7 SEPTEMBER 1867, Page 9

SOFT MURDER.

LOUIS BORDIER certainly has the art which Sir Walter Scott so graphically delineated in one of Bordier's countrymen, of many centuries ago, of connecting a soft manner with his mur- derous actions. We do not mean that he is any way as evil- hearted as Petit Andre in Quentin Durward, for there is no evi- dence at all of real cruelty, or of pleasure in inspiring fear and in- flicting torture for its own sake, such as is the chief feature in Petit Andrd's character ; and his softness is melancholy softness, while Petit Andre's was lively and gay. Moreover the softness of tone, and feeling, and fancy in which this murder of Emma Snow by Louis Bordier is enveloped, ghastly as it is, does not seem to have been in any sense what we properly mean by ' heartless.' We should rather call it the very excess of selfish and egotistic heart. It seems certain that Louis Bordier warmly loved the woman who had, he says, been in all respects but name a faithful wife to him for thirteen years, and that he felt a real tenderness for his three children. But these warm and gentle feelings of his underwent absolutely no greater struggle while he contem- plated and planned a suicide and quadruple murder, and while he effected the fifth part of what he had planned, than would have been involved with any other man in contemplating and carrying out suicide alone. The woman and the three children were so completely merged in himself, that to plan his own death alone would have been even a more revolting task to him than to plan the complete extinction of the family. Bordier does not seem, as we read the evidence with which he has so freely furnished us, to have had a single misgiving as to his right to determine that if he preferred to leave the world with those whom he identified most closely with himself, to leaving it without them, he had any one else but himself to consult on the matter. He could not bear, he said, to part from the woman he held as his wife, so he would kill her with himself. Further, he could not endure that any of his children should survive to call their father a murderer, so he felt it his duty to kill them as well as their mother, at the time when he put an end to his own life. It was quite true that he loved them all very dearly. According to his own account, he kissed Emma Snow tenderly the last thing before he murdered her, and he kissed her again after he had mur- dered her. Nor had be ever a compunction about the terrible deed even when it was done. Although he found a suicide and four murders more than he bad " strength " for, espe- cially as he found it " rather hard " to cut through his wife's windpipe, still, when the " duty " he had set himself was only begun, and a constable was there to prevent any resumption of his labours, he expressed the most earnest hope that his single victim would die, as she did within five minutes ; and indeed he seems to have felt even more tenderly towards her for not frus- trating his intention. He seems to have given up the idea of cutting his own throat on finding it such fagging work to get through his wife's, and rather oddly told the policeman that " the blood from my wife's throat prevented me getting to my own throat with the knife," and perhaps he was not sorry at the time to fall back on the certainty that the law would do for him what he had not nerve enough left to do for himself. Still, he seems to have re- solved even then to destroy his eldest girl, and to have only changed

his mind at the last moment, when h'e holding her down in her bed, with his knife behind his back. But from what he told the policeman, even this was more due to exhaustion and inadequate strength to carry through what he had decided upon as his " duty," than to any even momentary relenting towards the child as if it could have been good for her to survive her father. Had he been able to buy firearms, he would, he said, have completed his work. As it was, the difficulty of getting through his wife's windpipe with his currier's knife had exhausted him.

The great feature, as it seems to us, about Bordier's mur- der is the curiously tranquil persistency and self-possession of murderous purpose which seems to have been at the core of so much feeling which, selfish or not—it is certainly utterly self- occupied—we must call soft and almost feebly sensitive. While his wife is still living, he gently hopes she'll die, but he keeps his hand on her breast, and afterwards kisses the corpse. His feelings after the murder seem just as quietly satisfied, as before the murder they were quietly regretful that it must be. The regret may no doubt have been simulated, and be only a sign of the theatrical vanity which sometimes induces men to act a character

