M.Bruneau was naturally sensitive to suspicion,and he determined upon the immediate removal of this danger to his peace.On January 2,1894,M.Fricot returned to supper after administering the extreme unction to a parishioner.While the meal was preparing,he went into his garden in sabots and bareheaded,and never again was seen alive.The supper cooled,the vicar was still absent;the murderer,hungry with his toil,ate not only his own,but his victim's share of the food,grimly hinting that Fricot would not come back.Suicide was dreamed of,murder hinted;up and down the village was the search made,and none was more zealous than the distressed curate.
At last a peasant discovered some blocks of wood in the well,and before long bloodstains revealed themselves on the masonry.
Speedily was the body recovered,disfigured and battered beyond recognition,and the voice of the village went up in denunciation of the Abb<e'>Bruneau.Immunity had made the culprit callous,and in a few hours suspicion became certainty.A bleeding nose was the lame explanation given for the stains which were on his clothes,on the table,on the keys of his harmonium.A quaint and characteristic folly was it that drove the murderer straight to the solace of his religion.You picture him,hot and redhanded from murder,soothing his battered conscience with some devilish Requiem for the unshrived soul he had just parted from its broken body,and leaving upon the harmonium the ineradicable traces of his guilt.Thus he lived,poised between murder and the Church,spending upon the vulgar dissipation of a Breton village the blood and money of his foolish victims.But for him `les tavernes et les filles'of Laval meant a veritable paradise,and his sojourn in the country is proof enough of a limited cunning.Had he been more richly endowed,Paris had been the theatre of his crimes.As it is,he goes down to posterity as the Man in the Grey Suit,and the best friend the cabmen of Laval ever knew.Them,indeed,he left inconsolable.
MONSIEUR L'ABB<E'>
The childhood of the Abb<e'>Rosselot is as secret as his origin,and no man may know whether Belfort or Bavaria smiled upon his innocence.A like mystery enshrouds his early manhood,and the malice of his foes,who are legion,denounces him for a Jesuit of Innsbruck.But since he has lived within the eye of the world his villainies have been revealed as clearly as his attainments,and history provides him no other rival in the corruption of youth than the infamous Thwackum.
It is not every scholar's ambition to teach the elements,and Rosselot adopted his modest calling as a cloak of crime.No sooner was he installed in a mansion than he became the mansion's master,and henceforth he ruled his employer's domain with the tyrannical severity of a Grand Inquisitor.His soul wrapped in the triple brass of arrogance,he even dared to lay his hands upon food before his betters were served;and presently,emboldened by success,he would order the dinners,reproach the cook with a too lavish use of condiments,and descend with insolent expostulation into the kitchen.In a week he had opened the cupboards upon a dozen skeletons,and made them rattle their rickety bones up and down the draughty staircases,until the inmates shivered with horror and the terrified neighbours fled the haunted castle as a lazarhouse.Once in possession of a family secret,he felt himself secure,and henceforth he was free to browbeat his employer and to flog his pupil to the satisfaction of his waspish nature.Moreover,he was endowed with all the insight and effrontery of a trained journalist.So sedulous was he in his search after the truth,that neither man nor woman could deny him confidence.And,as vinegar flowed in his veins for blood,it was his merry sport to set wife against husband and children against father.Not even were the servants safe from his watchful inquiry,and housemaids and governesses alike entrusted their hopes and fears to his malicious keeping.
And when the house had retired to rest,with what a sinister delight did he chuckle over the frailties and infamies,a guilty knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner!
To oust him,when installed,was a plain impossibility,for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal;and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation,his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this smiling,demoniacal tutor.
But a too villainous curiosity was not the Abb<e'>'s capital sin.
Not only did he entertain his leisure with wrecking the happiness of a united family,but he was an enemy open and declared of France.It was his amiable pastime at the dinnertable,when he had first helped himself to such delicacies as tempted his dainty palate,to pronounce a pompous eulogy upon the German Emperor.France,he would say with an exultant smile,is a pays pourri,which exists merely to be the football of Prussia.She has but one hope of salvationstill the monster speaksand that is to fall into the benign occupation of a vigorous race.Once upon a timethe infamy is scarce crediblehe was conducting his young charges past a townhall,over the lintel of whose door glittered those proud initials `R.F.'
