A DEPRAVED LIFE.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 5833, 19 November 1880, Page 3

A DEPRAVED LIFE.

. Tho Paris correspondent of the New Zealand Times writes :—" The fashion able criminal i 3 Menesclou, aged 19, tho son of a clerk in the War Office. He soems to be naturally depraved ; ho was sent to sea, as parents can do when sons are incorrigible, as they can aLo incorcerate the in, or daughters, in a reformatory. Hs was dismissed after undergoing 117 punishment-— for him pleasurable excitements. Returning to Prris, he declined to work, frequented dram shops, but never drinking ; associating witli thieves, but never thieving; his weakness was for unnatural crimes. In the house whore he resided with his parents, dwelt a. family having five children; ono of these, Louise, he enticed, last April, to his chamber, to receive a sprig of lilac ; he violated, and then killed her, placing the body between two rnattrassos. He slept on it during the night, and next day, after his parents had left for their employment, he heated the stove red hot, cut up the body into forty morsels, and commenced burning them. The odour and the hissing noise attracted the attention of the neighbors, and the mother suspecting something wrong, called in a police inspector. The door was burst open ; the murderer found at full, foul work. At the station house, when searched, tho little hands of his victim were found in his pocket. It was believed for a time he was mad ; indeed, sane people happily do not so act, bnt, as he took in his cell to writing poetry, tho alienists held ho was responsible. Now, Shakespeare says, "The lunatic and the poet are of imagination all compact." He will likely be condemned to the guillotine, especially as he requested the Judge to treat him. as he did his victim, and so end the trial. The thermometer registers 102deg. in the shade : this may account for the rather increasing crop of murders, but, strange to say, few suicides or sunstrokes. The sun may be the source of life, but it is not less so the cause of deaths."