Blandford, Wimborne and Poole Telegram. — 1878-05-03 (Blandford, Dorset, England)

CELEBRE.  Lovers of the morbid interest which attaches to mysteries and murders are much excited by the trial of M. Eugene Chantrelle, French teacher in Edinburgh. for the alleged murder of his wile by poisoning, which is to begin in the High Court of Justiciary on Tuesday, the 7th of May. Madame Chantrelle died on the 2nd of January. A medical man called in on the morning of that day found her in a state of insensibility. He noticed a strong smell of gas in her bedroom, which it was discovered, was due to a Inv le break in the gas. pipe. Concluding that the case was one of poisoning by coal gas, the physician had the patient removed to the Royal Infirmary, were everything was done for her that medical skill could devise, but all to no purpose ; Mdme. Chantrelle (lied at five o'clock the same afternoon. lie husband was arrested immediately after the funeral in the sth of Jannary, and was conveyed to the Calton gaol, of which he has ever since been an inmate. The chief facts that have emetged since the arrest are that Madame Chantrelle was an Edinburgh lady and twenty-five years of age ; that she had been married for eight years, having been previously a pupil of the prisoner ; that the pair had led a very unhappy life—a fast well known to the relatives of of the deceased, and that three children the youngest an infant, are the issue of the manage. The formal indictment, which was served on the prisoner on the Bth of April, charges the husband with having administerad opium or some other poison to his wife in an orange or in lemonade, with having evinced towards her malice and with having falsely accused her of monstrous immoralities, and with having threatened to shoot her and to poison her. The witnesses cited for the prosecution number 115, and the documentary and material evidence comprises 198 items. The latter includes letters from the deceased to her mother, Mrs. Dyer, describing the treatment she received from her husband, and three policies of insurance on her life— one for £l,OOO in her own name with the Accident Insurance Association of Scotland ; one also for £l,OOO recently effected in the name of M. Chantrelle, and one for £lOO in the name of " Mary Byrne," who was a domestic servant in the employment of the family. It is surmised from the nature of these 'insurances that the intention was, in the first instanc, to base the defence on the plea f accidental tea- h from poisoning by means of the broken gas- ipe, how Woken remains to be proved. But the result of the post-mortem investigation has evidently knocked that plea on the bead ; and it is now well understood that the strength of the defence will lie in the allegation that Madame •Chantrelle was in the habit of taking narcotics, and that the poison found in the stemach was selfadministered. In whatever light it may he viewed, it is an ugly case, and the trial cannot fail to reveal an appalling state of domestic indiscretion and social infelicity.  ItEN'r or cirmoßEN. SHAMEFUL EAT At Gla,gow Circuit Court, Bernard Murphy has been sentenced to five years' penal servitnile for unnatural treatment of his daughter, who died in January last. The evidence disclosed disgraceful circumstanees connected with the case. The neighbours told how the girl went about almost naked in the midst of winter - her only clothing being a scanty petticoat— begging bread. When examined after dea h the lower parts of ,the body were found one mass of di,colouration, the cuts and bruises inflicted by her father being, according to medical witnesses, too numerous to particularise. The left eve was black, the mark of a recent blow, and the medical witnesses stated the girl was an actual skeleton, and that however much a patient might bo emaciated hy consumptii in, it cull never reduce one to such an extent as this poor girl was bromfht to. At Greenock, a woman has been sent to prison for sixty days for assaulting her child, an infant only two ysars and seven months old. She hail beaten it with a strap till it was covered with bruises, and had been known to keep it for hours seated in a tub of cold water.