A sergent de ville arrested the assassin
upon the spot. He did not make the
slightest attempt to escape, and delivered
up his formidable weapon. When he was
taken out of the church, and the mob knew
what he had done, some of them proposed
to take him back to the blood-stained
spot, and tear him to pieces. Echarper,
the verb they use, means literally, to tear
into pieces as rags are torn into lint.

The newspapers of the Sabbath morning
spread the news all over Paris, of the assassination
of the Archbishop. I happened on this
particular Sunday to have offered to take an
acquaintance over the principal churches of
the French metropolis. I shall never forget
their mournful aspect. The music was silent
in their orchestras, and the lights were few
and dim upon their altars. Nothing but low
masses were performed, and the clergy
chanted the psalms of penitence. The audience
were, however, unusually numerous,
and when the preachers mounted the pulpits
the flocks seemed to cower together under
them, as if seeking refuge from the gloom and
terror of a thunder-storm. The church of
Saint Étienne du Mont was shut, and black
cloth was hanging before the principal porch
and the two side-doors.

On the black hangings before the porch
there was a large white placard, upon which
was written the following legend:

Monseigneur the Archbishop of Paris, having been
struck dead by a criminal hand, in the Church of Saint
Étienne du Mont, yesterday, at five o'clock in the
evening, the church will remain interdicted until the
ceremony of expiation, which will be announced here-
after. Signed, ED. DE BORIES, Curé.

As I mingled in the crowd who were
reading the placard, I could not avoid hearing
their discussions upon the event. A well-
dressed citizen (bourgeois), about thirty years
of age, and whose intelligent face and neatly-
clipped beard apparently announced a
republican, exclaimed:

"We are then in the middle ages!"

A burgess about sixty, with a keen mask
of irony serving him as a countenance, and
whom I suspected of being a Voltairian,
exclaimed sarcastically:

"And it was by an ecclesiastic!"

A lady advanced in life, and dissatisfied
with the course taken by the current of
sentiment, objected:

"But several times suspended."

To this objection, the Voltairian rejoined,
with a slight sneer of triumph:

"He had therefore bad antecedents."

As the old lady held down her discomfited
head, a young workman in a blue blouse said,
as plainly as a sardonic grin could speak
through the villanous countenance it lighted
up, "Our priests are like ourselves."
Subsequently I heard a burgess say to a physician,
"That the priests kill each other:—What
is that to us? He stabbed him to show how                                                          well they had brought him up to be without
malignity."

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

WHEN taken to the police office of the
quarter, the assassin, in reply to the
questions of the authorities, said that his name
was Verger, that he was born at Neuilly,
that he was a priest of the diocese of Meaux,
that he had been suspended for preaching
against the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception, that he had not any personal ill-will
to Archbishop Sibour, and that he stabbed
the prelate in the church to protest once
more, publicly, solemnly, and finally, against
an impious idolatry, crying, ''À bas les
Déesses." He had given but one stab, knowing
well he had pierced the heart. When
the magistrate pointed to him the enormity
of his crime, he shed tears, and said, "Yes, it
is frightful." The magistrates recognised in
him a man of superior intelligence and
instruction. He is good-looking, with a fine
forehead, fine eyes, and an expressive
countenance. Remarkably calm and tranquil in
his manner, his self-possession never forsook
him; only he exclaimed several times, "No
goddesses! no goddesses! " While they
were reading his deposition over to him, he
criticised the report, and obliged the reporter
to correct some phrases, and use his own
exact and clear expressions. On entering
his cell in the prison, he asked for something
to eat, saying he had not eaten anything
since morning. The last thing he asked for
was an Evangile, or Four Gospels, observing,
"I shall have much need of it this night."

Louis-Jean Verger was born upon the
twentieth of August, eighteen hundred and
twenty-six, at Neuilly-sur-Seine. At his
first school he was remarkable for his
studious and pious disposition. When at the
age of twelve he made his first communion
at Neuilly, the Curé Legrand took particular
notice of him, and his apparent piety
obtained him the protection of the Marchioness
de Rochefort, called the Sister Milanie, the
superior of the daughters of Saint Vincent
de Paul. Sister Milanie took upon herself
the expenses of his education for the priesthood,
and he was received in the little seminary
of Saint Nicholas de Chardonnet, in the
Rue Saint Victor, which was then directed
by the Abbé Dupanloup, the present Bishop
of Orleans. The high classical attainments
of this bishop obtained him recently the rare
honour of admission into the Academy of
Letters; and, as I remember, he discoursed
eloquently, on the delight he had derived
from the study of the verses of Virgil.

In eighteen hundred and forty-two, when
he was sixteen years of age, Verger went
from the seminary of Saint Nicholas in the
Rue Saint Victor, to a seminary connected with
it at Gentilly. He was there dux or leader of
the school, obtaining the first prize for good
conduct, and the first prize for religious