On Murder (Oxford World's Classics)
Page 24
1. the particular degree of interest which Fonk had in Coenen’s death. Had he so powerful an interest staked upon that event, was the alternative for instance bankruptcy, exposure as a swindler, &c., as that in this interest alone it is possible to find a sufficient inducement to commit murder? For certainly to a man in Fonk’s situation, a husband, a father, a citizen, the mere prospect of evading the necessity for refunding a considerable sum of money was not a sufficient motive.
2. the very perplexing mystery connected with the alleged visit of Coenen to Fonk on the fatal evening of Saturday Nov. 9:—what was the object of that visit? This is a question upon which greater skill and perseverance would undoubtedly have elicited more light. A passage in one of the last letters of Coenen to his friends, which was brought forward on Hamacher’s trial, but afterwards suppressed on Fonk’s, gave some ground to suspect that Coenen had not been proof against temptation, but had at last closed with Fonk’s proposals for corrupting his integrity. He there expresses himself mysteriously about some great pecuniary advantages that he was speedily to reap. Ill-judged zeal for the honor of the unhappy deceased led his friends to suppress this document; and yet, supposing that the alleged fatal visit did in fact take place, some such guilty understanding between the parties is absolutely necessary to explain it in such a way as to account for Fonk’s being aware of it beforehand. This was the view which Hahnenbein took of that matter on his death-bed. ‘Coenen,’ said he to his brother with his dying breath, ‘went doubtless to Fonk’s with the expectation of meeting a bribe or security for one, and instead of that God willed that he should meet his murderer.’ Coenen and Fonk, it will be remembered, had a private interview on the Saturday morning previously to the conference with Schröder: and, if we suppose the first overtures towards such a collusion to have been made on that occasion, it became necessary that Coenen should endeavour to see Fonk once again without Schröder’s privity. Yet for this he had no time left but the evening of the same day; for on the following morning the final conclusion of the negociation and the departure of Schröder from Cologne were settled to take place, after which Coenen would lose all power to compel Fonk into the fulfilment of his promises. Some pretence however was necessary to color his going out so late from his inn, which might else have roused suspicions in Schröder; and with that view he affected to walk home with Hahnenbein. It is much to be regretted that, in the final investigations of this extraordinary case, no allusion should have been made to the letter of Coenen: although indeed, as both Hahnenbein and Schröder were then dead, it was perhaps too late to turn it to much account.
Many other reflexions are suggested by this memorable affair, which upon the whole seems to justify the wish that with the German system of fundamental and deliberate investigation there might, if possible, be combined the publicity of the English system.2 But after all it is probable that no system whatsoever would have sufficed to illuminate the guilty darkness of this transaction; and that it is one of those cases which are reserved for the perfect light of a heavenly tribunal—and for that day when the murderer and his victim shall meet once more and the grave shall give up it’s secrets!
B. To the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine
[This manuscript fragment is in the National Library of Scotland, MS 4789, fos. 33–6. The date of the manuscript is 1828. De Quincey observes that he is writing ‘at a distance of 12 years’ from the slaying of William Coenen, which took place in 1816. The 1828 date of composition is confirmed by De Quincey’s letter of 24 April 1828 to William Blackwood asking for money ‘for the half-sheet of Fonk accepted some time back’, and assuring him that ‘with an Introduction ready this evening it will make half a sheet’ (Barry Symonds, ‘De Quincey and his Publishers’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1994, 329). The present transcription does not record De Quincey’s deletions. Superscript letters are given in regular type (‘Mr’ appears as ‘Mr’, for example). Underlined words are italicized. For full details of the manuscript, and a complete transcription, see The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Six, ed. David Groves and Grevel Lindop (London, 2000), 294–301. The manuscript was intended by De Quincey as the introduction to his discussion of Peter Anthony Fonk (see above, pp. 143–54). William Blackwood seems provisionally to have accepted some combination of the two papers, but he must have changed his mind, for no such article appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine. Groves and Lindop point out that in the present manuscript De Quincey has ‘confused the finer points of his own fiction’. In the published ‘On Murder’ article of 1827, ‘his persona “X.Y.Z.” had professed to be shocked by the lecture he transmitted. Now the lecturer signs himself “X.Y.Z.” and attacks the correspondent who transmitted his lecture to the magazine’ (The Works of Thomas De Quincey: Volume Six, 294). De Quincey reworked parts of the dialogue with the servant (see below, p. 157) for his second paper ‘On Murder’ (see above, p. 84).]
