HORRIBLE TRAGEDY IN FRANCE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 88, 15 April 1899, Page 5 (Supplement)

HORRIBLE TRAGEDY IN FRANCE.

JEALOUS SON MURDERS HIS FATHER AND HIS SWEETHEART.

The little village of Belout, near Bordeaux, was on February 2Sth the scene of a dreadful double murder, one of the victims being the murderer's own father. While Madame Girard and her maidservant were walking on the farm at Belout they saw Maurice Girard (the son of the former), a young man of twenty years of age, rushing towards them with a gun. Young Girard, whose appearance bore signs of the great agitation under which he was labouring, cried to the two women 'I have killed my father; you will never see him again.' He then ran up to Clementine (the servant, who is only seventeen years of age), seized her round the waist, and kissed her twice passionately on the mouth. Then drawing off a few pace? he fired full at her, missed once owing to a sudden movement of the poor girl, and then fired a second time with fatal effect, the bullet entering the head behind the right ear and killing her upon the spot.

The father was found in the kitchen of the farmhouse, lying bathed in blood-from a large wound in the head, and he expired within a few moments of the arrival of some farm labourers.

The most terrible part of the whola thing is that the motive of the double crime, for which Maurice Girard will doubtless suffer the last penalty, if the authorities can catch him, is said to have been jealousy, Maurice being bitterly jealous of his father, whom he believed to be on intimate terms with Clementine, whom he himself-h^d hoped to marry.

The sympathy of the neighbours is almost unanimously With the murderer, who is still at large. . . .■ ■..