LXIII. Le dîner
LXIII. Dinner
The Beethoven festival at Bonn, Guizot's speech to Norman electors, and the Paris schools prize day dominate this issue.
- Jules Janin reports from Bonn that a 200-foot festival hall was built in nine days to hold 3,000 guests for the Beethoven statue inauguration, with Spohr, Liszt, Berlioz, Schumann and Clara Wieck among the artists present.
- Liszt conducted his own cantata at the Bonn festival, prompting Spohr to declare that if Liszt followed the new path he had opened, 'he would arrive at some result that no one could foresee.'
- Foreign Minister Guizot addressed 260 guests at a banquet in Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, defending press freedom while insisting that fifteen years of conservative government had secured constitutional liberty and peace abroad without war.
- The Queen of England, travelling with Prince Albert, was expected to pass through Antwerp to Mechelen before proceeding to the Prussian royal family at Stolzenfels Castle, with 200 post-horses held in readiness at three staging points.
- At the Paris concours général, pupil Caro of the Collège Stanislas swept both the French and Latin dissertation prizes of honour, while the Collège Charlemagne topped the overall table with 25 prizes and 75 accessits from 848 pupils.
- Minister of Public Instruction Salvandy told prize-day pupils that French forces had 'planted the cross and the lily' in Africa 'as did Saint Louis their ancestor,' making it 'French beyond all contest and beyond all return.'
- Barrister Eugène Béchaire vanished after cashing a large sum at the Treasury and breakfasting at the Café de Paris; his young wife and family could find no explanation for his disappearance.
- An advocate-general told the Seine Assizes that more than twenty thefts by the so-called 'band of Auvergnats' — mostly committed with false keys on small tradespeople and poor workmen — would be put to the jury, while seeking leniency for the informer Gaillard.