SIR,
SEVERAL months ago, whilst travelling in Germany, I met with a number of your far-famed journal, in which I was surprized to find published a lecture of my own, delivered sometime back to a Society of Gentlemen Amateurs, on Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts. The person, who communicated that article, did so from no good will to me,—as he discovers pretty clearly by his very hypocritical preface. He would denounce me, forsooth, to Bow Street! and quotes Lactantius* against me. But I despise him, and defy his innuendoes and his threats. And it gratifies me to find that Christopher North* despises him no less. The few words he bestows upon your correspondent are just what I should have anticipated from his known good sense and philosophy: and the whole club are as much pleased as myself; and I have it in command from them to make our united acknowledgements.
In saying this I discharge one part of my business in now addressing you; and I am further specially instructed to request the honor of your company upon any occasion when you may visit London. Two such celebrated public characters as Christopher North or Mr Blackwood, we should feel proud to welcome with a splendid banquet and the honors of an extraordinary sitting. Pray do not be alarmed by any superannuated old assassins whom you may see lounging about our ante-chambers: for they are all as good as muzzled, if not absolutely toothless. I dare say it has often happened to you, in calling upon a country gentleman, to make your way to his presence through a whole kennel of dogs littering the lawn or the vestibule—hounds, pointers, grey-hounds, and perhaps a wolf-dog or two, whose ‘feud’ you have to stand until they are called off by the master’s voice. Few situations of petty danger require more nerve; nay, without exaggeration I might say, of extreme danger. For myself, I have during my life been four times in peril of instant death: yet on any one of those occasions I have had less need of steeling myself to firmness by an extraordinary effort than at the moment of standing that burst of sudden fury and hostile demonstration which follows the first discovery of a stranger’s person by these canine loungers about rural dwellings: especially in cases where one is not quite assured that any controlling voice is immediately at hand. Yet, much as people suffer in nerves from these rencontres, it is seldom that one hears of their suffering anything worse. And so you will find it with us: for, as I have said, besides amateurs, we have a few old professional murderers at our board: and they will be apt to snarl a little as you pass them. But you need only hold up your stick at any one of them, and say—Down, Sir, down, when in all probability he will slink off growling to his seat. One of them undoubtedly is rather savage, and in the dark might be dangerous. Not but he is an excellent and solid character in the main, though rather given to stab his dearest friends when he can get behind their backs. But we all have our little faults. And now that you know the worst about us, I may say—‘Forewarned, fore-armed.’*
So much on the part of the club generally. And, now for myself in particular, I have something more pressing to trouble you upon; and that is—to clear myself of two calumnies with which malicious people have aspersed me. One is—that, in my character of a man of
taste and virtu,* I have gone so far as to offer premiums—and bounties to my own servant for murders of a superior quality. I do assure you, Mr North, that this is not the fact: and what it may have grown out of I presume to be this. Saturday is my day for regaling with the best murders that can be had in the public journals of the Empire. After the fatigues of the week it is delightful to the mind of sensibility to relax in this way, and to sacrifice to the muses and the fine arts. My servant therefore has it amongst his duties to cater for me on this occasion: his orders are always to have a murder ready for my inspection, and if possible a series of murders; fresh, if such are to be had,—if not, stale. Now my enemies would insinuate that, in default of any satisfactory murders turning up in the papers,—(as there are dull periods in this business no less than in others), he is incited to embark on a home manufacture of his own: and I do not deny that a faithful servant, who is zealous for his master’s service, may be likely to entertain such a thought. But it is well known to all my friends that I uniformly set my face against anything of the sort. I tell my servant that, when the newspapers fail him, he is at liberty to supply my table out of the Newgate Calendar, God’s Revenge Against Murder,* or other books of that class. Indeed to me it seems to something like presumption in a mere illiterate serving-man to think that he can execute anything that is fit to meet the approbation of connoisseurs. Over and above which reason, it is well known to candid people that I am most decidedly for goodness and morality. Therefore, on both considerations, as soon as ever I hear of any fellow of mine throwing out hints that look that way,—I make up my mind to nip the thing in the bud;* and I have him up to the drawing-room without delay; and then I reason with him. Let me alone for reasoning with him. ‘John,’ I say to him, (or ‘Thomas,’ as the case may be), ‘From having read Aristotle,* and the Scholiasts,* and Thomas a Kempis,* and what not, I am enabled to see to the bottom of this matter: and now suffer me to reason with you as a man and as a footman.’ And so then I reason with him; and I show him clearly what comes of taking to professional practices. ‘From Murder,’ I say to him, ‘you will soon come to highway robbery; and from highway robbery it is but a short step to petty larceny. And when once you are got to that, there comes in sad progression sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and late hours; until the awful climax terminates in neglect of dress, non-punctuality, and general waspishness. Many a man has begun with dabbling a little in murder, and thought he would stop there, until from one thing to another he has been led so far that in a few years he has become generally disrespectable.’ In this way I reason with them; and by these and similar pictures of the shocking tendencies of a taste for murder when immoderately indulged, I have sometimes brought a great stout cartilaginous fellow to tremble like an aspen tree and to sob like a child. Oh! Sir, it’s awful to hear the scale of horrors that I set before them!—But if it happens that all I can say is thrown away, that one might as well talk to the wind, and that a man is clearly bent upon doing a little in the murderous line, — I then change my tone, and after expressing a hope that as soon as he has sown his wild oats in that seductive path, he will see his error, and cultivate less agitating studies than murder, which (as I tell them candidly) never fails in the long run to make a man an object of dislike and obloquy,—I then wind up by throwing in a few suggestions on the principles of good taste. For, because a man’s morals are bad, that is no reason why his taste should not be improved:
Est aliquid prodire tenus, si non datur ultrà:*
and, if murders are to be committed, it can do no party any good that they should offend in point of elegance. It is from this latter part of my lecture, as I suppose, that the calumny I have mentioned takes it’s rise.
But another calumny, which wounds my feelings no less, is—that, in my critical judgements upon murders, it is pretended I shew myself biassed by an unworthy nationality. This notion must have grown out of that particular lecture published by you, in which it is true that I draw my illustrations chiefly from English murders. But that is all an accident. I never had a thought of insinuating that most meritorious murders have not been committed in other parts of Great Britain and also in various regions of the continent. In particular, with respect to the Germans—who are loud in complaining that the only murder, I have condescended to notice as coming from their country (viz. the Mannheim baker’s*) was due to an Englishman — I protest that this circumstance had no weight in my selection. I was undoubtedly influenced by the consideration that the author of that murder was a member of our club—a man of refined taste—and a particular friend of my own. But otherwise, as to mere national distinctions, I am above them: Tros, Tyriusque mihi* &c. And, to shew that I am sincere, I send you herewith the most eminent German murder that has been produced for the last 50 years,* which kept all the states of the Rhine and the Danube in agitation for 7 years, and even yet, at a distance of 12 years, is the subject of conversation and profound interest.———As to French murders, I acknowledge that not one out of a hundred is entirely satisfactory to my mind: circumstances of outrage and unnatural horror disfigure most of them: and very rarely it is that you will find a French murder in a chaste and pure style. Yet the following murder of more than a century back, communicated to me by a Frenchman who writes in a very angry tone, is certainly unobjectionable. It belongs to that very valuable class of murders—the mysterious; for to this hour no light has been thrown upon it. The Frenchman insists upon it that the great Williams, in his last performance (viz. at the Williamsons’*) was indebted for some of his best ideas to this Parisian murder: indeed, he calls Williams a ‘filthy plagiarist’: but that is what nobody will admit but a jealous Frenchman: though it must be owned that some of the circumstances in the Parisian case of 1720 and the London of 1811 are in remarkable coincidence.
