for that purpose.
    </p>
    <p>
      The unpleasant duty of identifying the rapidly decomposing remains was
      greatly curtailed by the readiness of Mr. Holmes. When the party met on
      the 22nd at the Potter's Field, where the body had been disinterred and
      laid out, the doctor present was unable to find the distinctive marks
      which would show Perry and Pitezel to have been the same man. Holmes at
      once stepped into the breach, took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves,
      put on the rubber gloves, and taking a surgeon's knife from his pocket,
      cut off the wart at the back of the neck, showed the injury to the leg,
      and revealed also a bruised thumbnail which had been another distinctive
      mark of Pitezel. The body was then covered up all but the teeth; the girl
      Alice was brought in, and she said that the teeth appeared to be like
      those of her father. The insurance company declared themselves satisfied,
      and handed to Mr. Howe a cheque for 9,175 dollars, and to Mr. Holmes ten
      dollars for his expenses. Smith, the carpenter, had been present at the
      proceedings at the Potter's Field. For a moment he thought he detected a
      likeness in Mr. Holmes to the man who had visited Perry at Callowhill
      Street on August 22 and gone upstairs with him, but he did not feel sure
      enough of the fact to make any mention of it.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the prison at St. Louis there languished in the year 1894 one Marion
      Hedgspeth, serving a sentence of twenty years' imprisonment for an
      audacious train robbery. On the night of November 30, 1891, the 'Friscow
      express from St. Louis had been boarded by four ruffians, the express car
      blown open with dynamite, and 10,000 dollars carried off. Hedgspeth and
      another man were tried for the robbery, and sentenced to twenty years'
      imprisonment. On October 9, 1894, Hegspeth{sic} made a statement to the
      Governor of the St. Louis prison, which he said he wished to be
      communicated to the Fidelity Mutual Life Association. In the previous July
      Hedgspeth said that he had met in the prison a man of the name of H. M.
      Howard, who was charged with fraud, but had been released on bail later in
      the month. While in prison Howard told Hedgspeth that he had devised a
      scheme for swindling an insurance company of 10,000 dollars, and promised
      Hedgspeth that, if he would recommend him a lawyer suitable for such an
      enterprise, he should have 500 dollars as his share of the proceeds.
      Hedgspeth recommended Jephtha D. Howe. The latter entered with enthusiasm
      into the scheme, and told Hedgspeth that he thought Mr. Howard "one of the
      smoothest and slickest" men he had ever known. A corpse was to be found
      answering to Pitezel's description, and to be so treated as to appear to
      have been the victim of an accidental explosion, while Pitezel himself
      would disappear to Germany. From Howe Hedgspeth learnt that the swindle
      had been carried out successfully, but he had never received from Howard
      the 500 dollars promised him. Consequently, he had but little compunction
      in divulging the plot to the authorities.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was realised at once that H. M. Howard and H. H. Holmes were the same
      person, and that Jephtha D. Howe and Mr. Holmes were not the strangers to
      each other that they had affected to be when they met in Philadelphia.
      Though somewhat doubtful of the truth of Hedgspeth's statement, the
      insurance company decided to set Pinkerton's detectives on the track of
      Mr. H. H. Holmes. After more than a month's search he was traced to his
      father's house at Gilmanton, N. H., and arrested in Boston on November 17.
    </p>
    <p>
      Inquiry showed that, early in 1894, Holmes and Pitezel had acquired some
      real property at Fort Worth in Texas and commenced building operations,
      but had soon after left Texas under a cloud, arising from the theft of a
      horse and other dubious transactions.
    </p>
    <p>
      Holmes had obtained the property at Fort Worth from a Miss Minnie
      Williams, and transferred it to Pitezel. Pitezel was a drunken "crook," of
      mean intelligence, a mesmeric subject entirely under the influence of
      Holmes, who claimed to have considerable hypnotic powers. Pitezel had a
      wife living at St. Louis and five children, three girls&mdash;Dessie,
      Alice, and Nellie&mdash;a boy, Howard, and a baby in arms. At the time of
      Holmes' arrest Mrs. Pitezel, with her eldest daughter, Dessie, and her
      little baby, was living at a house rented by Holmes at Burlington,
      Vermont. She also was arrested on a charge of complicity in the insurance
      fraud and brought to Boston.
    </p>
    <p>
      Two days after his arrest Holmes, who dreaded being sent back to Texas on
      a charge of horse-stealing, for which in that State the punishment is apt
      to be rough and ready, made a statement to the police, in which he
      acknowledged the fraud practised by him and Pitezel on the insurance
      company. The body substituted for Pitezel had been obtained, said Holmes,
      from a doctor in New York, packed in a trunk and sent to Philadelphia, but
      he declined for the present to give the doctor's name. Pitezel, he said,
      had gone with three of his children&mdash;Alice, Nellie and Howard&mdash;to
      South America. This fact, however, Holmes had not communicated to Mrs.
      Pitezel. When she arrived at Boston, the poor woman was in great distress
      of mind. Questioned by the officers, she attempted to deny any complicity
      in the fraud, but her real anxiety was to get news of her husband and her
      three children. Alice she had not seen since the girl had gone to
      Philadelphia to identify the supposed remains of her father. Shortly after
      this Holmes had come to Mrs. Pitezel at St. Louis, and taken away Nellie
      and Howard to join Alice, who, he said, was in the care of a widow lady at
      Ovington, Kentucky. Since then Mrs. Pitezel had seen nothing of the
      children or her husband. At Holmes' direction she had gone to Detroit,
      Toronto, Ogdensberg and, lastly, to Burlington in the hope of meeting
      either Pitezel or the children, but in vain. She believed that her husband
      had deserted her; her only desire was to recover her children.
    </p>
    <p>
      On November 20 Holmes and Mrs. Pitezel were transferred from Boston to
      Philadelphia, and there, along with Benjamin Pitezel and Jephtha D. Howe,
      were charged with defrauding the Fidelity Life Association of 10,000
      dollars. Soon after his arrival in Philadelphia Holmes, who was never
      averse to talking, was asked by an inspector of the insurance company who
      it was that had helped him to double up the body sent from New York and
      pack it into the trunk. He replied that he had done it alone, having
      learned the trick when studying medicine in Michigan. The inspector
      recollected that the body when removed from Callowhill Street had been
      straight and rigid. He asked Holmes what trick he had learnt in the course
      of his medical studies by which it was possible to re-stiffen a body once
      the rigor mortis had been broken. To this Holmes made no reply. But he
      realised his mistake, and a few weeks later volunteered a second
      statement. He now said that Pitezel, in a fit of depression, aggravated by
      his drinking habits, had committed suicide on the third story of the house
      in Callowhill Street. There Holmes had found his body, carried it down on
      to the floor below, and arranged it in the manner agreed upon for
      deceiving the insurance company. Pitezel, he said, had taken his life by
      lying on the floor and allowing chloroform to run slowly into his mouth
      through a rubber tube placed on a chair. The three children, Holmes now
      stated, had gone to England with a friend of his, Miss Minnie Williams.
    </p>
    <p>
      Miss Minnie Williams was the lady, from whom Holmes was said to have
      acquired the property in Texas which he and Pitezel had set about
      developing. There was quite a tragedy, according to Holmes, connected with
      the life of Miss Williams. She had come to Holmes in 1893, as secretary,
      at a drug store which he was then keeping in Chicago. Their relations had
      become more intimate, and later in the year Miss Williams wrote to her
      sister, Nannie, saying that she was going to be married, and inviting her
      to the wedding. Nannie arrived, but unfortunately a violent quarrel broke
      out between the two sisters, and Holmes came home to find that Minnie in
      her rage had killed her sister. He had helped her out of the trouble by
      dropping Nannie's body into the Chicago lake. After such a distressing
      occurrence Miss Williams was only too glad of the opportunity of leaving
      America with the Pitezel children. In the meantime Holmes, under the name
      of Bond, and Pitezel, under that of Lyman, had proceeded to deal with Miss
      Williams' property in Texas.
    </p>
    <p>
      For women Holmes would always appear to have possessed some power of
      attraction, a power of which he availed himself generously. Holmes, whose
      real name was Herman W. Mudgett, was thirty-four years of age at the time
      of his arrest. As a boy he had spent his life farming in Vermont, after
      which he had taken up medicine and acquired some kind of medical degree.
      In the course of his training Holmes and a fellow student, finding a body
      that bore a striking resemblance to the latter; obtained 1,000 dollars
      from an insurance company by a fraud similar to that in which Holmes had
      engaged subsequently with Pitezel. After spending some time on the staff
      of a lunatic asylum in Pennsylvania, Holmes set up as a druggist in
      Chicago. His affairs in this city prospered, and he was enabled to erect,
      at the corner of Wallace and Sixty-Third Streets, the four-storied
      building known later as "Holmes Castle." It was a singular structure. The
      lower part consisted of a shop and offices. Holmes occupied the second
      floor, and had a laboratory on the third. In his office was a vault, air
      proof and sound proof. In the bathroom a trap-door, covered by a rug,
      opened on to a secret staircase leading down to the cellar, and a similar
      staircase connected the cellar with the laboratory. In the cellar was a
      large grate. To this building Miss Minnie Williams had invited her sister
      to come for her wedding with Holmes, and it was in this building,
      according to Holmes, that the tragedy of Nannie's untimely death occurred.
    </p>
    <p>
      In hoping to become Holmes' wife, Miss Minnie Williams was not to enjoy an
      exclusive privilege. At the time of his arrest Holmes had three wives,
      each ignorant of the others' existence. He had married the first in 1878,
      under the name of Mudgett, and was visiting her at Burlington, Vermont,
      when the Pinkerton detectives first got on his track. The second he had
      married at Chicago, under the name of Howard, and the third at Denver as
      recently as January, 1894, under the name of Holmes. The third Mrs. Holmes
      had been with him when he came to Philadelphia to identify Pitezel's body.
      The appearance of Holmes was commonplace, but he was a man of plausible
      and ingratiating address, apparent candour, and able in case of necessity
      to "let loose," as he phrased it, "the fount of emotion."
    </p>
    <p>
      The year 1895 opened to find the much enduring Holmes still a prisoner in
      Philadelphia. The authorities seemed in no haste to indict him for fraud;
      their interest was concentrated rather in endeavouring to find the
      whereabouts of Miss Williams and her children, and of one Edward Hatch,
      whom Holmes had described as helping him in arranging for their departure.
      The "great humiliation" of being a prisoner was very distressing to
      Holmes.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     "I only know the sky has lost its blue,
     The days are weary and the night is drear."
</pre>
    <p>
      These struck him as two beautiful lines very appropriate to his situation.
      He made a New Year's resolve to give up meat during his close confinement.
      The visits of his third wife brought him some comfort. He was "agreeably
      surprised" to find that, as an unconvicted prisoner, he could order in his
      own meals and receive newspapers and periodicals. But he was hurt at an
      unfriendly suggestion on the part of the authorities that Pitezel had not
      died by his own hand, and that Edward Hatch was but a figment of his rich
      imagination. He would like to have been released on bail, but in the same
      unfriendly spirit was informed that, if he were, he would be detained on a
      charge of murder. And so the months dragged on. Holmes, studious, patient,
      injured, the authorities puzzled, suspicions, baffled&mdash;still no news
      of Miss Williams or the three children. It was not until June 3 that
      Holmes was put on his trial for fraud, and the following day pleaded
      guilty. Sentence was postponed.
    </p>
    <p>
      The same day Holmes was sent for to the office of the District Attorney,
      who thus addressed him: "It is strongly suspected, Holmes, that you have
      not only murdered Pitezel, but that you have killed the children. The best
      way to remove this suspicion is to produce the children at once. Now,
      where are they?" Unfriendly as was this approach, Holmes met it calmly,
      reiterated his previous statement that the children had gone with Miss
      Williams to England, and gave her address in London, 80 Veder or Vadar
      Street, where, he said, Miss Williams had opened a massage establishment.
      He offered to draw up and insert a cipher advertisement in the New York
      Herald, by means of which, he said, Miss Williams and he had agreed to
      communicate, and almost tearfully he added, "Why should I kill innocent
      children?"
    </p>
    <p>
      Asked to give the name of any person who had seen Miss Williams and the
      children in the course of their journeyings in America, he resented the
      disbelief implied in such a question, and strong was his manly indignation
      when one of the gentlemen present expressed his opinion that the story was
      a lie from beginning to end. This rude estimate of Holmes' veracity was,
      however, in some degree confirmed when a cipher advertisement published in
      the New York Herald according to Holmes' directions, produced no reply
      from Miss Williams, and inquiry showed that no such street as Veder or
      Vadar Street was to be found in London.
    </p>
    <p>
      In spite of these disappointments, Holmes' quiet confidence in his own
      good faith continued unshaken. When the hapless Mrs. Pitezel was released,
      he wrote her a long letter. "Knowing me as you do," he said, "can you
      imagine me killing little and innocent children, especially without any
      motive?" But even Mrs. Pitezel was not wholly reassured. She recollected
      how Holmes had taken her just before his arrest to a house he had rented
      at Burlington, Vermont, how he had written asking her to carry a package
      of nitro-glycerine from the bottom to the top of the house, and how one
      day she had found him busily removing the boards in the cellar.
    </p>
    <p>
      II THE WANDERING ASSASSIN
    </p>
    <p>
      The District Attorney and the Insurance Company were not in agreement as
      to the fate of the Pitezel children. The former still inclined to the hope
      and belief that they were in England with Miss Williams, but the insurance
      company took a more sinister view. No trace of them existed except a tin
      box found among Holmes' effects, containing letters they had written to
      their mother and grandparents from Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Detroit,
      which had been given to Holmes to dispatch but had never reached their
      destination. The box contained letters from Mrs. Pitezel to her children,
      which Holmes had presumably intercepted.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was decided to make a final attempt to resolve all doubts by sending an
      experienced detective over the route taken by the children in America. He
      was to make exhaustive inquiries in each city with a view to tracing the
      visits of Holmes or the three children. For this purpose a detective of
      the name of Geyer was chosen. The record of his search is a remarkable
      story of patient and persistent investigation.
    </p>
    <p>
      Alice Pitezel had not seen her mother since she had gone with Holmes to
      identify her father's remains in Philadelphia. From there Holmes had taken
      her to Indianapolis. In the meantime he had visited Mrs. Pitezel at St.
      Louis, and taken away with him the girl, Nellie, and the boy, Howard,
      alleging as his reason for doing so that they and Alice were to join their
      father, whose temporary effacement was necessary to carry out successfully
      the fraud on the insurance company, to which Mrs. Pitezel had been from
      the first an unwilling party. Holmes, Nellie and Howard had joined Alice
      at Indianapolis, and from there all four were believed to have gone to
      Cincinnati. It was here, accordingly, on June 27, 1895, that Geyer
      commenced his search.
    </p>
    <p>
      After calling at a number of hotels, Geyer found that on Friday, September
      28, 1894, a man, giving the name of Alexander E. Cook, and three children
      had stayed at a hotel called the Atlantic House. Geyer recollected that
      Holmes, when later on he had sent Mrs. Pitezel to the house in Burlington,
      had described her as Mrs. A. E. Cook and, though not positive, the hotel
      clerk thought that he recognised in the photographs of Holmes and he three
      children, which Geyer showed him, the four visitors to the hotel.
    </p>
    <p>
      They had left the Atlantic House the next day, and on that same day, the
      29th, Geyer found that Mr. A. E. Cook and three children had registered at
      the Bristol Hotel, where they had stayed until Sunday the 30th.
    </p>
    <p>
      Knowing Holmes' habit of renting houses, Geyer did not confine his
      enquiries to the hotels. He visited a number of estate agents and learnt
      that a man and a boy, identified as Holmes and Howard Pitezel, had
      occupied a house No. 305 Poplar Street. The man had given the name of A.
      C. Hayes. He had taken the house on Friday the 28th, and on the 29th had
      driven up to it with the boy in a furniture wagon. A curious neighbour,
      interested in the advent of a newcomer, saw the wagon arrive, and was
      somewhat astonished to observe that the only furniture taken into the
      house was a large iron cylinder stove. She was still further surprised
      when, on the following day, Mr. Hayes told her that he was not going after
      all to occupy the house, and made her a present of the cylinder stove.
    </p>
    <p>
      From Cincinnati Geyer went to Indianapolis. Here inquiry showed that on
      September 30 three children had been brought by a man identified as Holmes
      to the Hotel English, and registered in the name of Canning. This was the
      maiden name of Mrs. Pitezel. The children had stayed at the hotel one
      night. After that Geyer seemed to lose track of them until he was reminded
      of a hotel then closed, called the Circle House. With some difficulty he
      got a sight of the books of the hotel, and found that the three Canning
      children had arrived there on October 1 and stayed until the 10th. From
      the former proprietor of the hotel he learnt that Holmes had described
      himself as the children's uncle, and had said that Howard was a bad boy,
      whom he was trying to place in some institution. The children seldom went
      out; they would sit in their room drawing or writing, often they were
      found crying; they seemed homesick and unhappy.
    </p>
    <p>
      There are letters of the children written from Indianapolis to their
      mothers, letters found in Holmes' possession, which had never reached her.
      In these letters they ask their mother why she does not write to them. She
      had written, but her letters were in Holmes' possession. Alice writes that
      she is reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin." She has read so much that her eyes
      hurt; they have bought a crystal pen for five cents which gives them some
      amusement; they had been to the Zoo in Cincinnati the Sunday before: "I
      expect this Sunday will pass away slower than I don't know&mdash;Howard is
      two (sic) dirty to be seen out on the street to-day." Sometimes they go
      and watch a man who paints "genuine oil paintings" in a shoe store, which
      are given away with every dollar purchase of shoes&mdash;"he can paint a
      picture in one and a half minutes, ain't that quick!" Howard was getting a
      little troublesome. "I don't like to tell you," writes Alice, "but you ask
      me, so I will have to. Howard won't mind me at all. He wanted a book and I
      got 'Life of General Sheridan,' and it is awful nice, but now he don't
      read it at all hardly." Poor Howard! One morning, says Alice, Mr. Holmes
      told him to stay in and wait for him, as he was coming to take him out,
      but Howard was disobedient, and when Mr. Holmes arrived he had gone out.
      Better for Howard had he never returned! "We have written two or three
      letters to you," Alice tells her mother, "and I guess you will begin to
      get them now." She will not get them. Mr. Holmes is so very particular
      that the insurance company shall get no clue to the whereabouts of any
      member of the Pitezel family.
    </p>
    <p>
      Geyer knew that from Indianapolis Holmes had gone to Detroit. He
      ascertained that two girls, "Etta and Nellie Canning," had registered on
      October 12 at the New Western Hotel in that city, and from there had moved
      on the 15th to a boarding-house in Congress Street. From Detroit Alice had
      written to her grandparents. It was cold and wet, she wrote; she and Etta
      had colds and chapped hands: "We have to stay in all the time. All that
      Nell and I can do is to draw, and I get so tired sitting that I could get
      up and fly almost. I wish I could see you all. I am getting so homesick
      that I don't know what to do. I suppose Wharton (their baby brother) walks
      by this time, don't he? I would like to have him here, he would pass away
      the time a good deal." As a fact little Wharton, his mother and sister
      Dessie, were at this very moment in Detroit, within ten minutes' walk of
      the hotel at which Holmes had registered "Etta and Nellie Canning."
    </p>
    <p>
      On October 14 there had arrived in that city a weary, anxious-looking
      woman, with a girl and a little baby. They took a room at Geis's Hotel,
      registering as Mrs. Adams and daughter. Mrs. Adams seemed in great
      distress of mind, and never left her room.
    </p>
    <p>
      The housekeeper, being shown their photographs, identified the woman and
      the girl as Mrs. Pitezel and her eldest daughter Dessie. As the same time
      there had been staying at another hotel in Detroit a Mr. and Mrs. Holmes,
      whose photographs showed them to be the Mr. Holmes in question and his
      third wife. These three parties&mdash;the two children, Mrs. Pitezel and
      her baby, and the third Mrs. Holmes&mdash;were all ignorant of each
      other's presence in Detroit; and under the secret guidance of Mr. Holmes
      the three parties (still unaware of their proximity to each other), left
      Detroit for Canada, arriving in Toronto on or about October 18, and
      registering at three separate hotels. The only one who had not to all
      appearances reached Toronto was the boy Howard.
