y man. Decaying and satiated communities need not be treated as
children; they require neither diplomatic handling nor precaution, and it
may be good that they should see and touch the putrescent sores which
canker them. Why fear to mention that which everyone knows? Why dread to
sound the abyss which can be measured by everyone? Why fear to bring
into the light of day unmasked wickedness, even though it confronts the
public gaze unblushingly? Extreme turpitude and extreme excellence are
both in the schemes of Providence; and the poet has summed up eternal
morality for all ages and nations in this sublime exclamation--

"Abstulit hunc tandem Rufini poem tumultum."

Besides, and we cannot insist too earnestly that our intention must not
be mistaken, if we had wished to inspire any other sentiment than that of
horror, we should have chosen a more imposing personage from the annals
of crime. There have been deeds which required audacity, a sort of
grandeur, a false heroism; there have been criminals who held in check
all the regular and legitimate forces of society, and whom one regarded
with a mixture of terror and pity. There is nothing of that in Derues,
not even a trace of courage; nothing but a shameless cupidity, exercising
itself at first in the theft of a few pence filched from the poor;
nothing but the illicit gains and rascalities of a cheating shopkeeper
and vile money-lender, a depraved cowardice which dared not strike
openly, but slew in the dark. It is the story of an unclean reptile
which drags itself underground, leaving everywhere the trail of its
poisonous saliva.

Such was the man whose life we have undertaken to narrate, a man who
represents a complete type of wickedness, and who corresponds to the most
hideous sketch ever devised by poet or romance-writer: Facts without
importance of their own, which would be childish if recorded of anyone
else, obtain a sombre reflection from other facts which precede them, and
thenceforth cannot be passed over in silence. The historian is obliged
to collect and note them, as showing the logical development of this
degraded being: he unites them in sequence, and counts the successive
steps of the ladder mounted by the criminal.

We have seen the early exploit of this assassin by instinct; we find him,
twenty years later, an incendiary and a fraudulent bankrupt. What had
happened in the interval? With how much treachery and crime had he
filled thi