necrophilia. From time to time he would visit houses of prostitution in Paris and order a prostitute, dressed in white like a corpse, to be laid out on a bed. At the appointed hour he would appear in the room, which, in the meantime, had been elaborately prepared as a room of mourning; then he would act as if reading a mass for the soul, and finally throw himself on the git, who, during the whole time, was compelled to play the rôle of a corpse.[1]
The cases in which the perpetrator injures and cuts up the corpse are clearer. Such cases come next to those of lust-murder, in that, in these individuals, cruelty, or at least an impulse to attack the female body, is connected with lust. It is possible that a remnant of moral sense deters from the cruel act on a living woman, and possibly the fancy passes beyond lust-murder and rests on its result, the corpse. Here, also, it is possible that the idea of defenselessness of the body plays a rôle.
Case 23. Sergeant Bertrand, a man of delicate physical constitution and of peculiar character; from childhood silent and inclined to solitude.
The details of the health of his family are not satisfactorily known; but the occurrence of mental diseases in his ancestry is ascertained. It is said that while he was a child he was affected with destructive impulses, which he himself could not explain. He would break whatever was at hand. In early childhood, without teaching, he learned to masturbate. At nine he began to feel inclinations toward persons of the opposite sex. At thirteen the impulse to sexual intercourse became powerfully awakened in him. He now masturbated excessively. When he did this his fancy always created a room filled with women. He would imagine that he carried out the sexual act with them, and then killed them. Immediately thereafter he would think of them as corpses, and of how he defiled them. Occasionally, in such situations, the thought of carrying out a similar act with male corpses would come up, but it was always attended with a feeling of disgust.
In time he felt the impulse to carry out such acts with actual corpses. For want of human bodies, he obtained those of animals. He would cut open the abdomen, tear out the entrails, and masturbate during the act. He declares that in this way he experienced inexpressible pleasure. In- ↑ Simon (Crimes et Délits, p. 209) mentions an experience of Lacassagne’s, to whom a respectable man said that he was never intensely excited sexually except when a spectator at a funeral.
