This view, however, is at once seen to be fallacious, (even leaving
aside the delirium, which might have been the effect of imprisonment),
if we remember that, as has already been said, frugality and
unselfishness are special characteristics of the mattoid, and, not
seldom, also of the insane, some of whom seem to have more affection for
their country, and for humanity in general, than for their families and
themselves, and if we notice the indifference or even pleasure with
which, in his writings, he refers to the murders committed by his
countrymen, when, “to the sound of axes, they make foreigners give them
money,” above all, the enjoyment with which he records the cruel
practical joke played on a poor man who was very fond of his cherry
tree, by digging up the latter, bringing it back stripped of its fruit,
and leaving it at his front door. This morbid apathy is especially
revealed in the want of emotion shown after the crime, in the face of
the anger of the populace which was let loose against him. Yet even the
greatest fanatics among political assassins, such as Orsini, Sand, and
Nobiling, have been overwhelmed by emotion after the deed, and have
often attempted suicide.
The true motive of the act is quite sufficient to prove this: being
dismissed from his situation on account of his political vagaries,
arrested as a vagabond, and, in addition, ill-used by the police, he
thought--with a vanity as boundless as his impotence to gratify it, or
even to live--of imitating the heroes he had heard talked of in the
clubs (and against whom he had himself declaimed), so as to find a way
of ending his life by the hand of another.
“As I found myself ill-used by my employers, and felt a horror of life,
I formed the design of assassinating the king, so as not to have to kill
myself,” he said to the magistrate, immediately after his arrest. To the
judge Azzaritti, “I attempted the king’s life in the certainty that I
should be killed.” In fact, two days previously, he had been much more
occupied with his dismissal from his place than with projects of
regicide; and at his arrest he did all he could to make his situation
more serious, reminding the delegate that he had forgotten his
revolutionary card on which was written, “Death to the King! long live
the Republic!” It was a case of _indirect_ suicide, such as Maudsley,
Crichton, Esquirol,[430] and Krafft-Ebing have recorded in great
numbers. These, however, are only committed by the insane, or by
cowardly and immoral men; and I insist upon this motive all the more
that he formed at the same time the means of satisfying that incoherent
vanity which in him predominated over the love of life. It is well known
that many vain suicidal maniacs enjoy the sight of their own death
surrounded by pomp, like the Englishman who had a mass composed and
executed in public, and shot himself while the _Requiescat_ was being
chanted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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