but he knows his man, is sure that he will have no difficulty in
securing the other's co-operation in his felonious purpose.
Armand Peltzer should have lived in the Italy of the Renaissance.

The crime was cunningly devised, and methodically and
successfully accomplished. Only an over-anxiety to secure the
fruits of it led to its detection. Barre and Lebiez are a
perfect criminal couple, both young men of good education,
trained to better things, but the one idle, greedy and vicious,
the other cynical, indifferent, inclined at best to a lazy
sentimentalism. Barre is a needy stockbroker at the end of
his tether, desperate to find an expedient for raising the wind,
Lebiez a medical student who writes morbid verses to a skull and
lectures on Darwinism. To Barre belongs the original
suggestion to murder an old woman who sells milk and is reputed
to have savings. But his friend and former schoolfellow, Lebiez,
accepts the suggestion placidly, and reconciles himself to the
murder of an unnecessary old woman by the same argument as that
used by Raskolnikoff in "Crime and Punishment" to justify the
killing of his victim.

In all the cases here quoted the couples are essentially criminal
couples. From whichever of the two comes the first suggestion of
crime, it falls on soil already prepared to receive it; the
response to the suggestion is immediate. In degree of guilt
there is little or nothing to choose between them. But the more
interesting instances of dual crime are those in which one
innocent hitherto of crime, to whom it is morally repugnant, is
persuaded by another to the commission of a criminal act, as
Cassius persuades Brutus; Iago, Othello. Cassius is a criminal