    </p>
    <p>
      In Toronto "Alice and Nellie Canning" stayed at the Albion Hotel.
    </p>
    <p>
      They arrived there on October 19, and left on the 25th. During their stay
      a man, identified as Holmes, had called every morning for the two
      children, and taken them out; but they had come back alone, usually in
      time for supper. On the 25th he had called and taken them out, but they
      had not returned to supper. After that date Geyer could find no trace of
      them. Bearing in mind Holmes' custom of renting houses, he compiled a list
      of all the house agents in Toronto, and laboriously applied to each one
      for information. The process was a slow one, and the result seemed likely
      to be disappointing.
    </p>
    <p>
      To aid his search Geyer decided to call in the assistance of the Press.
      The newspapers readily published long accounts of the case and portraits
      of Holmes and the children. At last, after eight days of patient and
      untiring investigation, after following up more than one false clue, Geyer
      received a report that there was a house&mdash;No. 16 St. Vincent Street&mdash;which
      had been rented in the previous October by a man answering to the
      description of Holmes. The information came from an old Scottish gentleman
      living next door. Geyer hastened to see him. The old gentleman said that
      the man who had occupied No. 16 in October had told him that he had taken
      the house for his widowed sister, and he recognised the photograph of
      Alice Pitezel as one of the two girls accompanying him. The only furniture
      the man had taken into the house was a bed, a mattress and a trunk. During
      his stay at No. 16 this man had called on his neighbour about four o'clock
      one afternoon and borrowed a spade, saying that he wanted to dig a place
      in the cellar where his widowed sister could keep potatoes; he had
      returned the spade the following morning. The lady to whom the house
      belonged recognised Holmes' portrait as that of the man to whom she had
      let No. 16.
    </p>
    <p>
      At last Geyer seemed to be on the right track. He hurried back to St.
      Vincent Street, borrowed from the old gentleman at No. 18 the very spade
      which he had lent to Holmes in the previous October, and got the
      permission of the present occupier of No. 16 to make a search. In the
      centre of the kitchen Geyer found a trap-door leading down into a small
      cellar. In one corner of the cellar he saw that the earth had been
      recently dug up. With the help of the spade the loose earth was removed,
      and at a depth of some three feet, in a state of advanced decomposition,
      lay the remains of what appeared to be two children. A little toy wooden
      egg with a snake inside it, belonging to the Pitezel children, had been
      found by the tenant who had taken the house after Holmes; a later tenant
      had found stuffed into the chimney, but not burnt, some clothing that
      answered the description of that worn by Alice and Etta Pitezel; and by
      the teeth and hair of the two corpses Mrs. Pitezel was able to identify
      them as those of her two daughters. The very day that Alice and Etta had
      met their deaths at St. Vincent Street, their mother had been staying near
      them at a hotel in the same city, and later on the same day Holmes had
      persuaded her to leave Toronto for Ogdensburg. He said that they were
      being watched by detectives, and so it would be impossible for her husband
      to come to see her there.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the problem was not yet wholly solved. What had become of Howard? So
      far Geyer's search had shown that Holmes had rented three houses, one in
      Cincinnati, one in Detroit, and one in Toronto. Howard had been with his
      sisters at the hotels in Indianapolis, and in Detroit the house agents had
      said that, when Holmes had rented a house there, he had been accompanied
      by a boy. Yet an exhaustive search of that house had revealed no trace of
      him. Geyer returned to Detroit and again questioned the house agents; on
      being pressed their recollection of the boy who had accompanied Holmes
      seemed very vague and uncertain. This served only to justify a conclusion
      at which Geyer had already arrived, that Howard had never reached Detroit,
      but had disappeared in Indianapolis. Alice's letters, written from there,
      had described how Holmes had wanted to take Howard out one day and how the
      boy had refused to stay in and wait for him. In the same way Holmes had
      called for the two girls at the Albion Hotel in Toronto on October 25 and
      taken them out with him, after which they had never been seen alive except
      by the old gentleman at No. 18 St. Vincent Street.
    </p>
    <p>
      If Geyer could discover that Holmes had not departed in Indianapolis from
      his usual custom of renting houses, he might be on the high way to solving
      the mystery of Howard's fate. Accordingly he returned to Indianapolis.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime, Holmes, in his prison at Philadelphia, learnt of the
      discovery at Toronto. "On the morning of the 16th of July," he writes in
      his journal, "my newspaper was delivered to me about 8.30 a.m., and I had
      hardly opened it before I saw in large headlines the announcement of the
      finding of the children in Toronto. For the moment it seemed so impossible
      that I was inclined to think it was one of the frequent newspaper
      excitements that had attended the earlier part of the case, but, in
      attempting to gain some accurate comprehension of what was stated in the
      article, I became convinced that at least certain bodies had been found
      there, and upon comparing the date when the house was hired I knew it to
      be the same as when the children had been in Toronto; and thus being
      forced to realise the awfulness of what had probably happened, I gave up
      trying to read the article, and saw instead the two little faces as they
      had looked when I hurriedly left them&mdash;felt the innocent child's kiss
      so timidly given, and heard again their earnest words of farewell, and
      realised that I had received another burden to carry to my grave with me,
      equal, if not worse, than the horrors of Nannie Williams' death."
    </p>
    <p>
      Questioned by the district attorney, Holmes met this fresh evidence by
      evoking once again the mythical Edward Hatch and suggesting that Miss
      Minnie Williams, in a "hellish wish for vengeance" because of Holmes'
      fancied desertion, and in order to make it appear probable that he, and
      not she, had murdered her sister, had prompted Hatch to commit the horrid
      deed. Holmes asked to be allowed to go to Toronto that he might collect
      any evidence which he could find there in his favour. The district
      attorney refused his request; he had determined to try Holmes in
      Philadelphia. "What more could, be said?" writes Holmes. Indeed, under the
      circumstances, and in the unaccountable absence of Edward Hatch and Minnie
      Williams, there was little more to be said.
    </p>
    <p>
      Detective Geyer reopened his search in Indianapolis by obtaining a list of
      advertisements of houses to let in the city in 1894. Nine hundred of these
      were followed up in vain. He then turned his attention to the small towns
      lying around Indianapolis with no happier result. Geyer wrote in something
      of despair to his superiors: "By Monday we will have searched every
      outlying town except Irvington. After Irvington, I scarcely know where we
      shall go." Thither he went on August 27, exactly two months from the day
      on which his quest had begun. As he entered the town he noticed the
      advertisement of an estate agent. He called at the office and found a
      "pleasant-faced old gentleman," who greeted him amiably. Once again Geyer
      opened his now soiled and ragged packet of photographs, and asked the
      gentleman if in October, 1894, he had let a house to a man who said that
      he wanted one for a widowed sister. He showed him the portrait of Holmes.
    </p>
    <p>
      The old man put on his glasses and looked at the photograph for some time.
      Yes, he said, he did remember that he had given the keys of a cottage in
      October, 1894, to a man of Holmes' appearance, and he recollected the man
      the more distinctly for the uncivil abruptness with which he had asked for
      the keys; "I felt," he said, "he should have had more respect for my grey
      hairs."
    </p>
    <p>
      From the old gentleman's office Geyer hastened to the cottage, and made at
      once for the cellar. There he could find no sign of recent disturbance.
      But beneath the floor of a piazza adjoining the house he found the remains
      of a trunk, answering to the description of that which the Pitezel
      children had had with them, and in an outhouse he discovered the
      inevitable stove, Holmes' one indispensable piece of furniture. It was
      stained with blood on the top. A neighbour had seen Holmes in the same
      October drive up to the house in the furniture wagon accompanied by a boy,
      and later in the day Holmes had asked him to come over to the cottage and
      help him to put up a stove. The neighbour asked him why he did not use
      gas; Holmes replied that he did not think gas was healthy for children.
      While the two men were putting up the stove, the little boy stood by and
      watched them. After further search there were discovered in the cellar
      chimney some bones, teeth, a pelvis and the baked remains of a stomach,
      liver and spleen.
    </p>
    <p>
      Medical examination showed them to be the remains of a child between seven
      and ten years of age. A spinning top, a scarf-pin, a pair of shoes and
      some articles of clothing that had belonged to the little Pitezels, had
      been found in the house at different times, and were handed over to Geyer.
    </p>
    <p>
      His search was ended. On September 1 he returned to Philadelphia.
    </p>
    <p>
      Holmes was put on his trial on October 28, 1895, before the Court of Oyer
      and Terminer in Philadelphia, charged with the murder of Benjamin Pitezel.
      In the course of the trial the district attorney offered to put in
      evidence showing that Holmes had also murdered the three children of
      Pitezel, contending that such evidence was admissible on the ground that
      the murders of the children and their father were parts of the same
      transaction. The judge refused to admit the evidence, though expressing a
      doubt as to its inadmissibility. The defence did not dispute the identity
      of the body found in Callowhill Street, but contended that Pitezel had
      committed suicide. The medical evidence negatived such a theory. The
      position of the body, its condition when discovered, were entirely
      inconsistent with self-destruction, and the absence of irritation in the
      stomach showed that the chloroform found there must have been poured into
      it after death. In all probability, Holmes had chloroformed Pitezel when
      he was drunk or asleep. He had taken the chloroform to Callowhill Street
      as a proposed ingredient in a solution for cleaning clothes, which he and
      Pitezel were to patent. It was no doubt with the help of the same drug
      that he had done to death the little children, and failing the
      nitro-glycerine, with that drug he had intended to put Mrs. Pitezel and
      her two remaining children out of the way at the house in Burlington; for
      after his trial there was found there, hidden away in the cellar, a bottle
      containing eight or ten ounces of chloroform.
    </p>
    <p>
      Though assisted by counsel, Holmes took an active part in his defence. He
      betrayed no feeling at the sight of Mrs. Pitezel, the greater part of
      whose family he had destroyed, but the appearance of his third wife as a
      witness he made an opportunity for "letting loose the fount of emotion,"
      taking care to inform his counsel beforehand that he intended to perform
      this touching feat. He was convicted and sentenced to death on November 2.
    </p>
    <p>
      Previous to the trial of Holmes the police had made an exhaustive
      investigation of the mysterious building in Chicago known as "Holmes'
      Castle." The result was sufficiently sinister. In the stove in the cellar
      charred human bones were found, and in the middle of the room stood a
      large dissecting table stained with blood. On digging up the cellar floor
      some human ribs, sections of vertebrae and teeth were discovered buried in
      quicklime, and in other parts of the "castle" the police found more
      charred bones, some metal buttons, a trunk, and a piece of a watch chain.
    </p>
    <p>
      The trunk and piece of watch chain were identified as having belonged to
      Miss Minnie Williams.
    </p>
    <p>
      Inquiry showed that Miss Williams had entered Holmes' employment as a
      typist in 1893, and had lived with him at the castle. In the latter part
      of the year she had invited her sister, Nannie, to be present at her
      wedding with Holmes. Nannie had come to Chicago for that purpose, and
      since then the two sisters had never been seen alive. In February in the
      following year Pitezel, under the name of Lyman, had deposited at Fort
      Worth, Texas, a deed according to which a man named Bond had transferred
      to him property in that city which had belonged to Miss Williams, and
      shortly after, Holmes, under the name of Pratt, joined him at Fort Worth,
      whereupon the two commenced building on Miss Williams' land.
    </p>
    <p>
      Other mysterious cases besides those of the Williams sisters revealed the
      Bluebeard-like character of this latterday castle of Mr. Holmes. In 1887 a
      man of the name of Connor entered Holmes' employment. He brought with him
      to the castle a handsome, intelligent wife and a little girl of eight or
      nine years of age.
    </p>
    <p>
      After a short time Connor quarrelled with his wife and went away, leaving
      Mrs. Connor and the little girl with Holmes. After 1892 Mrs. Connor and
      her daughter had disappeared, but in August, 1895, the police found in the
      castle some clothes identified as theirs, and the janitor, Quinlan,
      admitted having seen the dead body of Mrs. Connor in the castle. Holmes,
      questioned in his prison in Philadelphia, said that Mrs. Connor had died
      under an operation, but that he did not know what had become of the little
      girl.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the year of Mrs. Connor's disappearance, a typist named Emily Cigrand,
      who had been employed in a hospital in which Benjamin Pitezel had been a
      patient, was recommended by the latter to Holmes. She entered his
      employment, and she and Holmes soon became intimate, passing as "Mr. and
      Mrs. Gordon." Emily Cigrand had been in the habit of writing regularly to
      her parents in Indiana, but after December 6, 1892, they had never heard
      from her again, nor could any further trace of her be found.
    </p>
    <p>
      A man who worked for Holmes as a handy man at the castle stated to the
      police that in 1892 Holmes had given him a skeleton of a man to mount, and
      in January, 1893, showed him in the laboratory another male skeleton with
      some flesh still on it, which also he asked him to mount. As there was a
      set of surgical instruments in the laboratory and also a tank filled with
      a fluid preparation for removing flesh, the handy man thought that Holmes
      was engaged in some kind of surgical work.
    </p>
    <p>
      About a month before his execution, when Holmes' appeals from his sentence
      had failed and death appeared imminent, he sold to the newspapers for
      7,500 dollars a confession in which he claimed to have committed
      twenty-seven murders in the course of his career. The day after it
      appeared he declared the whole confession to be a "fake." He was tired, he
      said, of being accused by the newspapers of having committed every
      mysterious murder that had occurred during the last ten years. When it was
      pointed out to him that the account given in his confession of the murder
      of the Pitezel children was clearly untrue, he replied, "Of course, it is
      not true, but the newspapers wanted a sensation and they have got it." The
      confession was certainly sensational enough to satisfy the most exacting
      of penny-a-liners, and a lasting tribute to Holmes' undoubted power of
      extravagant romancing.
    </p>
    <p>
      According to his story, some of his twenty-seven victims had met their
      death by poison, some by more violent methods, some had died a lingering
      death in the air-tight and sound-proof vault of the castle. Most of these
      he mentioned by name, but some of these were proved afterwards to be
      alive. Holmes had actually perpetrated, in all probability, about ten
      murders. But, given further time and opportunity, there is no reason why
      this peripatetic assassin should not have attained to the considerable
      figure with which he credited himself in his bogus confession.
    </p>
    <p>
      Holmes was executed in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896. He seemed to meet his
      fate with indifference.
    </p>
    <p>
      The motive of Holmes in murdering Pitezel and three of his children and in
      planning to murder his wife and remaining children, originated in all
      probability in a quarrel that occurred between Pitezel and himself in the
      July of 1894. Pitezel had tired apparently of Holmes and his doings, and
      wanted to break off the connection. But he must have known enough of
      Holmes' past to make him a dangerous enemy. It was Pitezel who had
      introduced to Holmes, Emily Cigrand, the typist, who had disappeared so
      mysteriously in the castle; Pitezel had been his partner in the fraudulent
      appropriation of Miss Minnie Williams' property in Texas; it is more than
      likely, therefore, that Pitezel knew something of the fate of Miss
      Williams and her sister. By reviving, with Pitezel's help, his old plan
      for defrauding insurance companies, Holmes saw the opportunity of making
      10,000 dollars, which he needed sorely, and at the same time removing his
      inconvenient and now lukewarm associate. Having killed Pitezel and
      received the insurance money, Holmes appropriated to his own use the
      greater part of the 10,000 dollars, giving Mrs. Pitezel in return for her
      share of the plunder a bogus bill for 5,000 dollars. Having robbed Mrs.
      Pitezel of both her husband and her money, to this thoroughgoing criminal
      there seemed only one satisfactory way of escaping detection, and that was
      to exterminate her and the whole of her family.
    </p>
    <p>
      Had Holmes not confided his scheme of the insurance fraud to Hedgspeth in
      St. Louis prison and then broken faith with him, there is no reason why
      the fraud should ever have been discovered. The subsequent murders had
      been so cunningly contrived that, had the Insurance Company not put the
      Pinkerton detectives on his track, Holmes would in all probability have
      ended by successfully disposing of Mrs. Pitezel, Dessie, and the baby at
      the house in Burlington, Vermont, and the entire Pitezel family would have
      disappeared as completely as his other victims.
    </p>
    <p>
      Holmes admitted afterwards that his one mistake had been his confiding to
      Hedgspeth his plans for defrauding an insurance company&mdash;a mistake,
      the unfortunate results of which might have been avoided, if he had kept
      faith with the train robber and given him the 500 dollars which he had
      promised.
    </p>
    <p>
      The case of Holmes illustrates the practical as well as the purely ethical
      value of "honour among thieves," and shows how a comparatively
      insignificant misdeed may ruin a great and comprehensive plan of crime. To
      dare to attempt the extermination of a family of seven persons, and to
      succeed so nearly in effecting it, could be the work of no tyro, no
      beginner like J. B. Troppmann. It was the act of one who having already
      succeeded in putting out of the way a number of other persons undetected,
      might well and justifiably believe that he was born for greater and more
      compendious achievements in robbery and murder than any who had gone
      before him. One can almost subscribe to America's claim that Holmes is the
      "greatest criminal" of a century boasting no mean record in such persons.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the remarkable character of his achievements as an assassin we are apt
      to lose sight of Holmes' singular skill and daring as a liar and a
      bigamist. As an instance of the former may be cited his audacious
      explanation to his family, when they heard of his having married a second
      time. He said that he had met with a serious accident to his head, and
      that when he left the hospital, found that he had entirely lost his
      memory; that, while in this state of oblivion, he had married again and
      then, when his memory returned, realised to his horror his unfortunate
      position. Plausibility would seem to have been one of Holmes' most useful
      gifts; men and women alike&mdash;particularly the latter&mdash;he seems to
      have deceived with ease. His appearance was commonplace, in no way
      suggesting the conventional criminal, his manner courteous, ingratiating
      and seemingly candid, and like so many scoundrels, he could play
      consummately the man of sentiment.
    </p>
    <p>
      The weak spot in Holmes' armour as an enemy of society was a dangerous
      tendency to loquacity, the defect no doubt of his qualities of plausible
      and insinuating address and ever ready mendacity.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      The Widow Gras
    </h2>
    <p>
      Report of the trial of the woman Gras and Gaudry in the Gazette des
      Tribunaux. The case is dealt with also by Mace in his "Femmes
      Criminelles."
    </p>
    <p>
      I THE CHARMER
    </p>
    <p>
      Jenny Amenaide Brecourt was born in Paris in the year 1837. Her father was
      a printer, her mother sold vegetables. The parents neglected the child,
      but a lady of title took pity on her, and when she was five years old
      adopted her. Even as a little girl she was haughty and imperious. At the
      age of eight she refused to play with another child on the ground of her
      companion's social inferiority. "The daughter of a Baroness," she said,
      "cannot play with the daughter of a wine-merchant." When she was eleven
      years old, her parents took her away from her protectress and sent her
      into the streets to sell gingerbread&mdash;a dangerous experience for a
      child of tender years. After six years of street life, Amenaide sought out
      her benefactress and begged her to take her back. The Baroness consented,
      and found her employment in a silk manufactory. One day the girl, now
      eighteen years old, attended the wedding of one of her companions in the
      factory. She returned home after the ceremony thoughtful.
    </p>
    <p>
      She said that she wanted to get married. The Baroness did not take her
      statement seriously, and on the grocer calling one day, said in jest to
      Amenaide, "You want a husband, there's one."
    </p>
    <p>
      But Amenaide was in earnest. She accepted the suggestion and, to the
      Baroness' surprise, insisted on taking the grocer as her husband.
      Reluctantly the good lady gave her consent, and in 1855 Amenaide Brecourt
      became the wife of the grocer Gras.
