Being a Narrative of the extraordinary hallucination of Gottlieb Einhalter, alias Raoul Croc, a native of Tours, carefully abstracted from the Rechtsfalle of the Law Courts of Wittenberg, and compared with the Report made by the Committee of Savans to the French Academy of Sciences.
by R.H. Horne.
Originally published in Howitt's Journal (William Lovett) vol.1 #8 (20 Feb 1847).
It is our semi-barbarous Code of Laws that makes Heroes of vulgar felons, by exciting the imagination, and calling forth sympathy and pity for a poor wretch about to become the principal performer in a public Strangling Show. The Law, is the Newgate dramatist; the scaffold, is the stage; the whole mixed public, is the audience; and "the moral" is, in its most extensive influence, that there is something great in a man who is hanged.—R.H.H.
While the police were puzzling themselves with all sorts of investigations as to the meeting of the three men at the dyke for secret conference—the plot for the fair—the counter-device of cheating—and the murderous shot—the family of Mr. Stewart arrived in Wittenberg. Mr. Stewart having applied for permission to see the prisoner Einhalter, at once identified him. This, of course, rendered his position still more suspicious, and he was subjected to a further and still more rigorous examination. Nothing, however, tending to criminate him in this murderous attempt was elicited.
But a new witness now appeared. Gustav Grimm, the man who had been shot, was not killed outright, but had lingered in a state of delirium, or insensibility, ever since. Though little hopes were entertained of his recovery, he now rallied sufficiently to make the following deposition:—He was left alone with Gottlieb Einhalter. He began to talk to Einhalter. Einhalter was sitting upon a chair, with another chair near him in front. While he, Grimm, was talking, Kinhalter slowly raised his wooden leg, and laid it in a level across the seat of the other chair. He, witness, noticed that the stump pointed directly at his body; and chancing to look up from it to the face of Gottlieb Einhalter, he saw a strange smile, and one eye shut. The next moment he was shot. Einhalter instantly put his wooden leg down upon the floor, and witness saw some smoke come out from beneath the stump. Witness then lost his senses.
Gottlieb Einhalter was once more searched, and all the mystery was clearly explained; in fact, he himself confessed his guilt the moment they laid hands upon his wooden leg, for examination. This leg contained a long pistol-tube; in fact, the lower part of the leg was a pistol, and the trigger was pulled by means of a string which led up into his right hand side-pocket. He could thus, as he naively observed, with one hand in his side pocket—while, to all appearance, quietly resting his wooden leg upon a bank or other support, or sitting with one leg crossed over the other—take a deliberate aim at his man; pull the trigger, and then down went his pistol-leg upon the ground—and what was the matter? From the moment of his last arrest he betrayed no wish to conceal anything; on the contrary, he showed an anxiety to be extremely communicative. So far from displaying the least signs of a remorse of conscience, he only regretted any pain he might have caused to individuals, whether victims or their relatives; but otherwise he gloried in the murders he had committed. This old man, previously so quiet, guarded, and sedate in his speech and behaviour, now displayed an energy and enthusiasm that were quite surprising.—He held up the book which he always carried in his bosom, saying that he was the apostle of a great principle—the executor of a great law—the martyr of a practical philanthropy. Vulgar minds, who judge of everything by their own narrow and every-day standard, might consider that he was mad; but the finer intellects of France, of Germany, and of England, would do him justice.
