The Sun.
London, England, 1868-01-02 00:00:00

CORRESPONDENCE PROM PARIS.

("nom OUR Ow CORDESPONDENT.)

PARIS. WEDNESDAY, %Tan. 1,
The receptions at the Tuileries are over, but the
Imperial utterances have not yet been divulged.
Count von der Goltz, the newly-accredited representa-
tive of the North German Confederation, did not leave
Paris, as report stated that he intended to-do, in order to
avoid an interview with the Emperor. That interview
took place yesterday, and the assurances of the friendship
of the King of Prussia, conveyed through the Ambassador,
were very cordially received and reciprocated by the Em-
petor. I have it on good authority that Count von
der Goltz delayed leaving Paris for Berlin, whither
he has gone to consult his physician, on purpose to attend
at the Tuileries.
most curious suit is under the consideration of our
Crown lawyers. The action is brought by a cab-driver
and his wife to obtain that support which children
are bound to provide in this country for impoverished
parents, from their daughter and son-in-law, the Marquis
and Marquise d'Orvault. The fortune which these latter
possess was not derived from the Marquis d'Orvault, but
belonged to the cab-driver's daughter. Catherine Schu-
macher until recently might have been classed as belong-
ing to the demi-monde of Paris. In 1E66 she was 36 years
of age, and possessed a fortune of 1,000,000 f. in securities,
besides furniture, jewellery, &c., valued at 325,000 f.
At that time Jacques Marie Armand, Count de
Guerry, de Beauregard, de Maubreuil, Marquis d'Orvault,
was aged 83, his only means of existence being a pension
2,7001. from his family. He, however, loved luxury, and
in order to obtain it gave his name in exchange, and made
the cabman's daughter the lawful wife of the represen-
tative of one of the oldest families in France. The mar-
quis, at the same time, adopted legally the illegitimate
son of Catherine. Schumacher, conferring -his name on
the boy. The man Schumacher does not appear to have
shown much affection for his dr.ughter, as when she was
Only 15 years old, and possessing great personal attrac-
tions, he turned her into the streets to get her living as she
could. At the trial it was stated that, notwithstanding
this abandonment, she had always treated her parents with
great kindness ; had placed them in comfortable lodgings ;
and assisted them with money. She had besides
obtained for a brother a good situation in a public
company. The counsel for Madame d'Orvault also
said that the present suit was inspired by a feeling of
annoyance at her marriage and legal adoption of her son,
who thus became heir to her fortune. From that time
Madame d'Orvault became subject to continued acts of
extortion and menaces. As recently as September last
the brother forced an entry into her drawing-room, and on
her refusing to give him a sum of money which he had de•
manded, he fired at her four shots from a revolver, by
which she was slightly hurt. The case now stands over
for some days, to allow the law officers of the Crown to
express an opinion on it. The marquis, I should state, is
a turncoat in politics, has been convicted and punished
for a highway robbery on the Queen of Westphalia, and
for an assault on Talleyrand, by whom he had been em-
ployed in secret service at the funeral of Louis XVIII.
It is not often that one has to recount a theatrical dis-
.urbance of a character so grave as that which has occurred
at the theatre of the Porte St. Martin. At this house a
piece has been put on the stage, entitled " 1867; ou Si to
n' es pas content, demandes autre chose." As Mdlle.
Silly the night before last was performing her role,
which consists of an imitation of the intonations and ges-
tures of Mdlle. Schneider in " The Grande Duchesse," imd

the audience, amused with the imitation—which is indis-
putably good—were loudly applauding, a whistle was
heard from the first row of the gallery. The noise
was continued until the audience, almost driven mad,

simultaneously sprang to their feet. A police agent was
then seen approaching a young man, respectably dressed,
who was pointed out as the offender. Nothing of what
was said could be heart'', but it was easy to guess by their
gestures that the one was requesting the other to leave,
and that the other energetically refused to do so. Cries
of "'Turn him out !" " No, no !" were raised, and the

usual jokes under such circumstances were bandied about

The police agent withdrew, and tranquillity was about to
be restored, when two gendarmes advanced to the dis-

turber, and put their hands upon his shoulder. He
resisted manfully, held firmly to the woodwork in front,

and, although his cravat was torn off, still kept his place.