    </p>
    <p>
      A union, so hasty and ill-considered, was not likely to be of long
      duration. With the help of the worthy Baroness the newly married couple
      started a grocery business. But Amenaide was too economical for her
      husband and mother-in-law. Quarrels ensued, recriminations. In a spirit of
      unamiable prophecy husband and wife foretold each other's future. "You
      will die in a hospital," said the wife. "You will land your carcase in
      prison," retorted the husband. In both instances they were correct in
      their anticipations. One day the husband disappeared. For a short time
      Amenaide returned to her long-suffering protectress, and then she too
      disappeared.
    </p>
    <p>
      When she is heard of again, Amenaide Brecourt has become Jeanne de la
      Cour. Jeanne de la Cour is a courtesan. She has tried commerce, acting,
      literature, journalism, and failed at them all. Henceforth men are to make
      her fortune for her. Such charms as she may possess, such allurements as
      she can offer, she is ready to employ without heart or feeling to
      accomplish her end. Without real passion, she has an almost abnormal,
      erotic sensibility, which serves in its stead. She cares only for one
      person, her sister. To her Jeanne de la Cour unfolded her philosophy of
      life. While pretending to love men, she is going to make them suffer. They
      are to be her playthings, she knows how to snare them: "All is dust and
      lies. So much the worse for the men who get in my way. Men are mere
      stepping-stones to me. As soon as they begin to fail or are played out, I
      put them scornfully aside. Society is a vast chess-board, men the pawns,
      some white, some black; I move them as I please, and break them when they
      bore me."
    </p>
    <p>
      The early years of Jeanne de la Cour's career as a Phryne were hardly more
      successful than her attempts at literature, acting and journalism. True to
      her philosophy, she had driven one lover, a German, to suicide, and
      brought another to his death by over-doses of cantharides. On learning of
      the death of the first, she reflected patriotically, "One German the less
      in Paris!" That of the second elicited the matter-of-fact comment, "It was
      bound to happen; he had no moderation." A third admirer, who died in a
      hospital, was dismissed as "a fool who, in spite of all, still respects
      women." But, in ruining her lovers, she had ruined her own health. In 1865
      she was compelled to enter a private asylum. There she is described as
      "dark in complexion, with dark expressive eyes, very pale, and of a
      nervous temperament, agreeable, and pretty." She was suffering at the time
      of her admission from hysterical seizures, accompanied by insane
      exaltation, convulsions and loss of speech. In speaking of her humble
      parents she said, "I don't know such people"; her manner was bombastic,
      and she was fond of posing as a fine lady.
    </p>
    <p>
      After a few months Jeanne de la Cour was discharged from the asylum as
      cured, and on the advice of her doctors went to Vittel.
    </p>
    <p>
      There she assumed the rank of Baroness and recommenced her career, but
      this time in a more reasonable and businesslike manner. Her comments,
      written to her sister, on her fellow guests at the hotel are caustic. She
      mocks at some respectable married women who are trying to convert her to
      Catholicism. To others who refuse her recognition, she makes herself so
      mischievous and objectionable that in self-defence they are frightened
      into acknowledging her. Admirers among men she has many, ex-ministers,
      prefects. It was at Vittel that occurred the incident of the wounded
      pigeon. There had been some pigeon-shooting. One of the wounded birds flew
      into the room of the Baroness de la Cour. She took pity on it, tended it,
      taught it not to be afraid of her and to stay in her room. So touching was
      her conduct considered by some of those who heard it, that she was
      nicknamed "the Charmer." But she is well aware, she writes to her sister,
      that with the true ingratitude of the male, the pigeon will leave her as
      soon as it needs her help no longer.
    </p>
    <p>
      However, for the moment, "disfigured as it is, beautiful or ugly," she
      loves it. "Don't forget," she writes, "that a woman who is practical and
      foreseeing, she too enjoys her pigeon shooting, but the birds are her
      lovers."
    </p>
    <p>
      Shortly after she left Vittel an event occurred which afforded Jeanne de
      la Cour the prospect of acquiring that settled position in life which,
      "practical and foreseeing," she now regarded as indispensable to her
      future welfare. Her husband, Gras, died, as she had foretold, in the
      Charity Hospital. The widow was free. If she could bring down her bird, it
      was now in her power to make it hers for life. Henceforth all her efforts
      were directed to that end. She was reaching her fortieth year, her hair
      was turning grey, her charms were waning. Poverty, degradation, a
      miserable old age, a return to the wretched surroundings of her childhood,
      such she knew to be the fate of many of her kind. There was nothing to be
      hoped for from the generosity of men. Her lovers were leaving her.
      Blackmail, speculation on the Bourse, even the desperate expedient of a
      supposititious child, all these she tried as means of acquiring a
      competence. But fortune was shy of the widow. There was need for dispatch.
      The time was drawing near when it might be man's unkind privilege to put
      her scornfully aside as a thing spent and done with. She must bring down
      her bird, and that quickly. It was at this critical point in the widow's
      career, in the year 1873, that she met at a public ball for the first time
      Georges de Saint Pierre.(16)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (16) For obvious reasons I have suppressed the real name of the widow's
lover.
</pre>
    <p>
      Georges de Saint Pierre was twenty years of age when he made the
      acquaintance of the Widow Gras. He had lost his mother at an early age,
      and since then lived with relatives in the country. He was a young man of
      independent means, idle, of a simple, confiding and affectionate
      disposition. Four months after his first meeting with the widow they met
      again. The end of the year 1873 saw the commencement of an intimacy, which
      to all appearances was characterised by a more lasting and sincere
      affection than is usually associated with unions of this kind. There can
      be no doubt that during the three years the Widow Gras was the mistress of
      Georges de Saint Pierre, she had succeeded in subjugating entirely the
      senses and the affection of her young lover. In spite of the twenty years
      between them, Georges de Saint Pierre idolised his middle-aged mistress.
      She was astute enough to play not only the lover, but the mother to this
      motherless youth. After three years of intimacy he writes to her: "It is
      enough for me that you love me, because I don't weary you, and I, I love
      you with all my heart. I cannot bear to leave you. We will live happily
      together. You will always love me truly, and as for me, my loving care
      will ever protect you. I don't know what would become of me if I did not
      feel that your love watched over me." The confidence of Georges in the
      widow was absolute. When, in 1876, he spent six months in Egypt, he made
      her free of his rooms in Paris, she was at liberty to go there when she
      liked; he trusted her entirely, idolised her. Whatever her faults, he was
      blind to them. "Your form," he writes, "is ever before my eyes; I wish I
      could enshrine your pure heart in gold and crystal."
    </p>
    <p>
      The widow's conquest, to all appearances, was complete. But Georges was
      very young. He had a family anxious for his future; they knew of his
      liaison; they would be hopeful, no doubt, of one day breaking it off and
      of marrying him to some desirable young person. From the widow's point of
      view the situation lacked finality. How was that to be secured?
    </p>
    <p>
      One day, toward the end of the year 1876, after the return of Georges from
      Egypt, the widow happened to be at the house of a friend, a ballet dancer.
      She saw her friend lead into the room a young man; he was sightless, and
      her friend with tender care guided him to a seat on the sofa. The widow
      was touched by the spectacle. When they were alone, she inquired of her
      friend the reason of her solicitude for the young man. "I love this victim
      of nature," she replied, "and look after him with every care. He is young,
      rich, without family, and is going to marry me. Like you, I am just on
      forty; my hair is turning grey, my youth vanishing. I shall soon be cast
      adrift on the sea, a wreck. This boy is the providential spar to which I
      am going to cling that I may reach land in safety." "You mean, then," said
      the widow, "that you will soon be beyond the reach of want?" "Yes,"
      answered the friend, "I needn't worry any more about the future."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I congratulate you," said the widow, "and what is more, your lover will
      never see you grow old."
    </p>
    <p>
      To be cast adrift on the sea and to have found a providential spar! The
      widow was greatly impressed by her friend's rare good fortune. Indeed, her
      experience gave the widow furiously to think, as she revolved in her brain
      various expedients by which Georges de Saint Pierre might become the
      "providential spar" in her own impending wreck. The picture of the blind
      young man tenderly cared for, dependent utterly on the ministrations of
      his devoted wife, fixed itself in the widow's mind; there was something
      inexpressibly pathetic in the picture, whilst its practical significance
      had its sinister appeal to one in her situation.
    </p>
    <p>
      At this point in the story there appears on the scene a character as
      remarkable in his way as the widow herself, remarkable at least for his
      share in the drama that is to follow. Nathalis Gaudry, of humble
      parentage, rude and uncultivated, had been a playmate of the widow when
      she was a child in her parents' house.
    </p>
    <p>
      They had grown up together, but, after Gaudry entered the army, had lost
      sight of each other. Gaudry served through the Italian war of 1859,
      gaining a medal for valour. In 1864 he had married.
    </p>
    <p>
      Eleven years later his wife died, leaving him with two children. He came
      to Paris and obtained employment in an oil refinery at Saint Denis. His
      character was excellent; he was a good workman, honest, hard-working, his
      record unblemished. When he returned to Paris, Gaudry renewed his
      friendship with the companion of his youth. But Jeanne Brecourt was now
      Jeanne de la Cour, living in refinement and some luxury, moving in a
      sphere altogether remote from and unapproachable by the humble workman in
      an oil refinery. He could do no more than worship from afar this strange
      being, to him wonderfully seductive in her charm and distinction.
    </p>
    <p>
      On her side the widow was quite friendly toward her homely admirer. She
      refused to marry him, as he would have wished, but she did her best
      without success to marry him to others of her acquaintance. Neither a
      sempstress nor an inferior actress could she persuade, for all her zeal,
      to unite themselves with a hand in an oil mill, a widower with two
      children. It is typical of the widow's nervous energy that she should have
      undertaken so hopeless a task. In the meantime she made use of her
      admirer. On Sundays he helped her in her apartment, carried coals, bottled
      wine, scrubbed the floors, and made himself generally useful. He was
      supposed by those about the house to be her brother. Occasionally, in the
      absence of a maid, the widow allowed him to attend on her personally, even
      to assist her in her toilette and perform for her such offices as one
      woman would perform for another. The man soon came to be madly in love
      with the woman; his passion, excited but not gratified, enslaved and
      consumed him. To some of his fellow-workmen who saw him moody and
      preoccupied, he confessed that he ardently desired to marry a friend of
      his childhood, not a working woman but a lady.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such was the situation and state of mind of Nathalis Gaudry when, in
      November, 1876, he received a letter from the widow, in which she wrote,
      "Come at once. I want you on a matter of business. Tell your employer it
      is a family affair; I will make up your wages." In obedience to this
      message Gaudry was absent from the distillery from the 17th to the 23rd of
      November.
    </p>
    <p>
      The "matter of business" about which the widow wished to consult with
      Gaudry turned out to be a scheme of revenge. She told him that she had
      been basely defrauded by a man to whom she had entrusted money. She
      desired to be revenged on him, and could think of no better way than to
      strike at his dearest affections by seriously injuring his son. This she
      proposed to do with the help of a knuckle-duster, which she produced and
      gave to Gaudry. Armed with this formidable weapon, Gaudry was to strike
      her enemy's son so forcibly in the pit of the stomach as to disable him
      for life. The widow offered to point out to Gaudry the young man whom he
      was to attack. She took him outside the young man's club and showed him
      his victim. He was Georges de Saint Pierre.
    </p>
    <p>
      The good fortune of her friend, the ballet-dancer, had proved a veritable
      toxin in the intellectual system of the Widow Gras. The poison of envy,
      disappointment, suspicion, apprehension had entered into her soul. Of what
      use to her was a lover, however generous and faithful, who was free to
      take her up and lay her aside at will? But such was her situation relative
      to Georges de Saint Pierre. She remembered that the wounded pigeon, as
      long as it was dependent on her kind offices, had been compelled to stay
      by her side; recovered, it had flown away. Only a pigeon, maimed beyond
      hope of recovery, could she be sure of compelling to be hers for all time,
      tied to her by its helpless infirmity, too suffering and disfigured to be
      lured from its captivity. And so, in accordance with her philosophy of
      life, the widow, by a blow in the pit of the stomach with a
      knuckle-duster, was to bring down her bird which henceforth would be
      tended and cared for by "the Charmer" to her own satisfaction and the
      admiration of all beholders.
    </p>
    <p>
      For some reason, the natural reluctance of Gaudry, or perhaps a feeling of
      compunction in the heart of the widow, this plan was not put into
      immediate execution. Possibly she hesitated before adopting a plan more
      cruel, more efficacious. Her hesitation did not last long.
    </p>
    <p>
      With the dawn of the year 1877 the vigilant apprehension of the widow was
      roused by the tone of M. de Saint Pierre's letters. He wrote from his home
      in the country, "I cannot bear leaving you, and I don't mean to. We will
      live together." But he adds that he is depressed by difficulties with his
      family, "not about money or business but of a kind he can only communicate
      to her verbally." To the widow it was clear that these difficulties must
      relate to the subject of marriage. The character of Georges was not a
      strong one; sooner or later he might yield to the importunities of his
      family; her reign would be ended, a modest and insufficient pension the
      utmost she could hope for. She had passed the meridian of her life as a
      charmer of men, her health was giving way, she was greedy, ambitious,
      acquisitive. In January she asked her nephew, who worked as a gilder, to
      get her some vitriol for cleaning her copper. He complied with her
      request.
    </p>
    <p>
      During Jeanne de la Cour's brief and unsuccessful appearance as an actress
      she had taken part in a play with the rather cumbrous title, Who Puts out
      the Eyes must Pay for Them. The widow may have forgotten this event; its
      occurrence so many years before may have been merely a sinister
      coincidence. But the incident of the ballet-dancer and her sightless lover
      was fresh in her mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      Early in January the widow wrote to Georges, who was in the country, and
      asked him to take her to the masked ball at the Opera on the 13th. Her
      lover was rather surprised at her request, nor did he wish to appear with
      her at so public a gathering. "I don't understand," he writes, "why you
      are so anxious to go to the Opera. I can't see any real reason for your
      wanting to tire yourself out at such a disreputable gathering. However, if
      you are happy and well, and promise to be careful, I will take you. I
      would be the last person, my dear little wife, to deny you anything that
      would give you pleasure." But for some reason Georges was unhappy,
      depressed. Some undefined presentiment of evil seems to have oppressed
      him. His brother noticed his preoccupation.
    </p>
    <p>
      He himself alludes to it in writing to his mistress: "I am depressed this
      evening. For a very little I could break down altogether and give way to
      tears. You can't imagine what horrid thoughts possess me. If I felt your
      love close to me, I should be less sad." Against his better inclination
      Georges promised to take the widow to the ball on the 13th. He was to come
      to Paris on the night of the 12th.
    </p>
    <p>
      II THE WOUNDED PIGEON
    </p>
    <p>
      On the afternoon of January 11, Gaudry called to see the widow. There had
      been an accident at the distillery that morning, and work was suspended
      for three days. The widow showed Gaudry the bottle containing the vitriol
      which her nephew had procured for her use. She was ill, suffering, she
      said; the only thing that could make her well again would be the execution
      of her revenge on the son of the man who had defrauded her so wickedly:
      "Make him suffer, here are the means, and I swear I will be yours." She
      dropped a little of the vitriol on to the floor to show its virulent
      effect. At first Gaudry was shocked, horrified. He protested that he was a
      soldier, that he could not do such a deed; he suggested that he should
      provoke the young man to a duel and kill him. "That is no use," said the
      widow, always sensitive to social distinctions; "he is not of your class,
      he would refuse to fight with you." Mad with desire for the woman, his
      senses irritated and excited, the ultimate gratification of his passion
      held alluringly before him, the honest soldier consented to play the
      cowardly ruffian. The trick was done. The widow explained to her
      accomplice his method of proceeding. The building in the Rue de Boulogne,
      in which the widow had her apartment, stood at the end of a drive some
      twenty-seven and a half yards long and five and a half yards wide. About
      half-way up the drive, on either side, there were two small houses, or
      pavilions, standing by themselves and occupied by single gentlemen. The
      whole was shut off from the street by a large gate, generally kept closed,
      in which a smaller gate served to admit persons going in or out. According
      to the widow's plan, the young man, her enemy's son, was to take her to
      the ball at the Opera on the night of January 13. Gaudry was to wait in
      her apartment until their return. When he heard the bell ring, which
      communicated with the outer gate, he was to come down, take his place in
      the shadow of one of the pavilions on either side of the drive, and from
      the cover of this position fling in the face of the young man the vitriol
      which she had given him. The widow herself, under the pretence of closing
      the smaller gate, would be well behind the victim, and take care to leave
      the gate open so that Gaudry could make his escape.
    </p>
    <p>
      In spite of his reluctance, his sense of foreboding, Georges de Saint
      Pierre came to Paris on the night of the 12th, which he spent at the
      widow's apartment. He went to his own rooms on the morning of the 13th.
    </p>
    <p>
      This eventful day, which, to quote Iago, was either to "make or fordo
      quite" the widow, found her as calm, cool and deliberate in the execution
      of her purpose as the Ancient himself. Gaudry came to her apartment about
      five o'clock in the afternoon. The widow showed him the vitriol and gave
      him final directions. She would, she said, return from the ball about
      three o'clock in the morning. Gaudry was then sent away till ten o'clock,
      as Georges was dining with her. He returned at half-past ten and found the
      widow dressing, arraying herself in a pink domino and a blonde wig. She
      was in excellent spirits. When Georges came to fetch her, she put Gaudry
      into an alcove in the drawing-room which was curtained off from the rest
      of the room. Always thoughtful, she had placed a stool there that he might
      rest himself. Gaudry could hear her laughing and joking with her lover.
      She reproached him playfully with hindering her in her dressing. To keep
      him quiet, she gave him a book to read, Montaigne's "Essays." Georges
      opened it and read the thirty-fifth chapter of the second book, the essay
      on "Three Good Women," which tells how three brave women of antiquity
      endured death or suffering in order to share their husbands' fate.
      Curiously enough, the essay concludes with these words, almost prophetic
      for the unhappy reader: "I am enforced to live, and sometimes to live is
      magnanimity." Whilst Georges went to fetch a cab, the widow released
      Gaudry from his place of concealment, exhorted him to have courage, and
      promised him, if he succeeded, the accomplishment of his desire. And so
      the gay couple departed for the ball. There the widow's high spirits, her
      complete enjoyment, were remarked by more than one of her acquaintances;
      she danced one dance with her lover, and with another young man made an
      engagement for the following week.
    </p>
    <p>
      Meanwhile, at the Rue de Boulogne, Gaudry sat and waited in the widow's
      bedroom. From the window he could see the gate and the lights of the cab
      that was to bring the revellers home. The hours passed slowly. He tried to
      read the volume of Montaigne where Georges had left it open, but the words
      conveyed little to him, and he fell asleep. Between two and three o'clock
      in the morning he was waked by the noise of wheels. They had returned. He
      hurried downstairs and took up his position in the shadow of one of the
      pavilions. As Georges de Saint Pierre walked up the drive alone, for the
      widow had stayed behind to fasten the gate, he thought he saw the figure
      of a man in the darkness. The next moment he was blinded by the burning
      liquid flung in his face. The widow had brought down her pigeon.
    </p>
    <p>
      At first she would seem to have succeeded perfectly in her attempt.
      Georges was injured for life, the sight of one eye gone, that of the other
      threatened, his face sadly disfigured. Neither he nor anyone else
      suspected the real author of the crime. It was believed that the
      unfortunate man had been mistaken for some other person, and made by
      accident the victim of an act of vengeance directed against another.
      Georges was indeed all the widow's now, lodged in her own house to nurse
      and care for. She undertook the duty with every appearance of affectionate
      devotion. The unhappy patient was consumed with gratitude for her untiring
      solicitude; thirty nights she spent by his bedside. His belief in her was
      absolute. It was his own wish that she alone should nurse him. His family
      were kept away, any attempts his relatives or friends made to see or
      communicate with him frustrated by the zealous widow.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was this uncompromising attitude on her part toward the friends of
      Georges, and a rumour which reached the ears of one of them that she
      intended as soon as possible to take her patient away to Italy, that
      sounded the first note of danger to her peace of mind. This friend
      happened to be acquainted with the son of one of the Deputy Public
      Prosecutors in Paris. To that official he confided his belief that there
      were suspicious circumstances in the case of Georges de Saint Pierre. The
      judicial authorities were informed and the case placed in the hands of an
      examining magistrate. On February 2, nearly a month after the crime, the
      magistrate, accompanied by Mace, then a commissary of police, afterwards
      head of the Detective Department, paid a visit to the Rue de Boulogne.
