person may be tempted in violation of instinct and better nature
to the commission of a crime, is that of love or passion.
Examples of this kind are frequent in the annals of crime. There
is none more striking than that of the Widow Gras and Natalis
Gaudry. Here a man, brave, honest, of hitherto irreproachable
character, is tempted by a woman to commit the most cruel and
infamous of crimes. At first he repels the suggestion; at last,
when his senses have been excited, his passion inflamed by the
cunning of the woman, as the jealous passion of Othello is played
on and excited by Iago, the patriotism 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