A FRENCH SCANDAL.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume XI, Issue 1335, 28 July 1883, Page 4

A FRENCH SCANDAL.

Tlisiobt ofanHeibkss—The Victim of Vice and an Unscrui'Ulous and Dissipated Motiieb. The Monasterio case surpasses anything imagined by Zola in writing his most unsavoury novels. Such a collection of sharpers and. uninteresting, and indeed foul, dupes were never seen before. Madame Monasterio, who sits on the prisoners’ bench in the Sixth or Correctional Chamber, is a lady of Spanish ancestry, born in Chile. She is distinctly related to M. de Lesseps, and is really very like him, notwithstanding the bloating and degrading effects of habitual intoxication. Her husband was a man of very large fortune. He left his widow in opulent circumstances, and a splendid heritage to his daughter and heirs. The heiress was naturally weak-minded, and has since become almost idiotic. She is now forty years old. Her mother was galante, and gave birth in the third year of her widowhood to a son, w'ho goes by the name of Carlos Lafit. This individual is a good-for-nothing spendthrift. He is his mother’s idol. To insure him a fortune, she went deeply into Bourse and other speculations, and completely ruined herself. When all her substance was wasted, she fell back on the income of her daughter, and when that was insufficient, attempted to make her out a lunatic, and so obtain the control of her fortune. As a preliminary step, she locked her up in the Charenton Mad-house, but took her out again when she found that were the girl proved mad she would be handed over to the guardianship of her father’s relatives. The mother was surrounded by swindlers and sharks. They seemed to have an elective affinity for her. She lived in the most sordid manner in the Avenue Frochot, getting drunk every evening, and feeding herself and "her daughter on the vilest offal of the greengrocers and the butchers’ shops. Mlle, rejoices in the pretty name of Fidelia. It appears that she is addicted to numerous vices. A German waiting maid, either to obtain the stewardship of her large income or to hand her over for a sum of money to her father’s relations in Chile, coaxed her away from the maternal domicile to a lodging of her own. There she panderered to her vile lusts. The German took Mlle. Monasteria to orgies in the Quartier Breda, and initiated her into all the mysteries of that ultra fast section of the town. She thus afforded the mothei’ and Carlos a pretext for seizing upon the heiress, and taking her by force to a private lunatic asylum. The mad doctors, of whom certificates were asked, appeared in Court. Some of them were as disreputable sharpers as any of the spectators who plundered Madame Monasterio. It was those shady practitioners who certified to lunacy. But I should add that one of the most eminent specialists in France Dr Legrand du Saulle, has testified that Mlle. Monasterie has admitted to him her vices in a matter-of-course way, and was, if not a lunatic, an idiot. As the German woman notified the Chilian relatives of the young lady how she had been incarcerated, steps were taken by them to withdraw her from the mad-house and transport her to South America. But her mother and Carlos, getting wind of the plan, transferred her to England, She is now living at Stone in Kent, and lodges with the family of a Mr Hughes, What renders this trial so interesting is that it lays bare the workings of the lunacy law of 1838. No rich and eccentric Frenchman or woman either can be sure of remaining free while the law is unrepealed.—Paris eorrespondent of the New York Tribune,