that will attract the attention of the public and heighten curiosity in connection with a great crime. But we scarcely read the case so. No doubt his letter to his brother, written on the night before the murder, was expressly intended to be seen by the police. He gave it unsealed into their hands for the very purpose that they might read it and take it in evidence. And he kindly offered to translate for the inspector his brother's reply, if any should be received, which probably indicates that he held that every- thing in connection with what he had done, apart from the mere question of evidence, would have an absorbing human interest at least for the cultivated side of the inspector's mind. But admitting quite that Louis Bordier regards himself as constituting a problem of high interest to all who know of what he has done, we see no sign of affected or assumed feeling in the melancholy and rather maudlin little bits of piteous feeling in the letters to his brother and to his fellow-workmen. Bordier seems really to have been liked by his fellow-workmen, for after his committal, they crowded round the vehicle in which he was removed to prison, to shake hands with him ; and a man who had merely assumed these kindly feelings for a dramatic occasion would not have been so liked. We suspect the words with which his farewell to his fellow-opera- tives at the workshop commence, "Having always been a comrade with those with whom I have worked, I think it is a duty before quitting this world to address to them a last word," had nothing specially affected in them. It was certainly an od I "duty," as the last word was not a very instructive one. But Bordier thought it the gentlemanly thing to do, and saw no reason why he should neglect the other courtesies of life because he had such a very unpleasant task before him as that of cutting, —as he then intended, — five throats. It seems clear he did not want to be thought insane by his old companions. " After having tried by every means, I have at last decided," he writes to them, "to take away my life, that my poor mother had so much trouble to preserve, in order that the gentlemen of the jury who will trouble themselves about me may not return a verdict, as I believe it is said always, This man is insane.' " The sentence is very obscure, but appears to mean, that after having decided to kill the woman he called his wife, that she might not leave him as she had threatened to do, and his children, that they might not have to speak of a father who had been a murderer, he had finally resolved to kill himself also, rather than run the risk of being respited as insane by the law. He adds, " I have all my faculties at the moment I write these lines," and there seems no sort of reason to doubt it, or that amongst these faculties was a very large store of soft feeling for himself and others as belonging or related to himself, feeling sometimes almost maudlin. That line about his poor mother who had had so much vain trouble in preserving his life for him is quite an effort of feebly imaginative regret. When he adds that he has decided to kill his children that he may leave " no one behind whom people may one day reproach that his father was a murderer," he evidently feels that he is doing an almost heroic kindness to his children in deciding thus to dispose of them. And then he adds that Dostal—a working companion—is to have his few tools and a nightshirt belonging to him. He is quite anxious, after extin- guishing himself and his family, that the few traces left of his life on the earth shall all be traces of a considerate-minded, tender- hearted man. The letter to his "dear brother Alfred" in France is in the same tone. It begins by begging to be excused for troubling him for the last time, after having omitted to write for so long as four years. He then does the heartiest justice to his wife, say- ing that, in spite of small quarrels, no woman could have been more faithful to his interests, or have managed for him and his children better, and that it is " with the greatest regret," if, indeed, he has " strength in every case for the end," that he decides to kill her and three children, one 12 years, one 9 years, and one 19 months only old. Then comes a very curious religious passage :- " I ant going to try, at all events, to accomplish it,"—he is anxious not to speak too confidently, as the result showed with justice,—" and if there be a God, as many of those Jesuits who live by the sweat of our labours wish us to believe " [he guards himself from the supposition that all these Jesuits even wish them to believe as much], "I should have permission, I believe, in spite of my not having confessed myself to them, to have an inter- view with Him, and that He will pardon me the fault I am about to commit, —if, in any case, one can so call it thus to save me from misery as well as my family." There is a curiously anxious attempt at intellectual moderation in all this. Bordier evidently thinks that to save himself from misery as well as his family, is an end that even God could not with any justice condemn severely, if at all. But he is willing to go through the form of asking an

" interview " for the sake of formally receiving pardon for any little element of fault there may be in it. " I cannoe'say any more," he adds,—we suppose he means in order to persuade his brother to take his own view of what he is going to do, which he does not doubt he shall be able to persuade his Judge to adopt,—" for it would be necessary that I should pass in review all that has occurred during twenty-one years, and I should require the whole night. It is now 11 o'clock in the evening." He decides, therefore, that to sum up in his own favour at the expense of his last night's sleep in this world, would be too great a price to pay for convincing his brother. So he only adds, " Forget me for ever, and if my poor mother still lives do not strike her such a blow " [as to tell her of the event ?] " for the poor woman has always done what she could to bring us up in a good way ; as did our father, who is no more." He allows himself still one further touch of picturesque sensibility. " My wife as well as my children sleep peaceably, while I am writing these lines. They have no thought of what will happen to them." He pities them, but it must be.

One could understand better this vein of soft and feeble, but we think genuine sentiment, if the man had shown any irreso- lution, any reaction, any remorse, after he began his bloody work the next day. But he calmly tells the policeman he had decidedly regarded it in the light of a " duty," and hopes his wife will not survive, while showing quietly, and seemingly without any great ostentation, his fondness for her. His murderous pur- pose never flinches, except physically. He felt he could not get through his own windpipe after the hard work he had had to get through his wife's. But that is all. There is a bard core to all these soft emotions. Misery to himself must be warded off at all cost to others,—cost regrettable, but not the less to be exacted. Nothing seems to us more ghastly than this striking and glaring contrast between the murderous purpose and the bed of soft feel- ings in which it is found,—hard steel drawn from a velvet scab- bard, and held by a velvet-covered handle, up to which it is yet gently and deliberately plunged in his victim.