The Criminal

Let us take another example--this time from France--in which the pathological element does not clearly appear. A gentleman named X., the French paper informs us, has been passing the summer at his country house with his daughter, aged twenty-two, and his son, aged twenty. From the moment of his arrival devastations occurred everywhere on his property. The shrubs were cut; garden plants and large branches of the birch trees removed; the doors and walls of the house were soiled. The grounds and dwellings of other persons in the neighbourhood were similarly treated. Windows were broken; the emblems of religion were outrageously insulted; the walls and doors of the church, the priest’s house, and even the altar, were soiled with ordure. A drawing of the priest administering the sacrament to a cow was found on the walls, and obscene letters, containing also menaces of death and incendiarism, were received by M. X., the priest, and others. Terror overspread the parish, and no one dared to go out by night. At last M. X.’s son and daughter were discovered in the act. Alexis, the least guilty, having been drawn on by his sister, confessed his part in what had been done; he was the accomplice and confidant of his sister. She denied everything, even that she had aided her brother. There was no motive for these acts, save the pleasure of spreading terror through the country; they had had no intention of accomplishing their threats. The girl carried her impudence and imprudence so far as to send an insulting letter to the magistrate who was investigating her misdeeds, and to break windows, unperceived, in his presence.[4] This is an example of moral perversity, showing itself in malevolent and unsocial acts. Possibly, if we possessed a scientific history of the case, we might find a pathological element in it, but as it stands it is but an extravagant example of anti-social instincts, on the borderland of crime, which in a minor degree are far from uncommon.