EFFECT OF BROODING.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5159, 1 August 1927, Page 1

EFFECT OF BROODING.

TRAGEDY AT ORLEANS. RESULT OF A TRIVIAL FINE. A trivial quarrel betwec-n neighbours and an equally trivial Police Court case ended at Orleans in a terrible domestic tragedy. Antoine Gruinmel, wi*h liisi wife- and four-year-old daughter, occupied a room in the Rue des Pastoureaux, and, as their landlord saw nothing of them one morning and could get no answer to his knockings at their door, he called upon the police to break in. The room was tilled with fumes from a charcoal stove-'. Grummel was lying unconscious on the bed beside the body of his, child, whose throat had been cut, and he died soon after removal to hospital.

His wife lay on the floor, near the stove, half-strangled with a cord, one end of which was attached to a trunk. Her life was saved, and on being asked to explain the drama she told ah amazing story of a molehill which became a mountain.

A short time before she struck a neighbour during a quarrel, and for this was fined five francs at the local Police Court. But, small as it, was, this fine and the costs, it involved were more than the coupile could pay, and so, plunged in despair, Grummel and his wife resolved to commit suicide together, after killing the child as she slept.

As she and her husband lay together with their he,ads near the charcoal stove, the woman found the process of suffocation too slow, and tried to hasten her end by strangulation.