MARQUIS’ LOVER TRIED.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9066, 5 February 1908, Page 2

MARQUIS’ LOVER TRIED.

VITRIOL ENDS ROMANCE BEGUN IN A CATHEDRAL. The Seine Assizes Court was crowded by the fashionable world the other day, when Mme. Valentine Florentie, or d’Orville, was charged with throwing vitriol at the Marquis Louis de St. Legier, so that he lost the sight of an eye. M. Bertulus narrated how the marquis, then twenty, met the prisoner in the height of her youth and beauty at Royan in 1905. To years before she had married a merchant of Bordeaux, but three months later she informed her husband that she had made up her mind to leave him. The happiness of the marquis and Valentine was brief. His money ran short, and he told her they must separate. In January, 1906, a final quarrel took place. That night, while he slept, Valentine attacked him with a razor, and cut him about the face. The marquis put her to the door, promising to take no further action if she left him in peace. She returned to Bordeaux, but her husband refused to receive her. She then wrote several letters to j|the marquis, requesting him to intercede with her husband. She came to Paris twice, but the marquis’ attitude was so unsympathetic that she determined to be revenged. On December 18th the marquis received a telegram signed “de Pontange,” the name of a friend, giving 'him an appointment at a cafe on the boulevards. The marquis was leaving the cafe when Valentine jumped ’out of a cab and threw a glass of vitriol in his face. At the trial Valentine showed no repentance for the terrible injuries she had inflicted. She was smartly dressed in a long black velvet jacket, and over her shoulders was thrown a long fur boa. Speaking in a very low voice, she admitted that she met the marquis in the Cathedral at Royan. “The accusation which you make against the marquis,’’ interrupted the president, “is not in conformity with French gallantry.” The prisoner, however, maintained that it was at the instigation of the marquis she left her husband. Valentine declared that finally, when the marquis repulsed her and declined to write to her husband ' and assume the responsibility for her flight, she made up her mind to be revenged upon him. She did not intend to deform the marquis, but only to mark him. The hearing was adjourned.