The most famous case of all is one of the most recent, and made the reputation of M. Macé, the well-known chief of the French detective police. Here a suspicious parcel had been found in a well in the centre of an apartment house. A second parcel was presently recovered, with identical contents. Both parcels were tied up in black glazed calico, the ends of both were knotted in a peculiar way, and both were stitched with black cotton. These facts threw suspicion upon some journeyman tailor. It was soon discovered that an inmate of the apartment house, who was a working sempstress, received the visits of a tailor, who brought her work. Attention was thus directed to this man Voirbo. His antecedents were investigated, and it was found that an aged man, a miser with means, often in Voirbo’s company, had disappeared. The crowning point in this case was the cleverness shown by M. Macé in discovering that the dismemberment had taken place in Voirbo’s own rooms. The tiled floor in the living room sloped in one direction, and M. Macé, readily judging that if a body had been disposed of in the room, the blood would have flowed that way, at once emptied a decanter upon the floor. The running water led him to a spot under which, when laid bare, a quantity of dark matter, proved later to be dry human blood, was disinterred. Voirbo was challenged with the crime, and confessed, but before execution committed suicide. Crimes of the character indicated above are numerous enough in the criminal annals of France, but they by no means constitute the whole of her calendar of crime; and in the next chapter we pass on to others not less fearsome. CHAPTER VI CELEBRATED CASES Parricide--Benoit and his mother--Donon Cadot--Combinations for crime--Soufflard and Le Sage--The mysterious case of Madame Lafarge--A strange story--The Duc de Choiseul-Praslin kills his wife in the faubourg St. Honoré--Evidence clearly against him--Poisons himself and escapes justice--Suspected in Paris that special favor was shown him on account of his rank--Failure of justice in this case one of the supposed causes of the French Revolution of 1848. The crime of parricide was so little conceivable in ancient law that no mention of it appears in the early codes. Six centuries of civilisation elapsed before the Roman law-makers devised a special penalty for the child who slew his parent. The guilty offspring was sewn up in a leather sack, and drowned in the sea; in this it was the custom later to enclose a dog, a cock, a viper and a monkey. The case of Benoit, quoted below, was by no means isolated. At the trial of Edward Donon Cadot in 1844, the public prosecutor admitted that there had been ninety-five parricides in France in the course of ten years. Only a short time before had the special penalty inflicted in addition to death, that of mutilation by striking off the offending hand, been suppressed.