Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/213

Rh orator was permitted to praise him as a political man without interruption from the delegate.

One day, irritated because he had been denied some permission, he abruptly took his leave, declaring that he was not born to be a servant, and returned to Switzerland to work as a marble polisher. But even from Switzerland he kept continually imploring his old employer to take him back, declaring in a letter which revealed symptoms of a persistent delirium that "he probably would not receive him again because he did not go to mass"; which indicates substantially that he had not that repugnance for the antianarchical life of a servant which he manifested previously and afterward.

Whether all at once or not he became an extreme anarchist. He signed and composed anarchist hymns. Suspected by his comrades of not being zealous enough, and also perhaps of being a spy, he decided to strike a blow against some prince; he chose the empress as his victim possibly because he had suffered his first annoyance in Austria. He, who had never killed a fly, had a rude instrument prepared—a file; practiced for a considerable time, perhaps a month, at striking with it, and having committed the crime, tried to escape. When stopped by two citizens he did not resist, and behaved in a very different way from common criminals, therein exhibiting a tinge of insanity. He, for example, although he knew French very well, denied it and demanded an interpreter in the interrogations. He sang and laughed continually, and was glad that he had dealt his victim a good blow, and that he had struck deep with the instrument, boasting that he had used a file instead of a dagger. He was, besides, solicitous of publicity, declaring to the reporters and the judges that he had done the deed all alone, that he had left his captain to accomplish his idea, that he had been an anarchist for thirteen years, etc. In two ungrammatical and very long letters to the journal Bon Marzio, in N'aples, chosen evidently because he had seen it at his master's, he declared that he was not a criminal born, as Lombroso would have it, nor a madman, and that he had not been incited by misery but by conviction, because, if all would do as he had done, middle-class society would soon disappear. He knew that this single assassination would be of no avail, but he had, nevertheless, committed it for an example.

He wrote to the President of the Swiss Confederation that he would rather be tried at Lucerne, because the death penalty was in force there, and repeated the statement to the judges; he wrote to his master that he was more worthy of him than ever; he replied to the reporters and the judges who reproached him with having killed