1846 these bodies no longer satisfied him. He now killed dogs, and proceeded with them as before. Toward the end of 1846 he first felt the desire to make use of human bodies. At first he had a horror of it. In 1847, being by accident in a grave-yard, he ran across the grave of a newly-buried corpse. Then this impulse, with headache and palpitation of the heart, became so powerful that, although there were people near by, and he was in danger of detection, he dug up the body. In the absence of a convenient instrument for cutting it up, he satisfied himself by hacking it with a shovel.
In 1847 and 1848, during two weeks, as reported, the impulse, accompanied by violent headache, to commit brutalities on corpses, actuated him. Amidst the greatest dangers and difficulties, he satisfied this impulse some fifteen times. He dug up the bodies with his hands, in nowise sensible, in his excitement, to the injuries he thus inflicted on himself. When he had obtained the body, he cut it up with a sword or pocket-knife, tore out the entrails, and then masturbated. The sex of the bodies is said to have been a matter of indifference to him, though it was ascertained that this modern vampire had dug up more female than male corpses. During these acts he declares himself to have been in an indescribable state of sexual excitement. After having cut them up, he had sometimes reinterred the bodies.
In July, 1848, he accidentally came across the body of a girl of sixteen. Then, for the first time, he experienced a desire to carry out coitus on a cadaver. “I covered it with kisses and pressed it wildly to my heart. All that one could enjoy with a living woman is nothing in comparison with the pleasure I experienced. After I had enjoyed it for about a quarter of an hour, I cut the body up, as usual, and tore out the entrails. Then I buried the cadaver again.” Only after this, as B. declares, had he felt the impulse to use the bodies sexually before cutting them up, and thereafter he had done it in three instances. The actual motive of the exhuming of the bodies, however, was then, as before, to cut them up; and the enjoyment in so doing was greater than in using the bodies sexually. The latter act had always been nothing more than an episode of the principal one, and had never quieted his desires; therefore, he had always cut up the body afterward or mutilated another body. The medico-legal examiners gave an opinion of “monomania.” Court-martial sentence to one year’s imprisonment. (Michéa, Union méd., 1849; Lunier, Annal. méd.-psychol., 1849, p. 153; Tardieu, “Attentats aux moeurs,” 1878, p. 114; Legrand, “La folie devant les tribun.,” p. 524.)
(c) Injury of Women (Stabbing, Flagellation, etc.).—Following lust-murder and violation of corpses, come cases closely allied to the former, in which injury of the victim of lust and sight of the victim’s blood area delight and pleasure for degener-
