Causes Célèbres. says the excellent advocate, gravely, " it is surely a simplicity on the part of any to believe that the speaking of certain syllables can be productive of such an effect." Torture having done its miserable worst, the criminal was conveyed to the cell for the condemned, and handed over for a time to two reverend persons, — the Sieur d' Arras (curate of St. Marcel of Metz) and a Capu chin friar, — who were awaiting him with the benevolent purpose of exhorting him to embrace the Christian faith. The unhappy culprit, though acknowledging that he had not too deeply studied the mysteries of his own faith, still refused to substitute another, and turning away from his exhorters, seemed to await with impatience the closing scene. Conducted at last towards the place of punishment, he tied round his left arm and forehead narrow strips of leather, with knots in the centre. One of the officers having demanded the meaning of this ceremony, Levi replied that in the knots were contained the commandments of his law, and that it was customary with his people at the point of death to attach them thus to the head and arm. Still haunted with the idea of some concealed spell, the intelligent Commission ers deprived the criminal of these symbols, and once more pressed him to acknowledge the abduction of the child, the place of its concealment, and the time and manner of its murder. Raphael Levi returned thereupon to his first unqualified denial, asserting that he was
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perfectly innocent, and the witnesses for sworn. It was remarked that during the trial he had, nevertheless, made no exception to their testimony. Still, the Church made one final effort to secure the convert. The curate and Capu chin pressed up to him, and were commenc ing a new exhortation, when the criminal, bound as he was, pushed them from him with his elbows, sternly desiring them to notice that he died as he had lived — a Jew; and that, dying in such a manner, his soul would assuredly be carried into Abraham's bosom; even adding that for the act imputed to him as a crime, he would not ask pardon of God himself! This last expression con firmed the then popular opinion that the Jews included the abstraction and murder of Christian children in the category of religious acts! The courage and calmness of the con demned man, whatever their source, re mained unabated to the end. Arrived at the pile, he dressed himself, unaided, in the gar ment in which he was to suffer. Attached to the stake, and pressed to the last moment on the one side to confess his crime, on the other to disavow his creed, the unhappy man continued to reply with as much courage as though he had not been standing on the verge of death. At last, turning to the executioner, he begged him to put an end to the scene by strangling him with the rope that confined him to the stake. And this was done. — Judicial Dramas.
