LXXXI. La chambre du boulanger retiré
LXXXI. The Retired Baker's Room
The death of philosopher-statesman Royer-Collard, political unrest in Madrid, and the Texas-Mexico war crisis dominate this issue.
- Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, the Doctrinaire philosopher who led constitutional opposition to Charles X and read the Address of the 221 to the king in 1830, has died, prompting a lengthy tribute to his singular political legacy.
- In Madrid, a council of war is set to judge 34 prisoners from the September 5th disturbance, with officers ordered to circulate only in civilian dress as daggers and assassinations are feared.
- General Gaines requisitioned Louisiana militia including eight field guns after intelligence that a Mexican force of 10,000 men had come within eight days' march of General Zachary Taylor's quarters, as private letters from Vera Cruz call war with the United States inevitable.
- Smugglers on the Rhine-to-Rhine canal concealed silk handkerchiefs, nankeen cloth, and embroidered muslins worth 15,000 francs in twelve hermetically sealed zinc cases suspended beneath a timber raft — a device unmasked by Mulhouse customs officers.
- A carter named Thouillet was found murdered on the rise of Villejuif, his skull crushed to a pulp, his four horses stolen and brought into Paris under cover of the pre-dawn market-gardener traffic; only 12 francs were taken from his purse.
- A decorated man wearing several orders in his buttonhole was arrested at a Palais-Royal restaurant after he slipped away mid-dinner to pawn a silver table-cover at the nearby Mont-de-Piété, where a clerk recognised it and followed him back.
- A sweeping review of French agricultural literature argues that an English farmer working half the acreage and under a less favourable sun produces 715 francs of output per man against a French farmer's 215, and calls fallow fields, sharecropping, and absentee ownership the chief causes of the gap.
- Eugène Chevandier, analysing over 600 cubic metres of timber felled in the Vosges across 18,000 hectares, has demonstrated chemically that selective thinning (éclaircies) is beyond comparison the best method of woodland management — work the reviewer says has put France ahead of Germany in forest science.