were fixed on
him all the time, murmured: "Georges! Georges! Defend me! Defend me!" "I
state the facts," he replied.

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.

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.

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.

Vitalis and Marie Boyer

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.

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