-an honest man himself-was cognizant of the murder from the first, but was afraid to utter to his nearest connection a hint of the secret which he possessed. "The hills breathe again," was the brief expression of the people, on the arrest of this man.

Another of these "terrors of the neigh-malefactors. It came out that an innkeeper borhood," one Pingaud, roamed the Haute Saone for a twelvemonth, armed with six pistols, and levying, by his single audacity, a tribute on the country people. He would enter a house in full day, and the inhabitants would instantly leave it, abandoning the entire contents to his discretion. When he presented himself to demand work-for he had a fit of industry on him every now and then--no one ventured to refuse him. At last, pursued by two gendarmes more courageous than the rest, he shot one of them, and escaped into a wood. The gendarme, wounded almost to death, was actually refused admission into the neighboring houses, in dread of the resentment of Pingaud. In the year 1852, in the heart of France, the agent of the law, dying in discharge of his duty, was refused succor by a whole parish, through the terror inspired by a single malefactor.

Another instance is equally striking; it likewise occurred last year in the Isere. A man called Tirard Gallier, notoriously of bad character, had been sentenced to imprisonment for the sixth or seventh time: he broke out from the prison of Grenoble, and reappeared in his own village without molestat on. He had been convicted chiefly on the testimony of his relatives. He planted himself one Sunday in open day in their way as they returned from church, shot one of his cousins, and sabred his aunt. He then sauntered from house to house, sabre in hand, boasting of what he had done, and dined at a cabaret, where he entertained the company with the details. At night, four cottages belonging to the family were found to be on fire; not a person went to extinguish the flames every one suspecting Gallier, and dreading to encounter him. He was seized, nine months after, at the other end of France, at Arear. In his own country, no one seems to have thought of molesting him.

Victor Marnac was last year condemned to the hulks for life: he was a man of superior education, immense force, and had scoured for years the Pays de Dome with impunity -no one daring either to attack or to resist. It was the ordinary speech to every man who went about after dark, "Take care not to meet with Marnac." When arrested, at last, for murder, it was with difficulty that witnesses could be found against him, so great was the terror he inspired, even when in the hands of justice. This is, in fact, quite an ordinary occurrence; the same difficulty is always found at the trials of this

There can be no doubt that the French law of inheritance creates strong temptations to family crime. Each addition to the number of the family is to the rest a fixed sum deducted from their future property, without appeal, and without compensation. Necessarily, amongst the unscrupulous and immoral, ideas arise which are nursed till they are carried into action. Cases of child-murder are constantly aided by the brothers and sisters, and still more often concealed, and approved as acts from which themselves derive a certain benefit. It is, besides. a common practice in the country, when a woman has ceased to entertain thoughts of marriage, for her to resign her part in the family inheritance, on condition of receiving an annuity. This habit leads to serious crimes. One Maria Anne Constant, the daughter of people of position in the Aveyron, and sister of one of the first physicians in the district, had compounded in this way with another brother. This last, with his wife, absolutely besieged a woman of loose character, who had acquired some influence over their sister, with entreaties to take away her life. They offered first a bushel of potatoes, and then the quarter of a pig. Finally, they raised their price to a round sum of money, and recommended their agent to attract their sister to the river-side, and push her in. A message from her confessor, they said, would take her anywhere, and nothing was easier than to propose one, although the banks of the Tarn would seem a strange place for a spiritual conference. The crime was accomplished as it was arranged; yet the jury found "attenuating circumstances" in their verdict.

Last February, an old man named Rouillon was found dead, with his face in the fire. It was alleged that he had fallen into a fit while sitting at his hearth. But it appeared, on inquiry, that he had divided his property amongst five children for a stipulated sum in money and provisions; that there were continual quarrels about this allowance; that the wine thus furnished was sent to the adjoint of the district, with the request that he would taste it, and declare if it was drinkable. A married daughter, who lived close

it was clearly proved on inquiry that she had killed her aged parent with a poker, with precautions long devised, and had thrown

him into the fire.