      Their reception was not cordial. It was only after they had made known
      their official character that they got audience of the widow. She entered
      the room, carrying in her hand a surgical spray, with which she played
      nervously while the men of the law asked to see her charge. She replied
      that it was impossible. Mace placed himself in front of the door by which
      she had entered, and told her that her attitude was not seemly. "Leave
      that spray alone," he said; "it might shoot over us, and then perhaps we
      should be sprinkled as M. de Saint Pierre was." From that moment, writes
      Mace, issue was joined between the widow and himself.
    </p>
    <p>
      The magistrate insisted on seeing the patient. He sat by his bedside. M.
      de Saint Pierre told him that, having no enemies, he was sure he had been
      the victim of some mistake, and that, as he claimed no damages for his
      injuries, he did not wish his misfortune to be made public. He wanted to
      be left alone with his brave and devoted nurse, and to be spared the
      nervous excitement of a meeting with his family. He intended, he added, to
      leave Paris shortly for change of scene and air. The widow cut short the
      interview on the ground that her patient was tired.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was inhuman, she said, to make him suffer so. The magistrate, before
      leaving, asked her whither she intended taking her patient. She replied,
      "To Italy." That, said the magistrate, would be impossible until his
      inquiry was closed. In the meantime she might take him to any place within
      the Department of the Seine; but she must be prepared to be under the
      surveillance of M. Mace, who would have the right to enter her house
      whenever he should think it expedient. With this disconcerting
      intelligence the men of the law took leave of the widow.
    </p>
    <p>
      She was no longer to be left in undisturbed possession of her prize. Her
      movements were watched by two detectives. She was seen to go to the
      bachelor lodgings of Georges and take away a portable desk, which
      contained money and correspondence. More mysterious, however, was a visit
      she paid to the Charonne Cemetery, where she had an interview with an
      unknown, who was dressed in the clothes of a workman. She left the
      cemetery alone, and the detectives lost track of her companion. This
      meeting took place on February 11. Shortly after the widow left Paris with
      Georges de Saint Pierre for the suburb of Courbevoie.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mace had elicited certain facts from the porter at the Rue de Boulogne and
      other witnesses, which confirmed his suspicion that the widow had played a
      sinister part in her lover's misfortune. Her insistence that he should
      take her to the ball on January 13; the fact that, contrary to the
      ordinary politeness of a gentleman, he was walking in front of her at the
      time of the attack; and that someone must have been holding the gate open
      to enable the assailant to escape it was a heavy gate, which, if left to
      itself after being opened, would swing too quickly on its hinges and shut
      of its own accord&mdash;these facts were sufficient to excite suspicion.
      The disappearance, too, of the man calling himself her brother, who had
      been seen at her apartment on the afternoon of the 13th, coupled with the
      mysterious interview in the cemetery, suggested the possibility of a crime
      in which the widow had had the help of an accomplice. To facilitate
      investigation it was necessary to separate the widow from her lover. The
      examining magistrate, having ascertained from a medical report that such a
      separation would not be hurtful to the patient, ordered the widow to be
      sent back to Paris, and the family of M. de Saint Pierre to take her
      place. The change was made on March 6. On leaving Courbevoie the widow was
      taken to the office of Mace. There the commissary informed her that she
      must consider herself under provisional arrest. "But who," she asked
      indignantly, "is to look after my Georges?" "His family," was the curt
      reply. The widow, walking up and down the room like a panther, stormed and
      threatened. When she had in some degree recovered herself, Mace asked her
      certain questions. Why had she insisted on her lover going to the ball?
      She had done nothing of the kind. How was it his assailant had got away so
      quickly by the open gate? She did not know. What was the name and address
      of her reputed brother? She was not going to deliver an honest father of a
      family into the clutches of the police. What was the meaning of her visit
      to the Charonne Cemetery? She went there to pray, not to keep
      assignations. "And if you want to know," she exclaimed, "I have had
      typhoid fever, which makes me often forget things. So I shall say nothing
      more&mdash;nothing&mdash;nothing."
    </p>
    <p>
      Taken before the examining magistrate, her attitude continued to be
      defiant and arrogant. "Your cleverest policemen," she told the magistrate,
      "will never find any evidence against me. Think well before you send me to
      prison. I am not the woman to live long among thieves and prostitutes."
      Before deciding finally whether the widow should be thrown into such
      uncongenial society, the magistrate ordered Mace to search her apartment
      in the Rue de Boulogne.
    </p>
    <p>
      On entering the apartment the widow asked that all the windows should be
      opened. "Let in the air," she said; "the police are coming in; they make a
      nasty smell." She was invited to sit down while the officers made their
      search. Her letters and papers were carefully examined; they presented a
      strange mixture of order and disorder. Carefully kept account books of her
      personal expenses were mixed up with billets dous, paints and pomades,
      moneylenders' circulars, belladonna and cantharides. But most astounding
      of all were the contents of the widows' prie-Dieu. In this devotional
      article of furniture were stored all the inmost secrets of her profligate
      career. Affectionate letters from the elderly gentleman on whom she had
      imposed a supposititious child lay side by side with a black-edged card,
      on which was written the last message of a young lover who had killed
      himself on her account. "Jeanne, in the flush of my youth I die because of
      you, but I forgive you.&mdash;M." With these genuine outpourings of
      misplaced affection were mingled the indecent verses of a more vulgar
      admirer, and little jars of hashish. The widow, unmoved by this rude
      exposure of her way of life, only broke her silence to ask Mace the
      current prices on the Stock Exchange.
    </p>
    <p>
      One discovery, however, disturbed her equanimity. In the drawer of a
      cupboard, hidden under some linen, Mace found a leather case containing a
      sheaf of partially-burnt letters. As he was about to open it the widow
      protested that it was the property of M. de Saint Pierre. Regardless of
      her protest, Mace opened the case, and, looking through the letters, saw
      that they were addressed to M. de Saint Pierre and were plainly of an
      intimate character. "I found them on the floor near the stove in the
      dining-room," said the widow, "and I kept them. I admit it was a wrong
      thing to do, but Georges will forgive me when he knows why I did it." From
      his better acquaintance with her character Mace surmised that an action
      admitted by the widow to be "wrong" was in all probability something
      worse. Without delay he took the prisoner back to his office, and himself
      left for Courbevoie, there to enlighten, if possible, her unhappy victim
      as to the real character of his enchantress.
    </p>
    <p>
      The interview was a painful one. The lover refused to hear a word against
      his mistress. "Jeanne is my Antigone," he said. "She has lavished on me
      all her care, her tenderness, her love, and she believes in God." Mace
      told him of her past, of the revelations contained in the prie-Dieu of
      this true believer, but he could make no impression. "I forgive her past,
      I accept her present, and please understand me, no one has the power to
      separate me from her." It was only when Mace placed in his hands the
      bundle of burnt letters, that he might feel what he could not see, and
      read him some passages from them, that the unhappy man realised the full
      extent of his mistress' treachery. Feeling himself dangerously ill, dying
      perhaps, M. de Saint Pierre had told the widow to bring from his rooms to
      the Rue de Boulogne the contents of his private desk. It contained some
      letters compromising to a woman's honour. These he was anxious to destroy
      before it was too late. As he went through the papers, his eyes bandaged,
      he gave them to the widow to throw into the stove. He could hear the fire
      burning and feel its warmth. He heard the widow take up the tongs. He
      asked her why she did so. She answered that it was to keep the burning
      papers inside the stove. Now from Mace he learnt the real truth. She had
      used the tongs to take out some of the letters half burnt, letters which
      in her possession might be one day useful instruments for levying
      blackmail on her lover. "To blind me," exclaimed M. de Saint Pierre, "to
      torture me, and then profit by my condition to lie to me, to betray me&mdash;it's
      infamous&mdash;infamous!" His dream was shattered. Mace had succeeded in
      his task; the disenchantment of M. de Saint Pierre was complete. That
      night the fastidious widow joined the thieves and prostitutes in the St.
      Lazare Prison.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was all very well to imprison the widow, but her participation in the
      outrage on M. de Saint Pierre was by no means established.
    </p>
    <p>
      The reputed brother, who had been in the habit of attending on her at the
      Rue de Boulogne, still eluded the searches of the police. In silence lay
      the widow's only hope of baffling her enemies. Unfortunately for the
      widow, confinement told on her nerves. She became anxious, excited. Her
      very ignorance of what was going on around her, her lover's silence made
      her apprehensive; she began to fear the worst. At length&mdash;the widow
      always had an itch for writing&mdash;she determined to communicate at all
      costs with Gaudry and invoke his aid. She wrote appealing to him to come
      forward and admit that he was the man the police were seeking, for
      sheltering whom she had been thrown into prison. She drew a harrowing
      picture of her sufferings in jail. She had refused food and been forcibly
      fed; she would like to dash her head against the walls. If any misfortune
      overtake Gaudry, she promises to adopt his son and leave him a third of
      her property. She persuaded a fellow-prisoner; an Italian dancer
      undergoing six months' imprisonment for theft, who was on the point of
      being released, to take the letter and promise to deliver it to Gaudry at
      Saint Denis. On her release the dancer told her lover of her promise. He
      refused to allow her to mix herself up in such a case, and destroyed the
      letter. Then the dancer blabbed to others, until her story reached the
      ears of the police. Mace sent for her. At first she could remember only
      that the name Nathalis occurred in the letter, but after visiting
      accidentally the Cathedral at Saint Denis, she recollected that this
      Nathalis lived there, and worked in an oil factory. It was easy after this
      for the police to trace Gaudry. He was arrested. At his house, letters
      from the widow were found, warning him not to come to her apartment, and
      appointing to meet him in Charonne Cemetery. Gaudry made a full
      confession. It was his passion for the widow, and a promise on her part to
      marry him, which, he said, had induced him to perpetrate so abominable a
      crime. He was sent to the Mazas Prison.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the meantime the Widow Gras was getting more and more desperate. Her
      complete ignorance tormented her. At last she gave up all hope, and twice
      attempted suicide with powdered glass and verdigris. On May 12 the
      examining magistrate confronted her with Gaudry. The man told his story,
      the widow feigned surprise that the "friend of her childhood" should
      malign her so cruelly. But to her desperate appeals Gaudry would only
      reply, "It is too late!" They were sent for trial.
    </p>
    <p>
      The trial of the widow and her accomplice opened before the Paris Assize
      Court on July 23, 1877, and lasted three days. The widow was defended by
      Lachaud, one of the greatest criminal advocates of France, the defender of
      Madame Lafarge, La Pommerais, Troppmann, and Marshal Bazaine. M. Demange
      (famous later for his defence of Dreyfus) appeared for Gaudry. The case
      had aroused considerable interest. Among those present at the trial were
      Halevy, the dramatist, and Mounet-Sully and Coquelin, from the Comedie
      Francaise. Fernand Rodays thus described the widow in the Figaro: "She
      looks more than her age, of moderate height, well made, neither blatant
      nor ill at ease, with nothing of the air of a woman of the town. Her hands
      are small. Her bust is flat, and her back round, her hair quite white.
      Beneath her brows glitter two jet-black eyes&mdash;the eyes of a tigress,
      that seem to breathe hatred and revenge."
    </p>
    <p>
      Gaudry was interrogated first. Asked by the President the motive of his
      crime, he answered, "I was mad for Madame Gras; I would have done anything
      she told me. I had known her as a child, I had been brought up with her.
      Then I saw her again. I loved her, I was mad for her, I couldn't resist
      it. Her wish was law to me."
    </p>
    <p>
      Asked if Gaudry had spoken the truth, the widow said that he lied. The
      President asked what could be his motive for accusing her unjustly. The
      widow was silent. Lachaud begged her to answer. "I cannot," she faltered.
      The President invited her to sit down. After a pause the widow seemed to
      recover her nerve.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Was Gaudry at your house while you were at the ball?
    </p>
    <p>
      Widow: No, no! He daren't look me in the face and say so.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: But he is looking at you now.
    </p>
    <p>
      Widow: No, he daren't! (She fixes her eyes on Gaudry, who lowers his
      head.)
    </p>
    <p>
      President: I, whose duty it is to interrogate you, look you in the face
      and repeat my question: Was Gaudry at your house at half-past ten that
      night?
    </p>
    <p>
      Widow: No.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: You hear her, Gaudry?
    </p>
    <p>
      Gaudry: Yes, Monsieur, but I was there.
    </p>
    <p>
      Widow: It is absolutely impossible! Can anyone believe me guilty of such a
      thing.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Woman Gras, you prefer to feign indignation and deny
      everything. You have the right. I will read your examination before the
      examining magistrate. I see M. Lachaud makes a gesture, but I must beg the
      counsel for the defence not to impart unnecessary passion into these
      proceedings.
    </p>
    <p>
      Lachaud: My gesture was merely meant to express that the woman Gras is on
      her trial, and that under the circumstances her indignation is natural.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Very good.
    </p>
    <p>
      The appearance in the witness box of the widow's unhappy victim evoked
      sympathy. He gave his evidence quietly, without resentment or indignation.
      As he told his story the widow, whose eyes were fixed on him all the time,
      murmured: "Georges! Georges! Defend me! Defend me!" "I state the facts,"
      he replied.
    </p>
    <p>
      The prisoners could only defend themselves by trying to throw on each
      other the guilt of the crime. M. Demange represented Gaudry as acting
      under the influence of his passion for the Widow Gras. Lachaud, on the
      other hand, attributed the crime solely to Gaudry's jealousy of the
      widow's lover, and contended that he was the sole author of the outrage.
    </p>
    <p>
      The jury by their verdict assigned to the widow the greater share of
      responsibility. She was found guilty in the full degree, but to Gaudry
      were accorded extenuating circumstances. The widow was condemned to
      fifteen years' penal servitude, her accomplice to five years'
      imprisonment.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is dreadful to think how very near the Widow Gras came to accomplishing
      successfully her diabolical crime. A little less percipitancy on her part,
      and she might have secured the fruits of her cruelty. Her undoubted powers
      of fascination, in spite of the fiendishness of her real character, are
      doubly proved by the devotion of her lover and the guilt of her
      accomplice. At the same time, with that strange contradiction inherent in
      human nature, the Jekyll and Hyde elements which, in varying degree, are
      present in all men and women, the Widow Gras had a genuine love for her
      young sister. Her hatred of men was reasoned, deliberate, merciless and
      implacable. There is something almost sadistic in the combination in her
      character of erotic sensibility with extreme cruelty.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      Vitalis and Marie Boyer
    </h2>
    <p>
      I found the story of this case in a brochure published in Paris as one of
      a series of modern causes celebres. I have compared it with the reports of
      the trial in the Gazette des Tribunaux.
    </p>
    <p>
      I In the May of 1874, in the town of Montpellier, M. Boyer, a retired
      merchant, some forty-six years of age, lay dying. For some months previous
      to his death he had been confined to his bed, crippled by rheumatic gout.
      As the hour of his death drew near, M. Boyer was filled with a great
      longing to see his daughter, Marie, a girl of fifteen, and embrace her for
      the last time. The girl was being educated in a convent at Marseilles. One
      of M. Boyer's friends offered to go there to fetch her. On arriving at the
      convent, he was told that Marie had become greatly attracted by the
      prospect of a religious life. "You are happy," the Mother Superior had
      written to her mother, "very happy never to have allowed the impure breath
      of the world to have soiled this little flower. She loves you and her
      father more than one can say." Her father's friend found the girl dressed
      in the costume of a novice, and was told that she had expressed her desire
      to take, one day, her final vows. He informed Marie of her father's dying
      state, of his earnest wish to see her for the last time, and told her that
      he had come to take her to his bedside. "Take me away from here?" she
      exclaimed. The Mother Superior, surprised at her apparent reluctance to
      go, impressed on her the duty of acceding to her father's wish. To the
      astonishment of both, Marie refused to leave the convent. If she could
      save her father's life, she said, she would go, but, as that was
      impossible and she dreaded going out into the world again, she would stay
      and pray for her father in the chapel of the convent, where her prayers
      would be quite as effective as by his bedside. In vain the friend and the
      Mother Superior tried to bend her resolution.
    </p>
    <p>
      Happily M. Boyer died before he could learn of his daughter's singular
      refusal. But it had made an unfavourable impression on the friend's mind.
      He looked on Marie as a girl without real feeling, an egoist, her religion
      purely superficial, hiding a cold and selfish disposition; he felt some
      doubt as to the future development of her character.
    </p>
    <p>
      M. Boyer left a widow, a dark handsome woman, forty years of age.
    </p>
    <p>
      Some twenty years before his death, Marie Salat had come to live with M.
      Boyer as a domestic servant. He fell in love with her, she became his
      mistress, and a few months before the birth of Marie, M. Boyer made her
      his wife. Madame Boyer was at heart a woman of ardent and voluptuous
      passions that only wanted opportunity to become careless in their
      gratification. Her husband's long illness gave her such an opportunity. At
      the time of his death she was carrying on an intrigue with a bookseller's
      assistant, Leon Vitalis, a young man of twenty-one. Her bed-ridden
      husband, ignorant of her infidelity, accepted gratefully the help of
      Vitalis, whom his wife described as a relative, in the regulation of his
      affairs. At length the unsuspecting Boyer died. The night of his death
      Madame Boyer spent with her lover.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mother had never felt any great affection for her only child.
    </p>
    <p>
      During her husband's lifetime she was glad to have Marie out of the way at
      the convent. But the death of M. Boyer changed the situation. He had left
      almost the whole of his fortune, about 100,000 francs, to his daughter,
      appointing her mother her legal guardian with a right to the enjoyment of
      the income on the capital until Marie should come of age. Madame Boyer had
      not hitherto taken her daughter's religious devotion very seriously. But
      now that the greater part of her husband's fortune was left to Marie, she
      realised that, should her daughter persist in her intention of taking the
      veil, that fortune would in a very few years pass into the hands of the
      sisterhood. Without delay Madame Boyer exercised her authority, and
      withdrew Marie from the convent. The girl quitted it with every
      demonstration of genuine regret.
    </p>
    <p>
      Marie Boyer when she left the convent was growing into a tall and
      attractive woman, her figure slight and elegant, her hair and eyes dark,
      dainty and charming in her manner. Removed from the influences of convent
      life, her religious devotion became a thing of the past. In her new
      surroundings she gave herself up to the enjoyments of music and the
      theatre. She realised that she was a pretty girl, whose beauty well repaid
      the hours she now spent in the adornment of her person. The charms of
      Marie were not lost on Leon Vitalis. Mean and significant in appearance,
      Vitalis would seem to have been one of those men who, without any great
      physical recommendation, have the knack of making themselves attractive to
      women. After her husband's death Madame Boyer had yielded herself
      completely to his influence and her own undoubted passion for him. She had
      given him the money with which to purchase a business of his own as a
      second-hand bookseller. This trade the enterprising and greedy young man
      combined with money-lending and he clandestine sale of improper books and
      photographs. To such a man the coming of Marie Boyer was a significant
      event. She was younger, more attractive than her mother; in a very few
      years the whole of her father's fortune would be hers. Slowly Vitalis set
      himself to win the girl's affections. The mother's suspicions were
      aroused; her jealousy was excited. She sent Marie to complete her
      education at a convent school in Lyons. This was in the April of 1875. By
      this time Marie and Vitalis had become friendly enough to arrange to
      correspond clandestinely during the girl's absence from home. Marie was so
      far ignorant of the relations of Vitalis with her mother.
