XXXVII. Les catacombes de Saint-Sébastien
XXXVII. The Catacombs of Saint Sebastian
A French government commission recommends trials of electric telegraphy, while a double poisoning trial at Blois ends in two death sentences.
- A French government commission estimated that an electric telegraph line from Paris to Rouen could be built for 240,000 francs, transmitting messages at a speed exceeding that of light — making the existing optical telegraph obsolete.
- Spanish liberal general Juan Prim, on trial before a court-martial in Madrid, told the judges his prosecutor 'either had his course traced for him in advance, or has a thirst for blood.'
- Martín Zurbano, rallying fifty to eighty cavalrymen, seized the town of Nájera in La Rioja and called on veterans of the civil war to join him in revolt against the Spanish government.
- Thorvaldsen's statue of Lord Byron, excluded from Westminster, is to be erected instead in Kensal Green cemetery.
- A clog-maker named Rougier and his mistress Mme Hagu were sentenced to death at Blois after arsenic was found in the bodies of both Hagu's husband and Rougier's wife, poisoned over several weeks in spring 1844.
- The proprietor of the fashionable Parisian bazaar Châteaux des fleurs was fined 100 francs for calling a customer an intrigant and accapareur after refusing to sell him five lengths of silk velvet at 13 fr. 50 c. each.
- The Princes of Joinville and Aumale were fêted at Toulon with cannon salvoes, illuminations, and the launch of the frigate la Pomone-Minerve, before departing for Naples aboard the Gomer.
- Adolphe Thiers and Charles de Lacretelle, the two most celebrated historians of the French Revolution, are both about to publish competing histories of the Consulate and the Empire.