“Lecœur’s case,” replied the doctor, “presents many other peculiarities which cannot fail to be significant in the eyes of a scientist. Like so many born criminals his senses are blunted. Thus I found, when I examined him, that he was tattooed in every part of his body. You would be surprised at the lewd fancy shown in the choice of scenes and symbols painted on his skin.” “Really?” said M. de Terremondre. “The skin of this patient,” said Dr. Fornerol, “really ought to be properly prepared and preserved in our museum. But it is not the character of the tattooing that I want to insist upon, but rather the number of the pictures and their arrangement on the body. Certain parts of the operation must have caused the patient an amount of pain which could scarcely have been bearable to a person of ordinary sensibility.” “There you are making a mistake!” exclaimed M. de Terremondre. “It is evident that you don’t know my friend Jilly. Yet he is a very well-known man. Jilly was quite young when, in 1885 or ’86, he made the tour of the world with his friend Lord Turnbridge on the yacht _Old Friend_. Jilly swears that throughout the whole voyage, through storms and calm, neither Lord Turnbridge nor himself ever put foot on deck for a single moment. The whole time they remained in the cabin drinking champagne with an old top-man of the marines who had been taught tattooing by a Tasmanian chief. In the course of the voyage this old top-man covered the two friends from head to foot with tattoo marks, and Jilly returned to France adorned with a fox-hunt that comprises as many as three hundred and twenty-four figures of men, women, horses and dogs. He is always delighted to show it when he sups with boon companions at an inn. Now I really cannot say whether Jilly is abnormally insensitive to pain, but what I can tell you is that he is a fine fellow, and a man of honour and that he is incapable of....” “But,” asked M. Bergeret, “do you think it right that this butcher’s boy should be guillotined? For you confess that there are such things as born criminals, and in your own phrase it seems that Lecœur was only partially responsible for his acts, through a congenital predisposition to crime.” The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Then what would you do with him?” he asked. “As a matter of fact,” replied M. Bergeret, “I am but little interested in the fate of this particular man. But I am, nevertheless, opposed to the death penalty.” “Let’s hear your reasons, Bergeret,” said Mazure, the archivist, for to him, living as he did in admiration of ’93 and the Terror, the idea of the guillotine carried with it mystic suggestions of moral beauty. “For my part, I would prohibit the death penalty in common law, but re-establish it in political cases.”