    </p>
    <p>
      Her daughter sent away, Madame Boyer surrendered herself with complete
      abandonment to her passion for her lover. At Castelnau, close to
      Montpellier, she bought a small country house. There she could give full
      rein to her desire. To the scandal of the occasional passerby she and her
      lover would bathe in a stream that passed through the property, and sport
      together on the grass. Indoors there were always books from Vitalis'
      collection to stimulate their lascivious appetites. This life of pastoral
      impropriety lasted until the middle of August, when Marie Boyer came home
      from Lyons.
    </p>
    <p>
      Vitalis would have concealed from the young girl as long as he could the
      nature of his relations with Madame Boyer, but his mistress by her own
      deliberate conduct made all concealment impossible. Whether from the utter
      recklessness of her passion for Vitalis, or a desire to kill in her
      daughter's heart any attachment which she may have felt towards her lover,
      the mother paraded openly before her daughter the intimacy of her
      relations with Vitalis, and with the help of the literature with which the
      young bookseller supplied her, set about corrupting her child's mind to
      her own depraved level. The effect of her extraordinary conduct was,
      however, the opposite to what she had intended. The mind of the young girl
      was corrupted; she was familiarised with vice. But in her heart she did
      not blame Vitalis for what she saw and suffered; she pitied, she excused
      him. It was her mother whom she grew to hate, with a hate all the more
      determined for the cold passionless exterior beneath which it was
      concealed.
    </p>
    <p>
      Madame Boyer's deliberate display of her passion for Vitalis served only
      to aggravate and intensify in Marie Boyer an unnatural jealousy that was
      fast growing up between mother and daughter.
    </p>
    <p>
      Marie did not return to the school at Lyons. In the winter of 1875, Madame
      Boyer gave up the country house and, with her daughter, settled in one of
      the suburbs of Montpellier. In the January of 1876 a theft occurred in her
      household which obliged Madame Boyer to communicate with the police.
      Spendthrift and incompetent in the management of her affairs, she was
      hoarding and suspicious about money itself. Cash and bonds she would hide
      away in unexpected places, such as books, dresses, even a soup tureen. One
      of her most ingenious hiding places was a portrait of her late husband,
      behind which she concealed some bearer bonds in landed security, amounting
      to about 11,000 francs. One day in January these bonds disappeared. She
      suspected a theft, and informed the police. Three days later she withdrew
      her complaint, and no more was heard of the matter. As Marie and Vitalis
      were the only persons who could have known her secret, the inference is
      obvious. When, later in the year, Vitalis announced his intention of going
      to Paris on business, his mistress expressed to him the hope that he would
      "have a good time" with her bonds. Vitalis left for Paris. But there was
      now a distinct understanding between Marie and himself. Vitalis had
      declared himself her lover and asked her to marry him. The following
      letter, written to him by Marie Boyer in the October of 1876, shows her
      attitude toward his proposal:
    </p>
    <p>
      "I thank you very sincerely for your letter, which has given me very great
      pleasure, because it tells me that you are well. It sets my mind at rest,
      for my feelings towards you are the same as ever. I don't say they are
      those of love, for I don't know myself; I don't know what such feelings
      are. But I feel a real affection for you which may well turn to love. How
      should I not hold in affectionate remembrance one who has done everything
      for me? But love does not come to order. So I can't and don't wish to give
      any positive answer about our marriage&mdash;all depends on circumstances.
      I don't want any promise from you, I want you to be as free as I am. I am
      not fickle, you know me well enough for that. So don't ask me to give you
      any promise. You may find my letter a little cold. But I know too much of
      life to pledge myself lightly. I assure you I think on it often. Sometimes
      I blush when I think what marriage means."
    </p>
    <p>
      Madame Boyer, displeased at the theft, had let her lover go without any
      great reluctance. No sooner had he gone than she began to miss him. Life
      seemed dull without him. Mother and daughter were united at least in their
      common regret at the absence of the young bookseller. To vary the monotony
      of existence, to find if possible a husband for her daughter, Madame Boyer
      decided to leave Montpellier for Marseilles, and there start some kind of
      business. The daughter, who foresaw greater amusement and pleasure in the
      life of a large city, assented willingly. On October 6, 1876, they arrived
      at Marseilles, and soon after Madame bought at a price considerably higher
      than their value, two shops adjoining one another in the Rue de la
      Republique. One was a cheese shop, the other a milliner's.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mother arranged that she should look after the cheese shop, while her
      daughter presided over the milliner's. The two shops were next door to one
      another. Behind the milliner's was a drawing-room, behind the cheese shop
      a kitchen; these two rooms communicated with each other by a large dark
      room at the back of the building. In the kitchen was a trap-door leading
      to a cellar. The two women shared a bedroom in an adjoining house.
    </p>
    <p>
      Vitalis had opposed the scheme of his mistress to start shop-keeping in
      Marseilles. He knew how unfitted she was to undertake a business of any
      kind. But neither mother nor daughter would relinquish the plan. It
      remained therefore to make the best of it. Vitalis saw that he must get
      the business into his own hands; and to do that, to obtain full control of
      Madame Boyer's affairs, he must continue to play the lover to her. To the
      satisfaction of the two women, he announced his intention of coming to
      Marseilles in the New Year of 1877. It was arranged that he should pass as
      a nephew of Madame Boyer, the cousin of Marie. He arrived at Marseilles on
      January 1, and received a cordial welcome. Of the domestic arrangements
      that ensued, it is sufficient to say that they were calculated to whet the
      jealousy and inflame the hatred that Marie felt towards her mother, who
      now persisted as before in parading before her daughter the intimacy of
      her relations with Vitalis.
    </p>
    <p>
      In these circumstances Vitalis succeeded in extracting from his mistress a
      power of attorney, giving him authority to deal with her affairs and sell
      the two businesses, which were turning out unprofitable. This done, he
      told Marie, whose growing attachment to him, strange as it may seem, had
      turned to love, that now at last they could be free. He would sell the two
      shops, and with the money released by the sale they could go away
      to-gether. Suddenly Madame Boyer fell ill, and was confined to her bed.
      Left to themselves, the growing passion of Marie Boyer for Vitalis
      culminated in her surrender. But for the sick mother the happiness of the
      lovers was complete. If only her illness were more serious, more likely to
      be fatal in its result! "If only God would take her!" said Vitalis. "Yes,"
      replied her daughter, "she has caused us so much suffering!"
    </p>
    <p>
      To Madame Boyer her illness had brought hours of torment, and at last
      remorse. She realised the duplicity of her lover, she knew that he meant
      to desert her for her daughter, she saw what wrong she had done that
      daughter, she suspected even that Marie and Vitalis were poisoning her.
      Irreligious till now, her thoughts turned to religion. As soon as she
      could leave her bed she would go to Mass and make atonement for her sin;
      she would recover her power of attorney, get rid of Vitalis for good and
      all, and send her daughter back to a convent. But it was too late. Nemesis
      was swift to overtake the hapless woman. Try as he might, Vitalis had
      found it impossible to sell the shops at anything but a worthless figure.
      He had no money of his own, with which to take Marie away. He knew that
      her mother had resolved on his instant dismissal.
    </p>
    <p>
      As soon as Madame Boyer was recovered sufficiently to leave her bed, she
      turned on her former lover, denounced his treachery, accused him of
      robbing and swindling her, and bade him go without delay. To Vitalis
      dismissal meant ruin, to Marie it meant the loss of her lover. During her
      illness the two young people had wished Madame Boyer dead, but she had
      recovered. Providence or Nature having refused to assist Vitalis, he
      resolved to fall back on art. He gave up a whole night's rest to the
      consideration of the question. As a result of his deliberations he
      suggested to the girl of seventeen the murder of her mother. "This must
      end," said Vitalis. "Yes, it must," replied Marie. Vitalis asked her if
      she had any objection to such a crime. Marie hesitated, the victim was her
      mother. Vitalis reminded her what sort of a mother she had been to her.
      The girl said that she was terrified at the sight of blood; Vitalis
      promised that her mother should be strangled. At length Marie consented.
      That night on some slight pretext Madame Boyer broke out into violent
      reproaches against her daughter. She little knew that every reproach she
      uttered served only to harden in her daughter's heart her unnatural
      resolve.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the morning of March 19 Madame Boyer rose early to go to Mass.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before she went out, she reminded Vitalis that this was his last day in
      her service, that when she returned she would expect to find him gone. It
      was after seven when she left the house. The lovers had no time to lose;
      the deed must be done immediately on the mother's return. They arranged
      that Vitalis should get rid of the shop-boy, and that, as soon as he had
      gone, Marie should shut and lock the front doors of the two shops. At one
      o'clock Madame Boyer came back. She expressed her astonishment and disgust
      that Vitalis still lingered, and threatened to send for the police to turn
      him out. Vitalis told the shop-boy that he could go away for a few hours;
      they had some family affairs to settle. The boy departed. Madame Boyer,
      tired after her long morning in the town, was resting on a sofa in the
      sitting-room, at the back of the milliner's shop. Vitalis entered the
      room, and after a few heated words, struck her a violent blow in the
      chest. She fell back on the sofa, calling to her daughter to come to her
      assistance. The daughter sought to drown her mother's cries by banging the
      doors, and opening and shutting drawers. Vitalis, who was now trying to
      throttle his victim, called to Marie to shut the front doors of the two
      shops.
    </p>
    <p>
      To do so Marie had to pass through the sitting-room, and was a witness to
      the unsuccessful efforts of Vitalis to strangle her mother. Having closed
      the doors, she retired into the milliner's shop to await the issue. After
      a few moments her lover called to her for the large cheese knife; he had
      caught up a kitchen knife, but in his struggles it had slipped from his
      grasp. Quickly Marie fetched the knife and returned to the sitting-room.
      There a desperate struggle was taking place between the man and woman. At
      one moment it seemed as if Madame Boyer would get the better of Vitalis,
      whom nature had not endowed greatly for work of this kind. Marie came to
      his aid. She kicked and beat her mother, until at last the wretched
      creature released her hold and sank back exhausted. With the cheese knife,
      which her daughter had fetched, Vitalis killed Madame Boyer.
    </p>
    <p>
      They were murderers now, the young lovers. What to do with the body? The
      boy would be coming back soon. The cellar under the kitchen seemed the
      obvious place of concealment. With the help of a cord the body was lowered
      into the cellar, and Marie washed the floor of the sitting-room. The boy
      came back. He asked where Madame Boyer was. Vitalis told him that she was
      getting ready to return to Montpellier the same evening, and that he had
      arranged to go with her, but that he had no intention of doing so; he
      would accompany her to the station, he said, and then at the last moment,
      just as the train was starting, slip away and let her go on her journey
      alone. To the boy, who knew enough of the inner history of the household
      to enjoy the piquancy of the situation, such a trick seemed quite amusing.
      He went away picturing in his mind the scene at the railway station and
      its humorous possibilities.
    </p>
    <p>
      At seven o'clock Vitalis and Marie Boyer were alone once more with the
      murdered woman. They had the whole night before them. Vitalis had already
      considered the matter of the disposal of the body. He had bought a pick
      and spade. He intended to bury his former mistress in the soil under the
      cellar. After that had been done, he and Marie would sell the business for
      what it would fetch, and go to Brussels&mdash;an admirable plan, which two
      unforeseen circumstances defeated. The Rue de la Republique was built on a
      rock, blasted out for the purpose. The shop-boy had gone to the station
      that evening to enjoy the joke which, he believed, was to be played on his
      mistress.
    </p>
    <p>
      When Vitalis tried to dig a grave into the ground beneath the cellar he
      realised the full horror of the disappointment. What was to be done? They
      must throw the body into the sea. But how to get it there? The crime of
      Billoir, an old soldier, who the year before in Paris had killed his
      mistress in a fit of anger and cut up her body, was fresh in the
      recollection of Vitalis. The guilty couple decided to dismember the body
      of Madame Boyer and so disfigure her face as to render it unrecognisable.
      In the presence of Marie, Vitalis did this, and the two lovers set out at
      midnight to discover some place convenient for the reception of the
      remains. They found the harbour too busy for their purpose, and decided to
      wait until the morrow, when they would go farther afield. They returned
      home and retired for the night, occupying the bed in which Madame Boyer
      had slept the night before.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the morning of the 20th the lovers rose early, and a curious neighbour,
      looking through the keyhole, saw them counting joyously money and
      valuables, as they took them from Madame Boyer's cashbox. When the
      shop-boy arrived, he asked Vitalis for news of Madame Boyer. Vitalis told
      him that he had gone with her to the station, that she had taken the train
      to Montpellier, and that, in accordance with his plan, he had given her
      the slip just as the train was starting. This the boy knew to be false: he
      had been to the station himself to enjoy the fun, and had seen neither
      Vitalis nor Madame Boyer. He began to suspect some mystery. In the
      evening, when the shops had been closed, and he had been sent about his
      business, he waited and watched. In a short time he saw Vitalis and Marie
      Boyer leave the house, the former dragging a hand-cart containing two
      large parcels, while Marie walked by his side. They travelled some
      distance with their burden, leaving the city behind them, hoping to find
      some deserted spot along the coast where they could conceal the evidence
      of their crime. Their nerves were shaken by meeting with a custom-house
      officer, who asked them what it was they had in the cart. Vitalis answered
      that it was a traveller's luggage, and the officer let them pass on. But
      soon after, afraid to risk another such experience, the guilty couple
      turned out the parcels into a ditch, covered them with stones and sand,
      and hurried home.
    </p>
    <p>
      The next day, the shop-boy and the inquisitive neighbour having consulted
      together, went to the Commissary of Police and told him of the mysterious
      disappearance of Madame Boyer. The Commissary promised to investigate the
      matter, and had just dismissed his informants when word was brought to him
      of the discovery, in a ditch outside Marseilles, of two parcels containing
      human remains. He called back the boy and took him to view the body at the
      Morgue. The boy was able, by the clothes, to identify the body as that of
      his late mistress. The Commissary went straight to the shops in the Rue de
      la Republique, where he found the young lovers preparing for flight. At
      first they denied all knowledge of the crime, and said that Madame Boyer
      had gone to Montpellier. They were arrested, and it was not long before
      they both confessed their guilt to the examining magistrate.
    </p>
    <p>
      Vitalis and Marie Boyer were tried before the Assize Court at Aix on July
      2, 1877. Vitalis is described as mean and insignificant in appearance,
      thin, round-backed, of a bilious complexion; Marie Boyer as a pretty, dark
      girl, her features cold in expression, dainty and elegant. At her trial
      she seemed to be still so greatly under the influence of Vitalis that
      during her interrogatory the President sent him out of court. To the
      examining magistrate Marie Boyer, in describing her mother's murder, had
      written, "I cannot think how I came to take part in it. I, who wouldn't
      have stayed in the presence of a corpse for all the money in the world."
      Vitalis was condemned to death, and was executed on August 17. He died
      fearful and penitent, acknowledging his miserable career to be a warning
      to misguided youth. Extenuating circumstances were accorded to Marie
      Boyer, and she was sentenced to penal servitude for life. Her conduct in
      prison was so repentant and exemplary that she was released in 1892.
    </p>
    <p>
      M. Proal, a distinguished French judge, and the author of some important
      works on crime, acted as the examining magistrate in the case of Vitalis
      and Marie Boyer. He thus sums up his impression of the two criminals:
      "Here is an instance of how greed and baseness on the one side, lust and
      jealousy on the other, bring about by degrees a change in the characters
      of criminals, and, after some hesitation, the suggestion and
      accomplishment of parricide, Is it necessary to seek an explanation of the
      crime in any psychic abnormality which is negatived to all appearances by
      the antecedents of the guilty pair? Is it necessary to ask it of anatomy
      or physiology? Is not the crime the result of moral degradation gradually
      asserting itself in two individuals, whose moral and intellectual
      faculties are the same as those of other men, but who fall, step by step,
      into vice and crime? It is by a succession of wrongful acts that a man
      first reaches the frontier of crime and then at length crosses it."
    </p>
    <p>
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    <h2>
      The Fenayrou Case
    </h2>
    <p>
      There is an account of this case in Bataille "Causes Criminelles et
      Mondaines" (1882), and in Mace's book, "Femmes Criminelles." It is alluded
      to in "Souvenirs d'un President d'Assises," by Berard des Glajeux. The
      murder of the chemist Aubert by Marin Fenayrou and his wife Gabrielle was
      perpetrated near Paris in the year 1882. In its beginning the story is
      commonplace enough. Fenayrou was the son of a small chemist in the South
      of France, and had come to Paris from the Aveyron Department to follow his
      father's vocation. He obtained a situation as apprentice in the Rue de la
      Ferme des Mathurins in the shop of a M. Gibon. On the death of M. Gibon
      his widow thought she saw in Fenayrou a man capable of carrying on her
      late husband's business. She gave her daughter in marriage to her
      apprentice, and installed him in the shop. The ungrateful son-in-law, sure
      of his wife and his business and contrary to his express promise, turned
      the old lady out of the house. This occurred in the year 1870, Fenayrou
      being then thirty years of age, his wife, Gabrielle, seventeen.
    </p>
    <p>
      They were an ill-assorted and unattractive couple. The man, a compound of
      coarse brutality and shrewd cunning, was at heart lazy and selfish, the
      woman a spoilt child, in whom a real want of feeling was supplied by a
      shallow sentimentalism. Vain of the superior refinement conferred on her
      by a good middle-class education, she despised and soon came to loathe her
      coarse husband, and lapsed into a condition of disappointment and
      discontent that was only relieved superficially by an extravagant devotion
      to religious exercises.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was in 1875, when the disillusionment of Mme. Fenayrou was complete,
      that her husband received into his shop a pupil, a youth of twenty-one,
      Louis Aubert. He was the son of a Norman tradesman. The ambitious father
      had wished his son to enter the church, but the son preferred to be a
      chemist. He was a shrewd, hard-working fellow, with an eye to the main
      chance and a taste for pleasures that cost him nothing, jovial, but vulgar
      and self-satisfied, the kind of man who, having enjoyed the favours of
      woman, treats her with arrogance and contempt, till from loving she comes
      to loathe him&mdash;a characteristic example, according to M. Bourget, of
      le faux homme a femmes. Such was Aubert, Fenayrou's pupil. He was soon to
      become something more than pupil.
    </p>
    <p>
      Fenayrou as chemist had not answered to the expectations of his
      mother-in-law. His innate laziness and love of coarse pleasures had
      asserted themselves. At first his wife had shared in the enjoyments, but
      as time went on and after the birth of their two children, things became
      less prosperous. She was left at home while Fenayrou spent his time in
      drinking bocks of beer, betting and attending race-meetings. It was
      necessary, under these circumstances, that someone should attend to the
      business of the shop. In Aubert Fenayrou found a ready and willing
      assistant.
    </p>
    <p>
      From 1876 to 1880, save for an occasional absence for military service,
      Aubert lived with the Fenayrous, managing the business and making love to
      the bored and neglected wife, who after a few months became his mistress.
      Did Fenayrou know of this intrigue or not? That is a crucial question in
      the case. If he did not, it was not for want of warning from certain of
      his friends and neighbours, to whom the intrigue was a matter of common
      knowledge. Did he refuse to believe in his wife's guilt? or, dependent as
      he was for his living on the exertions of his assistant, did he
      deliberately ignore it, relying on his wife's attractions to keep the
      assiduous Aubert at work in the shop? In any case Aubert's arrogance,
      which had increased with the consciousness of his importance to the
      husband and his conquest of the wife, led in August of 1880, to a rupture.
      Aubert left the Fenayrous and bought a business of his own on the
      Boulevard Malesherbes.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before his departure Aubert had tried to persuade Mme. Gibon to sell up
      her son-in-law by claiming from him the unpaid purchase-money for her
      husband's shop. He represented Fenayrou as an idle gambler, and hinted
      that he would find her a new purchaser. Such an underhand proceeding was
      likely to provoke resentment if it should come to the ears of Fenayrou.