During the time that Gottlieb Einhalter was under sentence of death, communications were made with France, and a number of other murders, previously enveloped in mystery, could now be clearly traced to this misguided man. The account he gave of his fanatical career was to the following purport:—
Gottlieb Einhalter was a native of Tours. His real name was Raoul Croc. He was born on the 4th of April, 1775. His father was a Frenchman, but his mother was a German. She had been a tight-rope dancer, before his father married her. His father was a perruquier and barber, and had a little shop on the outskirts of the town. His son was brought up in idleness; he, young Raoul, had led a roving life; married early; deserted his wife, and, joining the French army, went to Italy. He lost his leg in consequence of the bite of a dog, who seized him one night while on a secret expedition of plunder. He had no pension from Government. But five years afterwards, when he had returned to France, and had taken to a studious life, he chanced among other books to meet with the wonderful work which had been his bosom companion ever since. From this book, to which England claimed the honour of giving birth, he had suddenly received a new light. It came upon him like the flash of a flint in the night. His first victim happened to be Amande Giraud, who had lost his leg at the battle of Austerlitz, and had a pension from Marshal Soult. He shot him one day as they sat smoking together in a little garden. Gottlieb Einhalter made this confession in the most distinct terms. He, however, declared most vehemently that he had no thought of the pension at the time he shot him. It was only when he turned the matter over in his mind, and considered the great principle of action which was in future to be the whole aim of his life, that he came to see there was the finger of Providence pointing to it for his good. He therefore obeyed the inspiration, and passing himself off as Amande Giraud, the agents of Marshal Soult had always paid him the pension. From this hour he had devoted all his energies to rectify the evils of over-population, so clearly displayed in the Divine book he carried at his breast—the beneficent production of the great English Malthus! Once, indeed, he—Croc, not Malthus—had suffered a qualm of doubt for several days, and had sleepless nights, in consequence of a friend sending him the roe of a herring wrapped in a multiplication table; but he soon came to perceive that the Divine Author of Over-population must eventually, in the course of billions of ages, be right, and all the produce of the sea, as well as the land, be eaten up by the over-populated world. Henceforth he went on his way rejoicing, ever mindful of his high mission, ever coming in with his check upon all good opportunities. He confessed, in the course of his efforts in this philanthropic cause, to have killed seven-and-twenty individuals; to have occasioned the execution of five others, who were accused and found guilty of the murders; and to have wounded fourteen others, most of whom, alas! had recovered. His first effort had been made on a fine morning in June, the 1st of the month, 1810. He distinctly stated that these murders had all been committed by him privately, after he had left the army, and were by no means included among the men he might have killed while in the regular profession. He set no account by those; it was a mere firing through smoke according to order. He had followed a higher duty. He had chosen the name of "Gottlieb Einhalter" (Lovegod, the Checker) to express a due sense of his calling.
Many questions were put to him concerning the original designer of the pistol-leg; but on this one point he always observed a profound and mysterious silence.
He was asked why he had deserted his wife? He said he did so for her happiness, His was not a selfish, but a noble-minded affection. She had objected to some of his ways, and he had resolved to make the sacrifice. Was not much given to intoxication at that time—or nothing to signify. On being questioned about the love-letter to the putzmacherin, who resided in the suburbs, which had been found in his pocket, he admitted that he had offered her marriage two years ago, and had been accepted; but had never fulfilled the engagement, because that would have put an end to the fine sentiment he entertained; and besides, it was a high and praiseworthy conquest in a man to subdue his passions. Mortify your passions—that was his maxim. His age being asked, he stated that he should be sixty-three on his next birthday. He was asked if he was aware of the course of life his son, Pierre Giraud (so called) was leading in Bourdeaux? He said he was not. On being informed that his son was a known thief, he said he was sorry to hear it; but Pierre had always been an extraordinary boy, and he had no doubt but the money he collected was saved for a high purpose. He should not be surprised if Pierre built a hospital for the poor, some day.
The political opinions of Gottlieb Einhalter, alias Raoul Croc, appear to have been unsettled; some of his thoughts on men, and on society, however, are worth recording. He spoke of Fieschi, and the other regicides of France, with much contempt.--They were ignorant egotists. He considered that Buonaparte and the Duke of Wellington (next to the vice-and-misery checks of Malthus) had been the greatest benefactors of the human race; but not the greatest men, because they had thinned the populations on no philosophical principle. Mr. Pitt was a great man—a prime cause. Besides the divine work of Malthus, he often spoke of a curious book in German, entitled, "Documentary Exposition of Remarkable Crimes," by Anselm von Feurbach, Knight, State Councillor, and President of the Court of Appeals; Commander of the Order of the Bavarian Crown; Knight of the Russian Order of St. Anne; Commander of the Grand Ducal Order of the White Eagle of the House of Saxony, ≈c. Great criminals, he said, could only be properly handed down to posterity by authors of the highest titles to distinction. He spoke of the habitual murder-plots of Simon Stigler in terms of respect and discrimination; and entered with much acumen into the case of Anne Margaretha Zwanziger, the woman who was so expert in making oxalic-acid negus, and sugar-of-lead cake. He was quite conversant with the story of Solomon Scales, the Cornish wife-killer; Jacob Solly, who had a passion for shooting soldiers on sentry; and Thomas Pig, of Hertfordshire, who killed nine infants with a pipe of tobacco. He also was fond of discoursing of the pyramids and columns made of human skulls by the celebrated hero and architect, Nadir Shah; and he dwelt with peculiar interest on the principle involved in the eighty thousand executions of Henry VIII. of England. These men, he said, were all great benefactors of the human race. They were the magnificent carriers-out of the Malthusian theories; they furnished the only efficient checks and remedies that could be found. Emigration and colonization were mere temporizing; there was nothing for it but killing people.