Instances of this kind are of alarming frequency in the remote districts, and there can be no doubt that the greater number are never discovered. Nor is there less danger in the other case, when the parent has resigned his property to his children, and is supported by them as a compensation. In the following instance, the reader will not fail to remark the strange working of the law of "attenuating circumstances.'

complaint of the younger, proposed and intended a fresh division. All at once, he disappeared. His body was found after a long search, and it turned out that he had been shot by the husband of the elder daughter, to make irrevocable his original distribution of the property.

The frequency of cases of poisoning almost carries us back to the middle ages. Often a dozen successive days will each produce their tragedy, ordinarily the counterpart of Madame Laffarge; a wife poisons her husband, or the husband the wife. The instances are too common even for selection. We give one or two characteristic cases.

Stephen Puige lived at Perpignan in easy circumstances, with his wife, his daughter, At Loriol, in the Drome, a retired phyand a son, who lived only partially in the sician lived in easy circumstances and avowed house. He was of a singular temperament, concubinage with his servant, Henriette Vinand brutal manner, often acting towards cent. He had one daughter, whom he had those about him with unaccountable caprice. recently recalled from school to his house. On the other hand, he paid a sum to his The servant immediately proceeded to poison children on condition that they managed the her young mistress. She proceeded very expenses. This arrangement was followed systematically: first made the poor girl ill by the usual consequences-the old man was with a dose of mallow, and then, having half-starved; he often begged a dinner from placed her under medical regimen, prepared his neighbors, and the children, feeling every the potions with her own hand. The victim hour that they had a direct interest in his complained to her aunt, to her friends, to her death, gave expression, sometimes, to their physician. This last, an excellent but timid sentiments. One morning, the old man was man, made some attempts to take the prepafound dead, covered with bruises. The cir- ration out of the servant's hands; the sercumstances proved a murder, and that the vant insisted, and the doctor, whose suswife and children were the murderers; but picions were roused to the highest point, the jury hesitated. The son was stated to gave way notwithstanding. The father rehave borne the insults of his father with ex-mained passive and immovable. His daughemplary patience; the daughter had been diligent in her attendance at church; the case presented difficulties; and the verdict was "guilty, with attenuating circumstances." And thus persons who were altogether innocent, or else guilty of parricide, under all the aggravations of premeditation and hypocrisy, were only condemned to five years at the hulks; and this because the jury were not quite satisfied of their guilt. There is a legal bull of an English jury quoted in Joe Miller, where the jury recommended a criminal to mercy on the ground of insufficient evidence." This is a joke in England, but the practice in France.

"

The instances under which the murders are perpetrated on account of the small properties held by the country people, are endless in their variety. Sometimes, as we have seen, it is for the acquirement of the property; at others, it is on account of the partition. In August last, a farmer in the Nièvre had divided his property between his two daughters. The eldest obtained by much the best share, and the father, on the

ter wasted before his eyes; she repeated that she was being poisoned day after day. Every one suspected the authoress of the crime, yet no one attempted to remove the mistress of the master of the house. The young lady died, after four months' suffering, from the combined effects of opium and arsenic; and when it was too late, shame and remorse compelled the doctor to denounce the crime which he and so many others might so easily have prevented. The clearness of the case, the cognizance of the family throughout, and the carelessness of the degraded parent, are characteristic of the facilities for crime offered by the state of the rural population, of whatever class.

In the instances, unfortunately of weekly occurrence, when the husband is poisoned by a guilty wife and her paramour, the attempts are of common notoriety long before their success. Sometimes it is the children who talk about it. "The ruin is upon us,' said one little fellow to his playmates; "my mother poisons my father every day." Sometimes the wife, asked by her own domestics

the reason of their master's ill health, replies | coolly that "it is no wonder, for she has given him a dose of cantharides."