In the year 1720 the murder of M. de Savary* made a prodigious sensation throughout France. He lived in Paris; was an unmarried man of dissipated life; and his house was the resort of many wits and courtiers. His establishment was a very small one, consisting only of a valet and a woman cook. One day a person unknown, of polished manners and elegant appearance, paid him a visit. This person was courteously received, and asked to dinner; an invitation which he readily accepted. A little before dinner the valet was sent down into the cellar for a few bottles of Champaigne; and, upon some pretence or other, the stranger followed him. In the cellar the valet, wholly off his guard and stooping down into a wine-binn, was easily and without noise despatched by a blow from a wooden mallet on the back of the head. A dog, confined in the same cellar, was despatched in the same way. This done, the murderer crept silently into the kitchen—where the cook was fricasseeing some chickens: her attention was called off by the noise of frying and stewing; and one blow from the mallet effectually stunned her, after which the murder was completed. Without any noise or disturbance the extermination was now complete below stairs. Reascending therefore to M. Savary, whom he had reserved for his bonne bouche,* the murderer found little difficulty with him; for he was disabled at this time from offering any resistance by an attack of gout which confined him to his easy chair. These circumstances came to be known in the most singular way possible: the murderer actually sate down and deliberately recorded them in the blank leaves of a book which he left open upon the table: after which he walked out, and shut the door. The first discovery was made pretty much in the same way as in the case of the Marrs: a person called in the evening, and knocked long and loud for above a quarter of an hour,* until the attention of the neighbours was roused; violent suspicions arose; the door was forced; and the corpses were found lying prostrate just as they had fallen, but without much bloodshed—the heads having in every case been thoroughly crushed by the mallet. The next mystery was as to the motive of the assassin. That it was not robbery, appeared clearly from the state of the dining table which was laid out for dinner and not one piece of plate missing. It was concluded therefore to have been revenge: to confirm which, on a small time-piece bearing a skull cut in
ivory, with the following inscription—‘Look on this, that you may regulate your life’—there was found written in pencil by the murderer—‘Look at his life, and you will not be surprized at his death.’ Another discovery was soon made which seemed to point to some dishonored husband as the author of this revenge. Amongst M. de Savary’s papers, when examined by the Police, was found one in a lady’s hand-writing containing these words: ‘We are lost! My husband has just learned all! think of some means to avert his anger. Parapel is the only one who can restore him to reason. Let him speak to my husband: for, unless he does, we have no hope of safety.’ This billet had neither signature nor date. Parapel was arrested, and acknowledged himself an acquaintance of M. de Savary’s: but, after many examinations and long confinement, persisting in his first declaration that he knew nothing of the circumstances to which the note referred, he was set at liberty. Many others were arrested on suspicion: and it was then ascertained that a prince of the blood and numerous persons of the highest rank frequented the house; and either because the suspicions took a dangerous direction, or because no clue really could be gained,—the affair was gradually hushed up: all the parties arrested were liberated; and the whole investigation was dismissed by the police: though the matter was not forgotten, and even to the time of the revolution* it remained a mystery of profound interest.
My judgement upon this transaction, which I solemnly pronounce of the first water,* is—that, whether the murderer were a dishonored husband or not, he was clearly an amateur of the finest genius; so fine, that I must be allowed to doubt of his being a Frenchman: a point which I must remind my angry French correspondent is not quite established.