Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1883-08-31

miss him if be were false to his oath. For
he was going away once more! He was
leaving, by the morning train, with all
the widows family papers in his pocket,to
prove to his sire, that sire whose prejudices
about blue blood are so ridiculous, how
the van Heedeghems of Clamart are no
less illustrious than the gingerbread of
Essonnes, the maccaroons of Montlhery,
the buns of Poutoise, and any other
of the glOries OF the departments
touching upon the Seine contempOraneous
with the crusades. You are perhaps aware
of the fact that recent discoveries made
by French academicians have proved that
the inordinate consumption of sweet pas
try had quite rs much to do with the de-
ciluation Of the army of st. Louis as the
plague.
Next morning the Duke started. =
Here allow me to open parenthesis-
Ye naturalists, if We have read thus far,
will exclaim. What miserable tumble of
unlikelihoods Who is the author? Labi-
date him for 10 he has written for chill
dren or for unedueated kitchen-maids. |
am sorry to say, that their Judgment is
premature, for it was told, in the first
case. to the French magistracy; true, that
institution is about to be reformed. Not
one word ofmy story is invented, and only
week ago the Judge and jury OF Limoges in
1icted five years of hard labor upon it's
hero, which would have been an excessive
punishment for a simple literary misde-
meanQr. But | have not told you the
donouement. and must do so. The Dukes
absence was prolonged, his letters grew
cold and infrequent. and the widow,
growing impatient. wrote to the German
Embassy, and there learned the illustri-
Gus race of the Hassunburg had been eX-
tinct for some half dozen centuries. But
So Rf Il
turer: Here there is no doubt. To all
appearances and in all probability his
name is Lautheaume, for under that name
he was convicted and locked up.
But it is not sure at all, for before he stole
the papers of the van Heedeghem family,
which was the object of his courtship OF
the widow before he was the Duke of Has
sunburg, whom we have known, he had
been successfully Count Naresky at La
Rochelle, Baron de Simian at Oran, a
Vial at Romans, Boyer and an Alleman
at VierZon and Priyas. And how many
professions he had exercised! Previous
TO being a LuXemburgian n0bleman he
had been a hack driver. a. peripatetic dem
fist, a stOker on the z. L. NJ, herbOrist,
Il magician, for, when in Dauphine, this
industrious man used to discover,
with a wand of witch hazel, hidden
springs as surely as an engineer could
with his boring apparatus, and when ar
rested deigned to tin the insIdes of his
cOmpatri0ts saucepans for few pennies.
The Duke" for so | must call him still,
not being surer Of his other designations
than | am of this one, was brilliantly de-
Tended by Maitre X, who went all the way
from Paris to Limoges on purpose, and did
not leave poor Nine. van Heedeghem a leg
to stand upon, but chopped her reputation
into mince-meat, yethe was convicted, as
his counsel said before he left Paris he
must be, but that is a subsidiary matter.
Maitre Y. got off telling speech, and so
acquired another title to that niche in the
temple of fame which he hopes to occupy
by the side of those two Princes Of
vituperation, Maitres Senard and jules
Fayre.
And you will inquire, probably, at what
conclusion | wish to arrive At two.
One direct, which is that truth is often as
strange as fiction; that those who sheer at
Dumas creations are altogether i'll the
wrong when they fancy themselves near
er nature in depicting bourgeois who
lives and dies in the same snuf-colored
coat than he who transforms his person.
s0nages into heroes. D'Artagnan is as
probable as the apothecary, Hormis. The
most unlikely adventures are within the
limits OF possibility, and the proof that it
is so is that justice has shown how, in the
life Of an itinerant tinker, there were more
ayatars, voluntary qujd pro guOS, auda-
ci0uS combinations, and strange accidents
than are found in any OF those novels
which seem to you so infantile. The
OtheF-l have termed it conclusion
which is misnomer-the other point that
l want to speak Of is suggested by the
pleading of the DUKES" counsel, who
sought less to defend his client than to
blacken the character OF his clients
prosecutor, n custom which is becoming
so general among the members of the
French bar that the press warns them
that the time has come when lawyers
must put a bride on their tongues, and
not make an abuse of that liberty of the
defense which permits a counsel to dis
honor his clients adversary and yet re-
lieves him of the responsibility that his
fellOw-cItiZens not of the guild would in
chr by similar intemperances of Ian
guage.
The lawyers rule in France. They hold
all the public offices, from the Chief EX-
ecutive of the nation down to the sub
procedures; all the ministries belong to
them, save those OF war and the navy,
and even the titularies of those are only
their creatures; they ale in their sight,
and no one can complain, because to them
belongs every situation of trust and profit
under the government, but they have not
the right to attack the honor of their fell
iO"-SiCAEohSs " INNS 'tAoAOho1 uPOd any
one, unless with evidence to support
their allegations. There are eagles at the
bar, and geese, also others who are a con-
Meeting link between the two species, but
TO whichever category they belong, nine
tenths of those who now practice at the
French bar seem to think that their repu-
tatiOn is to be made or maintained, not by
the display Of legal acumen, but by the
virulence of their vituperation, who ape
those glories OF a past generation whose
weapons were unpunishable impertinence
and calumny, against which redress is inn
possible.