ITALY AND FRANCE.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2591, 11 July 1881, Page 2

ITALY AND FRANCE.

The Italian correspondent of the Melbourne; Argus” tells the following ; Amidst nil her distress, however, Italy can still laugh, though the laugh is n very bitter one. The French accounts of their triumphant entry into Tabaron, an Island just off the coast in the neighborhood of Biserta, are affording a grand occasion to our satirical papers. In old times, the Genoese had a thriving colony on this little island, and erected a fort there. The island has long since been abandoned, and the fort, nearly dismantled, was occupied by a few troops of the Bey, who had ordered them to retire rather than offer an evidently useless resistance to the French. Wall I the gallant crews of the French ironclads bombarded the poor little fort for four hours before they discovered that there was not a sonl there, though their guns had all the firing to themselves. At the end of the four hours the victorious warriors rushed in, under a blaze of electric light, and to the sound of the “ Marceillaise,” to find —nobody I And this their own papers relate for the greater glorifiction ot the French arms 1 We have all been told that Franco is a country where ridicule hills. Yet, surely no human beings were ever so impervious to a sense of the ridioulou*.