Denton Examiner, Audenshaw, Hooley Hill and Dukinfield Advertiser. — 1876-07-01 (Denton, Greater Manchester, England)

CONVICTS. The Paris oerreepondent of the Globe, writing on Friday night, says: A strange wedding is fixed to take place to-morrew, at the Mania of the 12th Arrondissement, situated on the Place de l'Eglia6, at fleecy. Maillard, the leader of a gang of thieves, supposed to have committed several murders, who halt become the very terror of the interior boulevards, is to be married ' to Eugenie Pint, a woman of ill-fame, who lured to her den the victims robbed by her male accomplice; while Vrignault, Maillards lieutenant, offers at the same time hie hand and heart to liortense Couturier, worthy, ss regards crime and debauchery, of her convict husband. klaillard, who is only 25 yearn of age, was, according to his statements, a carrier by trade, but his antecedente, as adduced by the police, prove that since he left the reformatory, where he had been sent until he was 13, had been one long career of undetected crime. As he appeared on the day of his trial, his face showed that he was not devoid of energy or intelligence. lie seemed quite at e/ide when seated in the dock at the Court of Assize, and when not talking with his affianced, Eugenie Piet, who sat behind him, for whom, as he said, he was ready to " embrace the widow," the cant term for being guillotined, he was looking round the court, nodding to some sinister - looking acquaintance who might have been found among the audience. Maillard happened to say one day, when being tried for the offence which he had been arrested for, that if the doors of the court were closed, and the criminal antecedents of each individual examined into, come of the most adroit thieves in Paris would be taken, a remark 'which caused some uneasiness among the audience, and many of the seats to be deserted. On the first trial the two women were not implicated, but when Maillard found that he had got twenty years he turned informer, so that he and his lieutenant, Vrignault, might find the two women in the penal settlement where they were to be sent. In exchange far a promise from the authorities that a double marriage would be permitted, Maillard enabled the police to lay hands on half-a-dozen members of his gang, and to get the two women convicted, the latter not demurring, no strong was their affection for their degraded paramours that they wished for nothing better than to be married to them, and follow them to some convict settlement, such as Cayenne, where every advantage is offered to married convicts, so as to induce them to colonise. Eugenie Piet, dressed in the clothes worn by the prisoners at Saint Lazare, is under •20; her features are pretty and regular; vice has stamped none of its indelible traces on her youthful face, which became loathsome as she confessed, smiling, and with revolting cynicism, the pa,t she had- taken in the different robberies laid to the charge of her lover. Vrignault is a commearlooking ruffian, a regular gaol-bird, a professional thief, whose sinister expression of countenance is increased by a sear extending from his Mouth to his eye, said to have been caused by a stab reoeived from some friend in a drunken quarrel. Borten. Couturier in a vulgarlooking creature, coarse and bloated, whose face bears out the statement that for the last fifteen yeare she had pursued a career of debauchery. Everything loas been arranged for the double marriage. Four cabs will leave Mazes to-morrow morning for the Mamie. Each cab will contain one of the convicts well guarded by the police, and when the handcuffs are removed, since the French law prescribes that the civil marriage shall take place in perfect liberty, arrangements will be made so as to frustrate any attempt to escape on the part of the convicts, or to rescue them on the part of them friends. The eight policemen will be the witnesses of these strange marriages, and the nuptial benediction will be oven after the civil ceremonies in the chapel at Mazes, all the doors leading to which will have to be left open until the affair is over, and the four prisoners have parted to meet again at Cayenne, or some other penal settlement, where the next generation may perhaps be better than their fathers and mothers.