recall a long series of crimes, but when one examines this low, crooked, and obscure life, one finds a fresh stain at every step, and perhaps no one has ever surpassed him in dissimulation, in profound hypocrisy, in indefatigable depravity.  Derues was executed at thirty-two, and his whole life was steeped in vice; though happily so short, it is full of horror, and is only a tissue of criminal thoughts and deeds, a very essence of evil.  He had no hesitation, no remorse, no repose, no relaxation; he seemed compelled to lie, to steal, to poison!  Occasionally suspicion is aroused, the public has its doubts, and vague rumours hover round him; but he burrows under new impostures, and punishment passes by.  When he falls into the hands of human justice his reputation protects him, and for a few days more the legal sword is turned aside.  Hypocrisy is so completely a part of his nature, that even when there is no longer any hope, when he is irrevocably sentenced, and he knows that he can no longer deceive anyone, neither mankind nor Him whose name he profanes by this last sacrilege, he yet exclaims, “O Christ!  I shall suffer even as Thou.”  It is only by the light of his funeral pyre that the dark places of his life can be examined, that this bloody plot is unravelled, and that other victims, forgotten and lost in the shadows, arise like spectres at the foot of the scaffold, and escort the assassin to his doom.

Let us trace rapidly the history of Derues’ early years, effaced and forgotten in the notoriety of his death.  These few pages are not written for the glorification of crime, and if in our own days, as a result of the corruption of our manners, and of a deplorable confusion of all notions of right and wrong, it has been sought to make him an object; of public interest, we, on our part, only wish to bring him into notice, and place him momentarily on a pedestal, in order to cast him still lower, that his fall may be yet greater.  What has been permitted by God may be related by 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.”