me, 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."

The Fenayrou Case

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.

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 th