      During the two years that elapsed between his departure from Fenayrou's
      house and his murder, Aubert had prospered in his shop on the Boulevard
      Malesherbes, whilst the fortunes of the Fenayrous had steadily
      deteriorated.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the end of the year 1881 Fenayrou sold his shop and went with his
      family to live on one of the outer boulevards, that of Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.
      He had obtained a post in a shady mining company, in which he had
      persuaded his mother-in-law to invest 20,000 francs. He had attempted also
      to make money by selling fradulent imitations of a famous table-water. For
      this offence, at the beginning of 1882, he was condemned by the
      Correctional Tribunal of Paris to three months' imprisonment and 1,000
      francs costs.
    </p>
    <p>
      In March of 1882 the situation of the Fenayrous was parlous, that of
      Aubert still prosperous.
    </p>
    <p>
      Since Aubert's departure Mme. Fenayrou had entertained another lover, a
      gentleman on the staff of a sporting newspaper, one of Fenayrou's turf
      acquaintances. This gentleman had found her a cold mistress, preferring
      the ideal to the real. As a murderess Madame Fenayrou overcame this
      weakness.
    </p>
    <p>
      If we are to believe Fenayrou's story, the most critical day in his life
      was March 22, 1882, for it was on that day, according to his account, that
      he learnt for the first time of his wife's intrigue with Aubert. Horrified
      and enraged at the discovery, he took from her her nuptial wreath, her
      wedding-ring, her jewellery, removed from its frame her picture in
      charcoal which hung in the drawing-room, and told her, paralysed with
      terror, that the only means of saving her life was to help him to murder
      her lover.
    </p>
    <p>
      Two months later, with her assistance, this outraged husband accomplished
      his purpose with diabolical deliberation. He must have been well aware
      that, had he acted on the natural impulse of the moment and revenged
      himself then and there on Aubert, he would have committed what is regarded
      by a French jury as the most venial of crimes, and would have escaped with
      little or no punishment. He preferred, for reasons of his own, to set
      about the commission of a deliberate and cold-blooded murder that bears
      the stamp of a more sinister motive than the vengeance of a wronged
      husband.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only step he took after the alleged confession of his wife on March 22
      was to go to a commissary of police and ask him to recover from Aubert
      certain letters of his wife's that were in his possession. This the
      commissary refused to do. Mme. Gibon, the mother-in-law, was sent to
      Aubert to try to recover the letters, but Aubert declined to give them up,
      and wrote to Mme. Fenayrou:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Madame, to my displeasure I have had a visit this morning from your
      mother, who has come to my home and made a most unnecessary scene and
      reproached me with facts so serious that I must beg you to see me without
      delay. It concerns your honour and mine.... I have no fear of being
      confronted with your husband and yourself. I am ready, when you wish, to
      justify myself.... Please do all you can to prevent a repetition of your
      mother's visit or I shall have to call in the police."
    </p>
    <p>
      It is clear that the Fenayrous attached the utmost importance to the
      recovery of this correspondence, which disappeared with Aubert's death.
      Was the prime motive of the murder the recovery and destruction of these
      letters? Was Aubert possessed of some knowledge concerning the Fenayrous
      that placed them at his mercy?
    </p>
    <p>
      It would seem so. To a friend who had warned him of the danger to which
      his intimacy with Gabrielle Fenayrou exposed him, Aubert had replied,
      "Bah! I've nothing to fear. I hold them in my power." The nature of the
      hold which Aubert boasted that he possessed over these two persons remains
      the unsolved mystery of the case, "that limit of investigation," in the
      words of a French judge, "one finds in most great cases, beyond which
      justice strays into the unknown."
    </p>
    <p>
      That such a hold existed, Aubert's own statement and the desperate
      attempts made by the Fenayrous to get back these letters, would seem to
      prove beyond question. Had Aubert consented to return them, would he have
      saved his life? It seems probable. As it was, he was doomed. Fenayrou
      hated him. They had had a row on a race-course, in the course of which
      Aubert had humiliated his former master. More than this, Aubert had
      boasted openly of his relations with Mme. Fenayrou, and the fact had
      reached the ears of the husband. Fenayrou believed also, though
      erroneously, that Aubert had informed against him in the matter of the
      table-water fraud. Whether his knowledge of Aubert's relations with his
      wife was recent or of long standing, he had other grounds of hate against
      his former pupil. He himself had failed in life, but he saw his rival
      prosperous, arrogant in his prosperity, threatening, dangerous to his
      peace of mind; he envied and feared as well as hated him. Cruel, cunning
      and sinister, Fenayrou spent the next two months in the meditation of a
      revenge that was not only to remove the man he feared, but was to give him
      a truly fiendish opportunity of satisfying his ferocious hatred.
    </p>
    <p>
      And the wife what of her share in the business? Had she also come to hate
      Aubert? Or did she seek to expiate her guilt by assisting her husband in
      the punishment of her seducer? A witness at the trial described Mme.
      Fenayrou as "a soft paste" that could be moulded equally well to vice or
      virtue, a woman destitute of real feeling or strength of will, who, under
      the direction of her husband, carried out implicitly, precisely and
      carefully her part in an atrocious murder, whose only effort to prevent
      the commission of such a deed was to slip away into a church a few minutes
      before she was to meet the man she was decoying to his death, and pray
      that his murder might be averted.
    </p>
    <p>
      Her religious sense, like the images in the hat of Louis XI., was a source
      of comfort and consolation in the doing of evil, but powerless to restrain
      her from the act itself, in the presence of a will stronger than her own.
      At the time of his death Aubert contemplated marriage, and had advertised
      for a wife. If Mme. Fenayrou was aware of this, it may have served to
      stimulate her resentment against her lover, but there seems little reason
      to doubt that, left to herself, she would never have had the will or the
      energy to give that resentment practical expression. It required the
      dictation of the vindictive and malevolent Fenayrou to crystallise her
      hatred of Aubert into a deliberate participation in his murder.
    </p>
    <p>
      Eight or nine miles north-west of Paris lies the small town of Chatou, a
      pleasant country resort for tired Parisians. Here Madeleine Brohan, the
      famous actress, had inhabited a small villa, a two-storied building. At
      the beginning of 1882 it was to let. In the April of that year a person of
      the name of "Hess" agreed to take it at a quarterly rent of 1,200 francs,
      and paid 300 in advance. "Hess" was no other than Fenayrou&mdash;the villa
      that had belonged to Madeleine Brohan the scene chosen for Aubert's
      murder. Fenayrou was determined to spare no expense in the execution of
      his design: it was to cost him some 3,000 francs before he had finished
      with it.
    </p>
    <p>
      As to the actual manner of his betrayer's death, the outraged husband
      found it difficult to make up his mind. It was not to be prompt, nor was
      unnecessary suffering to be avoided. At first he favoured a pair of
      "infernal" opera-glasses that concealed a couple of steel points which, by
      means of a spring, would dart out into the eyes of anyone using them and
      destroy their sight. This rather elaborate and uncertain machine was
      abandoned later in favour of a trap for catching wolves. This was to be
      placed under the table, and seize in its huge iron teeth the legs of the
      victim. In the end simplicity, in the shape of a hammer and sword-stick,
      won the day. An assistant was taken in the person of Lucien Fenayrou, a
      brother of Marin.
    </p>
    <p>
      This humble and obliging individual, a maker of children's toys, regarded
      his brother the chemist with something like veneration as the gentleman
      and man of education of the family. Fifty francs must have seemed to him
      an almost superfluous inducement to assist in the execution of what
      appeared to be an act of legitimate vengeance, an affair of family honour
      in which the wife and brother of the injured husband were in duty bound to
      participate. Mme. Fenayrou, with characteristic superstition, chose the
      day of her boy's first communion to broach the subject of the murder to
      Lucien. By what was perhaps more than coincidence, Ascension Day, May 18,
      was selected as the day for the crime itself. There were practical reasons
      also. It was a Thursday and a public holiday. On Thursdays the Fenayrou
      children spent the day with their grandmother, and at holiday time there
      was a special midnight train from Chatou to Paris that would enable the
      murderers to return to town after the commission of their crime. A goat
      chaise and twenty-six feet of gas piping had been purchased by Fenayrou
      and taken down to the villa.
    </p>
    <p>
      Nothing remained but to secure the presence of the victim. At the
      direction of her husband Mme. Fenayrou wrote to Aubert on May 14, a letter
      in which she protested her undying love for him, and expressed a desire to
      resume their previous relations. Aubert demurred at first, but, as she
      became more pressing, yielded at length to her suggestion. If it cost him
      nothing, Aubert was the last man to decline an invitation of the kind. A
      trip to Chatou was arranged for Ascension Day, May 18, by the train
      leaving Paris from the St. Lazare Station, at half-past eight in the
      evening.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the afternoon of that day Fenayrou, his wife and his brother sent the
      children to their grandmother and left Paris for Chatou at three o'clock.
      Arrived there, they went to the villa, Fenayrou carrying the twenty-six
      feet of gas-piping wound round him like some huge hunting-horn. He spent
      the afternoon in beating out the piping till it was flat, and in making a
      gag. He tried to take up the flooring in the kitchen, but this plan for
      the concealment of the body was abandoned in favour of the river. As soon
      as these preparations, in which he was assisted by his two relatives, had
      been completed, Fenayrou placed a candle, some matches and the sword-stick
      on the drawing-room table and returned to Paris.
    </p>
    <p>
      The three conspirators dined together heartily in the Avenue de Clichy&mdash;soup,
      fish, entree, sweet and cheese, washed down by a bottle of claret and a
      pint of burgundy, coffee to follow, with a glass of chartreuse for Madame.
      To the waiter the party seemed in the best of spirits. Dinner ended, the
      two men returned to Chatou by the 7.35 train, leaving Gabrielle to follow
      an hour later with Aubert. Fenayrou had taken three second-class return
      tickets for his wife, his brother and himself, and a single for their
      visitor. It was during the interval between the departure of her husband
      and her meeting with Aubert that Mme. Fenayrou went into the church of St.
      Louis d'Antin and prayed.
    </p>
    <p>
      At half-past eight she met Aubert at the St. Lazare Station, gave him his
      ticket and the two set out for Chatou&mdash;a strange journey Mme.
      Fenayrou was asked what they talked about in the railway carriage. "Mere
      nothings," she replied. Aubert abused her mother; for her own part, she
      was very agitated&mdash;tres emotionnee. It was about half-past nine when
      they reached their destination. The sight of the little villa pleased
      Aubert.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Ah!" he said, "this is good. I should like a house like this and twenty
      thousand francs a year!" As he entered the hall, surprised at the
      darkness, he exclaimed: "The devil! it's precious dark! 'tu sais,
      Gabrielle, que je ne suis pas un heros d'aventure.'" The woman pushed him
      into the drawing-room. He struck a match on his trousers. Fenayrou, who
      had been lurking in the darkness in his shirt sleeves, made a blow at him
      with the hammer, but it was ineffectual. A struggle ensued. The room was
      plunged in darkness. Gabrielle waited outside. After a little, her husband
      called for a light; she came in and lit a candle on the mantelpiece.
      Fenayrou was getting the worst of the encounter. She ran to his help, and
      dragged off his opponent. Fenayrou was free. He struck again with the
      hammer. Aubert fell, and for some ten minutes Fenayrou stood over the
      battered and bleeding man abusing and insulting him, exulting in his
      vengeance. Then he stabbed him twice with the sword-stick, and so ended
      the business.
    </p>
    <p>
      The murderers had to wait till past eleven to get rid of the body, as the
      streets were full of holiday-makers. When all was quiet they put it into
      the goat chaise, wrapped round with the gas-piping, and wheeled it on to
      the Chatou bridge. To prevent noise they let the body down by a rope into
      the water. It was heavier than they thought, and fell with a loud splash
      into the river. "Hullo!" exclaimed a night-fisherman, who was mending his
      tackle not far from the bridge, "there go those butchers again, chucking
      their filth into the Seine!"
    </p>
    <p>
      As soon as they had taken the chaise back to the villa, the three
      assassins hurried to the station to catch the last train. Arriving there a
      little before their time, they went into a neighbouring cafe. Fenayrou had
      three bocks, Lucien one, and Madame another glass of chartreuse. So home
      to Paris. Lucien reached his house about two in the morning. "Well," asked
      his wife, "did you have a good day?" "Splendid," was the reply.
    </p>
    <p>
      Eleven days passed. Fenayrou paid a visit to the villa to clean it and put
      it in order. Otherwise he went about his business as usual, attending race
      meetings, indulging in a picnic and a visit to the Salon. On May 27 a man
      named Bailly, who, by a strange coincidence, was known by the nickname of
      "the Chemist," walking by the river, had his attention called by a
      bargeman to a corpse that was floating on the water. He fished it out. It
      was that of Aubert. In spite of a gag tired over his mouth the water had
      got into the body, and, notwithstanding the weight of the lead piping, it
      had risen to the surface.
    </p>
    <p>
      As soon as the police had been informed of the disappearance of Aubert,
      their suspicions had fallen on the Fenayrous in consequence of the request
      which Marin Fenayrou had made to the commissary of police to aid him in
      the recovery from Aubert of his wife's letters. But there had been nothing
      further in their conduct to provoke suspicion. When, however, the body was
      discovered and at the same time an anonymous letter received denouncing
      the Fenayrous as the murderers of Aubert, the police decided on their
      arrest. On the morning of June 8 M. Mace, then head of the Detective
      Department, called at their house. He found Fenayrou in a dressing-gown.
      This righteous avenger of his wife's seduction denied his guilt, like any
      common criminal, but M. Mace handed him over to one of his men, to be
      taken immediately to Versailles. He himself took charge of Madame, and, in
      the first-class carriage full of people, in which they travelled together
      to Versailles, she whispered to the detective a full confession of the
      crime.
    </p>
    <p>
      Mace has left us an account of this singular railway journey. It was two
      o'clock in the afternoon. In the carriage were five ladies and a young man
      who was reading La Vie Parisienne. Mme. Fenayrou was silent and
      thoughtful. "You're thinking of your present position?" asked the
      detective. "No, I'm thinking of my mother and my dear children." "They
      don't seem to care much about their father," remarked Mace. "Perhaps not."
      "Why?" asked M. Mace. "Because of his violent temper," was the reply.
      After some further conversation and the departure at Courbevoie of the
      young man with La Vie Parisienne, Mme. Fenayrou asked abruptly: "Do you
      think my husband guilty?" "I'm sure of it." "So does Aubert's sister."
      "Certainly," answered M. Mace; "she looks on the crime as one of revenge."
      "But my brother-in-law," urged the woman, "could have had no motive for
      vengeance against Aubert." Mace answered coldly that he would have to
      explain how he had employed his time on Ascension Day. "You see criminals
      everywhere," answered Madame.
    </p>
    <p>
      After the train had left St. Cloud, where the other occupants of the
      carriage had alighted, the detective and his prisoner were alone, free of
      interruption till Versailles should be reached. Hitherto they had spoken
      in whispers; now Mace seized the opportunity to urge the woman to unbosom
      herself to him, to reveal her part in the crime. She burst into tears.
      There was an interval of silence; then she thanked Mace for the kindness
      and consideration he had shown her. "You wish me," she asked, "to betray
      my husband?" "Without any design or intention on your part," discreetly
      answered the detective; "but by the sole force of circumstances you are
      placed in such a position that you cannot help betraying him."
    </p>
    <p>
      Whether convinced or not of this tyranny of circumstance, Mme. Fenayrou
      obeyed her mentor, and calmly, coldly, without regret or remorse, told him
      the story of the assassination. Towards the end of her narration she
      softened a little. "I know I am a criminal," she exclaimed. "Since this
      morning I have done nothing but lie. I am sick of it; it makes me suffer
      too much. Don't tell my husband until this evening that I have confessed;
      there's no need, for, after what I have told you, you can easily expose
      his falsehoods and so get at the truth."
    </p>
    <p>
      That evening the three prisoners&mdash;Lucien had been arrested at the
      same time as the other two&mdash;were brought to Chatou. Identified by the
      gardener as the lessee of the villa, Fenayrou abandoned his protestations
      of innocence and admitted his guilt. The crime was then and there
      reconstituted in the presence of the examining magistrate. With the help
      of a gendarme, who impersonated Aubert, Fenayrou repeated the incidents of
      the murder. The goat-chaise was wheeled to the bridge, and there in the
      presence of an indignant crowd, the murderer showed how the body had been
      lowered into the river.
    </p>
    <p>
      After a magisterial investigation lasting two months, which failed to shed
      any new light on the more mysterious elements in the case, Fenayrou, his
      wife and brother were indicted on August 19 before the Assize Court for
      the Seine-et-Oise Department, sitting at Versailles.
    </p>
    <p>
      The attitude of the three culprits was hardly such as to provoke the
      sympathies of even a French jury. Fenayrou seemed to be giving a clumsy
      and unconvincing performance of the role of the wronged husband; his heavy
      figure clothed in an ill-fitting suit of "blue dittos," his ill-kempt red
      beard and bock-stained moustache did not help him in his impersonation.
      Mme. Fenayrou, pale, colourless, insignificant, was cold and impenetrable.
      She described the murder of her lover "as if she were giving her cook a
      household recipe for making apricot Jam." Lucien was humble and
      lachrymose.
    </p>
    <p>
      In his interrogatory of the husband the President, M. Berard des Glajeux,
      showed himself frankly sceptical as to the ingenuousness of Fenayrou's
      motives in assassinating Aubert. "Now, what was the motive of this
      horrible crime?" he asked. "Revenge," answered Fenayrou.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: But consider the care you took to hide the body and destroy all
      trace of your guilt; that is not the way in which a husband sets out to
      avenge his honour; these are the methods of the assassin! With your wife's
      help you could have caught Aubert in flagrante delicto and killed him on
      the spot, and the law would have absolved you. Instead of which you decoy
      him into a hideous snare. Public opinion suggests that jealousy of your
      former assistant's success, and mortification at your own failure, were
      the real motives. Or was it not perhaps that you had been in the habit of
      rendering somewhat dubious services to some of your promiscuous clients?
    </p>
    <p>
      Fenayrou: Nothing of the kind, I swear it!
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Do not protest too much. Remember that among your acquaintances
      you were suspected of cheating at cards. As a chemist you had been
      convinced of fraud. Perhaps Aubert knew something against you. Some act of
      poisoning, or abortion, in which you had been concerned? Many witnesses
      have believed this.
    </p>
    <p>
      Your mother-in-law is said to have remarked, "My son-in-law will end in
      jail."
    </p>
    <p>
      Fenayrou (bursting into tears): This is too dreadful.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: And Dr. Durand, an old friend of Aubert, remembers the deceased
      saying to him, "One has nothing to fear from people one holds in one's
      hands."
    </p>
    <p>
      Fenayrou: I don't know what he meant.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Or, considering the cruelty, cowardice, the cold calculation
      displayed in the commission of the crime, shall we say this was a woman's
      not a man's revenge. You have said your wife acted as your slave&mdash;was
      it not the other way about?
    </p>
    <p>
      Fenayrou: No; it was my revenge, mine alone.
    </p>
    <p>
      The view that regarded Mme. Fenayrou as a soft, malleable paste was not
      the view of the President.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Why," he asked the woman, "did you commit this horrible murder, decoy
      your lover to his death?" "Because I had repented," was the answer; "I had
      wronged my husband, and since he had been condemned for fraud, I loved him
      the more for being unfortunate. And then I feared for my children."
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Is that really the case?
    </p>
    <p>
      Mme. Fenayrou: Certainly it is.
    </p>
    <p>
      President: Then your whole existence has been one of lies and hypocrisy.
      Whilst you were deceiving your husband and teaching your children to
      despise him you were covering him with caresses.
    </p>
    <p>
      You have played false to both husband and lover&mdash;to Aubert in
      decoying him to his death, to your husband by denouncing him directly you
      were arrested. You have betrayed everybody. The only person you have not
      betrayed is yourself. What sort of a woman are you? As you and Aubert went
      into the drawing-room on the evening of the murder you said loudly, "This
      is the way," so that your husband, hearing your voice outside, should not
      strike you by mistake in the darkness. If Lucien had not told us that you
      attacked Aubert whilst he was struggling with your husband, we should
      never have known it, for you would never have admitted it, and your
      husband has all along refused to implicate you.... You have said that you
      had ceased to care for your lover: he had ceased to care for you. He was
      prosperous, happy, about to marry: you hated him, and you showed your hate
      when, during the murder, you flung yourself upon him and cried, "Wretch!"
