the native population. He also adds: “The abodes of the dead have been visited, violated; the exhumed corpses, or parts of them, have been kissed, caressed, or appropriated, and carried to the homes of the ravisher, although belonging to total strangers.” He also says: “I was much struck, when frequenting the Parisian asylums as a student, with the numbers of anæmic, dejected females who obtruded upon me the piteous confession that they had eaten human flesh, devoured corpses, that they were vampires, etc.” Dr. Legrande du Saulle says that in many members of a Scottish family there appeared connate necrophagism.[116] Prochaska mentions a woman of Milan also tempted children to her house and ate them at her leisure. A girl of fourteen, belonging to Puy de Drôme, is described as having displayed on all occasions an extraordinary avidity for human blood and as sucking greedily recently inflicted wounds. The brigand Gaetano Mammone, who long terrorized South Italy, was accustomed as a regular habit to drain with his lips the blood of his unhappy captives.[117] In another instance a man who dwelt apart in a cave in the South of France seized a girl of twelve years old, strangled her, violated the corpse, and then inflicting deep gashes upon it with a knife drank the blood and devoured the flesh. He kept the remains in his retreat but subsequently interred them. He was judged insane.[118]
In the sixteenth century there dwelt in Hungary a terrible ogress, the Countess Elisabeth Ba’thory, who for her necrosadistic abominations was known as “la comtesse hongroise sanguinaire.” The comte de Charolais (1700-1760), “de lugubre mémoire,” loved nothing better than to mingle murder with his debauches, and many of the darkest scenes in Juliette but reproduce the orgies he shared with his elder brother, the Duke of Burgundy.
Dr. Lacassagne, in his study Vacher l’éventreur et les crimes sadiques, Lyon-Paris, 1899, has collected many cases of necrosadism. Joseph Vacher, who was born at Beaufort (Isère), 16th November, 1869, was guilty of a series of crimes which lasted from May, 1894, to August, 1897. He was tramping during those years up and down France, immediately after his release as cured from an asylum where he had been confined for attempting to rape a young servant who refused his hand in marriage. Vacher’s first crime seems to have been committed
