October 10. Yet another. I was walking by the river, after

breakfast. And I saw, under a willow, a fisherman asleep. It was
noon. A spade, as if expressly put there for me, was standing in

a potato-field near by.
I took it. I returned; I raised it like a club, and with one blow

of the edge I cleft the fisherman's head. Oh! he bled, this
one!--rose-colored blood. It flowed into the water quite gently.

And I went away with a grave step. If I had been seen! Ah! I
should have made an excellent assassin.

October 25. The affair of the fisherman makes a great noise. His
nephew, who fished with him, is charged with the murder.

October 26. The examining magistrate affirms that the nephew is
guilty. Everybody in town believes it. Ah! ah!

October 27. The nephew defends himself badly. He had gone to the
village to buy bread and cheese, he declares. He swears that his

uncle had been killed in his absence! Who would believe him?
October 28. The nephew has all but confessed, so much have they

made him lose his head! Ah! Justice!
November 15. There are overwheming proofs against the nephew, who

was his uncle's heir. I shall preside at the sessions.
January 25, 1852. To death! to death! to death! I have had him

condemned to death! The advocate-general spoke like an angel! Ah!
Yet another! I shall go to see him executed!

March 10. It is done. They guillotined him this morning. He died
very well! very well! That gave me pleasure! How fine it is to

see a man's head cut off!
Now, I shall wait, I can wait. It would take such a little thing

to let myself be caught.
* * * * * * *

The manuscript contained more pages, but told of no new crime.
Alienist physicians to whom the awful story has been submitted

declare that there are in the world many unknown madmen; as
adroit and as terrible as this monstrous lunatic.

AN UNFORTUNATE LIKENESS
It was during one of those sudden changes of the electric light,

which at one time throws rays of exquisite pale pink, of a liquid
gold filtered through the light hair of a woman, and at another,

rays of bluish hue with strange tints, such as the sky assumes at
twilight, in which the women with their bare shoulders looked

like living flowers--it was, I say, on the night of the first of
January at Montonirail's, the daintypainter of tall, undulating

figures, of bright dresses, of Parisian prettiness--that tall
Pescarelle, whom some called "Pussy," though I do not know why,

suddenly said in a low voice:
"Well, people were not altogethermistaken, in fact, were only

half wrong when they coupled my name with that of pretty Lucy
Plonelle. She had caught me, just as a birdcatcher on a frosty

morning catches an imprudent wren on a limed twig--in fact, she
might have done whatever she liked with me.

"I was under the charm of her enigmatical and mocking smile, that
smile in which her teeth gleamed cruelly between her red lips,

and glistened as if they were ready to bite and to heighten the
pleasure of the most delightful, the most voluptuous, kiss by

pain.
"I loved everything in her--her feline suppleness, her languid

looks which emerged from her half-closed lids, full of promises
and temptation, her somewhat extremeelegance, and her hands,

those long, delicate white hands, with blue veins, like the
bloodless hands of a female saint in a stained glass window, and

her slender fingers, on which only the large blood-drop of a ruby
glittered.

"I would have given her all my remaining youth and vigor to have
laid my burning hands upon the back of her cool, round neck, and

to feel that bright, silk, golden mane enveloping me and
caressing my skin. I was never tired of hearing her disdainful,

petulant voice, those vibrations which sounded as if they
proceeded from clear glass, whose music, at times, became hoarse,

harsh, and fierce, like the loud, sonorous calls of the
Valkyries.

"Good heavens! to be her lover, to be her chattel, to belong to
her, to devote one's whole existence to her, to spend one's last

half-penny and to sink in misery, only to have the glory and the
happiness of possessing her splendid beauty, the sweetness of her

kisses, the pink and the white of her demonlike soul all to
myself, if only for a few months!

"It makes you laugh, I know, to think that I should have been
caught like that--I who give such good, prudent advice to my

friends--I who fear love as I do those quicksands and shoals
which appear at low tide and in which one may be swallowed up and

disappear!
"But who can answer for himself, who can defend himself against

such a danger, as the magneticattraction that inheres in such a
woman? Nevertheless, I got cured and perfectly cured, and that

quite accidentally. This is how the enchantment, which was
apparently so infrangible, was broken.

"On the first night of a play, I was sitting in the stalls close
to Lucy, whose mother had accompanied her, as usual. They

occupied the front of a box, side by side. From some
unsurmountable attraction, I never ceased looking at the woman

whom I loved with all the force of my being. I feasted my eyes on
her beauty, I saw nobody except her in the theater, and did not

listen to the piece that was being performed on the stage.
"Suddenly, however, I felt as if I had received a blow from a

dagger in my heart, and I had an insane hallucination. Lucy had
moved, and her pretty head was in profile, in the same attitude

and with the same lines as her mother. I do not know what shadow
or what play of light had hardened and altered the color of her

delicate features, effacing their ideal prettiness, but the more
I looked at them both, at the one who was young and the one who

was old, the greater the distressing resemblance became.
"I saw Lucy growing older and older, striving against those

accumulating years which bring wrinkles in the face, produce a
double chin and crow's-feet, and spoil the mouth. THEY ALMOST

LOOKED LIKE TWINS.
"I suffered so, that I thought I should go mad. Yet in spite of

myself, instead of shaking off this feeling and making my escape
out of the theater, far away into the noise and life of the

boulevards, I persisted in looking at the other, at the old one,
in examining her, in judging her, in dissecting her with my eyes.

I got excited over her flabby cheeks, over those ridiculous
dimples, that were half filled up, over that treble chin, that

dyed hair, those lusterless eyes, and that nose, which was a
caricature of Lucy's beautiful, attractive little nose.

"I had a prescience of the future. I loved her, and I should love
her more and more every day, that little sorceress who had so

despotically and so quickly conquered me. I should not allow any
participation or any intrigue from the day she gave herself to

me, and once intimately connected, who could tell whether, just
as I was defending myself against it most, the legitimate

termination--marriage--might not come?
"Why not give one's name to a woman whom one loves, and whom one

trusts? The reason was that I should be tied to a disfigured,
ugly creature, with whom I should not venture to be seen in

public. My friends would leer at her with laughter in their eyes,
and with pity in their hearts for the man who was accompanying

those remains.
"And so, as soon as the curtain had fallen, without saying good