Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/521

 as was the valet Courtois, and both received heavy sentences, though not capital ones. The butler Renard nevertheless made a firm defence; claiming to he the victim of a tissue of vindictive falsehoods, by Courtois; and many arguments against his conviction were maintainable. He had a most excellent record, as a man and a servant, being already past middle life and made an excellent personal impression in the court-room. In fact, at this writing, the "Renard Case" is yet under appeal, and the two verdicts given may be set aside. All Paris crowded to this trial—a cause célèbre of the year. In the notable "Albinet-Leray Affair" occurring in 1908 in the Paris Criminal Assizes, in which were tried the audacious executants of a train-robbery—"The Affair of Train 16"—a group of homosexual associates and suggestions were in evidence. Albinet, the main agent of the robbery, was uranian; and his conviction was partly on the evidence of homosexuals, one of them, a certain Duros, of evil note. In the end of March, 1909, came before examination of a magistrate the murder of a Parisian lawyer and littérateur, Louis Farquharson-Fleurot, of about fifty-one years of age, found assassinated in his rooms in an apartment-house at No. 8, Rue du Mont-Thabor. Fleurot, though of excellent family and superiour education, had been in bad odour as member of the bar, but not actually dismissed from the roll, and was making a considerable income by shady litigations of all sorts. He was openly and notoriously homosexual; philosyrphetic even to bringing the worst class of street-pederasts to his lodgings. He had been obliged several times to move through complaints of his landlords or of fellow-tenants. He had "adopted" one young catamite, René B—, as his son or nephew, and had kept him handsomely, till a quarrel occurred. Fleurot once or twice had had ugly misadventures—robberies and assaults—due to the sort of male prostitutes he cultivated. He had last been seen alive when he was accompanying to his rooms, at four