Celebres. There is something essentially French both in the notion
and the reality of the Dimes Judiciaires. We, too, have tragedies enough, and more than enough, but we do not arrange them so effectively.
These all alike, victim, criminal, witnesses, prosecutor, judge, and, most of all, prisoner's advocate, pose themselves most dramatically.
Mr. Spicer tells his stories well enough, the better, we imagine, the more closely he follows his French original. The opening, for instance, of "The Skeleton of the Rue Vaugirard" is admirable ; the garden, the place marked with a red cross indicating the grave, the discovery of the skeleton, the judgment of the anatomist as to , the age and sex of the dead, the strange conjecture of the phrenologist as to her disposition—a conjecture which startles the accused more than anything else by its truth—and the sagacity with which science generally reproduces all the accessories of the murder, all these are given with much force.
Some of these dismal stories are of sufficiently recent date to be within the recollection of many readers. Such is the one entitled, "A French Wolf." The " wolf " was one Dumollard, who was accustomed to murder servant-girls whom he had enticed away by the pretence of finding them situations. For a wonder, Dumollard was found guilty without "extenuating circumstances ;" his murders had been committed for gain, and that is a really capital offence in the eyes of a French jury.
Such, too, is the tale of the Duchess° De Praslin (somewhat absurdly called by Mr. Spicer "the martyr-wife "), murdered by her husband in August, 1847. Nothing in the volume is more interesting than the story of the famous Cartouohe. We must protest, by the way, against the countenance which Mr. Spicer gives to the absurd medieval stories of child-murders committed by the Jews. Imagine a writer gravely speaking of Hugh of Lincoln as a well authenticated ease, and quoting Chaucer, "writing at a distance of little more than a century" as a conclusive witness !
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