THE FRENCH RAILWAY MURDER.
THE French police, it is stated, have come to the conclusion that the recent murder of M. Barreme, the Prefect of the Eure, which has even moved the Chamber to a debate, was a, murder from private motives of revenge ; and we believe that this opinion, which we also offered on the first report of the. occurrence, will turn out to be correct. It has been our lot to. study in detail most of the very few railway murders committed in England, and it has always struck us that the public alarm caused by such occurrences was exaggerated, and that the usual. murderer, the murderer for gain, would rarely choose a railway, carriage for the scene of his crime. A criminal of that kind, if alone in a compartment with his victim, might be in. duced to kill him by the spectacle of his visible wealth;. as Muller was ; but he would hardly premeditate the killing-. Midler, it will be remembered, the man who so nearly escaped, wanted money to emigrate with, thought that Mr. Briggs's watch was worth the amount he needed, and yielded suddenly. and implicitly to the sordid temptation. It is possible, indeed; that he never intended murder at all, and hoped to get the watch and escape after merely stunning his victim ; but of that, of course, there is no satisfactory proof. The kind; of man, however, who murders by premeditation for gain. would usually see many objections to choosing a railway. carriage as the scene of his crime. He wants, in the first place, like the high-class burglar, to be sure that he shall; obtain a good booty before he runs so dreadful a risk ; and that knowledge must be very difficult to obtain. Unless he knows his victim, he cannot be sure that he is wealthy ; and even, if he is sure, he may not be certain that he is carrying part of his wealth about with him on a short railway journey. He may have tracked him from a Bank, but that is no proof that he is, carrying property ; while if the guess is true, the property upon. the sufferer's person is necessarily in its most traceable form, The cashiers of the Bank, the moment they see the dead man's name, know the number of every note and bond which on that day he had taken from the Bank ; and in France especially, every one of the agents de change, with whom notes or bonds must be cashed, is an ally of the police, Then, though a railway compartment seems to a nervous traveller singularly lonely and unprotected, an habitual criminal would hardly regard it as such. No other "room" in the world is liable to inspection every few minutes by men with trained eyes, with telegraphs at their disposal, and in full communica, tion with the police. The victim may not be an unobservant man, may be able to make a fight for his life, and, unless killed at once, is by no means so isolated that his screams• cannot be heard in neighbouring compartments. Throwing out a body is a difficult task, liable to observation both from the guard, and from passers-by. Jumping out of a train in motion is still. more difficult, is, indeed, except to those habitually accustomed to
it, a most dangerous operation, and so is quitting a train at an accidental stopping place. The guards think that means evasion of payment, and arrest at once, as a railway murderer in Italy has just found. To pass through a station just after a murder apparently unconcerned requires great nerve and decision ; and in spite of the excessively frequent evidence, we should doubt if a murderer by design, and still less a murderer by trade, ever quite forgot that his crime would involve the effusion of tell- tale blood. Taking all risks together, the risk of failure to get anything worth having, the risk of resistance, the risk of observa-
tion, and the risks surrounding escape, we should question if the
railway compartments would attract the most dreadfully criminal class. The railway did attract Lefroy, who was an inexperienced
criminal ; but it did not attract Peace, who was very nearly a murderer by trade, and it never has attracted the Irish bravos, who must have thought over most possibilities, and always prefer the road. They do not like to be shut up with the victim, and neither would the kind of habitual criminal likely to commit murder.
It is evident that M. Barreme's murder was premeditated. His assailant was doubly armed, with a life-preserver and small revolver intended to make no noise, an equipment most unlikely to be carried for any purpose of self-defence. People, however nervous, hate to be loaded with heavy weapons. It is evident, too, that the murderer knew the line, had studied where to throw the body, and had made up his mind fully before he entered the carriage, his attack having commenced almost the moment after the train had thoroughly cleared the Paris station. Six minutes did not elapse between the clearing of the station and the next stoppage of the train ; and in that interval the murderer had struck his blow, fired
his shot, and effected the throwing-out of the dead body,—
the latter, if, as appears, the door was not opened, a great effort of physical strength. The leaving of the money behind points to- the same conclusion. No murderer for gain would leave twenty-five pounds upon his victim, even if he were afraid of taking the watch,—which, however, as no one could see it till he pawned it, ho would not have been afraid of. The crime was premeditated, and was not committed for money ; and if not
committed for that end, what was its motive ? We should say, with the French police, almost certainly revenge, and probably revenge of a particular kind. Jealousy, though a constant cause of murder, usually requires provocation, and is seldom the origin of such a crime committed in cold blood, more especially in a country and in a class of society in which a man who had given cause for jealousy could not avoid a duel. M. Barreme, moreover, seems to have been a respectable man, an official of marl, wholly absorbed in his duties and his ambi- tions, in furtherance of which his short visit to Paris had been made. He could hardly, from the position of his Department, have discovered a Secret Society, and his friends have no Idea that his " removal" could be advantageous to any one, though the police are said to have a notion that some of his wife's family may, for pecuniary reasons, have desired his death. That is possible, but most unlikely ; men hunting for family heritages rarely taking such risky steps. They poison, but do not use bludgeons. There remains revenge, which, though an uncommon motive in England, where hatred stops short of murder, and men do not fight duels —that practice always helps to exaggerate the evil but in- stinctive notion that revenge may be a duty—is by no means so uncommon on the Continent. A considerable proportion of the murders reported thence are murders of revenge, and an active Prefect may have given, in the course of his business, the most deadly offence. We do not mean to criminals. Colonel Chesterton, after an experience of thirty years, declares, in his book ou prisons, that convicts, unless perchance innocent, are rarely malignant against the agents of the law, whom they regard as men doing, and doing fairly, the business they live by, and whom they do not, there- fore, expect to favour them. The murderer, moreover, in this case was no convict, but a rather impressive person of late middle age, who struck the porter who stopped him when he got out at Mantes on the wrong side of the carriage as quite above suspicion. The deadly offence given by the Prefect—who, it must be added, has little to do with criminals—was probably the dismissal, or report which had caused the dismissal, of some minor official. Such a dismissal in France is considered a deadly blow, destruc- tive at once of character, income, and prospects ; and its subject might very well be a brooding man, who imagined, as so many people do, that he was the victim of a personal &alike, and in his rage and disappointment, and, perhaps, suffering, would decide on a full revenge. He would know the line, would know the Prefect's habits, would be able to enter the carriage without exciting his suspicions, and would act with the half-insane decision and fearlessness of the actual murderer, who, though he obviously wished not to be caught, and laid down the only relic of the Prefect not thrown out—a railway rug—in a by-street of Mantes, still used his return ticket to go back to Paris. He took no money, of course,—that. would have spoiled his revenge ; and if the anonymous letter published in Paris was really received, and was not a hoax, we should say he wrote it. It would be just like a man fired with revenge, for wrong he was powerless to redress—the wrong, of course, need not have been real—to be dissatisfied until he had told the world why his victim died. his animosity would be stimulated to that by the public pity for the man he hated. If we con- trolled the police of the Eure, and wished to vindicate justice we should search first of all among such older officials of the
Department as had been dismissed during M. Barreme's regime, and might have attributed to him the termination of their careers, with any subsequent misfortunes.
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