No one is so liberal that he does not wish to visit condign punishment upon at least one criminal or class of criminals. No one is so compassionate that his understanding is incapable of giving way to the desire for vengeance. It is as if the desire to punish and exact revenge were genetic, part of human nature, like the propensity to walk on two legs or learn to speak.
This summer, France was transfixed by the murder of a well-known actress, Marie Trintignant, herself the daughter of a well-known film director, Nadine Trintignant. She was killed by her boyfriend of a few months, the French rock-music star Bertrand Cantat. Marie was in Lithuania with her mother, shooting a film about the life of the French author Colette, when Cantat joined her there. In the course of a drunken argument in a hotel bedroom in Vilnius, Cantat hit her savagely in the face several times. She fell into a coma; he put her to bed, and then went to sleep himself. The next morning, he called her brother, who was also in Vilnius; when the severity of Marie’s condition became obvious, Cantat took an overdose. Despite two operations, Marie died about a week later. Cantat awaits his trial in Vilnius.
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