LXXXVI. Le jugement
LXXXVI. Judgement is Passed
French Algeria, the Russian campaign against Shamil in the Caucasus, and French by-elections dominate this issue.
- Colonel Berthier of the 4th Chasseurs d'Afrique was shot through the heart during a Flittas tribal revolt near Mostaganem; his furious troopers charged the Arabs to recover his body, but the column lost roughly 100 men killed or wounded.
- Russian forces under General Vorontsov retreated from Dargo for five days without rations, nearly without ammunition, carrying 3,000–4,000 casualties through Caucasian forests while Shamil's highlanders seized four cannon and reportedly destroyed two Georgian militia units entirely.
- Tunis's Bey Mustapha publicly refused to receive Austria's consul, who arrived bearing only an Ottoman firman rather than direct imperial credentials — a pointed assertion of the regency's de facto independence from Constantinople.
- In Barcelona, kidnappers seized the son of a wealthy merchant named Fontanillas and demanded 100,000 piastres (525,000 francs) in gold for his release; thirteen bandits from the same region were simultaneously condemned to be shot on the citadel glacis.
- A self-styled sorceress named Chenier — already convicted four times — was sentenced to one year's imprisonment after collecting 220 francs from a destitute sick girl on the promise of extracting a walnut-sized object from her body to cure her.
- Adolphe Adam's new ballet La Fille de marbre had a triumphant premiere at Drury Lane, with dancer Adèle Dumilâtre recalled after the curtain and receipts of 20,000 francs on opening night.
- The sole outstanding work among this year's Rome Prize envoys is pensioner Ernest Hébert's copy of Michelangelo's Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel; the critic dismisses most sculptors and painters as uninspired, singling out the Capitoline Venus as a poor model whose appeal rests entirely on its translucent marble.
- A plank washed ashore at Saint-Valery-en-Caux, encrusted with hundreds of living tube-dwelling creatures and bearing a medal inscribed Ludovicus magnus, rex, has been sent to the natural-history cabinet at Caudebec, puzzling local observers who had never seen such organisms on Norman shores.