by which he made considerable gains in silver-hilted
swords and watches. At length, having lost a
sum of five-and-twenty thousand crowns at the fair
of Saint-Germain, he was led to commit that crime
which he has just expiated on the scaffold. For
the purpose of discharging the debt he had contracted,
he sent for a banker’s clerk to bring him certain
bank bills, which he proposed to purchase. Having
connected himself with two other villains, he attacked
the clerk as soon as he arrived, and stabbed him with
poniards which he had bought three days before on
the Pont Neuf. Hoping to conceal the share which
he had taken in this crime, he went immediately after
its perpetration to the Commissaire du Quartier, and
told him, with a cool and determined air, that he
had been obliged, in his own defence, to kill the clerk,
who had attacked him and put him in danger of his
life. The Commissaire looking at him steadfastly,
said, “You are covered with blood, but you are
not even wounded; I must retain you in custody until
I can examine this affair more minutely.”
At this moment the accomplice entered the room.
“Here, sir,” said the Count to the Commissaire,
“is one who can bear testimony that the account
I have given you of this business is perfectly true.”
The accomplice was quite terrified at hearing this;
he thought that Count Horn had confessed his crime,
and that there could be no advantage in continuing
to deny it; he therefore confessed all that had taken
place, and thus the murder was revealed. The
Count was not more than two-and-twenty years of age,
and one of the handsomest men in Paris. Some
of the first persons in France solicited in his favour,
but the Duke Regent thought it necessary to make an
example of him on account of the prevalent excess
of crime. Horn was publicly broken on the wheel
with his second accomplice; the other died just before:
they were both gentlemen and of noble families.
When they arrived at the place of punishment, they
begged the people to implore the pardon of Heaven upon
their sins. The spectators were affected to tears,
but they nevertheless agreed in the just severity
of their punishment. The people said aloud after
the execution, “Our Regent has done justice.”
One lady was blaming another, her intimate friend,
for loving a very ugly man. The latter said,
“Did he ever speak to you tenderly or passionately?”—“No,”
replied the former. “Then you cannot judge,”
said her friend, “whether I ought to love him
or not.”
Madame de Nemours used to say, “I have observed
one thing in this country, ‘Honour grows again
as well as hair.’”
An officer, a gentleman of talent, whose name was
Hautmont, wrote the following verses upon Cardinal
Mazarin, for which he was locked up in the Bastille
for eighteen months:
Creusons
tous le tombeau
A
qui nous persecute;
A
ce Jules nouveauu
Cherchons
un nouveau Brute.
Que
le jour serait beau,
Si
nous voyions sa chute!