At last, amidst indignant cries of protest from the whole
house, the agents carried the man bodily off, though he was

still making the most violent opposition. The exelama.

tions and noises then became quite furious, and shouts of
" Rendez-le !" " Qu'il reviebne !" continued to be heard

for several minutes. The stage manager came forward,
but the audience refused to hear him. The curtain was

let fall, but the spectators continged their cries for the

liberation of the man, declaring that lie had a right to

hiss or whistle if he pleased, since he had paid his money

to applaud or the contrary, as he thought fit. The ladies

in the boxes had by this time been seized with the general

emotion, and stood up in the boxes waving their handker-
chiefs. At last shouts were heard, "La voilb, !" "La

voila !" and in a moment M. Langlois, who, I am told, is

a clerk in a commercial establishment, resumed his seat

in the gallery amidst applause, which was re-echoed from

every corner of the house.
I see it announced in the Presse, and I have no reason
to doubt the statement, that Mdlle. Patti will shortly be
married to the Marquis de Caux.

LITERATURE.

Men of the Time. Seventh Edition. Edited by
G. IL Townsend. George Routledge and Sons.
London and New York.
It would be unnecessary to say simply that this
new edition of " Men of the Time" is by far the
best that has yet been published. That—as a mat-
ter of course. A compilation of this well-sustained
and laborious kind must needs evidence improve-
ment upon every occasion of its reappearance.
Experientia docet. Omissions are made good. Slips
of the pen or of the press are rectified. Errors
of fact are cleared up. Interpolations, additions,
transpositions, are as carefully as possible attended
to. And, all this—while Death necessitates the
weeding out of biographies previously introduced,
and recognised Success, on the other hand, leads to
the introduction of biographies hitherto either never
dreamt of or accidentally overlooked. By reason
of the shifting nature of the materials herein
brought together—perfection, or rather an approxi-
mation to perfection, iu a book of this particular
description is simply an impossibility. Scrupulous
accuracy, even, is a thing unattainable. All that can
reasonably be hoped for or aimed at is a near ap-
proach to it. Otherwise to express the difficulty
of the task undertaken by the compiler—it is com-
parable to an attempt to take a comprehensive
photograph of a great multitude of people in con-
stant movement. A multitude—each member of which
is moving f As if one tried to photograph at noon-
day the throng of men and women going to and fro
in our greatest thoroughfares—in the Strand, let us
say, or in Piccadilly. A multitude, moreover, from
which familiar forms and faces are perpetually dis-
appearing, and into the midst of which new and
strange faces and forms are as perpetually be-
ing introduced. Remembering as we do very
well indeed the earliest issue from the press
of this " Dictionary of Contemporaries" called
" Men of the Time" —we are peculiarly well
able to appreciate the contrasting excellence in every
way of this its seventh and latest republication.
Instead of being a tiny little volume very superfi-
cial, and, very restricted, indeed, in its way--the
work is now, everything considered, wonderfully
comprehensive. According to the title-page, the
book consists of " Biographical Notices of Eminent
Characters of both Sexes." Statesmen, Warriors,
Poets, Sculptors, Painters, Authors, Patriots, Phil-
anthropists, Novelists, Journalists, Travellers, In-
ventors, Navigators, Musicians, Actors, Orators
(whether from therulpit, the Tribune, the Platform,
or the Stump), Dancers and Divines, Cooks and
Mathematicians—here they all throng upon the
scene together in motley confusion, the order of
array amongst them being simply alphabetical.
Signor Mazzini and Pope Pius the Ninth, Victor
Hugo ar.d the Emperor of the French, M. Rouher
and S. Rattazzi, coming alternately to view in the
wildest contrast, as though, in turning the leaVes,
the book were a shaken kaleidoscope. Considering
the work simply as a Book, it is certainly remark-
able. Handsomely, simply, strongly bound—it
comprises within it some 866 printed pages, the
double-columned typography of which is at once
clear and beautiful. Without numbering them one
by one, we should say that there are here,
at a moderate computation, from 2,000 to 2,500
biographical notices. Among so many—errors,
of course, there are—errors of omission and of
commission. Biographies, for example, as of people
still living, are here given of people who have died
while the present edition has been passing through
the press. Eighteen of these are, in point of fact,
enumerated by the Editor himself in his Preface.
Yet, even since the Preface has been printed, in
