and marks of the powder would have been found upon the body of the victim, or at least her garments would have been burned. Three witnesses had furnished all the evidence admissible against the Verdures. In the first place there was the testimony of a woman named Bouillon, a former neigh bor of these unfortunates. She was a person of violent temper, and noted in the parish for her evil doings and venomous language; and Verdure, after bearing with her pa tiently for four years, had ended by forbid ding her to enter his house. For lack of proofs against Verdure this woman had recourse at first to vile insinuations. Then she drew upon her imagination, and swore that the father maltreated Rose, — that she had often heard the cries of the unfortunate girl. She said that Verdure had frequently threatened her (Bouillon), and that he and his children had more than once profited by the absence of her husband to break the windows and doors of her house. Not one of these assertions could be proved, and not one of the dwellers in the neighborhood had eVer heard of these pre tended violences of Verdure. The next evidence upon which they relied was that furnished by the son of Verdure, that child of six years, reduced to begging by the arrest of his father. Wandering from door to door, interrogated by those who assisted him as to the circumstances of a crime at which they took it for granted he was present, his mind filled with the contradictory recitals which he heard, the poor little one retold, for a piece of bread or an apple, some one of these ridiculous stories. The magistrates had with great care collected all these statements in order to choose from these versions, which flatly contradicted one another, some one which might be fatal to Verdure. The third witness was one Gentil. He swore that at a certain date, in a certain place, and under certain circumstances, Ver dure had announced to him his intention of killing his daughter.
Confronted with this Gentil, Verdure de clared that he did not even know him. He offered to prove that he could not have been in the place in question on the day desig nated. Gentil, put to the proof of his as sertions, retracted them entirely. Of these three pieces of evidence, that of the woman Bouillon had not the slightest bearing upon the case. It was evidently the product of personal malevolence. That of the son was contradicted by his own statements. A single witness had offered against Verdure not a proof, but an indica tion, and when shown that his statement was false, had at once retracted. The strange conduct of the magistrates in this affair can no longer be characterized as an error; it was a crime. All these facts and glaring iniquities M. Vieillard urged before the proper tribunals. Finally, after seven long years, the Parlia ment of Rouen issued a decree dated Jan. 31, 1787, declaring Lefret contumacious, and guilty of having participated in the assassination of Rose Verdure, and condemn ing him to be broken alive, after having been put to the torture to force him to dis close his accomplices. One would suppose that after this further proceedings against Verdure would have been abandoned. Nothing in the investiga tion, not a single fact, not a particle of evidence, except perhaps the contradictory stories of the young Verdure, showed the possibility of any complicity between Ver dure and Lefret. But justice at that time, like the greedy Acheron, did not willingly relinquish its prey. The same decree which condemned Lefret deferred doing justice to Verdure and his children, until after the dying statement of the condemned absent man. The conditional liberation of all but the father and the oldest son was ordered. The deferring action until after the dying statement of a man of whom the authorities had lost all trace was in effect condemning to an indefinite imprisonment an accused
