ARABI PASHA.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1187, 28 October 1882, Page 2

ARABI PASHA.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the interest of the disclosures recently made by the “New York Herald” with respect to Arabi Pasha. Englishmen who have hitherto been tormented by uncertainty respecting this person's nationality, unable to make up their minds whether he is by birth an Egyptian fellah or a Spanish j hidalgo, as has been variously asserted, will be glad to learn upon our spirited contemporary's authority that Arabi is a Frenchman 1 born, and that his name is Athanese Lambresecq. At the age of eighteen, muscular , of body, and adventurous of spirit, he joined a wandering troupe of gymnasts, and wfch it made the “grand tour” of France. Somewhere in Languedoc he eloped with the wife 1 of a sub-Prefect, whom he conducted to a forest near Montauban. In this leafy retreat , the guilty pair lived exclusively upon roots i and herbs for sixteen months. Then, finding : unlawful love, or a vegetable diet, or, perI hups, both combined, fall upon him, Arabi i forsook his companion, married the daughter ! of an ironmaster, and settled down to his I father-in-law’s business at Neussargues, I where he remained for some years, earning a good income, but gambling it all away, and 1 more, at lansquenet. Some embarrassment resulting from this practice, he , fled to Egypt to avoid his creditors. In 1 Pharaoh-land he started a dancing-bear enterprise, which turned out disastrous, and subsequently practised the professions of donkey-driver, hair-dresser, cook and confectioner. Io the last-mentioned line he achieved distinction. Tarts of his making, . which he was wont to sell about Cairo streets, obtained a considerable celebrity, and were rated as a leading delicacy of the Egyptian capital. They led to his being taken up by Buudruchar Effendi, then War Minister, in whose household be abode for fifteen years, rapidly rising from the rank of tart-maker to that of confidential secretary. His subsequent career is too well known tq need recapitulation in this place, perhaps it is a little disappointing to discover that the individual now bidding defiance to Brittania’s might is not an Egyptian nationalist but a French pieman. If M. Lambresenoy. instead of quitting pastry for politics, haci stuck to his patty-pans, he would have merited the eternal gratitude of the British taxpayer, who will, ere long, have only too much reason to execrate the name'of Arabi Pasha. —London “Daily Telegraph,” Sept. 6, 1882.