LXXXIII. La main de Dieu
LXXXIII. The Hand of God
The Mexico-United States border crisis, the Cour d'Assises trial of the Endormeurs gang, and a Swiss Young Germany conspiracy dominate this issue.
- Mexico's Minister of Finance told Congress the republic needs 15 million dollars to fight the United States, but Congress approved a loan on terms so restrictive — 6% interest, full disbursement upfront — that no creditor on earth would accept them.
- Swiss authorities arrested leaders of a secret Young Germany propaganda network that had organised 28 workers' clubs across Switzerland and France since 1838, using midnight blindfold initiations and fake piety to recruit atheist revolutionaries.
- Passenger letters from the Great Britain's transatlantic crossing declared the iron-hulled, screw-driven vessel 'without rival,' though the 16-day voyage from New York was slower than Cunard's paddle-steamers because engineers could not yet generate sufficient steam.
- King Friedrich August II of Saxony opened the Dresden Diet warning of 'deeply regrettable' religious unrest in the kingdom, while reporting new commercial treaties with Belgium, Sardinia, and Portugal and a coming reduction in land and trade taxes.
- The French naval schooner Doris, returning to Brest after four years in the Antilles, sank in the harbour entrance in a sudden squall; of 67 aboard, 31 perished, including commander Jules Lemoine, who drowned after pulling three sailors from the waves.
- At the Woolwich Arsenal explosion on 17 September, seven men and a dog were killed; a doctor on the scene attributed all deaths to asphyxiation by carbonic acid gas.
- In the trial of the sixteen-member Endormeurs gang, a witness described how tavern-keeper Mulot drugged victims' wine with tobacco and nail-clippings to rob them, while also running a rigged spinning-top to fleece gamblers.
- King Frederick William IV commissioned Meyerbeer to compose music for a German-language staging of Aeschylus's complete Oresteia trilogy — Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides — at the Berlin Royal Grand Opera.