On April 11, 1825, the body of Paul Louis Courier was found in a wood near his country home at Véretz. He had been assassinated. It was long believed that this was a political crime, “a kind of epilogue of secret vengeance in party politics” as Edmond Pilon puts it.[290] It might also have been the revenge of a philologist. Actually the shooting was the result of an embroglio with certain servants on his estate. Courier in 1814 had married Mlle Herminie Clavier, who managed his estate in his absence. She seems to have betrayed him both in business matters and affairs of the heart so that Courier separated from her and made new plans for the management of the estate. Five years after the murder the Department of Justice found that the assassins were certain servitors of Courier who had been dismissed because of their connivance with Madame Courier in her iniquities. Courier, whose dearest dream had been the pastoral life of Daphnis and Chloe, escaped the dangers of war and of prison only to be shot in the country he loved for petty personal spite. Paul Louis Courier would, I am sure, have been happy to have part of his fame rest on his precious new chapters of the Pastorals, and to know that his beautiful translation of their four books lives on in one new edition after another. VII _LUCIAN AND HIS SATIRIC ROMANCES: THE_ TRUE HISTORY _AND_ LUCIUS OR ASS “Lucian of Samosata [was] surnamed ‘The blasphemer,’ because in his dialogues he alleges that the things told of the gods are absurd.... He was at first an advocate in Antioch, but, having ill success in that, he turned to the composition of discourses, and his writings are innumerable. He is said to have been killed by dogs, he having been rabid against the truth. For in his ‘Life of Peregrinus’ he attacks Christianity and, wicked man, blasphemes against Christ himself. Wherefore for his madness he suffered meet punishment in this life, and hereafter with Satan he will be inheritor of the everlasting fire.”[291] This is the meagre biography by Suidas of the great satirist who through nearly all of the second century held up the mirror of his frankness to reflect images of the Greek and Roman world. Suidas’ misrepresentation of Lucian’s allusions to the Christians and his fanciful picture of the sophist’s end vilify much of this traditional vita. From Lucian’s own writings more facts may be assembled.