It had now become evident that Gottlieb Einhalter was by no means a criminal of the vulgar order, or one who was to be regarded and treated in the common way. He, in fact, considered himself a Great Criminal; and most people seemed disposed to view him in that light "He was one of those highly organized natures" (we quote from the Report of the Committee of Savans to the French Academy of Sciences) "which, possessing an excess of imaginative sensibility and the highest elements of philanthropy, aided by a potential will of that extraordinary kind which is at once the master and the slave of the individual, have been propelled by a mistaken principle, to the perpetration of detestable and wonderful crimes." He was visited by all the principal people in Wittenberg, and for leagues round; and particularly by the English residents and tourists, several of whom came from Berlin on purpose to see this extraordinary man. He was extremely affable and communicative. The head jailor assured the visitors that he wanted for nothing. He was asked by an English gentleman if there was anything more that could contribute to his comfort? He said he thought he should like a little vin de Bourdeaux; and, by permission of the master of the prison, a dozen of claret was immediately sent to him.
By this time the interest occasioned by his highly original character, almost to an equal degree with the unprecedented nature of his crimes, had risen to the utmost pitch. Nothing could exceed the excitement. Everybody shared in it. Meanwhile, Gottlieb Einhalter maintained the same dignified and philosophic bearing which had distinguished him ever since his arrest. An artist of eminence, deputed as it was whispered by a personage of the highest rank, requested permission to paint his portrait. He at once consented, and even took pains to sit well, and in the attitude of sitting with his right leg crossed over the other. Seven or eight amateurs, after this, requested to be allowed to make sketches of him, which was also accorded. A plaister cast was taken of his face, by a Professor of Physiognomy, and a model in wax of his right leg apparatus and of his right hand. Several literary gentlemen connected with the public journals of some of the principal towns of Upper Saxony, together with two special correspondents from Bourdeaux and Paris, were sedulously employed from day to day in taking notes from conversations with Gottlieb, with a view to the immediate publication of his Memoirs in the German and French newspapers, to be collected afterwards for a larger work, to be entitled, "Life and Opinions of Gottlieb Einhalter," &c. &c., and translated into English simultaneously, to prevent piracy. Many were the applications for his autographs, and for locks of his hair, and from the highest quarters; so that Gottlicb was at last obliged, though in the most courteous terms, to refuse the latter request, as it began already to effect a change in the appearance of his head, and to render it less picturesque. Amidst all this excitement, which was enough to have destroyed the balance of any ordinary mind, Gottlieb Einhalter never betrayed the least superciliousness or loss of serenity; and although one of the turnkeys declared that when the prisoner thought he was not observed he showed all sorts of signs of being horribly frightened and half mad with his prospect, everybody knew the declaration was a base calumny.
Some benevolent English ladies called to see him, and talked very earnestly with him about a future state, and exhorted him to make the most of the short time allotted to him on earth, and sent him soup from their table, and some clean linen, of which he was much in need. He refused to see the putzmacherin, who called daily to no purpose. He said, "Poor thing; it was all vanity and vexation of spirit." He declared that he died in the Roman Catholic faith, declining, however, for the present, the attendance of a confessor. Mrs. Stewart came to see him, and gave him her forgiveness for the attempt he had made upon her life in the woods of Rolandsbogen, and exhorted him to penitence. As it appeared by his replies that he was of the Protestant persuasion, Mrs, Stewart made him a present of a beautiful Prayer-book, bound in black morocco and gold. He said it would be a great comfort to him. In an interesting conversation with the Head Professor of the University, he begged the Professor's intercession with the chief judges, to obtain permission for him to bequeath his cranium to the French Academy of Sciences; his pistol-leg to the Museum of Berlin; his copy of Malthus to the University of Wittenberg; and earnestly desired that his heart should be embalmed, and placed in a marble urn, with an appropriate inscription, to be set upon a pedestal in front of the cathedral; he furthermore wished, as a last request, that his mortal remains might then be carried within the walls of the University Chapel, and that he might be buried between Luther and Melanethon. The worthy Professor shed tears; but said he could give him no hopes as to the last part of his request.
All the English and French residents and visitors indulged in many interesting speculations as to the mode of execution by which the last offices of the law would be performed upon Gottlieb Einhalter, as he was far from being a criminal of a common order. He could only with propriety be executed after the mode practised with all Great Criminals. An English naval officer who was present at one of these discussions, made a thoughtless speech enough. "I would have the infernal dog whipped at the cart's tail," said he, "and then flung into the dyke with a stone tied round his neck!" Everybody was excessively shocked at this unfeeling, this undiscriminating and brutal suggestion. It would certainly have been a strange death for a great criminal like him.
