Installment 44 of 141Sign in to track your progress

XXXIX. Les convives

XXXIX. The Guests

The British Parliament debates the Maynooth Bill and Irish education while the French Chambers vote on Savings Banks limits and railway funding.

  • MP John Roebuck read aloud in the House of Commons a dueling challenge sent to him by Irish member Mr. Somers, who had demanded satisfaction for Roebuck's remarks on Repeal — Somers was forced to withdraw the letter and faced a vote of censure.
  • The House of Lords passed the Maynooth Bill by a majority of 131 votes, while Lord Stanley confirmed that Britain maintained no direct diplomatic relations with Rome, only an attaché in Florence in contact with Vatican officials.
  • Survivors of Napoleon's household petitioned the Chamber of Peers to enforce Article 9 of the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau — a promised 2-million-franc fund — but the Minister of Finance argued the Emperor's return in 1815 had annulled the treaty, and the Chamber voted the order of the day.
  • Deputy Mortimer-Ternaux charged that military barrack construction costs had in some cases reached seventy-three times their original estimates under the law of 1841, with Marshal Soult as the minister responsible throughout.
  • An estimated 25 million francs' worth of buildings — factories, warehouses, dwellings — had been erected inside Paris's military easement zones since 1841, yet no royal ordinance had yet legally defined whether their owners held any right to compensation.
  • The Duke and Duchess of Nemours departed Buckingham Palace by four-horse carriage on 16 June, escorted to the Dover railway terminus by Prince Albert himself, before returning via Brussels to arrive at the palace of Neuilly on 18 June.
  • A Sister of Sainte-Philomène near Migné was killed instantly on 13 June when lightning struck a poplar and traveled down a washing-line coiled in her hands, partly consuming her garments.