which those eighteen names are mentioned by Mr.
Townsend, others have died also—such as the Due
de Luynes and the Countess of Harrington. Errors
of this kind, however, in a work of this precise cha-
racter, are simply unavoidable. Errors of a kind
that may easily enough be avoided are those we
would here specify—few and far between, and some
among them comparatively insignificant. Yet, for
all that, worth specifying thus, if only with a view
to their avoidance. While other Academicians, and
other Members of Parliament, have their n.tzues
hero followed by the enviable initials, we see no
reason whatever why Baron Marochetti should not
be styled R.A., or why John Francis Maguire
should not be dubbed M.P. Any more than why
Mr. Gladstone being designated as Right Honour-
able, Mr. Goschen should not have the same right
honourable prefix, he being also a privy councillor.
By an odd lapsus enough, in the enumeration of the
works of M. de Lamartine, La Genie de Chris-
tianisme, is mentioned—that being on the con-
trary, as all the world ought to know by this
time, the glorious literary masterpiece of the
Vicomte de Chateaubriand. Again in the number-
ing up of the pictures of Daniel Maclise-- the very first
one on the list is oddly put thus, " Mokanna uu-
veiling herfeatures to Zelica !" When Lever's Novels
again are being specified one by one, " Our Mess"
is spoken of side by side with " Jack Hinton"—as
if " Barnaby Rudge" and " Master Humphrey's
Clock" were jotted down together—" Jack Hinton"
being in point of fact a constituent portion of Our
Mess, just as " Barnaby Rudge" was a constituent
portion of Master Humphrey's Clock. Speaking of
Dickens, too, it is curious to find so famous a work
as "Pickwick" erroneously mentioned as the Posthu-
mous Memoirs (whereas it should be Posthumous
Papers) of the Pickwick Club. To Wilkie Collins.,
moreover, it may here be added, is awarded the credit
due to his brother Charles Alston Collins (of whom
no notice whatever is taken) the credit of the
authorship of "A Cruise upon Wheels." Why
again should there be no mention here at all of the
first farce writer surely who ever lived—meauitig,
of course, Maddison Morton. the delightful author
of the immortal Box and Cox? Vainly, too, do
we look for any biographical notice whatever
of a young novelist and man of letters
as vivacious and prolific as Percy Fitzgerald, and
even more strangely yet for any reference to a lady
novelist as gifted and voluminous as Mrs. Oliphant.
Omissions such as these must be looked to in the
next imprint of this valuable compilation— the
seventh edition of which is considerably enhanced
in value by the prefix to it, of a Key to Assumed
Names, as well as by the appending to it of a Biogra-
phical Index of Names dropped out of the present
imprint, but included in previous editions of the
work. As a token of how errors will creep in even
in the drawing up of an initial list of names, it is
curious to remark that, here, even in the Key to the
Pseudonyms—Delta is referred to as the nom de plume
of Aird, whereas as the very biographical notice here
given by Mr. Townsend he distinctly enough inti-
mates that Delta was the familiarly known pseudonym
of his friend and some time contemporary, David
Moir, the author, among other charming poems, of
" Casa Nappy." Slips of the pen or of the press,
such as those we have just now been particularising,
have been here indicated with an eye rather to the
future than to the past—in aid or encouragement,
rather than in dispraise or depreciation. The work is
so valuable of its kind intrinsically, that it should
be the aim of every one who treats upon it to assist
as far as possible in the publishers' and editor's evi-
dently conscientious and laborious efforts towards
the perfecting of it. This we have done very cordially
out of the fullness of our appreciation of the excel-
lence of Men of the Time as a Dictionary of Erni.
nent Contemporaries.

ONCE A WEEK—has inaugurated the New Year
with the commencement of a New Series. Its
price has fallen to Twopence—but simultaneously
its reputation has been raised a thousandfold.
Mr. Dallas, the author of the Gay Science, anti
the husband of Miss Glynn that was, has assumed
the Editorship at the same time that a serial
story, full of promise, and already of breathless
interest, has been commenced by masters of nar-
rative and dramatic effect as highly distinguished
as Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault. A wore
admirable commencement to a fiction we never
read. And the letterpress is accompanied by an
illustration quite as admirable in its way—a
sketch from the pencil of George Dumouier.
Besides these noticeable attractions to Once a Week,
the present number contains within it some fine
original verses by Tennyson, and some very read-
able gossipping paragraphs.