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 this space of twenty years?  Let us return to his infancy.

His unconquerable taste for theft caused him to be expelled by the relations who had taken charge of him.  An anecdote is told which shows his impudence and incurable perversity.  One day he was caught taking some money, and was soundly whipped by his cousins.  When this was over, the child, instead of showing any sorrow or asking forgiveness, ran away with a sneer, and seeing they were out of breath, exclaimed—­

“You are tired, are you?  Well, I am not!”

Despairing of any control over this evil disposition, the relations refused to keep him, and sent him to Chartres, where two other cousins agreed to have him, out of charity.  They were simpleminded women, of great and sincere piety, who imagined that good example and religious teaching might have a happy influence on their young relation.  The result was contrary to their expectation:  the sole fruit of their teaching was that Derues learnt to be a cheat and a hypocrite, and to assume the mask of respectability.

Here also repeated thefts insured him sound corrections.  Knowing his cousins’ extreme economy, not to say avarice, he mocked them when they broke a lath over his shoulders:  “There now, I am so glad; that will cost you two farthings!”