LXII. Les fantômes
LXII. Ghosts
Queen Victoria prorogues Parliament and travels to the Rhine; France's iron industry and Algeria campaigns dominate this issue.
- During the prorogation ceremony, the Duke of Argyll dropped the royal crown, which rolled away in front of the bishops' bench, momentarily disrupting the proceedings.
- Indian merchant Dwarkanath Tagore, attending the House of Lords prorogation, exchanged handshakes with the Duke of Wellington before taking his seat in the peers' gallery.
- A Swiss gunsmith in Solothurn claims his new rifle drove a ball through a four-and-a-half-inch oak beam at 500 feet — and through a two-inch stake at 2,000 feet.
- Two hundred galley-convicts being marched from Cartagena to the Canal of Castile massacred their guards, hanged the commanding officer from a tree, and scattered in all directions.
- A mysterious tongueless mute who arrived in Boulogne from London turns out not to be the cabin-boy Fournier at all; the real Fournier has reappeared and is being questioned about the deliberate sinking of the vessel Irma.
- Works by resident students of the Académie de France à Rome — including a marble Marcus Aurelius and a bas-relief of Brennus humiliating Rome — have arrived at the École des Beaux-Arts and will go on public display in September.
- France's blast-furnaces produced 623,622 tonnes of pig iron in 1843 — nearly four times the 1820 figure — and the Mining Engineers' report calculates that 1843's bar-iron output alone could supply over 2,600 kilometres of double-track railway.
- A traveller reports that the United States harvested 152 million hectolitres of maize in 1844 — so much that surplus wheat, enough to feed all of Ireland for a year, was fed to livestock for want of buyers.