LXXXII. L'effraction
LXXXII. Breaking and Entering
Postal reform debates, Queen Victoria's visit to Prussia, and a Parisian actress tried for inn thefts dominate this issue.
- Spain has introduced a uniform postal rate of 26 centimes for any letter under 11 grammes sent anywhere within the Peninsula, prompting French calls to end their own higher letter-tax without delay.
- A Berlin correspondent reports Queen Victoria's visit to Prussia backfired badly: German manufacturers suspected the English of lobbying for Manchester goods, and a Cologne counter-subscription mocking the Queen's cathedral donation was forcibly shut down by royal order.
- Copenhagen merchant Falkenberg silenced an auction of journalist Gjoedwad's library — seized to pay a 2,750 rix-dollar fine for mocking the King of Prussia — by bidding 3,000 rix-dollars for the first pamphlet, paying off the entire debt in one stroke.
- Actress Mme Héléna Gaussin, weeping and veiled in black, told the Royal Court of Paris that eleven pieces of silverware from a Troyes hotel ended up in her trunks by pure accident among fifty stage costumes; the court confirmed her fifteen-month sentence.
- A well-dressed thief hired a Paris hotel room, ordered lunch for four phantom guests, slipped out, and left behind a trunk stuffed with coal in exchange for five silver place-settings.
- Eight competitors for the Grand Prix de Paysage submitted landscapes of such wildly divergent vegetation that a reviewer warns one would think each painter had studied trees from a different continent.
- A grain-reaping machine invented by Polish mechanic Tymienczki, driven by two men and three horses, mowed a waterlogged field as fast in minutes as labourers could do in hours, though its weight of nearly 30 quintals remains a problem.
- The new Saint-Eustache organ, entrusted to Daublaine-Callinet, will contain 90 stops producing the effect of 150 registers via the Barker pneumatic mechanism, surpassing Hamburg's Saint-Michael's organ — the previous world record-holder at 88 registers.