      Is that the behaviour of a woman who represents herself to have been the
      timid slave of her husband? No. This crime is the revenge of a cowardly
      and pitiless woman, who writes down in her account book the expenses of
      the trip to Chatou and, after the murder, picnics merrily in the green
      fields. It was you who steeled your husband to the task.
    </p>
    <p>
      How far the President was justified in thus inverting the parts played by
      the husband and wife in the crime must be a matter of opinion. In his
      volume of Souvenirs M. Berard des Glajeux modifies considerably the view
      which he perhaps felt it his duty to express in his interrogatory of
      Gabrielle Fenayrou. He describes her as soft and flexible by nature, the
      repentant slave of her husband, seeking to atone for her wrong to him by
      helping him in his revenge. The one feature in the character of Mme.
      Fenayrou that seems most clearly demonstrated is its absolute
      insensibility under any circumstances whatsoever.
    </p>
    <p>
      The submissive Lucien had little to say for himself, nor could any motive
      for joining in the murder beyond a readiness to oblige his brother be
      suggested. In his Souvenirs M. Berard des Glajeux states that to-day it
      would seem to be clearly established that Lucien acted blindly at the
      bidding of his sister-in-law, "qu'il avait beaucoup aimee et qui n'avait
      pas ete cruelle a son egard."
    </p>
    <p>
      The evidence recapitulated for the most part the facts already set out.
      The description of Mme. Fenayrou by the gentleman on the sporting
      newspaper who had succeeded Aubert in her affections is, under the
      circumstances, interesting: "She was sad, melancholy; I questioned her,
      and she told me she was married to a coarse man who neglected her, failed
      to understand her, and had never loved her. I became her lover but, except
      on a few occasions, our relations were those of good friends. She was a
      woman with few material wants, affectionate, expansive, an idealist, one
      who had suffered much and sought from without a happiness her marriage had
      never brought her. I believe her to have been the blind tool of her
      husband."
    </p>
    <p>
      From motives of delicacy the evidence of this gentleman was read in his
      presence; he was not examined orally. His eulogy of his mistress is loyal.
      Against it may be set the words of the Procureur de la Republique, M.
      Delegorgue: "Never has a more thorough-paced, a more hideous monster been
      seated in the dock of an assize court. This woman is the personification
      of falsehood, depravity, cowardice and treachery. She is worthy of the
      supreme penalty." The jury were not of this opinion. They preferred to
      regard Mme. Fenayrou as playing a secondary part to that of her husband.
      They accorded in both her case and that of Lucien extenuating
      circumstances. The woman was sentenced to penal servitude for life, Lucien
      to seven years. Fenayrou, for whose conduct the jury could find no
      extenuation, was condemned to death.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is the custom in certain assize towns for the President, after
      pronouncing sentence, to visit a prisoner who had been ordered for
      execution. M. Berard des Glajeux describes his visit to Fenayrou at
      Versailles. He was already in prison dress, sobbing.
    </p>
    <p>
      His iron nature, which during five days had never flinched, had broken
      down; but it was not for himself he wept, but for his wife, his children,
      his brother; of his own fate he took no account. At the same moment his
      wife was in the lodge of the courthouse waiting for the cab that was to
      take her to her prison. Freed from the anxieties of the trial, knowing her
      life to be spared, without so much as a thought for the husband whom she
      had never loved, she had tidied herself up, and now, with all the ease of
      a woman, whose misfortunes have not destroyed her self-possession, was
      doing the honours of the jail. It was she who received her judge.
    </p>
    <p>
      But Fenayrou was not to die. The Court of Cassation, to which he had made
      the usual appeal after condemnation, decided that the proceedings at
      Versailles had been vitiated by the fact that the evidence of Gabrielle
      Fenayrou's second lover had not been taken ORALLY, within the requirements
      of the criminal code; consequently a new trial was ordered before the
      Paris Assize Court. This second trial, which commenced on October 12,
      saved Fenayrou's head. The Parisian jury showed themselves more lenient
      than their colleagues at Versailles. Not only was Fenayrou accorded
      extenuating circumstances, but Lucien was acquitted altogether. The only
      person to whom these new proceedings brought no benefit was Mme. Fenayrou,
      whose sentence remained unaltered.
    </p>
    <p>
      Marin Fenayrou was sent to New Caledonia to serve his punishment.
    </p>
    <p>
      There he was allowed to open a dispensary, but, proving dishonest, he lost
      his license and became a ferryman&mdash;a very Charon for terrestrial
      passengers. He died in New Caledonia of cancer of the liver.
    </p>
    <p>
      Gabrielle Fenayrou made an exemplary prisoner, so exemplary that, owing to
      her good conduct and a certain ascendancy she exercised over her
      fellow-prisoners, she was made forewoman of one of the workshops. Whilst
      holding this position she had the honour of receiving, among those
      entrusted to her charge, another Gabrielle, murderess, Gabrielle Bompard,
      the history of whose crime is next to be related.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      Eyraud and Bompard
    </h2>
    <p>
      There are accounts of this case in Bataille "Causes Criminelles et
      Mondaines," 1890, and in Volume X. of Fouquier "Causes Celebres."
      "L'Affaire Gouffe" by Dr. Lacassagne, Lyons, 1891, and Goron "L'Amour
      Criminel" may be consulted.
    </p>
    <p>
      ON July 27, in the year 1889, the Parisian police were informed of the
      disappearance of one Gouffe, a bailiff. He had been last seen by two
      friends on the Boulevard Montmartre at about ten minutes past seven on the
      evening of the 26th, a Friday. Since then nothing had been heard of him,
      either at his office in the Rue Montmartre, or at his private house in the
      Rue Rougemont. This was surprising in the case of a man of regular habits
      even in his irregularities, robust health, and cheerful spirits.
    </p>
    <p>
      Gouffe was a widower, forty-two years of age. He had three daughters who
      lived happily with him in the Rue Rougemont. He did a good trade as
      bailiff and process-server, and at times had considerable sums of money in
      his possession. These he would never leave behind him at his office, but
      carry home at the end of the day's work, except on Fridays. Friday nights
      Gouffe always spent away from home. As the society he sought on these
      nights was of a promiscuous character, he was in the habit of leaving at
      his office any large sum of money that had come into his hands during the
      day.
    </p>
    <p>
      About nine o'clock on this particular Friday night, July 26, the
      hall-porter at Gouffe's office in the Rue Montmartre heard someone, whom
      he had taken at first to be the bailiff himself, enter the hall and go
      upstairs to the office, where he remained a few minutes. As he descended
      the stairs the porter came out of his lodge and, seeing it was a stranger,
      accosted him. But the man hurried away without giving the porter time to
      see his face.
    </p>
    <p>
      When the office was examined the next day everything was found in perfect
      order, and a sum of 14,000 francs, hidden away behind some papers,
      untouched. The safe had not been tampered with; there was, in short,
      nothing unusual about the room except ten long matches that were lying
      half burnt on the floor.
    </p>
    <p>
      On hearing of the bailiff's disappearance and the mysterious visitor to
      his office, the police, who were convinced that Gouffe had been the victim
      of some criminal design, inquired closely into his habits, his friends,
      his associates, men and women. But the one man who could have breathed the
      name that would have set the police on the track of the real culprits was,
      for reasons of his own, silent. The police examined many persons, but
      without arriving at any useful result.
    </p>
    <p>
      However, on August 15, in a thicket at the foot of a slope running down
      from the road that passes through the district of Millery, about ten miles
      from Lyons, a roadmender, attracted by a peculiar smell, discovered the
      remains of what appeared to be a human body. They were wrapped in a cloth,
      but so decomposed as to make identification almost impossible. M. Goron,
      at that time head of the Parisian detective police, believed them to be
      the remains of Gouffe, but a relative of the missing man, whom he sent to
      Lyons, failed to identify them. Two days after the discovery of the
      corpse, there were found near Millery the broken fragments of a trunk, the
      lock of which fitted a key that had been picked up near the body. A label
      on the trunk showed that it had been dispatched from Paris to Lyons on
      July 27, 188&mdash;, but the final figure of the date was obliterated.
      Reference to the books of the railway company showed that on July 27,
      1889, the day following the disappearance of Gouffe, a trunk similar in
      size and weight to that found near Millery had been sent from Paris to
      Lyons.
    </p>
    <p>
      The judicial authorities at Lyons scouted the idea that either the corpse
      or the trunk found at Millery had any connection with the disappearance of
      Gouffe. When M. Goron, bent on following up what he believed to be
      important clues, went himself to Lyons he found that the remains, after
      being photographed, had been interred in the common burying-ground. The
      young doctor who had made the autopsy produced triumphantly some hair
      taken from the head of the corpse and showed M. Goron that whilst Gouffe's
      hair was admittedly auburn and cut short, this was black, and had
      evidently been worn long. M. Goron, after looking carefully at the hair,
      asked for some distilled water. He put the lock of hair into it and, after
      a few minutes' immersion, cleansed of the blood, grease and dust that had
      caked them together, the hairs appeared clearly to be short and auburn.
      The doctor admitted his error.
    </p>
    <p>
      Fortified by this success, Goron was able to procure the exhumation of the
      body. A fresh autopsy was performed by Dr. Lacassagne, the eminent medical
      jurist of the Lyons School of Medicine. He was able to pronounce with
      certainty that the remains were those of the bailiff, Gouffe. An injury to
      the right ankle, a weakness of the right leg, the absence of a particular
      tooth and other admitted peculiarities in Gouffe's physical conformation,
      were present in the corpse, placing its identity beyond question. This
      second post-mortem revealed furthermore an injury to the thyroid cartilage
      of the larynx that had been inflicted beyond any doubt whatever, declared
      Dr. Lacassagne, before death.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was little reason to doubt that Gouffe had been the victim of murder
      by strangulation.
    </p>
    <p>
      But by whom had the crime been committed? It was now the end of November.
      Four months had passed since the bailiff's murder, and the police had no
      clue to its perpetrators. At one time a friend of Gouffe's had been
      suspected and placed under arrest, but he was released for want of
      evidence.
    </p>
    <p>
      One day toward the close of November, in the course of a conversation with
      M. Goron, a witness who had known Gouffe surprised him by saying abruptly,
      "There's another man who disappeared about the same time as Gouffe." M.
      Goron pricked up his ears. The witness explained that he had not mentioned
      the fact before, as he had not connected it with his friend's
      disappearance; the man's name, he said, was Eyraud, Michel Eyraud, M.
      Goron made some inquires as to this Michel Eyraud. He learnt that he was a
      married man, forty-six years of age, once a distiller at Sevres, recently
      commission-agent to a bankrupt firm, that he had left France suddenly,
      about the time of the disappearance of Gouffe, and that he had a mistress,
      one Gabrielle Bompard, who had disappeared with him. Instinctively M.
      Goron connected this fugitive couple with the fate of the murdered
      bailiff.
    </p>
    <p>
      Confirmation of his suspicions was to come from London. The remains of the
      trunk found at Millery had been skilfully put together and exposed at the
      Morgue in Paris, whilst the Gouffe family had offered a reward of 500
      francs to anybody who could in any way identify the trunk. Beyond
      producing a large crop of anonymous letters, in one of which the crime was
      attributed to General Boulanger, then in Jersey, these measures seemed
      likely to prove fruitless. But one day in December, from the keeper of a
      boarding-house in Gower Street, M. Goron received a letter informing him
      that the writer believed that Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard had stayed
      recently at his house, and that on July 14 the woman, whom he knew only as
      "Gabrielle," had left for France, crossing by Newhaven and Dieppe, and
      taking with her a large and almost empty trunk, which she had purchased in
      London. Inquires made by the French detectives established the correctness
      of this correspondent's information. An assistant at a trunk shop in the
      Euston Road was able to identify the trunk&mdash;brought over from Paris
      for the purpose&mdash;as one purchased in his shop on July 12 by a
      Frenchman answering to the description of Michel Eyraud. The wife of the
      boarding-house keeper recollected having expressed to Gabrielle her
      surprise that she should buy such an enormous piece of luggage when she
      had only one dress to put into it. "Oh that's all right," answered
      Gabrielle smilingly, "we shall have plenty to fill it with in Paris!"
      Gabrielle had gone to Paris with the trunk on July 14, come back to London
      on the 17th, and on the 20th she and Eyraud returned together to Paris
      From these facts it seemed more than probable that these two were the
      assassins so eagerly sought for by the police, and it seemed clear also
      that the murder had been done in Paris. But what had become of this
      couple, in what street, in what house in Paris had the crime been
      committed? These were questions the police were powerless to answer.
    </p>
    <p>
      The year 1889 came to an end, the murderers were still at large. But on
      January 21, 1890, M. Goron found lying on his table a large letter bearing
      the New York postmark. He opened it, and to his astonishment read at the
      end the signature "Michel Eyraud." It was a curious letter, but
      undoubtedly genuine. In it Eyraud protested against the suspicions
      directed against himself; they were, he wrote, merely unfortunate
      coincidences. Gouffe had been his friend; he had had no share whatever in
      his death; his only misfortune had been his association with "that
      serpent, Gabrielle Bompard." He had certainly bought a large trunk for
      her, but she told him that she had sold it. They had gone to America
      together, he to avoid financial difficulties in which he had been involved
      by the dishonesty of the Jews. There Gabrielle had deserted him for
      another man. He concluded a very long letter by declaring his belief in
      Gabrielle's innocence&mdash;"the great trouble with her is that she is
      such a liar and also has a dozen lovers after her." He promised that, as
      soon as he learnt that Gabrielle had returned to Paris, he would, of his
      own free will, place himself in the hands of M. Goron.
    </p>
    <p>
      He was to have an early opportunity of redeeming his pledge, for on the
      day following the receipt of his letter a short, well-made woman, dressed
      neatly in black, with dyed hair, greyish-blue eyes, good teeth, a
      disproportionately large head and a lively and intelligent expression of
      face, presented herself at the Prefecture of Police and asked for an
      interview with the Prefect.
    </p>
    <p>
      Requested to give her name, she replied, with a smile, "Gabrielle
      Bompard." She was accompanied by a middle-aged gentleman, who appeared to
      be devoted to her. Gabrielle Bompard and her friend were taken to the
      private room of M. Loze, the Prefect of Police. There, in a half-amused
      way, without the least concern, sitting at times on the edge of the
      Prefect's writing-table, Gabrielle Bompard told how she had been the
      unwilling accomplice of her lover, Eyraud, in the murder of the bailiff,
      Gouffe. The crime, she stated, had been committed in No. 3 in the Rue
      Tronson-Ducoudray, but she had not been present; she knew nothing of it
      but what had been told her by Eyraud. After the murder she had accompanied
      him to America; there they had met the middle-aged gentleman, her
      companion. Eyraud had proposed that they should murder and rob him, but
      she had divulged the plot to the gentleman and asked him to take her away.
      It was acting on his advice that she had returned to France, determined to
      give her evidence to the judicial authorities in Paris. The middle-aged
      gentleman declared himself ready to vouch for the truth of a great part of
      this interesting narrative. There they both imagined apparently that the
      affair would be ended. They were extremely surprised when the Prefect,
      after listening to their statements, sent for a detective-inspector who
      showed Gabrielle Bompard a warrant for her arrest. After an affecting
      parting, at least on the part of the middle-aged gentleman, Gabrielle
      Bompard was taken to prison. There she soon recovered her spirits, which
      had at no time been very gravely depressed by her critical situation.
    </p>
    <p>
      According to Eyraud's letters, if anyone knew anything about Gouffe's
      murder, it was Gabrielle Bompard; according to the woman's statement, it
      was Eyraud, and Eyraud alone, who had committed it. As they were both
      liars&mdash;the woman perhaps the greater liar of the two&mdash;their
      statements are not to be taken as other than forlorn attempts to shift the
      blame on to each other's shoulders.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before extracting from their various avowals, which grew more complete as
      time went on, the story of the crime, let us follow Eyraud in his flight
      from justice, which terminated in the May of 1890 by his arrest in Havana.
    </p>
    <p>
      Immediately after the arrest of Gabrielle, two French detectives set out
      for America to trace and run down if possible her deserted lover. For more
      than a month they traversed Canada and the United States in search of
      their prey. The track of the fugitive was marked from New York to San
      Francisco by acts of thieving and swindling. At the former city he had
      made the acquaintance of a wealthy Turk, from whom, under the pretence of
      wishing to be photographed in it, he had borrowed a magnificent oriental
      robe. The photograph was taken, but Eyraud forgot to return the costly
      robe.
    </p>
    <p>
      At another time he was lodging in the same house as a young American
      actor, called in the French accounts of the incident "Sir Stout." To "Sir
      Stout" Eyraud would appear to have given a most convincing performance of
      the betrayed husband; his wife, he said, had deserted him for another man;
      he raved and stormed audibly in his bedroom, deploring his fate and vowing
      vengeance. These noisy representations so impressed "Sir Stout" that, on
      the outraged husband declaring himself to be a Mexican for the moment
      without funds, the benevolent comedian lent him eighty dollars, which, it
      is almost needless to add, he never saw again. In narrating this incident
      to the French detectives, "Sir Stout" describes Eyraud's performance as
      great, surpassing even those of Coquelin.
    </p>
    <p>
      Similar stories of theft and debauchery met the detectives at every turn,
      but, helped in a great measure by the publicity the American newspapers
      gave to the movements of his pursuers, Eyraud was able to elude them, and
      in March they returned to France to concert further plans for his capture.
    </p>
    <p>
      Eyraud had gone to Mexico. From there he had written a letter to M.
      Rochefort's newspaper, L'Intransigeant, in which he declared Gouffe to
      have been murdered by Gabrielle and an unknown. But, when official
      inquiries were made in Mexico as to his whereabouts, the bird had flown.
    </p>
    <p>
      At Havana, in Cuba, there lived a French dressmaker and clothes-merchant
      named Puchen. In the month of February a stranger, ragged and unkempt, but
      evidently a fellow-countryman, visited her shop and offered to sell her a
      superb Turkish costume. The contrast between the wretchedness of the
      vendor and the magnificence of his wares struck Madame Puchen at the time.
      But her surprise was converted into suspicion when she read in the
      American newspapers a description of the Turkish garment stolen by Michel
      Eyraud, the reputed assassin of the bailiff Gouffe. It was one morning in
      the middle of May that Mme. Puchen read the description of the robe that
      had been offered her in February by her strange visitor. To her
      astonishment, about two o'clock the same afternoon, she saw the stranger
      standing before her door. She beckoned to him, and asked him if he still
      had his Turkish robe with him; he seemed confused, and said that he had
      sold it. The conversation drifted on to ordinary topics; the stranger
      described some of his recent adventures in Mexico. "Oh!" exclaimed the
      dressmaker, "they say Eyraud, the murderer, is in Mexico! Did you come
      across him? Were you in Paris at the time of the murder?" The stranger
      answered in the negative, but his face betrayed his uneasiness. "Do you
      know you're rather like him?" said the woman, in a half-joking way. The
      stranger laughed, and shortly after went out, saying he would return. He
      did return on May 15, bringing with him a number of the Republique
      Illustree that contained an almost unrecognisable portrait of Eyraud. He
      said he had picked it up in a cafe. "What a blackguard he looks!" he
      exclaimed as he threw the paper on the table. But the dressmaker's
      suspicions were not allayed by the stranger's uncomplimentary reference to
      the murderer. As soon as he had gone, she went to the French Consul and
      told him her story.
    </p>
    <p>
      By one of those singular coincidences that are inadmissable in fiction or
      drama, but occur at times in real life, there happened to be in Havana, of
      all places, a man who had been employed by Eyraud at the time that he had
      owned a distillery at Sevres. The Consul, on hearing the statement of Mme.
