LOVER AND MURDERER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12272, 16 May 1903, Page 2 (Supplement)

LOVER AND MURDERER.

A STRANGE FRENCH CRIMINAL

EXPIATES HIS CRIMES. Paris, April 9.—Leclorc, the young shep herd convicted of five murders, was executed by the guillotine this morning at St. Mihiel (Meause). The execution took place at five o'clock, but from 2 a.m. the crowd in the streets was so great that the people had to be kept back by the military, and on ropes, ladders and other exalted positions the spectators awaited the appearance of the prisoner. Leclerc played dominoes until one o'clock in the morning, and at 4.30 was in a sound sleep when the governor of the prison called him three times bv his name. He started up in bed shouting "Who is there?" ard when lie was told that his last hour had come replied, All right. I understand." Then he dressed, went to confession, and listened to the Mass. He refused a glass of brandy, saying " I do not need that to mount the scaffold; besides, there is arsenic in it." He also declined the cigarette offered to him, preferring to select one himself, saying, that the other was doctored, like the brandy. When the prisoner walked to the scaffold he was pale but firm, and as the knife descended he was heard shouting above the clamour of the crowd, "Au revoir." While in prison he wrote his memoir, in which he described how he fell in love for the first time. One evening when he and his sweetheart went to fetch water together he summoned up courage to kiss her, and then begged to be forgiven. " But," he writes, "she was not angry, and when she let me kiss her again when we parted I was in Paradise from that moment." It is hard to believe tltot the individual who wrote these naive sentences was the callous wretch who, before he. was twenty years of age. had committed the most horrible murders, to which he was absolutely indifferent. During his trial at the assizes his sweetheart, who still loved him in spite of his misdeeds, was in Court and threw kisses to him from her place among the audience.