of Brutus artfully exploited by Cassius,
he yields to the repeated solicitation and does a deed in every way
repugnant to his normal character. Nothing seems so blinding in its
effect on the moral sense as passion. It obscures all sense of humour,
proportion, congruity; the murder of the man or woman who stands in
the way of its full enjoyment becomes an act of inverted justice to
the perpetrators; they reconcile themselves to it by the most perverse
reasoning until they come to regard it as an act, in which they may
justifiably invoke the help of God; eroticism and religion are often
jumbled up together in this strange medley of conflicting emotions.

A woman, urging her lover to the murder of her husband, writes of the
roses that are to deck the path of the lovers as soon as the crime is
accomplished; she sends him flowers and in the same letter asks if he
has got the necessary cartridges. Her husband has been ill; she hopes
that it is God helping them to the desired end; she burns a candle
on the altar of a saint for the success of their murderous plan.(4) A
jealous husband setting out to kill his wife carries in his pockets,
beside a knife and a service revolver, a rosary, a medal of the Virgin
and a holy image.(5) Marie Boyer in the blindness of her passion and
jealousy believes God to be helping her to get rid of her mother.

(4) Case of Garnier and the woman Aveline, 1884.

(5) Case of the Comte
de Cornulier: "Un An de Justice," Henri Varennes, 1901.

A lover persuades the wife to get rid of her husband. For a whole year
he instils the poison into her soul until she can struggle no longer
against the obsession; he offers to do the deed, but she writes that she
would rather suffer all the risks and consequences herself. "How many
times," she writes, "have I wished to go away, leave home, but it meant
leaving my children, losing them for ever.. that made my lover jealous,
he believed that I could not bring myself to leave my husband. But if my
husband were out of the way then I would keep my children, and my
lover would see in my crime a striking proof of my devotion." A curious
farrago of slavish passion, motherly love and murder.(6)

(6) Case of Madame Weiss and the engineer Roques. If I may be permitted
the reference, there is an account of this case and that of Barre and
Lebiez in my book "French Criminals of the Nineteenth Century."

There are some women such as Marie Boyer and Gab