All these attempts are nothing in magnitude to the audacity of a small farmer in the Deux Sevres, who attempted to poison a whole village. He had quarrelled with all his neighbors, and took his revenge at first after a fashion sufficiently ludicrous: he bored holes in the trees, passed the tails of their cattle through them, and left them, thus fastened, to starve; he cut off the legs of their poultry, and tied up the legs of their sheep. All this ended in his becoming more ferocious, as the quarrels consequent upon his pranks brought him into hostile contact with the entire neighborhood, either as principals or witnesses. So he took a summary mode of dealing with all his foes at once, by throwing arsenic into the village fountain. Every one knows the village fountain in France; it is the resort of the evening gossips, who meet, pitcher on shoulder, to exchange scandal and salutation. Its universal use, and its universal popularity, made such .a deed doubly dangerous and cruel. Fortunately, the poison was noticed before it had time to mix with the water.

Akin to the practice of downright poisoning, is another, well known throughout France, which consists in mixing soporific draughts, for purposes of robbery and vengeance. One Virling was famous about the country for years; he carried a soporific vial, with which, and two friends, he made the tour of France. A man of address, he insinuated himself into the good grace of strangers, with the facility afforded by French manners, gained admission to their repasts, and the vial did the rest.

We conclude with a few traits of the bizarreries of crime-traits which would have occurred nowhere but in a country infected with the furia Francese.

In March, 1853, one Jobard arrived at Lyons, by the steamboat of the Saone. He was a clerk in a house at Dijon; he had for three years discharged his duty punctually and faithfully; his employers declared that he never gave them cause for complaint, and that he possessed their entire esteem. One night, for no conceivable reason, he left the house, without luggage, and with a few francs in his pocket. He sauntered to the railway station, and took a place to Chalons. There he stood in front of the station, with his hands in his pockets, looking about him for the next thing to do, when the omnibus

At

entered it mechanically, and arrived at
Lyons. There, his money almost entirely
gone, he sauntered about the quays, without
object, without intention, and without the
slightest notion of his own movements.
last, he bought a knife, and spent his last sou
in a ticket for the theatre. A young woman
was before him; he had never before seen
her. She gave him no offence whatever ;
he stabbed her to the heart! An attempt
was, of course, made at the trial to prove
his insanity. It broke down, and Jobard
was condemned to the hulks for life.

It should be observed that the foreign tribunals are very cautious of admitting the plea of insanity as an excuse for crime. They are well aware that the impulsive temperament of the population produces actions of so wild a character, that this excuse, if easily admitted, would be pleaded with perilous frequency.

Sicard, who introduced himself, a few months ago, into the apartment of his wife, at the Hotel de Princes, by counterfeiting the voice of their child, and then shot her, had obtained her, in the first instance, by means which remind one of the middle ages. She was the daughter of a chamberlain of Napoleon's; he, son of a gendarme. When his future wife was quite a child, Sicard had seduced her, with the assistance of her nurse, and carried her from Paris, where she then lived with her family, to Bordeaux. Her parents reclaimed her as a minor, took her away, and prevented the marriage, notwithstanding the circumstances. When the young lady had been of age eight days, Sicard came to their place of residence, then at Bezieres, stood in the middle of the market-place, and harangued the people on the misdeeds of the villainous aristocracy, who prevented the course of true affection. He collected a mob, and stormed the lady's house in full day, and in one of the most populous cities of France. Her mother, who attempted an opposition, was nearly murdered. When married, Sicard threatened his wife's life so regularly, that one of her employments was to search his pockets and secrete his pistols. To be sure, he threatened his friends in the same way, and with the same regularity.

