The Abbe

As a young man, Guy Desnoyers wanted more than anything else to be a surgeon. But there was no money in his family to pay for long years of medical education, so after brooding for a while over his lost dreams. Guy. at the age of 29, turned to the priesthood. As the abbe of the little village of Uruffe in the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, he became a dynamo of public service, always busily organizing youth groups, a theatrical society, football team and other worthwhile projects. On Sundays, his sermons crackled with reproof of parishioners less disposed to such constant activity, but even the reproved agreed that handsome, young Abbe Desnoyers was a godsend to the flock.

The most devoted, perhaps, of all the stern young abbe's admirers was the rosy-cheeked peasant girl Regine, with whose family the priest often dined on Saturdays. Eager to help in his work. Regine took on the job of tending the church altar and the sacerdotal robes, and her kindly parents were proud indeed of their daughter --proud, that is, until one day early this year when Regine told them that she was pregnant and refused to name the father of her unborn child.

Time at last healed the wound in the parents' hearts, however, and by last week, though Regine still refused to name its father, her own mother and father bought a crib and layette and were looking forward to the birth of their grandchild. But it was not to be. One night, haggard and distracted, the young parish priest rushed in to report a fearful thing: he had found Regine shot through the head on a country road, beside her the child, cut out of her body and cruelly stabbed to death.

Who had perpetrated such a frightful crime? After a night of questioning, the police got the answer from the criminal himself--the frustrated surgeon-turned-priest, who had performed his first operation on the dead body of his mistress. "I offered Regine absolution before I killed her," said the Abbe Desnoyers.

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