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LXXXVI. Le jugement

LXXXVI. Judgement is Passed

O'Connell addresses half a million people in Tipperary for Repeal, Spain overhauls its university system, and a Paris railway fraud case reaches the courts.

  • Daniel O'Connell, aged seventy, addressed an estimated 500,000 people at Thurles, collecting £101 18s on the spot for the Repeal cause and mocking a Times correspondent who called Irish women ugly.
  • Spain's new public instruction decree abolishes three universities — Canary Islands, Huesca, and Toledo — and reserves the doctorate exclusively for Madrid, while fixing professors' salaries between 6,000 and 18,000 reales.
  • A Haitian force of 1,500 men massacred all inhabitants of a Dominican village without distinction of age or sex, prompting the Dominican Republic to mobilise 10,000 troops toward the frontier.
  • Sergeant-Major Gérard near Bône shot a black lion at four paces, only for the ball to ricochet and strike him in the chest; the lion then knocked a boulder onto his feet before fleeing with a broken dagger blade in its temple.
  • The iron steamboat Bangor, destroyed by fire off Castine because its heated iron sides ignited timber frames, had refused insurance on the assumption that iron vessels cannot burn — a loss exceeding 50,000 dollars.
  • Police arrested four ex-convicts in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine — two from Toulon's penal colony, two from Mont-Saint-Michel — caught on the third floor with a jemmy and a bundle of skeleton keys.
  • In the Pepin-Lehalleur Northern Railway fraud case, barrister Chaix d'Est-Ange revealed that subscriber M. Lagondeix had sold his letter of notification for a 4,000-franc premium, receiving only 500 francs in cash.
  • The Duchess of Valmy, widow of Napoleonic marshal Kellermann, died at the Batignolles at eighty; the lawyer and playwright M. de Laville de Mirmont, who had staged tragedies at the Comédie-Française, also died in Paris aged sixty-three.