fortune secured, rejoin his wife. As if to help this cruel plan,
the young lady has developed a sentimental affection for her
relative. The wife goes to America, the husband marries the
young lady. He commences to poison her, but, in the presence of
her youth, beauty and affection for him, relents, hesitates to
commit a possibly unnecessary crime. He decides to forget and
ignore utterly his wife who is waiting patiently in America. A
year passes. The expectant wife gets no sign of her husband's
existence. She comes back to Europe, visits under a false name
the town in which her faithless husband and his bride are living,
discovers the truth and divulges the intended crime to the
authorities. A sentence of penal servitude for life rewards this
perfidious criminal.[9]


[9] Case of the Scheffer couple at Linz, cited by Sighele.


Derues said to a man who was looking at a picture in the Palais
de Justice: "Why study copies of Nature when you can look at
such a remarkable original as I?" A judge once told the present
writer that he did not go often to the theatre because none of
the dramas which he saw on the stage, seemed to him equal in in-

tensity to those of real life which came before him in the course
of his duties. The saying that truth is stranger than fiction
applies more forcibly to crime than to anything else. But the
ordinary man and woman prefer to take their crime romanticised,
as it is administered to them in novel or play. The true stories
told in this book represent the raw material from which works of