Then they all went to the young man’s house and he told them his history.  The circus people had carried him off.  For three years he traveled with them in various countries.  Then the troupe disbanded, and one day an old lady in a chateau had paid to have him stay with her because she liked his appearance.  As he was intelligent, he was sent to school, then to college, and the old lady having no children, had left him all her money.  He, for his part, had tried to find his parents, but as he could remember only the two names, “Papa Pierre, Mamma Jeanne,” he had been unable to do so.  Now he was about to be married, and he introduced his fiancee, who was very good and very pretty.

When the two old people had told their story in their turn he kissed them once more.  They sat up very late that night, not daring to retire lest the happiness they had so long sought should escape them again while they were asleep.

But misfortune had lost its hold on them and they were happy for the rest of their lives.

A PARRICIDE

The lawyer had presented a plea of insanity.  How could anyone explain this strange crime otherwise?

One morning, in the grass near Chatou, two bodies had been found, a man and a woman, well known, rich, no longer young and married since the preceding year, the woman having been a widow for three years before.

They were not known to have enemies; they had not been robbed.  They seemed to have been thrown from the roadside into the river, after having been struck, one after the other, with a long iron spike.

The investigation revealed nothing.  The boatmen, who had been questioned, knew nothing.  The matter was about to be given up, when a young carpenter from a neighboring village, Georges Louis, nicknamed “the Bourgeois,” gave himself up.

To all questions he only answered this: 

“I had known the man for two years, the woman for six months.  They often had me repair old furniture for them, because I am a clever workman.”

And when he was asked: 

“Why did you kill them?”

He would obstinately answer: 

“I killed them because I wanted to kill them.”

They could get nothing more out of him.

This man was undoubtedly an illegitimate child, put out to nurse and then abandoned.  He had no other name than Georges Louis, but as on growing up he became particularly intelligent, with the good taste and native refinement which his acquaintances did not have, he was nicknamed “the Bourgeois,” and he was never called otherwise.  He had become remarkably clever in the trade of a carpenter, which he had taken up.  He was also said to be a socialist fanatic, a believer in communistic and nihilistic doctrines, a great reader of bloodthirsty novels, an influential political agitator and a clever orator in the public meetings of workmen or of farmers.