the same year, an inhabitant of Cahon was also
banished for theft; if he returned to the town
or its suburbs, one of his members was to
be cut off, whichever the Sheriffs pleased to
select. ln 1296, a woman, found guilty of
coining, was buried alive, in the presence of
the justices of the town. Other women,
found guilty of thefts, suffered the same punishment.

In 1346, an individual was stabbed in a
drunken brawl. The municipal authorities held
an inquest, discovered who were the guilty
parties, and rang their three bells to summon
them to appear and answer the charge; but they
neither came nor showed themselves. Whereupon,
the public were ordered to proceed to
demolish the houses of the murderers, in virtue of
certain articles in the corporation charter. But,
on their arrival, the wives of the accused
parties required the mayor and the sheriffs to
maintain their rights, summoning immediately
witnesses to prove that their jointure gave them
a life interest in the houses intended to be
pulled down. The mayor at once caused the
work to be stopped, and the demolition did not
take place until after the decease of the respective
women.

It will hardly be believed that animals then
were formally accused and put upon their trial
according to the rules of criminal jurisprudence;
nevertheless, proofs of the fact are furnished by
the archives of the Mairie of Abbeville: " It
happened that on Saturday the xvth day of
December, in the year MCCCCXIIII, Belot,
daughter of Jéhan Guillain, she being laid in her
cradle and asleep, was strangled and her face
devoured by a little pig, belonging to the said
Guillain; for which matter and by deliberation
of the council, he, the pig, was dragged and hung
by the hind-legs, on Christmas Eve, the XXIVth
day of the aforesaid year, and by judgment of
the mayor and sheriffs, Matthew Barbafust being
mayor."

Another pig, guilty of the same crime, was
arrested by the sénéchal's sergeants, and by them
made over to the jurisdiction of the municipal
officers, at whose hands it also suffered death by
hanging by the hind-legs. A third pig, again,
for murdering a babe in its cradle, was hung in
like manner from a gallows, in virtue of the
sentence pronounced by the mayor, on the leads of
the Shrievalty, to the tolling of bells. A like
instance occurred in 1479. The condemned
animal was driven to the place of execution in a
cart; the mace-bearers escorted it as far as the
gallows, and the executioner received sixty sous
for his trouble.

To pass on to an epoch nearer to the date of
our present. history, in 1724 three soldiers were
hung on the same gallows, in the Place St.
Pierre, for stealing forty-seven pounds of candles,
valued at eighteen livres sixteen sous. In the
following year, the wife of a porter, surnamed
La Commandante, was taken up for beggary and
conducted to the steeple of the Hôtel de Ville,
where was a wooden cage for confining mad
people. The wretched woman was put into this
cage, and almost instantly afterwards hung
herself there with her apron. The municipal officers
proceeded to the prison to ascertain the
fact of her death, the cause which had occasioned
it, and to institute proceedings against the body.
They discovered that she had already been in the
hands of justice, being branded on the shoulder.
They caused the body to be taken to a dungeon
of the Cour Ponthieu, where they left it
completely stripped. When their inquest was over,
the executioner dressed the body in a chemise,
put it in a sort of wicker box which did not conceal
it from view, and in which the head was not
enclosed, fastened it to a horse's tail, and dragged
it, with the face to the ground, as far as the
market, where it was hung on a gallows by the
feet; then, dragged away in the same fashion,
in the midst of an immense concourse of people,
it was finally buried in a wheel-rut. Wheel-
ruts existed then, deep enough to serve as
graves.

In 1730, a young man of Abbeville, who ven-
tured during the night to throw a stick at a little
group of images representing the Resurrection,
which was suspended in the middle of one of the
streets in honour of the fête of Saint Sepulchre,
was shot dead by a gunsmith named Leduc. The
authorities made inquiries, but took no further
proceedings, heedless of the solicitations of the
mother of the young man whom Leduc had
murdered. Tired of appealing in vain to the law,
the wretched parent contrived to obtain, through
one of her relations who was a servant at court,
an order requiring the Abbeville magistrates to
go on with the trial. The offender was
condemned to death. But at every consecration of
a Bishop of Orleans, the new prelate had the
privilege of pardoning a criminal; and in this
way Leduc escaped the scaffold.

At every step, you came upon crosses, images
of saints, Madonnas, and Ecce Homos. They
were to be found in every churchyard, in every
street, in the squares, on the ramparts, on the
bridges, at the portal of every church, against
the walls of every convent.

The hero of our tragic tale, the Chevalier de
la Barre, was the grandson of a lieutenant-
general who wrote several works on Guiana, of
which he was named governor in 1663. Born
in the neighbourhood of Coutances, in
Normandy, young De la Barre spent the earlier
part of his life with a country curé, and afterwards
resided with a farmer. He was clever
and good natured; but, being left an orphan in
his childhood, his education was very much
neglected; which did not prevent his entertaining,
nor his discussing with imprudent levity, the
free philosophical opinions then current among
the French nobility. In short, De la Barre
and his knot of young friends drew upon
themselves the ill-will of the clergy. It was
rumoured that he one day got within the walls of
a convent under the disguise of female attire;
and he and his companions really passed within
five-and-twenty paces of a procession of Capuchin
monks bearing the Host, without kneeling or
taking off their hats. The excuse was, that