THE DE TOURVILLE MURDER.
THE verdict of " Guilty " delivered by the Austrian jury in the case of Do Tourvillo, the Franco-English barrister accused of murdering his wife and throwing her over a precipice on the Stelvio, is a security to European society. The accused man, unless unfortunate to an incredible and almost impossible degree, belonged to an extremely limited but excessively dan- gerous class of criminals,—the human tigers, the business- like murderers, who use murder as a weapon with which to cleave their way through the obstacles of circumstance to their objects. The possibility of the existence of this kind of criminal is well known to historians, and is, perhaps, the strongest of the many reasons which induce men otherwise philanthropic to doubt the expediency of abolishing the penalty of death. Moralists have long admitted that the universal practice of placing murder at the head of crimes has not arisen from instinctive conscience, but from a sense of public convenience ; that the crime has probably more de- grees than any other, and that the severity with which it is punished in all countries is intended to be educational rather than disciplinary, and there may be truth in the argument of Radical statesmen that the separateness of the penalty does not much restrict the average of the offence. Statistics show, as might be expected, that murder is in the majority of cases subject to very unchanging laws. In most cases, the crime is so completely an act of impulse, that it would be difficult, but for what we know of the influence of fear upon the insane, to conceive of punishment having any preventive effect at all, any more than it has upon automatic action. Either the criminal is hopelessly brutalised, and murders where another man would only strike ; or he is drunk ; or he is actuated by a paroxysm of rage, jealousy, or fear, rising into an impulse over which he may at the last moment have no control. He acts with a suddenness which nearly forbids reflection, and is restrained, if restrained by punishment at all, rather by the moral instinct which the practice of ages has de- veloped in himself than by any mental calculation of results. Statesmen, however, though aware that in such cases punishment, except in its educational aspect, counts for little, re- member that they have to check murder of a much more for- midable kind,—murder employed by cool-headed men as war is employed by cool-headed statesmen in furtherance of their own designs. There is no profession of murder, but there are pro- fessional murderers. Such men, in a settled order of society wherein punishment follows offence as if it were its consequence, are so uncommon, that their existence is sometimes forgotten ; but they reappear whenever social order gives way, or the opinion of society has become lax. There have been robbers even in England who invariably murdered on calculation, and on the Continent lawyers defending the penalty of death always justify it by the necessity of restraining criminals who, .in countries where the laws of succession are absolute, would otherwise pursue murder as a kind of profession, and cleave their way to inheritances by causing deaths, just as other men cleave their way to fortune by running a series of speculative risks, and with almost as much callousness to any consequences not personal to themselves. It is one of the incidental advantages of the English system of allowing freedom of bequest, that it destroys the temp- tation to this class of crime, substituting a temptation to forgery ; but on the Continent it is believed to be terribly fre- quent, and has once or twice in times of disorder assumed pro- portions that threatened society with destruction, no rich man with relatives feeling himself safe. De Tourvillo belonged to this class, and to be in keeping with his surroundings should have lived in Rome when amine Tofanawas called the " heirs' elixir ;"or in France, under Louis XV., when " poison " frightened the rich as cholera does now ; or in Southern France, in those districts where peasants murmur that So-and-So is too well off and too much in the way to have a long life. The Lieutenant of Police in, say, 1776, would have understood all about De Tourville. His idea clearly was to use his natural advantages in forming rich alliances, and then murder any one who stood in the way of the speedy realisation of the property so obtained. He was not contented to be a rich expectant, or to be rich and burdened with a wife ; but when he found a relative in his way to the unburdened enjoyment of his fortune, he first thought out and then carried out a scheme for putting
her to death. Ile even, as the Austrians believe, though the evidence for this is hearsay, boasted of the adroitness of his plans to this end. We believe that as murderous brigands become common whenever murderous brigandage becomes a moderately- safe occupation, so calculating murderers of this kind would become common the moment the dread of extreme personal consequences was removed, whether by any paralysis in the Executive, or by any serious relaxation of public opinion. There are plenty of men in the world whose egotism is perfect, who, in their own judgment, stand alone in the world ; and who, left to themselves, would as little hesitate in distributing death for their own ends as many great captains have hesitated in distributing it for their own ambition, or the real or fancied benefit of their people. The man who would burn down a house with all in it, just to warm his hands, exists, and is potentially a far more dangerous criminal than the average murderer, just because he acts on calculation instead of impulse. Many people wonder why old lawyers are always so severe on crimes against property, while so much more lenient to crimes against the person ; but the old lawyers, though they carry their idea absurdly far, know well that the impulse to assault and battery is an impulse usually requiring provocation, but the de- sire for swift gain without work is a powerful and unrelaxing passion of the majority. People plan forgeries, not assaults. The murderer of this professional kind has his temptation always pre- sent, and is as much more dangerous than an ordinary criminal as a shell with its fuse lighted is more dangerous than a shell in a magazine.
A man like Do Tourville—a man released from the sense of the horror of murder—is as dangerous in modern society as a magazine in a populous neighbourhood, and he would be more dangerous still, but for one defect in his mental constitu- tion. He is almost invariably slightly stupid. That a man may be very intellectual and very wicked is certain, and certain, too, that murder is as much a crime of the educated as of the uneducated classes ; but the calculating murderer, who commits his crimes for the sake of money, has, so far as we have read his records, a dis- tinct want, His callous egotism is as inconsistent with true cautiousness as the structure of a tortoise is inconsistent with the possession of sensitive tentacles. He could not be what he is, but for some defect of sympathy with his kind, and that defect of sympathy always blinds him to what his fellow-creatures will think. In the case of the Ratcliffe-Street murderer Williams, so well known because the crime attracted the eerie genius of Do Quincey, the criminal indefinitely increased the public hate, and the consequent inten- sity of pursuit, by his inability to see the horror, rising to furious individual passion, which would be created in the public mind by his motiveless murder of the baby in the cradle. He showed a distinct grasp of his subject in his theory that if he killed every- body in the house he attacked there could be no direct evidence against him ; but he could not rise to the concep- tion that his theory, if carried out too logically, might create a hatred before which the need of evidence would partly disappear,—and he killed the child which could not bear witness. Pritchard' showed a similar stupidity in using the same poison, with its peculiar symptom, incessant sickness, three times over—that is, he had not recognised the instinctive suspicion of men about recurrent chances—and De Tourville was guilty of at least two errors of stupidity. No murder, in the first place, could be more dangerous than one of which the conditions were the open air and a place open to observation from a hundred upland pastures — he was, we have read, seen by a shep- herd, who was disqualified from giving evidence by some falsehoods, told to avoid the trouble of attending Court—and he despised the people of the locality far too deeply. He must, from the history of his whole career, have been an accomplished actor ; yet he would not take the trouble to affect grief for a catastrophe that, on his own account of it, would have affected the most heartless of husbands, or even dissimulate the profound indifference which first of all roused suspicion. It had not occurred to him, in his callous egotism, that the people of a little mountain town would expect him to suffer, or be indignant enough to insist upon an official inquiry. He managed his specu- lation as if human nature had nothing to say to it, and was ruined by a want of perception of others' feelings, which if he had pos- sessed, he could never have committed such a crime. A Do Tour- vile with a sensitive brain would be as dangerous a creature as Lytton'S weird conception, Louis Grayle, a man with superhuman attributes but no soul, but the De Tourvilles to exist must be devoid of sensibility.
Previous page