The morning before the execution of this extraordinary man, his fortitude appeared for the first time to desert him. He consented to see the poor putzmacherin. He even requested to be left a few minutes alone with her. After she was gone, he appeared very restless; so much so, indeed, that everybody felt real pity for him. His intellect seemed to be shaken, and he was losing himself. The putzmacherin came again in the afternoon, and this time he was most anxious to see her. They were left alone, as before, for a few minutes. It was subsequently discovered, that the infatuated woman had been persuaded to bring secretly to him three or four bullets, and an ounce of gunpowder. She pleaded, in extenuation, that she could not refuse a last request to the dear old man—he always had such a winning tongue.
After the second visit of this deluded woman, he became much more composed. Everybody saw that he was reconciled to his dark fate. They little knew what else was revolving in his mind.
The night before his execution, Gottlieb expressed a wish that the Chief Magistrate of Wittenberg and the Head Professor of the University should breakfast with him, next morning. It appeared, however, from some cause or other, that this request could not be granted; coffee and chocolate, however, with fried pork and onions, and a rich sauce of brown sugar, anchovy, and goose-fat, accompanied with several large slices of pumponikel bread, were furnished him, with which he appeared very well satisfied. He did not seem, however, to eat with a good appetite, but rather a forced one. He also made several anxious inquiries concerning the putzmacherin, who, together with her two nieces, he had strictly enjoined to be present at his last moments, that they might see how he died. He was assured they would all be there; and that some ladies had already sent them a variety of scarfs, silks, and trinkets, to enable them to make a good appearance. He showed signs of a melancholy pleasure on hearing this.
The terrible morning arrived. The University clock proclaimed the hour that was to close the mortal career of this unhappy man. He declared, however, that he was not unhappy, and that he died contented and hopeful. He walked with a firm step to the place of execution, which was outside the town, and passing through a lane of spectators. His bearing was self-possessed and imposing. Several ladies fainted as he passed the windows. A bouquet of white roses was thrown towards him by an unseen hand. He bowed gratefully, and laid his hand upon his heart; the confessor, however, would not allow him to receive it. The scene was altogether painful.
Rain had fallen in the night, and part of the way was over rough stones and gravel. Only one circumstance tended to create a little annoyance to him, and to discompose his demeanour, which was that some of the stones and mud appeared to have got jammed into the aperture at the lower end of his pistol-leg, the ferrule of which had fallen off. However, he quickly recovered himself, and walked on as steadily as before.
Arriving at the deadly platform, he ascended the steps without hesitation; bowed gracefully to the spectators all round; gazed at the various preparations with a calm interest; took off his cravat; and seated himself as directed. But when he had done this, his face underwent some dreadful changes. While the executioner's assistant was binding him to the back of the fatal chair for decapitation, he gazed round upon the concourse with a hurried glance, and discovered the putzmacherin with her two nieces, all of whom he had enjoined to be present.
They were all attired in full evening dresses, with large gold earrings, jewelled bracelets, and splendid combs in the dark and elaborate plaits of their skilfully dressed hair. Words are scarcely adequate to describe the elegance of the putzmacherin, whose finely-rounded arms were continually seen to advantage as she applied to her eyes a large lace-bordered handkerchief of snowy hue, while her magnificent bust heaved up and down with the difficult suppression of her inward emotion. These, indeed, are moments when the pen of the historian most feels its inadequacy. But Gottlieb—how could he bear the thought of leaving her for whom he had entertained so refined and disinterested a sentiment?—how could he leave her to the rude winds of adversity, and the cold scoffs of the common world? He had forecast everything. Placing his right leg across his left knee, so as to point directly at the heart of the unsuspecting putzmacherin, he thrust his right hand into his side pocket, and compressed his lips. Just as the executioner advanced behind him with his two-handed sword, a ghastly smile gleamed across the features of Gottlieb—he shut his left eye—and his right elbow was observed to give a smart jerk. An explosion took place! The putzmacherin and her nieces were untouched; for the pistol, owing to an over-charge, while its muzzle was blocked up with stones and muddy gravel, had burst, and blown the unhappy man all to pieces! Scarcely a vestige remained of the misguided enthusiast;—and of that finely developed cranium, which he had intended to be presented as a fertile field for discussion and suggestiveness to the French Academy of Sciences;—of that wonderful Idea—his wooden leg, and all its subjective objectivity, which the Museum of Berlin was anxiously expecting by the next post;—of that heart, the seat of all strong emotions of philanthropy (rightly understood), and also of magnanimous self-denial and valour in its Malthusian crusade, against rich and poor, (especially the hungry poor);—and of that equally beautiful apparatus, which in the full pride of gastric vitality had been but a day before the recipient of sympathetic English soup (to say nothing of clean linen and claret, and a gilt-edged prayer-book);—no satisfactory specimen could be collected. Nothing but the mere refuse of this wonderfully contrived being lay scattered about, which was soon blown away into the common sewer. Such was the melancholy end of an original thinker and practical philanthropist.