AN ECCENTRIC CHARACTER.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 339, 14 July 1875, Page 3

AN ECCENTRIC CHARACTER.

A rather eccentric character of the name of Leo Laspes has just expired in Paris rather suddenly. The deceased was widely known in the days of the Empire under the pseudonym of Timothy Trim, a name probably borrowed from Sterne’s celebrated corporal. Every day, for many years, he wrote a leading article in the Petit Journal, in which he vulgarised the most interesting topics of the day, and made the most complex and erudite questions clear to the meanest comprehension. He had swarms of admirers, and, touched with the vanity of his nation, it was a sight to see him leaning carelessly back in an open carriage. No man seemed better to understand his importance than Timothee Trim, and he was an important personage in the palmy days of the Petit Journal. That paper was very small, and cost but one sou, but then, be it said, without any disrespect for other claimants, it had perhaps the * largest circulation in the world.’ Copies were knocked off by the ton, and smart vans conveyed loads of papers to the various stations every evening, each van drawn by a pair of horses and ‘conducted ’ by a postillion dressed in the old costume of thoss worthies—jackboots, buff breeches, green jacket with red facings and the tinest tail, and a powdered wig, surmounted by a glazed hat decorated with ribbons. As the vans clattered alond the paved streets, the postillions cracking their whips, people stared with astonishment. Timothee Trim was one of the lions of Paris, and his name was familiar as a household word in every hamlet in France. There were no politics in the Petit Journal, nothing to excite the passions, but much to instruct and to render people both wiser and happier. Just before the war Leo Lespes grew weary of his daily toil, and laid down his pen, or at least only wrote at intervals. His health failed him more and more, and he who, like Alexander Dumas, had squandered large sums of money, died almost in want.