who remains fixed in the popular imagination as
the type of the polished, methodical, and lettered
villain.

Pierre-François Lacenaire was born in 1800,
at Francheville, a village in the environs of
Lyons. He was the fourth child of a man past
the middle age, possessed of a fortune of twenty
thousand pounds acquired in a business
partnership, and which was afterwards lost in
unlucky ventures. His birth was regarded by his
parents as a misfortune rather than a happiness;
he was treated like an unwelcome guest,
and soon sent out of the house to nurse. The
elder brother was ever afterwards the favourite.
The younger, in consequence of this injustice,
became a jealous, ill-tempered, cunning boy.
His natural intelligence told him that he was
not wanted; he was delighted at being sent
to the College of Saint-Chamond, some twenty
miles off, where he made rapid progress, and
gained four prizes in the course of twelve
months.

On his return for the vacation, with these
proofs of good conduct, he received a temporary
manifestation of parental affection. "It is
certain," Lacenaire afterwards asserted, "that if
my mother had continued to treat me with the
same affection, she would have changed her own
destiny, and mine also." Perhaps so; for, in
truth, as soon as these brief moments of tenderness
had once passed away, Lacenaire behaved
to his mother with the cold reserve, the silence,
and the stiffness which her early unkindness had
inspired.

From that time forward, it was he who was
always in the wrong. He was expelled from Saint-
Chamond, then from the seminary of Alix, then
from the Lyceum of Lyons, unjustly, it is said.
At the latter establishment, in consequence of
his father's entreaties, he was again received as a
day pupil only, of which he took advantage by
truanting, and spending his time in low public-
houses. Such amusements are expensive.
Consequently, he made a tool of his elder brother to
rob their mother; which went on until a quarrel
about a Louis d'or put an end to the horrid
partnership. Neither reform nor repentance
followed.

One day, he and his father happened to cross
the Place des Terreaux. They were not aware
that an execution was going to take place, until
they found themselves in front of the guillotine.
M. Lacenaire, in a rage with his son for the
commission of some fresh offence, stopped short,
and pointing to the scaffold, said, "Look there;
if you don't alter, that's how you will finish!"

"From that moment," Lacenaire subsequently
related, "a link seemed to exist between
myself and the fearful machine. I often thought
of it, without knowing why. At last I became
so accustomed to the idea, that I fancied I could
not die in any other way. How often have I
been guillotined in my dreams!

He was dismissed from the College of Chambery
for fighting with a priest. An attorney's
office, a notary's office, and a bank, had in
succession the honour of his transitional
presence. Accused of appropriating ten francs,
he denied it with the indignant protestation,
"I am not yet a thief!" He ran away to Paris
with the illusion that he could gain his livelihood
by literature, and at the same time lead a
life of idleness. Soon undeceived, he enlisted
for a soldier under a false name. Insubordinate,
and dishonest, he deserted, to escape
the sentence of a court-martial, and travelled
homewards. An aunt lent him three hundred
francs, which he risked, and lost, at trente-et-
quarante. Unabashed, he returned to the poor
woman, and squeezed out of her three hundred
francs more. In three strokes the gambling
table devoured them all.

Extortion and forgery were the natural
sequences of theft. "Send me money by return
of post," he wrote to his brother, "or I will
get some, in a way that won't please the family."
No money came, but plenty of good advice; so
forged bills of exchange were put in circulation,
which the wretched father, already in pecuniary
difficulties, bought up or stifled at a sacrifice of
five thousand francs. After braving for a while
the scorn and anger of his native town, he
retreated first to Switzerland, and afterwards to
Italy. At Verona, advancing in the career of
crime, he became an assassin. He there
committed his first murder. So that, when he
returned to Paris, robbery was his profession;
homicide only an occasional excitement. But the
criminal intellect ripens fast. One Bâton
suggested the idea of making wholesale cold-blooded
murder (as an easy means of robbery) the profession.
The proposed victims were clerks of bankers,
whose duty is to collect money about town.
Bâton himself was too weak and too cowardly to
serve as an active accomplice. A swindling
transaction about a carriage procured Lacenaire
a twelvemonth's imprisonment at Poissy, where
he composed plenty of verses, and found, what
he had long been seeking, a young man, named
Avril, a human animal, strong, hot-blooded,
sensual, obstinate, improvident, whom he dazzled
by his intellectual superiority, and tempted to
become the ready instrument of any crime, so
that it did but bring in money.

Bâton, the accomplice in the scheme of
murdering bankers' clerks for the cash they had
collected, was also a dancer at the theatre of
the Ambigu-Comique, and through him
Lacenaire contrived to obtain access to the theatre.
He was passionately fond of dramatic art and
artists, and succeeded in making acquaintance
with several of them, particularly with M. Albert,
then one of the stars of the Boulevard. No one
was less like a malefactor in appearance than
the well-gloved scoundrel.

One day he happened to be at the Ambigu, at
the rehearsal of a new piece, when one of the
scene-shifters fell from the flies and broke his
leg. Albert, who had a part in the piece,
proposed a, subscription in favour of the sufferer.
The idea was taken up immediately, and the
poor fellow received assistance and some money
in consequence. Lacenaire wrote verses on
the kind action he had witnessed, and dedi-