The crimes of the French population are generally of a melodramatic order. The temperament of the nation is eminently theatrical; and the multitude of minor theatres scattered through France, naturally sustain this original tendency. A villain in the south of France, lately constructed a sort of machinery for murder, which was evidently on the plan of the trap-doors and banditti displays of the Porte St Martin. Hiring an empty stable, he dug a pit in it of considerable depth. The pit was covered with a framework of wood, forming a floor, which, on the pulling of a string, gave way, and plunged the victim into a depth of twenty feet. But the contriver was not satisfied with his attempt to break the bones of the unfortunate person whom he thus entrapped. He managed to have a small chamber filled with some combustible in the side of the pit, which was to be set on fire, and, on the return of the platform to its place, suffocate his detenu with smoke. Whether he had performed any previous atrocities in this way, or whether the present instance was the commencement of his profession of homicide, is not told. By some means or other, having inveigled a stout countrywoman, coming with her eggs and apples to market, into his den, she no sooner trod upon the frame, than the string was pulled, it turned, and we may conceive with what astonishment and terror she must have felt herself plunged into a grave with the light of day shut out above. Fortunately for her, the match which was to light the combustibles failed, and she thus escaped suffocation. Her cries, however, were so loud, that they attracted some of the passers-by, and the villain attempted to take to flight. He was, however, seized, and given into the hands of justice.
An action was lately brought by an old lady against a dealer in curiosities, for cheating her in the matter of antiques. Her taste was not limited to the oddities of the present day, and, in the dealer, she found a person perfectly inclined to gratify her with wonders. He had sold her a model of the Alexandrian library, a specimen of the original type invented by Memnon the Egyptian, and a manuscript of the first play acted by Thespis. These had not exhausted the stock of the dealer: he possessed the skin of a giraffe killed in the Roman amphitheatre; the head of King Arthur's spear; and the breech of the first cannon fired at the siege of Constantinople. The jury, however, thought that the virtuoso having ordered those curiosities, ought to pay for them, and brought in a verdict for the dealer.
The French consul has been no sooner installed, than he has begun to give the world provocatives to war. His legion of honour is a military noblesse, expressly intended to make all public distinction originate in the army; for the few men of science decorated with its star are not to be compared with the list of soldiers, and even they are chiefly connected with the department of war as medical men, practical chemists, or engineers.
His next act was to fix the military establishment of France at 360,000 men; his third act, in violation of his own treaties, and of all the feelings of Europe, was to make a rapid invasion of Switzerland, thus breaking down the independence of the country, and seizing, in fact, the central fortress of the Continent. His fourth act has been the seizure of Piedmont, and its absolute annexation to France. By a decree of the Republic, Piedmont is divided into six departments, which are to send seventeen deputies to the French legislature. Turin is declared to be a provincial city of the Republican territory; and thus the French armies will have a perpetual camp in a country which lays Italy open to the invader, and will have gained a territory nearly as large as Scotland, but fertile, populous, and in one of the finest climates of the south. Those events have excited the strongest indignation throughout Europe. We have already discovered that the peace was but a truce; that the cessation of hostilities was but a breathing-time to the enemy; that the reduction of our armies was precipitate and premature; and that, unless the fears of the French government shall render it accessible to a sense of justice, the question must finally come to the sword.
Schiller's play of the "Robbers" is said to have propagated the breed of highwaymen in Germany. To ramble through the country, stop travellers on the highway, make huts in the forest, sing Bedlamite songs, and rail at priests and kings, was the fashion in Germany during the reign of that popular play. It was said, a banditti of students from one of the colleges had actually taken the road, and made Carl Moor their model. All this did very well in summer, but the winter probably cooled their enthusiasm; for a German forest, with its snow half a dozen feet deep, and the probability of famine, would be a formidable trial to the most glowing mysticism.
But an actual leader of banditti has been just arrested, whose exploits in plunder have formed the romance of Germany for a considerable period. The confusion produced by the French war, and the general disturbance of the countries on both sides of the Rhine, have at once awakened the spirit of license, and given it impunity. A dashing fellow named Schinderhannes, not more than three-and-twenty years of age, but loving the luxuries of life too well to do without them, and disliking the labour required for their possession, commenced a general system of plunder down the Rhine. He easily organized a band, composed, I believe, of deserters from the French and Austrian troops, who preferred wholesale robbery to being shot in either service at the rate of threepence a-day; and for a while nothing could be more prosperous than their proceedings. Their leader, with all his daring, was politic, professing himself the friend of the poor, standing on the best terms with the peasantry, scattering his money in all directions with the lavishness of a prince, and professing to make war only on the nobility, the rich clergy, and the Jew merchants especially—the German Jews being always supposed by the people to be the grand depositories of the national wealth. But this favouritism among the peasantry was of the highest service to his enterprizes. It gave him information, it rescued him from difficulties, and it recruited his troop, which was said to amount to several hundreds, and to be in the highest state of discipline. After laying the country under contribution from Mayence to Coblentz, he crossed the river into Franconia, and commenced a period of enterprize there. But no man's luck lasts for ever. It was his habit to acquire information for himself by travelling about in various disguises. One day, in entering one of the little Franconian towns in the habit of a pedlar, and driving a cart with wares before him, he was recognized by one of the passers-by, whose sagacity was probably sharpened by having been plundered by him. An investigation followed, in which the disguised pedlar declared himself an Austrian subject, and an Austrian soldier. In consequence, he was ordered to the Austrian depôt at Frankfort, where he met another recognition still more formidable. A comrade with whom he had probably quarrelled; for this part of the story is not yet clear, denounced him to the police; and, to the astonishment of the honest Frankforters, it was announced that the robber king, the bandit hero, was in their hands. As his exploits had been chiefly performed on the left bank of the Rhine, and his revenues had been raised out of French property in the manner of a forced loan, the Republic, conceiving him to be an interloper on their monopoly, immediately demanded him from the German authorities. In the old war-loving times, the Frankforters would probably have blown the trumpet and insisted on their privilege of acting as his jailers, but experience had given them wisdom, they swallowed their wrath, and the robber king was given up to the robber Republic. If Schinderhannes had been in the service of France, he would have been doing for the last ten years, on its account, exactly what he had been doing on his own. But unluckily for himself, he robbed in the name of Schinderhannes, and not in the name of liberty and equality; and now, instead of having his name shouted by all France, inserted in triumphant bulletins, and ranked with the Bonapartes and Cæsars, he will be called a thief, stripped of his last rixdollar, and hanged.