LXXVII. Haydée
LXXVII. Haydée
Russia's Caucasus campaign ends in near-rout, a potato blight spreads across Belgium and the Rhine, and the Duc de Montpensier travels up the Nile to Philæ.
- A senior Russian officer's account reveals that Prince Vorontsov's 40,000-man Caucasus expedition, celebrated officially as a triumph at Dargo, suffered up to 10,000 casualties and retreated in conditions likened to a routed army.
- Reports from Belgium, the Rhine, and Ghent warn that the potato blight is now almost universal, late-crop harvests will be nil, and a gastric illness in Ghent is attributed to rotten potatoes reaching the market.
- The Duc de Montpensier, hosted by Muhammad Ali's flotilla of three steamboats, shot the first cataract above Aswan in a rowing boat and visited the sacred island of Philæ, where Champollion had inscribed a warning not to deface the monuments.
- Mother and daughter Ceret, returned penniless from Algiers, furnished a Paris apartment on credit, claimed a theatrical salary of 6,000 francs (actually 1,200), pawned silks and lace worth over 10,000 francs, and were convicted of swindling; the mother fled to Brussels.
- A new instalment of Le Diable à Paris features Jules Janin on the debtors' prison of Clichy and caricaturist Bertall's series Les Cocottes et les Coquettes, with a forthcoming satire on indifference by Auguste Barbier.
- Italian sculptor Motelli, working in London under the patronage of Sir John Guise, is praised for two new pieces — the kneeling figure La Méditation and the Anacreontic La Ceinture des Amours — as marking a new era beyond Canova.
- Engineer Dumont's new Lyon waterworks filters turbid Rhône water through 45 metres of gravel and delivers roughly 16 million litres a day — about 79 litres per person — via a 45-horsepower steam pump.