he
strong-minded. A few of the more determined progressists, denying
the sacred laws of property, which the Saint-Simonians were already
attacking under their abstract theories of political economy, went
further.

"Pere Pingret," they said, "was the real author of the crime. By
hoarding his gold that man robbed the nation. What enterprises might
have been made fruitful by his useless money! He had barred the way of
industry, and was justly punished."

They pitied the poor murdered servant-woman, but Denise, Tascheron's
sister, who resisted the wiles of lawyers and did not give a single
answer at the trial without long consideration of what she ought to say,
excited the deepest interest. She became in their minds a figure to
be compared (though in another sense) with Jeannie Deans, whose piety,
grace, modesty and beauty she possessed.

Francois Tascheron continued, therefore, to excite the curiosity of
not only all the town but all the department, and a few romantic women
openly testified their admiration for him.

"If there is really in all this a love for some woman high above him,"
they said, "then he is surely no ordinary man, and you will see that he
will die well."

The question, "Will he speak out,--will he not speak?" gave rise to many
a bet.

Since the burst of rage with which Tascheron received his sentence, and
which was so violent that it might have been fatal to persons about him
in the court-room if the gendarmes had not been there to master him, the
condemned man threatened all who came near him with the fury of a
wild beast; so that the jailers were obliged to put him into a
straight-jacket, as much to protect his life as their own from the
effects of his anger. Prevented by that controlling power from doing
violence, Tascheron gave vent to his despair by convulsive jerks which
horrified his guardians, and by words and looks which the middle-ages
would have attributed to demoniacal possession. He was so young that
many women thought pitifully of a life so full of passion about to be
cut off forever. "The Last Day of a Condemned Man," that mournful
elegy, that useless plea against the penalty of death (the mainstay of
society!), which had lately been published, as if expressly to meet this
case, was the topic of all conversations.

But, above all, in the mind of every one, stood that invisible unknown
woman, her feet in blood, raised aloft by the trial as it were on a
pedestal,--torn, no doubt, b