AN INSANE HUSBAND

Otago Witness, Issue 2934, 8 June 1910, Page 28

AN INSANE HUSBAND

PARIS, June 6. Parat, the chemist who imprisoned his wife in February last, has been declared insane. Extraordinary as was the story in it 6 first form of a Paris chemist, whose insane jealousy drove him to padlock his wife in chains in a darkened room, the statements made by the woman before the examining magistrate were more remarkable still When the police, who had known of the husband's ill-treatment for 18 months, found, in February last, that the wife had not been out of the house for two months, they decided to forcibly enter the flat. They found the woman in a darkened room, fastened to her bed by two chains and nursing a,n infant three months old. The woman, who was clothed in rags, blinked at the unaceustom>f>d lirfit of the candle, for the outer shutters of the windows had been kept fast shut. Two children, aged three and two, were sitting on the floor at their mother's feet.

The woman was'wearing, under her rags, ia corset-like garment of fine chain mail, and the husband, when taken before the investigating magistrate, said he adored his wife, and would have done anything to prevent any other man coming'--near her. She had no medical attention when her baby was born. The husband, Jean Parat, is a well-to-do chemist of middle ege, whose shop is in the Rue d© Vaugirard, and his wife is aged about 31. The ex parte statements of the woman contained a series of charges. " I knew Parat," the wife states, " when he was a student of chemistry at Neuilly in 1899. I encouraged him in his studies, and gave him all the help I could; and when, in 1899, he obtained his diploma we were married."

For a time the pair had a hard struggle to live, but they were happy; and it was not until 1903 that she had to complain of any change in her husband's feelings towards her. He became unreasonably jealous " Last year," the wife's statement goes on, "he went away to attend a wedding, and he worried me to promise that during his absence I would drink and ■ would make the children drink corrosive sublimate. 'Then I shall be rid of you all,' he explained, ' and I can say that you did it in a fit of madness.'

" He constantly declared that he was not the father of my children, and that he would kill them —and me with them. He often threatened to torture me by burning me with nitric acid; and one day he arranged a series of retorts, and told me that he was going to chloroform me, in order that he might do it more easily. " He actually did chloroform me, but was afraid, I suppose, to go farther than this. It became clear that he was trying to drive me mad. He tried to make me believe frequently that he was about to kill my little daughter. " Onoe he placed bandages . round her head with red paper slipped among them, to look like bloodstains, placed a large pair of shears near her, and called me in He told me that he had murdered her, and, while I was. under the influence of the shock, called upon me to that she was really his own daughter. Of course I did so. and t.hea he told, me how be had

arranged the whole thing. He forced me to write letters saying that I was tortured by remorse, and was about to commit suicide."

The husband, on the other hand, in a letter to the juge d'instruction demanding his release, maintained that he has fallen, into " an infamous trap " prepared for him by his wife, on the instigation of " some criminal" whose name he did not know. "She is an unfortunate mad woman," he declared. " For a long time past she has shown signs of dementia. If I had heeded the advice of my medical friends I should have put her in an asylum. I have never done her any harm. I may have lost my temper with her, and spoken to her severely, and even angrily; but I have never treated her with any violence. She, on the other hand, made an attempt on my life only last year."