the jewels in which she was buried; and well-nigh a century before, in 1572, a grave-digger Jean Regnault was condemned to the galleys for having stolen jewels and even winding-sheets from corpses. In 1823, Pierre Renaud was sentenced at Riom for having opened a tomb with intent to steal. Not many years after, the police captured the band “de la rue Mercadier,” seven ruffians who made it their business to violate graves and the vaults of rich families and who thus had stolen gems and gold to the value of no less than 300,000 francs. It is well-known that the notorious Ravachol forced open the tomb of Madame de Rochetaillée in the expectation that she had been buried in her jewels, but found nothing of this kind, as the lady was merely wrapped in her shroud of lawn.
On 12th July, 1663, the Parliament of Paris heavily sentenced the son of the sexton of the cemetery attached to Saint-Sulpice. This young wretch was in the habit of exhuming corpses and selling them to the doctors. In the seventeenth century the Faculty of Paris was allowed one dead body a year, and the famous physician, Mauriceau lay under grave suspicion of having illegally procured bodies to dissect for his anatomical studies.
In England the Resurrection Men added a new terror to death. Even the bodies of the wealthy, when every precaution had been taken, were hardly safe against the burgling riflers of vault and tomb, whilst to the poor it was a monstrous horror as they lay on their sick beds to know that their corpses were ever in danger of being exhumed by ghouls, carted to the dissection theatre, sold to ’prentice doctors to hack and carve. In his novel, The Mysteries of London, G. W. M. Reynolds gives a terrible, but perhaps not too highly coloured, picture of these loathsome thefts. Irregular practitioners and rival investigators in the anatomy schools were always ready to buy without asking too many questions. Body-snatching became a regular trade of wide activities. One of the wretches who plied the business most successfully even added a word to the English language. William Burke, of the firm Burke and Hare, who was hanged 28th January, 1829,[107] began his career in November, 1827. This seems to have commenced almost accidentally. Hare was the keeper of a low lodging-house in an Edinburgh slum, and here died an old soldier owing a considerable amount for his rent. With
