OUR PARIS LETTER.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 313, 18 July 1879, Page 2

OUR PARIS LETTER.

Varieties.

(from our own correspondent.) Paris, May 22. ** In the midwifery school of this city pupils are henceforth to practice on dead bodies, as in Vienna. Lecturing and starting newspapers are* the latest manias in Paris. Bonnat is painting the portrait of PresiGrevy, as commissioned by the latter's old constituents of the Jura. Victor Hugo is to present 5,000 copies of his Napoleon Le Petit as prizes for- the lay schools. " While I live you shall never have a benefice," said Cardinal de Fleury to the Abbe de Bernis. "Well, then, mpnseigneur, I will wait," was the reply. The Protestants and Free-thinkers of France claim the right to employ the parish bier and pall, asserting their use has nothing to do with the Catholic creed. " Poverty is no crime," said a notorious* miser to a vagrant, as he re-placed the sous in his purse. The Zulus, according to a French.physiologist, " never yawn." "Paris, city of mud and smoke, I can never be far enough from you," was J. J. Rousseau's apostrophe to what Hugo calls " the city of light." A leading naturalist in the Eve Tronchet states, the favorite pets he now re-. ceives to stuff are " mice," white and grey; he is employed, however, on a "large order," that of a giraffe, intended to be hawked about the streets on a dray, holding the placard address of an outfitter in its mouth. In the pillage of Prague, an agent who made the inventory of the Palace pictures, ** described Titiou's painting of "Ledaand the swan ;" ditto, " a naked woman bitten by •a wild goose." The poet Hegisippe Morau, boasted that his verses were paid the same As prose. He offered on one occasion to become a bouse-pdrter, and to supply the landlord with poetry. He claimed hunger to be tbe best incentive to early rising, and a perfect substitute for coffee. ' •— St. Martin said, " I have noted that men were astonished to die, but never surprised at having been born." A dyspeptic states, eating is Paradise, but digesting the other place. . **• Sa'cher Masoch in his "Enemy of Women," has a character, a peasant, who has become " king of journalists, without knowing how to read or write." The late academecian Taillandier, wrote 30 volumes, but never succeeded in making a book. Republican hats are now lined with red, white, and blue silk. Gilding' books prevents dust entering the leaves ; hence their use for drawingroom tables. In a new hotel in the Avenue de .'''■% l'Opera, among other regulations suspended in the bedrooms, is that requesting tooth-picks, when used, not to te replaced in their holders. To punish a pet squirrel, pull its ears— * if you can. The Berlin Congress said to Greece— < " Take up thy bed, but don't walk." Michelet had in his study the portraits of all the celebrities of the Revolution, and at twilight paced the room, talking to them, criticising the incidents of their lives.

Northern France is protectionist, and southefn freetrado; the contrary is the oasu in Germany. , , Since the Ist of. March to. the 10th May 26 new journals. have been founded in Paris • 23 are'dead, arid] the others—? Two side walls of the Arc.de. Triomphe aro to contain the names' and-dates'of the chief inventions and discoveries of humanity. .. ,; ; ; ■■'.; :::'.'..■;'.'. ■-:•■■>'.-. I i ''' In the allegorical monument to perpetuate the souvenir of last year's busts of the reigning monarchs will ■be introduced. ~- *: . ,,: : . ■•' Sainte-Beure said of the Senate, of tbe Second Empire, of which he was a memIvor—" In wringing all the Catholics there, one would not obtain the soul of a good Christian." Georges Greive, who denounced Mine, dv Barry, signed himself " the friend of Franklin and Marat, anarchist of the first order, and disorganizer of despotism in the two hemispheres since. 20 years." The Hai'dougues, a sort of outlaw tribe of Bulgaria, in electing their \ chief annually, assure him-—" where your hair is, there are our heads." t Dumas fiU denies that he manufactures, dramas as others do toys and waterproof tissues, or that the re-estftblfshment of divorce would kill his industry, in aduL tery. An artist complains that -he expended 70f. on a frame for his picture now exposed in the Wow, but has been, offered 25f. for the lot; the canvas he concludes injured the frame. -\ . .• A joint stock company, of Almack ladies intend building a special theatre for representing their own private : theatricals. There are in Paris 520 Pogitivisfs, 2300 Spiritists, and about 1822 Dentists. In the 18th century, a Lorraine schoolmaster received 9 sous a year fees for each pupil, plus the right to a meal at their parents' by rotation, and liberty to follow the trade.of mason, tailor, or cobblerl _ Madame de Stael&ied from' an hysteria of talking. - ! ! ) ' Charles VLof France, the Well Beloved, was so pitied by his subjects that" they not only implored God arid the Saihts, : but the devil himself to restore the King his reason. - " " The dissolute life: of. a husband is the best guarantee for the liberty of a fashionable wife. . - The Emperor Joseph 11. of Austria prohibited the dead to be buried in coffins, it being a waste of wood, and if anyone described himself as a Deist he was to receive 20 blows with a stick for pretending to be something he did not understand. Ludovic Halevy maintains that Moliere's wife was not a dragon of; virtue ; the Bonapartists assert she. was. Macaroni is attacked by a bug said to resemble the phylloxera, and that produces diarrhoea. '- -'. Diderot, whenever He saw ra; picture wherein a mother and children figured, said it''preached population." Dijon is celebrated for its mustard, and the birth place of Victor Hugo and the new executioner. Fenelon observes—"The truly strong woman believes, holds her tongue, and obeys."