THE FENAYROU TRIAL.
WHAT strikes us much more than the wickedness involved in the Fenayrou murder of which all Paris and London have been talking for the last week, is the deadness of all the passions which seem to have been involved. We used to suppose that at least great crimes implied great passions,—great vitality of some sort, though vitality that defied the authority of con- science. But in not a few recent crimes,—in Guiteau's, for instance, in Lefroy's, and most of all in this execrable crime of the Feuayrous, there is hardly a trace of overpowering emotion of any sort. The woman, if the story given be credible, bar- gains with her husband for forgiveness for her unfaith- fulness to him, on condition that she betrays one of her former lovers to a horrible death. The murderer's brother and the woman's mother are both taken into confidence, in what looks like cold blood. The party of three who are bent on murder dine together for twenty-seven francs, as a pre- liminary to the bloody deed. The woman then passes half an hour on her knees in a church, waiting till the time of her
• appointment with the victim arrives. After the murder and after disposing of the body, the husband, wife, and brother return to Paris, without any sign of excitement; and two days later the two murderers visit the Salon together, and calmly tell the woman's mother that the intended victim is really disposed of. Even when the case is in the hands of the police, the demeanour of the murderer is so composed and natural that for some time he is not believed to be the guilty person. When found guilty and con- demned to death, he remarks to his counsel, "What does it matter P—one man the less." Neither the anticipation of a hideous murder,—te assist him in it, the chief actor bought a wolf trap, which, however, he did not use—nor the memory of it, seems to trouble any of the perpetrators in the least. They have just as good an appetite for delicacies at the little feast during which they are contemplating the crime, as if there were no blood-stains on their imagination. Their wish to visit the Salon is not extinguished afterwards by the traces of blood on their memory. They confide their intentions to the grandmother who is to take care of the children during the day of the crime itself, and tell her, almost incidentally, it would seem, after their visit to the Salon that their intentions had been carried into effect. The characteristic of the whole tissue of crimes appears to be an ossification of the heart. We said of the murderers Guitean and Lefroy that they seemed to have assassinated with a light heart. Of the Fenayrous, we may say better, perhaps, that they intrigued and committed a variety of evil and 'treacherous deeds, and finally murdered, with a dead rather than a light heart,—indeed, without any heart at all,—though, accord- ing to Fenayrou, he did say to the victim, Aubert, as he plunged the sword-stick into his breast, that as Aubert had made him suffer by the heart, by the heart he should perish. It seems very doubtful indeed, however, whether the murder was one of revenge for the suffering inflicted by jealousy. There was, it is admitted, certainly one other person,—probably more, —of whom Fenayrou had as much reason to be jealous as of the man whom he murdered, and yet there was no attempt to revenge himself on any other. Those who have held that neither the husband nor the wife was actuated by any feeling of revenge, but by some other and less passionate motive, certainly seem to have the facts on their side. But however this may be, it is, at all events, clear enough that the passions involved, whatever they were, were in no sense over- exciting or absorbing passions, interfering in any way with the transaction of business, or the ordinary course of petty engagements. The world was not out of joint for them, either before the bloody act or after it. Stolidity was the main feature of the whole plot. If it had really been the trapping of a wolf for which the wolf trap was purchased, there could hardly have been less sign of emotion, of tumult of feeling, of guilty fear, or of remorse, than there actually was. The main characteristic of the whole business, from the woman's intrigues to the man's revenge, and including apparently the grandmother's reception of the confidences given her in relation to the crime, was a thorough-going hardening of the heart.
Is not that the form which the worst wickedness of the pre- sent and future tends more and more to assume P The notion that guilt involves torment, visions of judgment, and indiffer- ence to all the common-place satisfactions of life, or even to its more trivial susceptibilities, seems to be, in many modern cases, as far as possible from the truth. Guiteau's blasphemous dying prayer, which he was so anxious to have published to all the world, was one which no man with either terror or anguish in his heart could have conceived at all. And as for Fenayrou, there is as much evidence as there can well be that the murder of which he had been guilty did not disarrange his usual habits of life at all. So far as we can judge, the slenderer hold which religious faith has of the modern world tends to this hardening of the heart. Fenayrou, we know, ridiculed his wife's religion in the early days of their married life ; and she, it seems, had aban- cloned her religious faith, under the influence of his ridicule. Gui- teau, on the contrary, chose the part of a conceited and frivolous fanatic; but though he talked of inspiration, it was obvious that he was thinking only of the effect of the part he was playing on the world, not of the spiritual judgment to which his own flimsy life and its last cruel deed were to be submitted. It seems to us certain that the more the genuine belief in a divine judgment fades away, the more likely it must be that exceptionally wicked criminals will be able to fit their crimes into a self-satisfied view of life, and to reconcile themselves both to the criminal intent and the criminal recollection. No doubt, it will be asked how we can reconcile this view with the actual existence of the divine judgment which they deny, how we suppose that—what- ever may be their theory—they manage to escape the actual stings of that conscience which is the witness of judgment P To this we should reply that there is nothing at all in temporary deadness of conscience to throw doubt upon the fact of divine judgment, any more than there is anything in temporary deadness of intellect to throw doubt upon the fact of divine causation. It is the sensitiveness of conscience to evil which is temporary, and which lasts only so long as it is beneficial in warning or startling us. • Steadily disregarded and trampled on, this sensitiveness is just as certain to disappear as the sen- sitiveness of the hand to all finer sensations is certain to dis- appear under the discipline of coarse labour that blunts all those finer sensations. The use of a real faith is to enlist the intellect on the side of the conscience—the use but the danger also so soon as the conscience gets into the habit of ignoring the warnings of the intellect, for then these warnings become pro- bably much more searing than useful. Nevertheless, to those whose intellect is really not enlisted on the side of faith, or enlisted on that side in so superficial and frivolous a form as to be worse than useless, the stage of utter bluntness, of ossification of the heart and conscience, will come sooner than to those whose faith battles with their actions. To us it seems at all events that the ago of general education is bringing on a now phase in the history of moral evil,—the phase in which evil has much fewer terrors, much fewer guilty starts, much fewer auguries of the intolerable misery of self-knowledge, than it used to have,—the age in which evil is stolid, and careful, and prudent, and obtuse, and far better disposed to live the small life of petty animal enjoyments, than it has ever been during the past. The truth is, that the more the intellectual view of the day seems to favour the notion that there is no such thing as an absolute law of righteousness, the defiance of which is misery and torment, the more is it possible for the life of man to shrink into one
of purely animal enjoyments or sufferings, because those animal enjoyments or sufferings chiefly occupy its attention. It is when animal enjoyments and sufferings can no longer divert us from the law which we have defied and despised, when the stupefaction of the senses is no longer possible, that this insensi- bility of the heart and conscience will vanish away, and the throbbing and pricking of the long disused spiritual nature will reappear.
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