thousand men," he added, "there is not my like;
the great tragi-comic drama is coming to an
end." He composed a song, which he declared
he would sing on his way to the scaffold. Never,
at any time, did he flinch from the tone he
adopted as soon as he perceived that his fate
was inevitable. He rejected all attempts of the
chaplain of the prison to bring him to any sense
of the gravity of his position, sometimes declaring
he was a Mahomedan, at others openly
deriding religion and its ministers.

The rain poured in torrents on the morning
of the execution, yet it in no way diminished the
crowd; among which were a large proportion of
women and children.

Arrived on the ground, Latour looked round
with an air of the most indomitable resolution.
From the door of the prison to the foot of the
scaffold, he had never ceased to sing at the top
of his voice the verse he had composed for the
occasion. He looked at the couperet, or blade
of the guillotine, without the slightest appearance
of emotion, and then with a jaunty step
ascended the stairs. On the platform he again
began his song:

Allons, pauvre victime,
Ton jour de mort est arrivé,
Contre toi de la tyrannie
Le couteau sanglant est levé!

Laid on the block, he recommenced,

Allons, pauvre victime,
Ton jour de mort—-

when the couperet fell, and all was over.

Setting aside the apocryphal stories related by
Latour concerning his own career, there can be
no doubt that his history has been such as can
hardly fail to attach itself to a man of indomitable
audacity, thirst for excitement, overweening
vanity, fearless self-confidence, ferocity, and the
utter absence of feeling or principle. Never was
jail-bird more difficult to keep within bars. On the
occasion of his imprisonment for the robbery of
church plate, the last crime he was known to have
committed, he was confined in the round tower
of the old castle of the ancient Comtes de Foix:
a place reserved for prisoners the most difficult
to keep in security; and as even in the " lowest
depth" there is, according to Milton, " a lower
deep," Latour was confined in the most inaccessible
room of the tower—that reserved for those
condemned to death. Yet from here he nearly
contrived his escape. He set fire to the
iron-bound wood of the cell door, and it was nearly
burnt through, when a piece of iron, becoming
detached from the charred wood on the outside,
fell off and rolled down the circular staircase,
giving the alarm to the jailers. In his cell were
found wooden skeleton keys he had made from
a broomstick, and a piece of tin of the bowl in
which his food was left, shaped into a knife-blade,
and sharpened on the stones. One of his
chief anxieties was concerning a photograph
taken of him at the time of the trial, and which
his unconquerable fatuity made him desire most
ardently to possess. Upon his being shown the
photographs of three criminals confined in the
prison of Pamiers, he immediately named them;
which, if the proverb be true, does not look
confirmatory of his theory of innocence, not
only of the present crime, but of all those
previously imputed to him.

Audouy has never ceased to maintain the
attitude of amenity and submission he from the
first assumed. It is singular that when he heard
of Latour's condemnation and sentence, he said,
"Et les autres?" " And the others?"

Various anonymous letters were addressed
to the counsel of Latour, one of them notably
from Baden, asserting his innocence and the
guilt of another man not named. Several persons
of Arbet, on the frontiers of Spain, declared that
they had, at about the time of the murder, seen
signal-fires on the most elevated points of the
mountains, and that Latour had been recognised
in company with two well-known malefactors of
Ariège: these were imagined to have escaped
across the Pyrenees, which Latour might easily
have done, had not his recklessness induced him
to remain near the scene of the crime, and his
ostentatious braggadocio to compromise himself
by his display of money and magnificent plans.
"Nous ne savons pas tout sur cette affaire."
"We don't know the whole of this business,"
said the procureur-général, even after all the
facts now known had been elicited. Yet, in the
face of this uncertainty, the awful question is
summarily concluded, the case is closed, and
finally put away among the things of the past, and
a man of whose guilt surely no satisfactory proof
has been adduced, is sent beyond the pale of all
human power of reparation. Audouy still lives,
and, in his case, the possibility of rehabilitation
exists.

NEW WORK BY MR. DICKENS,
In Monthly Parts, uniform with the Original Editions of
"Pickwick," "Copperfleld," &c.
Now publishing, PART VI., price 1s., of
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BY CHARLES DICKENS.
IN TWENTY MONTHLY PARTS.
With Illustrations by MARCUS STONE.
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