VII. L'interrogatoire
VII. The Interrogation
This issue ranges from battlefield dispatches and murder-trial fireworks to guano cargoes, Liszt serenading workmen, and a sweeping new biography of Buffon.
- Defence counsel in the Blétry murder trial dramatically walked out mid-hearing after the presiding judge refused to let them interrupt his interrogation, prompting the accused Blétry to cry out that he would defend himself alone, 'fortified by his innocence.'
- A Strasbourg chemistry professor testified that blood was found distinctly on a floorboard directly beneath a sofa in Blétry's lodgings, while the accused blamed a bedridden woman's haemorrhages — the court noted the blood had also spattered the wallpaper high above.
- Parisian bank cashier Paul Gauthier was sentenced to ten years of hard labour after embezzling 129,000 francs over two years and spending more than 80,000 francs of it on a kept woman named Joséphine Paringot, buying her two apartments, cashmere shawls, diamond earrings, and a novelty shop in the Passage Choiseul.
- Franz Liszt, passing through Toulouse, spontaneously gave a free concert for choral workmen who had serenaded him, distributing six hundred complimentary tickets on the spot.
- Richard Wagner — identified in the paper erroneously as 'Charles-Frédéric Wagner, pupil of Meyerbeer' — was appointed Kapellmeister at the Dresden court, filling the post that had stood vacant since Carl Maria von Weber's death in 1826.
- Thirty-seven ships were loading guano simultaneously at the deserted island of Ichaboe off the Namibian coast, where deposits run ten to fifteen metres deep and workers sometimes unearth perfectly preserved penguin eggs at twelve metres' depth.
- Pierre Flourens presented his new Histoire des Travaux et des Idées de Buffon to the Académie des Sciences, arguing that Buffon's ideas on continental animal distribution and the unity of the human species were 'veritable discoveries' still underappreciated by contemporary naturalists.
- J. Drummond-Hay, the son of Britain's consul-general in Tangier and the diplomat just charged with brokering peace between France and Morocco, has published Le Maroc et ses tribus nomades, described as an uncommonly faithful portrait of Moroccan society.