The following case is worth notice, as illustrative of the reckless crime which the excitement of an attachment, even of the most legitimate kind, will produce, under very slight temptation :

Pradeaux, a worker in artificial flowers, in

satisfied, that a riot ensued, and Ausmann was in danger of being lynched. They found a diary in his pocket, from which it would seem that the profits of a Swiss thief are considerable. It contained such items as the following:-" July 14th-Passed the night about the Aar (at Berne); not very lucky; thirteen francs, a silver spoon, and a watch. 21st-Operated at Oberhogen; a watch, and forty-two francs. 28th-Fished along the Aar; fifteen florins, and tolerably well in plate." This and two or three similar entries in one month. The man entered, at the same time, the name of the hotels where he lodged-they were the best in the country; yet he was a strolling thief, and had no pretension to the dignity of a swindler.

a young girl, who had herself been a foundling. He proposed to marry her. No great establishment was necessary for a foundling; the two had both their several employments, and an honest living was within their reach. But Pradeaux must dazzle his intended. He had money, he said, at the bank; he would make a lady of her. For the moment, he had not enough to buy the wedding-ring. He went into some shop on a trifling business, heard money jingle in the till, returned at night, murdered the guard, and took a bag of silver. With this he decked the young foundling in the gayest of dresses, and bought some furniture. His bag soon came to an end; but by this time he knew his business, and set methodically about it. An old woman kept a lodginghouse that he knew; he strangled her, and found money enough to hire carriages for his wedding, pay the fees in advance, and the wedding breakfast, also, in advance. The morning of his marriage came; his A huge mendicant used to be, and probamoney was gone; time pressed. He be- bly is now, notorious in the neighborhood of thought himself of the old women he knew, the Pont Neuf, exceedingly dirty, and of an murdered one, upon whom he found nothing, enormous size. He used to hold his cas-, and proceeded to another, the keeper of a ket to every passer-by, with the crywine-shop, where he was foiled and taken." Chimneys to sweep! chimneys to sweep!" In his visits to the young girl, who really-De haut en bas, messieurs! The idea of liked him, he was absolutely calm and com- this elephantine protuberance sweeping a posed when he handed her the money chimney was too much for the gravity of already acquired, and talked about expenses most people, and the amount of halfpence hereafter to be paid, by such means. the man got, by tickling the fancy of the public, was prodigious. He used to say that he made more money at the business than any man living.

If a legitimate connection will produce such vile actions, what may not be expected from those that are illegitimate? A mere glance at the annals of the tribunals of a single day will answer the question.

It is time to bring all these terrors to a close. We would leave the reader in good humor, by a few instances of a brighter or a redeeming character.

An old man was picked up about Paris, in a state of great destitution. He had kept sheep on the same hill for sixty-seven years. The proprietor by that time found him too old for his work, and turned him off. He heard that at Paris all the world was emigrating to California. Though a shepherd, the old man was a logician, and he naturally inferred that the city would be in want of inhabitants. He only found out his mistake when he arrived.

In Switzerland, the comparative rarity of crime, and the independent temperament of the people, make every grave offence the subject, not only of popular interest, but of popular influence. One Ausmann was arrested in June, 1851, for a murder, involving no extraordinary atrocity; but it was committed on a person generally liked, and the people were indignant accordingly. To please them, the place of trial was removed One man picked up a purse containing from the town-hall at Thoun, where Aus- fourteen francs. Not content with rushing mann was tried, to the parish church; and from house to house, exhibiting his purse, the place of worship of a Protestant country and expatiating on its contents, and inviting -that the mob might be enabled to look on every body to dine with him, he ended by -was turned into a criminal court, with attaching himself to a pretty and modest more than the usual amount of excitement work woman, declared that he was in possesand disturbance. It appeared that Aus- sion of a treasure, and offered her marriage. mann, while he intended to commit a theft, She consented-Parisian girls are not diffihad no intention of committing a murder, dent; and the farce would have been carand the Bernese law positively forbade a ried out, but that the man made so much capital sentence. The people were so little | noise with his nurse that the owner heard of

SIR DAVID BREWSTER.

See Plate.