ollowing notice was found in his handwriting:
"March 24th. On this date La Gala learnt to knit." Another criminal,
Crocco, tried hard to save his brother, "Lest," he said, "my race should
die out." Lacenaire was less troubled by the death-sentence than by
adverse criticisms of his bad verse and the fear of public contempt. "I
do not fear being hated," he is reported to have said, "but I dread
being despised--the tempest leaves traces of its passage, but unobserved
the humble flower fades."

Thus thieves are loth to confess that they are guilty of only petty
larceny, and are sometimes prompted by vanity to commit more serious
robberies. The same false shame is common to fallen women, among whom
contempt is incurred, not by excess of depravity but by the failure to
command high prices. Grellinier, a petty thief, boasted in court of
imaginary offences, with the desire of appearing in the light of a great
criminal. The crimes in the haunted castle, attributed by Holmes to
himself, were certainly in part inventions. The female poisoner,
Buscemi, when writing to her accomplice, signed herself, "Your Lucrezia
Borgia."

One of the most frequent causes of modern crime is the desire to gratify
personal vanity and to become notorious.

_Impulsiveness._ This is another and almost pathognomonical
characteristic of born criminals, and also, as we shall see later on, of
epileptics and the morally insane. That which in ordinary individuals is
only an eccentric and fugitive suggestion vanishing as soon as it
arises, in the case of abnormal subjects is rapidly translated into
action, which, although unconscious, is not the less dangerous. A youth
of this impulsive type, returning home one evening flushed with wine,
met a peasant leading his ass and cried out, "As I have not come to
blows with anyone to-day, I must vent my rage on this beast," at the
same time drawing his knife and plunging it several times into the poor
animal's body (Ladelci, _Il Vino_, Rome, 1868). Pinel describes a
morally insane subject, who was in the habit of giving way to his
passions, killing any horses that did not please him and thrashing his
political opponents. He even went to the length of throwing a lady down
a well, because she ventured to contradict him.

"The most trifling causes [remarks Tamburini, speaking of Sbro...]
that stand in the way of his wishes, provoke a fit of rage in which
he appears to lose all self-control, like little