XXXI. Italie. — Simbad le marin
XXXI. Italy — Sinbad the Sailor
The Spanish Cortes debates Queen Isabella's marriage and the Morocco conflict, while Paris follows a mass theft trial of forty-one accused.
- Spain's Foreign Minister Martínez de la Rosa declared in the Senate that the Carlist pretender would never "enter furtively into the palace of our kings" — drawing prolonged applause from all benches.
- Marshal Bugeaud wrote to the Duc de Montmorency refusing to abolish the slave trade in Algeria, arguing that 510 leagues of desert frontier could not be policed and that Arab chiefs prized enslaved persons too highly to risk a rebellion.
- Queen Victoria inaugurated the new Royal Exchange in London, dining off plate valued at over £100,000 and drinking sherry from the same cask served to King Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1824 — the cask alone cost £630.
- A woman stopped at a Marseille customs post feigned the pains of childbirth to avoid a search; officers proceeded anyway and found an enormous ham and two bladders of spirits concealed on her person.
- In Alabama, Dr Charles Tait shot his sister's bridegroom Mr Rives at point-blank range on the wedding day; Rives survived just 24 hours, long enough for the bride to insist the marriage vows be spoken at his deathbed.
- The president's summary of the Paris mutualists' theft trial posed 400 questions to the jury covering 41 accused and 61 separate thefts, dividing defendants into informers, thieves, receivers, and false-key makers.
- Over 1,200 navvies work day and night — sometimes blasting through rock — on the Chalon-to-Dijon railway tunnel under the Canal du Centre, with the line expected to open by July or August 1845.
- Beer-lovers in Cernay (Haut-Rhin) formed the Société cambrésienne under the patronage of King Gambrinus, pledging to boycott any brewer who uses dextrine, glucose, box-wood decoctions, or other adulterants in place of barley and hops.