as to excite suspicion. He ordered it to be placed in a separate
apartment for examination. A more careful inspection confirmed his
surmise that this was the body of no amazonian whose warlike zeal or
accidental presence in such an affray could explain its discovery. There
was no trace whereby the remains could be identified except a geranium
leaf that was found imbedded in her long and disheveled tresses. This
was given to a celebrated botanist, with orders to learn, if possible,
from what plant it had been taken. The man of science visited all the
houses of the neighborhood, and critically examined every specimen of
the shrub he could find. At length, in the elegant library of a young
abbe, he not only discovered one of the species, but, by means of a
powerful microscope, detected the very branch whence the leaf had been
nipped. By dexterous management the _chef_, thus scientifically put on
the track, brought home the charge to the priest, who confessed the
murder of the young lady in a fit of jealousy, and, by depositing her
body, at night, amid the dead of humbler lineage, who had fallen in the
revolutionary strife, thought to conceal all knowledge of his crime.
The lessee of an extensive 'hotel' had reason to believe that a child
had entered and left the world in one of his tenants' apartments,
without the cognizance of a human being except the mother; and, aware,
as a landlord in Paris should be, of his responsibility to the municipal
government, he communicated his suspicions to the authorities. The rooms
were searched, the charge denied, and no proof elicited to warrant
further action; and here the matter would have ended in any other
country. But the police agent entrusted with the inquiry raked over the
contents of a pigsty in the courtyard, and discovered a square inch of
thin bone, which he exhibited to an anatomist, who pronounced it a
fragment of a new-born infant's skull; the hogs were instantly killed,
the contents of their stomachs examined, and small portions of the body
found. The question then arose whether the child was born alive; pieces
of the lungs were placed in a basin of water, and the fact that they
floated on its surface proved, beyond a doubt, that the child had
breathed; the crime of infanticide was then charged upon the unhappy
mother, who, appalled by this evidence of her guilt, confessed.
In the gray of the dawn a watchful observer may behold the two extremes
of Paris life ominously h
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