with blood, the murder had no doubt been
committed. The doctor of the village gave it as
his opinion, that the unfortunate woman had
been outraged before being murdered, and that
she had been dead for some hours. There
were footsteps of a man's foot discovered in
the snow, leading from the window of the room
in which the priest slept, to the outside door of
the room opening into the garden in which
the murder had taken place, and these marks
corresponded exactly in size with a pair of shoes
which were found hidden under some rubbish in
the garden, which were dirty as having been
lately used, and were also spotted with blood.
These shoes were recognised as belonging to
the priest. In the same place a white cotton
handkerchief, upon which some person had
evidently wiped blood from his hands and fingers,
was also found, and this also was proved to
belong to the priest. The woman had not been
murdered for the sake of whatever money or
valuables she had about her, for her purse,
containing three or four gold pieces and some
silver, was found on a chair near the bed, and
hanging round her neck were a small gold
cross, and a silver box or case such as are
used in Roman Catholic countries to contain
relics. No person had been seen near the
priest's house during the day or evening previous
to the murder, and the old housekeeper declared
that, during the night in which the deed had
been committed, she had not heard any noise or
struggle. But it was shown that, as her room
was some distance from that in which the
murdered woman had slept, she might not have heard
what was taking place there, even if there had
been a noise. It was, however, proved that the
priest's room was so near the room in which the
murder had taken place, that it was almost
impossible for him not to have heard a disturbance
there. The priest himself declared that he
had slept sound, and had heard nothing. The
shoes which were found in the garden he
acknowledged to be his, but said they had been
kept for some considerable time in a cupboard
in the room where the murdered woman had
slept, as they were a pair which he did not use in
the winter months. The handkerchief he also
said was his, but declared that, on the previous
evening at supper, he had lent it to the woman,
who had told him she had none of her own, to tie
round her head during the night. He could
not account for the razor being found in the
room. Altogether, the evidence against him
was considered so strong that he was sent to
prison, and, in due time, was brought to trial,
on the accusation of having outraged and then
murdered the woman who had slept in his house.

In those days the public feeling and
prejudice against priests were very strong in
France. Moreover, then as now, every man
put on his trial in that country was considered
guilty until he could prove himself innocent.
The priest was tried, cross-questioned, badgered,
and questioned again, until he hardly knew what
he said or what he denied. The evidence against
him was purely circumstantial, but it was
strongly adverse. Moreover, it came out—or
was brought to light by the Procureur-Royal—
that, long ago, ten years before he became a
priest, when he was a mere boy, he had been
strongly suspected of an intrigue with a
married woman. Of course, this fact—which, in
England, would not for a moment have been
admitted in evidence—was made the most of.
To make a long story short, he was found guilty
of both charges, and condemned to death, from
which he was saved at the last moment by court
influence, as the Bourbons, who were then in
power, disliked the idea of a priest suffering an
ignominious death on the scaffold. His sentence
was commuted to the galleys for life, and he
was sent off, a condemned felon, to work in
chains for the rest of his days in the Bagne at
Brest.

This unfortunate man was chained to a
prisoner convicted of most atrocious crimes,
and, day or night, night or day, the chain
that linked these two together was never
undone. The blasphemy which sounded all day
and every day in his ears, was augmented
tenfold by the miscreants who surrounded him
when they discovered that he had been, and,
indeed, was yet, a minister of religion. By
day, in cold, or wet, or heat, he had to
toil in the dockyards at work, which he had
neither the strength of body to endure, nor the
knowledge how to make the best of. Blows
and oaths from the prisoners' warders were
amongst the least of the evils he had to submit
to in mute dispair. All prisoners condemned
in France to the galleys were treated not only
worse than the brutes that perish, but as if the
chief end and aim of their punishment were to
harden them in vice, and make them reckless of
the laws of God and man. But this unfortunate
priest was treated far worse than the others, for
he was the everlasting butt, and at him were
levied all the most horrible jokes, of all his
fellow-prisoners.

How he endured this existence, after his
peaceful life as a country parish priest, seems
little short of a miracle. And yet he did
endure it, not only for a few, but for more
than four-and-twenty years. He had been all
this time a condemned galley-slave, when a
soldier in one of the Trench colonies, being on
his death-bed, confessed, first in private to a
priest, and afterwards publicly before the
authorities, how he was the real culprit who had
committed the crime for which poor Monsieur
Flammand had been judged guilty. He gave full and
particular details how he had entered the room
where the girl slept, with the intention of stealing
whatever he could find. How he had found the
woman sleeping there, had committed the double
crime of which the priest had been accused,
and had used the shoes, which he found in
the cupboard, for the purpose of throwing
suspicion on the priest, making it appear as if the
latter had walked from his own window across
the garden to the door of the girl's room. The
handkerchief he declared he had found on the bed,
but did not know that it belonged to the priest.