A PARISIAN ROMANCE IN WHICH GAMBETTA FIGURED.

Kumara Times, Issue 912, 2 September 1879, Page 4

A PARISIAN ROMANCE IN WHICH GAMBETTA FIGURED.

[CORRESPONDENT CHICAGO TIMES.]

A case without fatal consequnces has, however, attracted the attention of the gay Parisians, who love to laugh and don’t care who or what they laugh at. As it makes Gambetta a trifle ridiculous, the enjoyment is intensified. The actors live in Lille, the Pittsburgh of France, the largest of the northern cities outside of Paris. Here a country youth engaged as a butcher boy, whom the journals describe as un grand beau garcon , in the intervals of his cutting and cleaving, put in an hour or two at the Variety Theatre, and fell madly in love with Mdlle Armand, One of the black-eyed, lithe-limbed beauties of the Parisian stage. The intervals of this “ fine, bold, good-looking boy’s ” steak-carving and bone-cutting were filled with epistolary devotions to the pretty mademoiselle, to whom he protested his love and despair. He wasted all the by no means munificent salary bestowed upon the office of butcher boy ; he adored his divinity nightly from the lofty altitude of the fourth gallery at the expense of 34 cents. He impoverished his purse in the purchase of violets and bonbons to throw at the feet of Mile. Armand—l have forgotten the name, but it don’t matter whom, save that she was gay and pretty, and sang enchantingly through her nose, and kicked behind her with an abandon of which to tell is impossible if one has not seen. It is enough that she fascinated the airy imagination of this sentimental butcher. He began to pay court vigorously, as only a Frenchman can, writing the seductive actress all sorts of expressions of Gallic devotion, and each note winding up with the declaration that he was going to blow—what the poor lad fondly imagined—his brains out. He had probably been reading the novels of Dumas, and modelled his epistles, ss far as phraseology went, upon these exciting and “ flamboyants ” models. Mademoiselle was evidently more struck with the title than the description of the “beaus garcon’s” appearance and she sent him what the priest’s servant, Pat, would call emotional but evasive answers. The time came, however, when the gay butcher found more money necessary for the pursuit of his inamorato then the slender proceeds that the patron (boss) was able to pay. Inspired by that fund of all French imagination, the novels of Dumas, Eugene, Sue, and Balsac he fixed upon the exhilarating expedient of a threat against the life of Gambetta, and wrote that astonished statesman an anonymous note to the effect that if before a certain day 60.000 francs were not lodged to his credit in a certain modest drinking shop in the good city of Lille, he,'the, anonymous who was at the head of a force of 300 desperadoes, and bound to avenge the mis fortunes of the empire, and hungering particularly for the blood of the one-eyed dictator, would, in the dead of the night, when the world was asleep and the gendarmes dancing at the “ Bulliers,” seize him— Gambetta—and deprive him of his life. “ You need not think,” wrote the bloodthirsty youth, “ that you can escape. My means are unfailing, ray process mysterious, my men unerring. Your life is not worth the naming of it if before 12 o’clock of the coming 24th of the month the packet addressed to the name which I here enclose, is not deposited with the Widow—it don’s matter whom—the corner of such and such street, Lille. Gambetta, who has recived in his time a good many threatening letters from one sort or another of persons—political, anonymous, as well as personal—paid no attention to this sinister document, merely throwing it over to his secretary with a laugh. The latter, however, much more impressed with the gravity of his situation, in case of so blood-thirsty a correspondent, able to command so many ferocious men, thought fit to put the matter in the hands of the police. These worthies, delighted with a mission so important as that of saving the life of the chief of the Republican forces, put all the complicated machinery of the most complicated department of human affairs into motion and the enamoured butcher soon found himself enmeshed in in their talons. At 12 o’clock on the night designated in his letter of warning he visited the designated wine shop of madame, the widow, and sure enough at the address named was a great square package, indicating that the trembling Gambetta had purchased his life for the 50.000 francs, which were to crown the butcher boy’s love. Taking the package hastily under his arm, he tore homeward in a delirium of anticipation, and in the very agonies of realisation, he was surprised by the police who followed him. He was forthwith carried off to prison' the package being merely an invention of the Chief of Police to make sure of the right man. Taken before the Court the frightened lad made a clean breast of his “ amour,” to the no small disgust of the actress, who found her occupation gone—the “ wits Lillois” overwhelming the gay demoiselle with ridicule over her conquest. Even the proverbial gravity of a French Court and there is nothing so grave—could not resist the comic spectacle of the large rea-faced youth blubbering cut his frightened explanation of what he called his “ fantaisie.” He told the Judge that he had only written it in fun, because, really and truly,” he affirmed, “ I have no men to help me, and I only thought to frighten M, Gambetta into giving me the money which I wanted to make use of in buying bonbons for Mademoiselle whom—to the uproarious delight of the aiidience, he added— “j’ai tani aime." With mock gravity the counsel for the btate pretended to see in the youth the leader of a Bonapartist outbreak

( ‘ because,” said he “ the very expression that this wicked young man used is that which is dear to the Bonapartist heart taken from the monument on Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalidos.” This was saluted with shouts of laughter, the epitaph alluded to being the famous lines of Napoleon’s will inscribed on his imposing tomb in the Invalides, the shrine of Bonapartist devotion : “ Je veut que mes cendres tent au bord de la Seine, parmi le peuple Francais que j’ai tant aime ” “I wish that my ashes may rest on the banks of the Seine, among the French people, whom I have loved so well.” The public prosecutor, however, did not succeed in making the trial a serious one. The candid, innocent face of the youth, and his pitiful appearance, his tearful protestations of his love for Mademoiselle, and the evident sincerity of his belief in the simple process of terrifying Gambetta, were too much for judicial gravity, and with shouts of hilarious good humor his counsel carried him off subject to a trifling fine and a trifling detention. It is a very characteristic outbreak of the French youth of from 16 to 25, and the extraordinary things they do under the impulse of what they call love, which is to real love what the thirst for brandy is to hunger.