tter authenticated, and
our version is abridged from the 'Relations' of 'Monsieur le Procureur
du Roi, Monsieur l'Abbe de la Garde, Monsieur Panthot, Doyen des
Medecins de Lyon, et Monsieur Aubert, Avocat celebre.'

On July 5, 1692, a vintner and his wife were found dead in the cellar
of their shop at Lyons. They had been killed by blows from a
hedging-knife, and their money had been stolen. The culprits could not
be discovered, and a neighbour took upon him to bring to Lyons a
peasant out of Dauphine, named Jacques Aymar, a man noted for his
skill with the divining rod. The Lieutenant-Criminel and the Procureur
du Roi took Aymar into the cellar, furnishing him with a rod of the
first wood that came to hand. According to the Procureur du Roi, the
rod did not move till Aymar reached the very spot where the crime had
been committed. His pulse then rose, and the wand twisted rapidly.
'Guided by the wand or by some internal sensation,' Aymar now pursued
the track of the assassins, entered the court of the Archbishop's
palace, left the town by the bridge over the Rhone, and followed the
right bank of the river. He reached a gardener's house, which he
declared the men had entered, and some children confessed that three
men (_whom they described_) had come into the house one Sunday
morning. Aymar followed the track up the river, pointed out all the
places where the men had landed, and, to make a long story short,
stopped at last at the door of the prison of Beaucaire. He was
admitted, looked at the prisoners, and picked out as the murderer a
little hunchback (had the children described a hunchback?) who had
just been brought in for a small theft. The hunchback was taken to
Lyons, and he was recognised, on the way, by the people at all the
stages where he had stopped. At Lyons he was examined in the usual
manner, and confessed that he had been an accomplice in the crime, and
had guarded the door. Aymar pursued the other culprits to the coast,
followed them by sea, landed where they had landed, and only desisted
from his search when they crossed the frontier. As for the hunchback,
he was broken on the wheel, being condemned on his own confession. It
does not appear that he was put to the torture to make him confess. If
this had been done his admissions would, of course, have been as
valueless as those of the victims in trials for witchcraft.

This is, in brief, the history of the famous Lyons murders. It must be
added that man