France seems to be experiencing an outbreak of serious crime.
Tuesday's papers, notes the Standard correspondent at Paris, reported no less than four murders. In the village of Ville d'Avary, a man of twenty, named Wladimizoff, of Russian extraction, shot his mistress, a widow twelve years his senior, because she would not marry him, and then gave himself up. At La Villette, one of the lowest of the Parisian suburbs, two men, aged respectively twenty-three and eighteen, trampled to death a woman of twenty, apparently their com- mon mistress, and, in addition, stabbed her several times in the chest. " At Alais, a young man was stabbed to the heart in a drunken brawl by a house-painter. At Montlandon, near Langres, a lady of sixty, living in a lonely cottage, was strangled by a burglar, who succeeded in making his escape." This terrible list is a grim comment on M. Carnot's exercise of the prerogative of mercy in the case of a man named Bosquet, whose crime was of a specially revolting kind. Besides killing a girl he had seduced under peculiarly aggra- vated circumstances, he murdered a barrister, M. Paquy, in whose house she was employed as a nursemaid. It is said that the powerful Corporation of Huissiers, to which the murderer belonged, put pressure on the Government to pardon him, on the ground of the discredit the execution would cast on their profession. If the President really yielded to such a demand, it is most discreditable ; but we expect his action was due to the false sentimentality of the hour, which cares little about the victims, but very much about the murderers. " Hanging him won't bring her to life," is the sort of way in which people excuse themselves for making things easy for criminals.
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