Vaillant, the Anarchist who threw the bomb in the French
Chamber of Deputies on December 9th, was found guilty and condemned to death, on Wednesday last, for having with pre- meditation attempted to take the lives of those assembled in the Chamber of Deputies on that occasion, many of whom he actually wounded. He read a speech in his own defence, the chief feature of which was his avowal of his desire to have killed as many Deputies as possible, as holding them chiefly respon- sible for the various miseries of the French poor. His pre- vious career, however, was proved to have been marked by the commoner and meaner crimes of vagrancy, swindling, and robbery, for 'which he had been already four times imprisoned, and a sentry proved that he had tried to escape through a window which he had broken in the Chamber of Deputies after his crime, and was only prevented from doing so by being threatened with the sentry's bayonet. It is probable, therefore, that his recent assumption of fear- lessness and indifference is in great measure bravado. He would rather, he said, have injured two hundred Deputies than a single innocent spectator in the galleries. Indeed, if his written speech had any truth in it, the more Deputies he had injured, the better he would have accomplished his pur- pose. However, he at first begged his advocate not to appeal against the sentence,—a request subsequently withdrawn,— and intimated by a gesture to an acquaintance that his destiny VMS the guillotine. We trust that be may be right, for the sake of those whose lives will be saved by a little sternness now.
