MURDER NOT MURDER!
AT the trial of Madame de Jeufosse, a French jury decided that if a person be found to enter another person's house clandestinely, not with the intention of committing a felony, but with that of declaring his affection to some engaging young lady, he may be shot like a dog, and the shooter may go unpunished and unre- strained. On the showing of the reports, Giullot commanded lit- tle sympathy; but the hazardous nature of the principle involved in the decision is brought out in another case.
Near the North-eastern frontier of France, a few miles from the town of Metz, is a place called Ail. The Moire of this small town lately found that his daughter, a charming child of a thou- sand weeks, had secret nocturnal interviews with a young man named Basset, who used to visit his innamorata by climbing up the window-grating from the garden side. The Maire became cognizant of this fact ; and, fresh perhaps from reading the re- port of the Jenfosse trial, he ordered his son to post himself at the window and to shoot the adventurous lover. No sooner ordered than done. The obedient son cocks his double-barrelled gun, lies down in ambush, and as soon as poor Basset appears blows out his brains. Father and son go quietly to bed, and sleep the slumber of virtue ; and when the gendarmes come to arrest the Maire of All and his son, both are highly astonished at being thus taken to account.
They had evidently failed in discrimination. There is no evi- dence that Gnillot had any warrant from the young lady for his intrusions ; yet he openly and impudently courte notoriety in his approaches, and defied. warning. His intrusion really assumed the aspect of forcible entry. He was not a Romeo, but a burglar, the object of whose rapacity was something more sacred than goods or gold. But the vulgar do not discriminate. Guillot was professedly a gallant seeking access to the object of his affections, and the Evreux verdict pronounced it lawful to shoot trespassers of that kind : the Maire of All seems only to have taken his law as it was laid down i by Berr.yer with the sanction of judge and jury. So dangerous s it in criminal law to let feelings how- ever laudable palter with principle.
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