as 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 blood-stains 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 Abbe 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 red-handed 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'ABBE

The childhood of the Abbe 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 hi