Mon Dieu!

For whatever reason—and I fear to psychoanalyze it—I’m attracted to macabre news stories. Such as, for example, when a number of severed feet, some of them still in sneakers, weirdly started washing up on the shores of Washington state and British Columbia a couple of years ago—as if a boatload of Ogre Raw Diet or Cannibal Kibble had overturned during a violent storm at sea. I was all over that phenomenon, checking various American and Canadian newspaper Web sites daily for weeks, until the tides stopped sending orphaned extremities shoreward, and the theories as to what the hell was happening dried up.

So, of course, I had to click today on this link to an AP story: “Couple Arrested in France After Police Recover Bodies of 8 Newborns.”

New homeowners in the northern city of Villers-au-Tertre, near Lille, had found bags of bones in the garden and basement of their new digs (no pun intended), which, the AP reported, prompted a criminal investigation that brought the arrest of the former homeowners, a couple in their 40s who, it turned out, had parented the unlucky octet.

OK, first, an aside: The entire five years we had our beloved greyhound Ellie—who recently died of cancer, but that’s a little too painful to write about just yet—Lynn and I BEGGED the dog to sniff up a body for us, or at least the remains of one. Ellie’s long snout was brilliant at locating chicken bones. Why not human bones? Wouldn’t that have been cool, in a grim kind of way? I always think about how a guy who’d been out looking for turtles, supposedly, years ago found Chandra Levy’s remains in Rock Creek Park in DC—less than 10 miles from my house, in a patch of woods that’s VERY near paths on which I’d run many times. Why couldn’t yours truly have found the slain intern and been the one to give the cops the goods? Anyway, did Ellie ever sniff up so much as a single human digit in all her years with us? No, she did not! But I digress.

The story about the French couple had no details about motive (a parental form of “buyer’s remorse,” perhaps?), logistics, time frame, etc. The investigation was termed “ongoing.” But here was the even more bizarre detail: According to the AP, “France has seen a string of cases in recent years of mothers killing their newborns and saving and hiding the corpses.”

A “string” of cases? They’re “saving and hiding” the corpses—as if infant cadavers are now a featured item on French scavenger hunts?

Finally, there was this: “Germany has seen a string of similar cases. In one, a woman was convicted of manslaughter in 2006 and sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison for killing eight of her newborn babies and burying them in flower pots and a fish tank in the garden of her parents’ home near the German-Polish border.”

Damn! One really must wonder what’s in the water over there. Do we need the European Union to place prohibitive tariffs on this sort of thing to discourage its spread throughout the Euro zone?

Not to mention, what exactly is the fish tank about? I’m picturing a Goth German girl wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I Asked for a Guppy and All I Got was Pregnant.”

Yikes!

Now, allow me to make crystal-clear that I’m appalled by the slaying of newborns and the severing of feet. I’d like to emphasize, too, that I am not a jingoist who hates the French. To the contrary, I never once called my pommes frites “freedom fries” after 9/11. I dig the existentialism of Albert Camus. I like wordy movies that feature lots of cafes, smoking and subtitles. I find amusing the Gallic concept of frequent yet joyless sex. Why, I can’t with any certainty say that I, too, wouldn’t have raised an immediate white flag in the face of the Blitzkrieg. But now I shudder to think what will happen if the American religious right catches wind of this nixed newborns story.

I can see the bumper stickers now: “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart—And So Do Those Liberty-hating French.”