A HORRIBLE STORY

Tuapeka Times, Volume I, Issue 12, 2 May 1868, Page 4

A HORRIBLE STORY

The Eastern King offered a priceless reward to the man who should invent for him a new pleasure. The latest chronicles of crime would seem to lead us to the conclusion that the heart of man, " deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," is capable, in its abominable madness and turpitude, of inventing a new pain. One H a shoemaker, living at La Villette, near Paris, has contrived, with the perverted ingenuity of a wholly bestial, but perhaps half-crazy mind, to inflict an entirely new species of anguish apon the woman who was miserable encmgli *to be liis wife. J?or a lengthened period he had been in the habit of • beating and otherwise brutally maltreating the unfortunate wretch. The man waß a drunk- ' ardj his principal reproach agaist the partner of his home was that she refused him the means to procure drink; and a few days^inee, in his endeavour to wriug his booty from her by torture, he flung her to the ground, put his knee on her chest, essayed to strangle her, and then gouged one of her eyes out. He said deliberately that he intended there and then to kill himself, and that she Bhould be a •spectatress ofhia death, and "shudder at his grimaces." He tied ber hand and foot, gagged her, and opening a knife swore that if she dared to stir he would at once cut her throat. Next he •lowly and coolly proceeded to hang himself to a huge nail which he' had driven into the wall, 'drinking while he was making bis preparations no less than fifteen glasses of rum. ' "Then, standing face to faoe before the pinioned sufferer, he kicked away the stool beneath him, and was duly strangled, his victim being compelled, as in a'hidious nightmare, helplessly to . witness the convulsions of his limbs and the distortion of his features. At last the woman contrived to liberate herself from; her bonds, and her shrieks brought up the 'neighbours and the police The man was dead ; and there is some consolation to think that the miscreant ehould have been his own executioner, and inflicted on himself the fate he so richly de. Berved. The tale would appear almost too in.credible for Dante j but we find it in " Le Droit," a grave legal journal, as trustworthy as the Old Bailey Sessions papers,—" Telegraph." ___________