A FRENCH TRAGEDY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 225, 28 January 1911, Page 9

A FRENCH TRAGEDY.

AN OLD MAN'S CIUME. TWO MURDERS AND TWO SUICIDES. An old man of 75, Jean Clanel, has committed suicide, after murdering his niece and one of her daughters at the villagers of Loupian, near Montpellier. The story, as told by Mr, John N. Raphael in the Loudon Daily Express, reads like a transcript from Zola. Jean Clanel was a peasant who prospered on an inheritance. By strict economy—by rising before dawn and going to bed at dusk to have candle-light —by sheer hard work of his own hands, and by sobriety and thrift, Clanel had put by a considerable fortune. Only three months ago he was perfectly happy. His life held two loves —his wife and his farm. He had married young, his wife had worked with him, had shareu his joys and sorrows, and the two old people had not been parted for a day since they were married 50 years ago. They had no children. Three months ago Mme. Clanel caught cold, took to her bed, and died. And Clanel, though the old man was as strong as ever, took no further interest in his farm, his work, or anything except the hope that death would not be long in coming to turn. Six weeks ago the peasant farmer formed a resolution. There he drew up a deed of gift by which he made over his farm and everything on it to his niece, Mme. Ausscnac, who was in return to board and lodge her uncle, and to give him weekly pocketmoney. Arrangements of this kind are quite usual in France. Mme. Aussenac, with her husband and two daughters—girls of nine and fivecame to live at the farm, and did all in their power to cheer the old man. But they could not console him. Clanel became morose, and took to reading books of law—those books which, as Zola has said and Balzac said before him, are the cause of more crime in France than any "penny dreadful." Clanel found out that if niece and her daughters died he would become their only heir. He would be the owner of his farm again, and this'time he would know better than to sign it away. STRANGE FLAVOR IN THE SOUP. He brooded on the notion, and one | Monday when the four sat down to supper (M. Aussenac had been called to Montpellier on business) one of the children noticed a strange flavor in the soup. The old man sat and watched them consume it. He knew what the strange flavor was. On the Monday night Mme. Aussenac and her daughters were taken violently ill. A doctor was sent for from Mont- - pellier, spent the night in the farmhouse, and next morning the whole village knew that Mme. Ausscnac and her daughters had been poisoned. But no one suspected the old man—there was no apparent motive for such a ghastly crime. Mme. Aussenac and the elder child got better; the younger one is still in danger, and it was by the child's bedside on the Tuesday that the horrible truth dawned on Mme. Aussenac. She taxed her uncle with it. Clanel looked at her and laugher. "You must be mad," he said, and went out for a walk. He remained away for some hours, and, to Mme. Aussenac's astonishment and alarm, her husband did not return from Montpellier. Clanel had walked out to meet him, and had sent him back to Montpellier to see the lawyer with some plausible story about a flaw in the title deeds. It was night when M. Aussenac returned. All was dark in the farmhouse, and the door was locked on the inside M. Aussenac shook it, hanged at it, and listened. At first he heard nothing; then he heard his youngest daughter's voice call to him from the room upstairs, and heard a faint moan. He could not get in at the ground floor, but the shutters were not closed upstairs. He was an active man, and climbed up a piece of piping, broke a window on the first floor, and got into his daughter's bedroom. The room looked like a charnel house. On the floor was Mme. Aussenac, lying in a pool of blood. Her head was terribly battered. On the bed lay the elder daughter, with her throat cut from ear to ear, and on the other bed the child of .five lay moaning. THE TERRIBLE TRUTH. It was some time before M. Aussenac learned the terrible truth. Jean Clanel had come back about an hour before, and there had been another quarrel between him and his niece. "He tried to put something in my medicine," said the child, "and mother would not let him do so. Then he got very angry, and said that mother had robbed him of bis home. All of a sudden he rushed across the room. Mother had been ironing our clothes when he came in, and the iron was on the board. He took it up, and he killed mother with it. "Alice and I cried and begged Uncle Clanel to spare me. He looked dreadful. Alice was clinging round his knees, and I lay here and cried. I tried to get up and to run away, but I could not. Then Uncle Clanel killed Alice with a knife." M. Aussenac asked the child where her grand-unele was, but she had fainted, and, with murder in his heart, the man left the room to look for him. He did not find him. Jean Clanel had heard him when he came to the front door, and had run upstairs to the garret. M. Aussenac searched room after room—the garret last of all. But as he burst in there (the door had been locked) he heard a shout of savage triumph. The window of the garret was open. Hanging from a rusty nail there was a strip of blue linen —a piece of Jean Clanel's smock. M. Aussenac ran to the window, looked out, and ran downstairs again. He unlocked the farm door, and there, upon the stones in front of it, he found the murderer of his wife and daughter. But the old man was dead. He knew that notning could have saved him from M. Aussenac's vengeance, and he had thrown himself out of the garret window. Mme. Aussenac lived for an hour, and recovered consciousness for a few minutes—long enough to confirm her little daughter's story. On the Wednesday morning a villager found the body of M. Aussenac in a pond 'half a mile iiway. He could not, and would not, survive his wife's death, and ■he bad drowned himself, leaving a letter which told the whole story.