A Book of Remarkable Criminals. H. B. Irving
of conflicting emotions.
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.
(4) Case of Garnier and the woman Aveline, 1884.
(5) Case of the Comte
de Cornulier: "Un An de Justice," Henri Varennes, 1901.
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)
(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."
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.
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.
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"—the argument of Raskolnikoff—"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)
(7) Case of Albert and the woman Lavoitte, Paris, 1877.
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.
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—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)
(8) Case of Porcher and Hardouin cited in Despine. "Psychologie
Naturelle."
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)
(9) Case of the Scheffer couple at Linz, cited by Sighele.
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