      Puchen, sent for this man and told him that a person believed to be Eyraud
      was in Havana. As the man left the Consulate, whom should he meet in the
      street but Eyraud himself! The fugitive had been watching the movements of
      Mme. Puchen; he had suspected, after the interview, that the woman would
      denounce him to the authorities. He now saw that disguise was useless. He
      greeted his ex-employe, took him into a cafe, there admitted his identity
      and begged him not to betray him. It was midnight when they left the cafe.
      Eyraud, repenting of his confidence, and no doubt anxious to rid himself
      of a dangerous witness, took his friend into an ill-lighted and deserted
      street; but the friend, conscious of his delicate situation, hailed a
      passing cab and made off as quickly as he could.
    </p>
    <p>
      Next day, the 20th, the search for Eyraud was set about in earnest. The
      Spanish authorities, informed of his presence in Havana, directed the
      police to spare no effort to lay hands on him. The Hotel Roma, at which he
      had been staying, was visited; but Eyraud, scenting danger, had gone to an
      hotel opposite the railway station. His things were packed ready for
      flight on the following morning. How was he to pass the night? True to his
      instincts, a house of ill-fame, at which he had been entertained already,
      seemed the safest and most pleasant refuge; but, when, seedy and shabby,
      he presented himself at the door, he was sent back into the street. It was
      past one in the morning. The lonely murderer wandered aimlessly in the
      streets, restless, nervous, a prey to apprehension, not knowing where to
      go. Again the man from Sevres met him. "It's all up with me!" said Eyraud,
      and disappeared in the darkness. At two in the morning a police officer,
      who had been patrolling the town in search of the criminal, saw, in the
      distance, a man walking to and fro, seemingly uncertain which way to turn.
      Hearing footsteps the man turned round and walked resolutely past the
      policeman, saying good-night in Spanish. "Who are you? What's your
      address?" the officer asked abruptly. "Gorski, Hotel Roma!" was the
      answer. This was enough for the officer. Eyraud was know{sic} to have
      passed as "Gorski," the Hotel Roma had already been searched as one of his
      hiding-places. To seize and handcuff "Gorski" was the work of a moment. An
      examination of the luggage left by the so-called Gorski at his last hotel
      and a determined attempt at suicide made by their prisoner during the
      night proved conclusively that to the Spanish police was the credit of
      having laid by the heels, ten months after the commission of the crime,
      Michel Eyraud, one of the assassins of the bailiff Gouffe.
    </p>
    <p>
      On June 16 Eyraud was delivered over to the French police. He reached
      France on the 20th, and on July 1 made his first appearance before the
      examining magistrate.
    </p>
    <p>
      It will be well at this point in the narrative to describe how Eyraud and
      Gabrielle Bompard came to be associated together in crime. Gabrielle
      Bompard was twenty-two years of age at the time of her arrest, the fourth
      child of a merchant of Lille, a strong, hardworking, respectable man. Her
      mother, a delicate woman, had died of lung disease when Gabrielle was
      thirteen. Even as a child lying and vicious, thinking only of men and
      clothes, Gabrielle, after being expelled as incorrigible from four
      educational establishments, stayed at a fifth for some three years. There
      she astonished those in authority over her by her precocious propensity
      for vice, her treacherous and lying disposition, and a lewdness of tongue
      rare in one of her age and comparative inexperience. At eighteen she
      returned to her father's house, only to quit it for a lover whom, she
      alleged, had hypnotised and then seduced her. Gabrielle was singularly
      susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. Her father implored the family doctor
      to endeavour to persuade her, while in the hypnotic state, to reform her
      deplorable conduct. The doctor did his best but with no success. He
      declared Gabrielle to be a neuropath, who had not found in her home such
      influences as would have tended to overcome her vicious instincts. Perhaps
      the doctor was inclined to sympathise rather too readily with his patient,
      if we are to accept the report of those distinguished medical gentlemen
      who, at a later date, examined carefully into the mental and physical
      characteristics of Gabrielle Bompard.
    </p>
    <p>
      This girl of twenty had developed into a supreme instance of the "unmoral"
      woman, the conscienceless egoist, morally colour-blind, vain, lewd, the
      intelligence quick and alert but having no influence whatever on conduct.
      One instance will suffice to show the sinister levity, the utter absence
      of all moral sense in this strange creature.
    </p>
    <p>
      After the murder of Gouffe, Gabrielle spent the night alone with the trunk
      containing the bailiff's corpse. Asked by M. Goron what were her
      sensations during this ghastly vigil, she replied with a smile, "You'd
      never guess what a funny idea come into my head! You see it was not very
      pleasant for me being thus tete-a-tete with a corpse, I couldn't sleep. So
      I thought what fun it would be to go into the street and pick up some
      respectable gentleman from the provinces. I'd bring him up to the room,
      and just as he was beginning to enjoy himself say, 'Would you like to see
      a bailiff?' open the trunk suddenly and, before he could recover from his
      horror, run out into the street and fetch the police. Just think what a
      fool the respectable gentleman would have looked when the officers came!"
    </p>
    <p>
      Such callousness is almost unsurpassed in the annals of criminal
      insensibility. Nero fiddling over burning Rome, Thurtell fresh from the
      murder of Weare, inviting Hunt, the singer and his accomplice, to "tip
      them a stave" after supper, Edwards, the Camberwell murderer, reading with
      gusto to friends the report of a fashionable divorce case, post from the
      murder of a young married couple and their baby&mdash;even examples such
      as these pale before the levity of the "little demon," as the French
      detectives christened Gabrielle.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such was Gabrielle Bompard when, on July 26, exactly one year to a day
      before the murder of Gouffe, she met in Paris Michel Eyraud. These two
      were made for each other. If Gabrielle were unmoral, Eyraud was immoral.
      Forty-six at the time of Gouffe's murder, he was sufficiently practised in
      vice to appreciate and enjoy the flagrantly vicious propensities of the
      young Gabrielle. All his life Eyraud had spent his substance in
      debauchery. His passions were violent and at times uncontrollable, but
      unlike many remarkable men of a similar temperament, this strong animalism
      was not in his case accompanied by a capacity for vigorous intellectual
      exertion or a great power of work. "Understand this," said Eyraud to one
      of the detectives who brought him back to France, "I have never done any
      work, and I never will do any work." To him work was derogatory; better
      anything than that. Unfortunately it could not be avoided altogether, but
      with Eyraud such work as he was compelled at different times to endure was
      only a means for procuring money for his degraded pleasures, and when
      honest work became too troublesome, dishonesty served in its stead. When
      he met Gabrielle he was almost at the end of his tether, bankrupt and
      discredited. At a pinch he might squeeze a little money out of his wife,
      with whom he continued to live in spite of his open infidelities.
    </p>
    <p>
      Save for such help as he could get from her small dowry, he was without
      resources. A deserter from the army during the Mexican war in 1869, he had
      since then engaged in various commercial enterprises, all of which had
      failed, chiefly through his own extravagance, violence and dishonesty.
      Gabrielle was quick to empty his pockets of what little remained in them.
      The proceeds of her own immorality, which Eyraud was quite ready to share,
      soon proved insufficient to replenish them. Confronted with ruin, Eyraud
      and Gompard hit on a plan by which the woman should decoy some would-be
      admirer to a convenient trysting-place. There, dead or alive, the victim
      was to be made the means of supplying their wants.
    </p>
    <p>
      On further reflection dead seemed more expedient than alive, extortion
      from a living victim too risky an enterprise. Their plans were carefully
      prepared. Gabrielle was to hire a ground-floor apartment, so that any
      noise, such as footsteps or the fall of a body, would not be heard by
      persons living underneath.
    </p>
    <p>
      At the beginning of July, 1889, Eyraud and Bompard were in London. There
      they bought at a West End draper's a red and white silk girdle, and at a
      shop in Gower Street a large travelling trunk. They bought, also in
      London, about thirteen feet of cording, a pulley and, on returning to
      Paris on July 20, some twenty feet of packing-cloth, which Gabrielle,
      sitting at her window on the fine summer evenings, sewed up into a large
      bag.
    </p>
    <p>
      The necessary ground-floor apartment had been found at No. 3 Rue
      Tronson-Ducoudray. Here Gabrielle installed herself on July 24. The
      bedroom was convenient for the assassins' purpose, the bed standing in an
      alcove separated by curtains from the rest of the room. To the beam
      forming the crosspiece at the entrance into the alcove Eyraud fixed a
      pulley. Through the pulley ran a rope, having at one end of it a swivel,
      so that a man, hiding behind the curtains could, by pulling the rope
      strongly, haul up anything that might be attached to the swivel at the
      other end. It was with the help of this simple piece of mechanism and a
      good long pull from Eyraud that the impecunious couple hoped to refill
      their pockets.
    </p>
    <p>
      The victim was chosen on the 25th. Eyraud had already known of Gouffe's
      existence, but on that day, Thursday, in a conversation with a common
      friend, Eyraud learnt that the bailiff Gouffe was rich, that he was in the
      habit of having considerable sums of money in his care, and that on Friday
      nights Gouffe made it his habit to sleep from home. There was no time to
      lose. The next day Gabrielle accosted Gouffe as he was going to his
      dejeuner and, after some little conversation agreed to meet him at eight
      o'clock that evening.
    </p>
    <p>
      The afternoon was spent in preparing for the bailiff's reception in the
      Rue Tronson-Ducoudray. A lounge-chair was so arranged that it stood with
      its back to the alcove, within which the pulley and rope had been fixed by
      Eyraud. Gouffe was to sit on the chair, Gabrielle on his knee. Gabrielle
      was then playfully to slip round his neck, in the form of a noose, the
      cord of her dressing gown and, unseen by him, attach one end of it to the
      swivel of the rope held by Eyraud. Her accomplice had only to give a
      strong pull and the bailiff's course was run.(17)
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (17) One writer on the case has suggested that the story of the murder
by rope and pulley was invented by Eyraud and Bompard to mitigate the
full extent of their guilt, and that the bailiff was strangled while
in bed with the woman. But the purchase of the necessary materials in
London would seem to imply a more practical motive for the use of rope
and pulley.
</pre>
    <p>
      At six o'clock Eyraud and Bompard dined together, after which Eyraud
      returned to the apartment, whilst Bompard went to meet Gouffe near the
      Madeline Church. What occurred afterwards at No. 3 Rue Tronson-Ducoudray
      is best described in the statement made by Eyraud at his trial.
    </p>
    <p>
      "At a quarter past eight there was a ring at the bell. I hid myself behind
      the curtain. Gouffe came in. 'You've a nice little nest here,' he said.
      'Yes, a fancy of mine,' replied Gabrielle, 'Eyraud knows nothing about
      it.' 'Oh, you're tired of him,' asked Gouffe. 'Yes,' she replied, 'that's
      all over.' Gabrielle drew Gouffe down on to the chair. She showed him the
      cord of her dressing-gown and said that a wealthy admirer had given it to
      her. 'Very elegant,' said Gouffe, 'but I didn't come here to see that.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "She then sat on his knee and, as if in play, slipped the cord round his
      neck; then putting her hand behind him, she fixed the end of the cord into
      the swivel, and said to him laughingly, 'What a nice necktie it makes!'
      That was the signal. Eyraud pulled the cord vigorously and, in two
      minutes, Gouffe had ceased to live."
    </p>
    <p>
      Eyraud took from the dead man his watch and ring, 150 francs and his keys.
      With these he hurried to Gouffe's office and made a fevered search for
      money. It was fruitless. In his trembling haste the murderer missed a sum
      of 14,000 francs that was lying behind some papers, and returned, baffled
      and despairing, to his mistress and the corpse. The crime had been a
      ghastly failure. Fortified by brandy and champagne, and with the help of
      the woman, Eyraud stripped the body, put it into the bag that had been
      sewn by Gabrielle, and pushed the bag into the trunk. Leaving his mistress
      to spend the night with their hateful luggage, Eyraud returned home and,
      in his own words, "worn out by the excitement of the day, slept heavily."
    </p>
    <p>
      The next day Eyraud, after saying good-bye to his wife and daughter, left
      with Gabrielle for Lyons. On the 28th they got rid at Millery of the body
      of Gouffe and the trunk in which it had travelled; his boots and clothes
      they threw into the sea at Marseilles. There Eyraud borrowed 500 francs
      from his brother. Gabrielle raised 2,000 francs in Paris, where they spent
      August 18 and 19, after which they left for England, and from England
      sailed for America. During their short stay in Paris Eyraud had the
      audacity to call at the apartment in the Rue Tronson-Ducoudray for his
      hat, which he had left behind; in the hurry of the crime he had taken away
      Gouffe's by mistake.
    </p>
    <p>
      Eyraud had been brought back to Paris from Cuba at the end of June, 1890.
      Soon after his return, in the room in which Gouffe had been done to death
      and in the presence of the examining magistrate, M. Goron, and some
      fifteen other persons, Eyraud was confronted with his accomplice. Each
      denied vehemently, with hatred and passion, the other's story. Neither
      denied the murder, but each tried to represent the other as the more
      guilty of the two. Eyraud said that the suggestion and plan of the crime
      had come from Gabrielle; that she had placed around Gouffe's neck the cord
      that throttled him. Gabrielle attributed the inception of the murder to
      Eyraud, and said that he had strangled the bailiff with his own hands.
    </p>
    <p>
      Eyraud, since his return, had seemed indifferent to his own fate; whatever
      it might be, he wished that his mistress should share it. He had no
      objection to going to the guillotine as long as he was sure that Gabrielle
      would accompany him. She sought to escape such a consummation by
      representing herself as a mere instrument in Eyraud's hands. It was even
      urged in her defence that, in committing the crime, she had acted under
      the influence of hypnotic suggestion on the part of her accomplice. Three
      doctors appointed by the examining magistrate to report on her mental
      state came unanimously to the conclusion that, though undoubtedly
      susceptible to hypnotic suggestion, there was no ground for thinking that
      she had been acting under such influence when she participated in the
      murder of Gouffe. Intellectually the medical gentlemen found her alert and
      sane enough, but morally blind.
    </p>
    <p>
      The trial of Eyraud and Bompard took place before the Paris Assize Court
      on December 16, 1890. It had been delayed owing to the proceedings of an
      enterprising journalist. The names of the jurymen who were to be called on
      to serve at the assize had been published. The journalist conceived the
      brilliant idea of interviewing some of these gentlemen.
    </p>
    <p>
      He succeeded in seeing four of them, but in his article which appeared in
      the Matin newspaper said that he had seen twenty-one. Nine of them, he
      stated, had declared themselves in favour of Gabrielle Bompard, but in
      some of these he had discerned a certain "eroticism of the pupil of the
      eye" to which he attributed their leniency. A month's imprisonment was the
      reward of these flights of journalistic imagination.
    </p>
    <p>
      A further scandal in connection with the trial was caused by the lavish
      distribution of tickets of admission to all sorts and kinds of persons by
      the presiding judge, M. Robert, whose occasional levities in the course of
      the proceedings are melancholy reading. As a result of his indulgence a
      circular was issued shortly after the trial by M. Fallieres, then Minister
      of Justice, limiting the powers of presidents of assize in admitting
      visitors into the reserved part of the court.
    </p>
    <p>
      The proceedings at the trial added little to the known facts of the case.
      Both Eyraud and Bompard continued to endeavour to shift the blame on to
      each other's shoulders. A curious feature of the trial was the appearance
      for the defence of a M. Liegeois, a professor of law at Nancy. To the
      dismay of the Court, he took advantage of a clause in the Code of Criminal
      Instruction which permits a witness to give his evidence without
      interruption, to deliver an address lasting four hours on hypnotic
      suggestion. He undertook to prove that, not only Gabrielle Bompard, but
      Troppmann, Madame Weiss, and Gabrielle Fenayrou also, had committed murder
      under the influence of suggestion.(18) In replying to this rather
      fantastic defence, the Procureur-General, M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire,
      quoted a statement of Dr. Brouardel, the eminent medical jurist who had
      been called for the prosecution, that "there exists no instance of a
      crime, or attempted crime committed under the influence of hypnotic
      suggestion." As to the influence of Eyraud over Bompard, M. de Beaurepaire
      said: "The one outstanding fact that has been eternally true for six
      thousand years is that the stronger will can possess the weaker: that is
      no peculiar part of the history of hypnotism; it belongs to the history of
      the world. Dr. Liegeois himself, in coming to this court to-day, has
      fallen a victim to the suggestion of the young advocate who has persuaded
      him to come here to air his theories." The Court wisely declined to allow
      an attempt to be made to hypnotise the woman Bompard in the presence of
      her judges, and M. Henri Robert, her advocate, in his appeal to the jury,
      threw over altogether any idea of hypnotic suggestion, resting his plea on
      the moral weakness and irresponsibility of his client.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     (18) Moll in his "Hypnotism" (London, 1909) states that, after Gabrielle
Bompard's release M. Liegeois succeeded in putting her into a hypnotic
state, in which she reacted the scene in which the crime was originally
suggested to her. The value of such experiments with a woman as
mischievous and untruthful as Gabrielle Bompard must be very doubtful.
No trustworthy instance seems to be recorded in which a crime has
been committed under, or brought about by, hypnotic or post-hypnotic
suggestion, though, according to Moll, "the possibility of such a crime
cannot be unconditionally denied."
</pre>
    <p>
      In sheer wickedness there seems little enough to choose between Eyraud and
      Bompard. But, in asking a verdict without extenuating circumstances
      against the woman, the Procureur-General was by no means insistent. He
      could not, he said, ask for less, his duty would not permit it: "But I am
      ready to confess that my feelings as a man suffer by the duty imposed on
      me as a magistrate. On one occasion, at the outset of my career, it fell
      to my lot to ask from a jury the head of a woman. I felt then the same
      kind of distress of mind I feel to-day. The jury rejected my demand; they
      accorded extenuating circumstances; though defeated, I left the court a
      happier man. What are you going to do to-day, gentlemen? It rests with
      you. What I cannot ask of you, you have the right to accord. But when the
      supreme moment comes to return your verdict, remember that you have sworn
      to judge firmly and fearlessly." The jury accorded extenuating
      circumstances to the woman, but refused them to the man. After a trial
      lasting four days Eyraud was sentenced to death, Bompard to twenty years
      penal servitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      At first Eyraud appeared to accept his fate with resignation. He wrote to
      his daughter that he was tired of life, and that his death was the best
      thing that could happen for her mother and herself. But, as time went on
      and the efforts of his advocate to obtain a commutation of his sentence
      held out some hope of reprieve, Eyraud became more reluctant to quit the
      world.
    </p>
    <p>
      "There are grounds for a successful appeal," he wrote, "I am pretty
      certain that my sentence will be commuted.... You ask me what I do?
      Nothing much. I can't write; the pens are so bad. I read part of the time,
      smoke pipes, and sleep a great deal. Sometimes I play cards, and talk a
      little. I have a room as large as yours at Sevres. I walk up and down it,
      thinking of you all."
    </p>
    <p>
      But his hopes were to be disappointed. The Court of Cassation rejected his
      appeal. A petition was addressed to President Carnot, but, with a firmness
      that has not characterised some of his successors in office, he refused to
      commute the sentence.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the morning of February 3, 1891, Eyraud noticed that the warders, who
      usually went off duty at six o'clock, remained at their posts. An hour
      later the Governor of the Roquette prison entered his cell, and informed
      him that the time had come for the execution of the sentence. Eyraud
      received the intelligence quietly. The only excitement he betrayed was a
      sudden outburst of violent animosity against M. Constans, then Minister of
      the Interior. Eyraud had been a Boulangist, and so may have nourished some
      resentment against the Minister who, by his adroitness, had helped to
      bring about the General's ruin. Whatever his precise motive, he suddenly
      exclaimed that M. Constans was his murderer: "It's he who is having me
      guillotined; he's got what he wanted; I suppose now he'll decorate
      Gabrielle!" He died with the name of the hated Minister on his lips.
    </p>
    <div style="height: 6em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
<pre xml:space="preserve">





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