Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

THE MINERALOGICAL MUSEUM.

A few days afterwards the Court of Peers met in secret conclave, when it received from the chancellor and president a report of the examination through which the accused had passed. The whole tendency of the report was to establish the guilt of the accused. “This presumption,” concluded Duke Pasquier, “was, unhappily, only too well founded. The prisoner has pronounced judgment and condemnation on himself. He succumbed seven days and a half after the moment when, with atrocious barbarity, he immolated the most innocent, the most pure, the most interesting of victims. This interval, however, was sufficient to enable the ordinary judges, pursuing their inquiry on the part of the Chamber of Peers, to bring completely to light the guilt of the accused, and the horrible circumstances which, from day to day, have made it still more clear.[{130}]”

The death of the criminal brought the labours of the court to an end. “But yet,” said the president, as he concluded his communication of the report, “it was to be desired that the reparation should have been as complete as was the crime itself. In such an affair as this the principle of equality before the law should have been proclaimed more forcibly than ever.”

The body of the Duc de Praslin was buried secretly at night on the 26th of August, in the southern cemetery, his grave not being marked even by a cross.

Mlle. Deluzy was taken before a police magistrate, when, on a proof of alibi, the case was dismissed, and she was set at liberty.

This terrible affair had beyond doubt a political effect, from the conviction with which it inspired the French people generally that there existed in France one law for the poor and another for the rich. The Court of Peers did its duty, and, in its desire to show how fully it recognised the principle of equality before the law, it communicated every document connected with the trial to the public press. But the duke, in spite of the crushing evidence against him, had been allowed to remain in his own house, when an ordinary criminal would have been at once taken to prison. No ordinary criminal, again, would have been in a position to obtain poison. The circumstances, moreover, under which the duke had been buried were suspicious; and many believed that he did not die at all of the poison—so slow in its action—but that he was enabled to cross the Channel and reach England, where, at the moment of his death being publicly announced in the Chamber of Peers, he was quietly living.

So much for the remarkable trials of which the Luxemburg has been the scene.

When, in 1848, the Republic was for the second time established in France, the Chamber of Peers was abolished; and in the spring of the great revolutionary year the members of the commission for the organisation of labour, wearing their blouses, seated themselves on the softly-cushioned benches of what had been formerly known as la chambre haute. It was on the recommendation of this commission that “national workshops” were opened, in order to satisfy the claims of the unemployed, who loudly asserted their “right to labour”; and it was on the closing of the national workshops, whose cost the Government was at last unable to meet, that the formidable insurrection of June, 1848, broke out. With the re-establishment of the Senate, under the Second Empire, the Luxemburg Palace became once more its place of meeting.