Installment 137 of 141Sign in to track your progress

CXIV. Peppino

CXIV. Peppino

King Louis-Philippe opens the 1846 legislative session, and a criminal gang trial concludes with harsh sentences in Paris.

  • Louis-Philippe opened the 1846 legislative session before 350 deputies and the full diplomatic corps, promising slave-trade suppression, Algerian pacification, and continued Anglo-French friendship.
  • Tsar Nicholas I visited Pope Gregory XVI in Rome, where the pontiff confronted him face-to-face over two ukases stripping Catholics in Russia of civil jurisdiction and handing it to the Orthodox clergy.
  • A student riot at Madrid's Colegio de San Carlos left many bleeding after medicine and surgery students pelted each other with stones for half an hour over a fee increase from 160 to 220 reals.
  • The Paris court acquitted Lord Coventry's coachman after a servant confessed that the real culprit was Mme d'Hozier's coachman Durozier, who had fled and could not be found — leaving Coventry's 150,000-franc furniture sale at auction as the price of a judicial error.
  • The gang trial of les chauffeurs ended with Gayot and Papin each condemned to twelve years of hard labour and public exposure; thirteen other defendants received sentences ranging from two to eight years.
  • A bottle found on the English coast at Ravenglass contained a letter dated 28 November 1844, signed John R. Brown, bidding farewell to his wife and children as his ship was driven onto a lee shore in a hurricane.
  • Philarète Chasles opened his Collège de France course on English literature — covering Byron, Wordsworth, Lamb, and Coleridge — to an audience repeatedly interrupting him with applause.
  • Publisher Hetzel's new two-volume Le Diable à Paris, illustrated by Gavarni and Bertall with contributions from Balzac, Eugène Sue, and Théophile Gautier, offers satirical sketches of Parisian manners from ballrooms to the boulevard.