BURNING OF THE PARIS OPERA HOUSE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1615, 2 August 1887, Page 3

BURNING OF THE PARIS OPERA HOUSE.

The English papers contain full and graphic accouots of the .burning of the Paris Opera Cpmique. Some of the incidents narrated are peculiarly p»theticjand painful. Among the victims are. .Mr Langeroau, of Tours, and hiswifo and daughter, who had come up to attend a friood's wedding, and for the daughter to buy articles for her own approaching marriage. The bodies found on the staircase between the upper arid lower boxes show,that death was due simply to suffocation. There is no trace of fire on them. Some of the women have their'gloves fastened, and even their bonnets are still tied under the chin, though displaced and crumpled. In one case; however, a woman's hair was dishevelled. The women are mostly stout and elderly, having succumbed in the fight- for egress, and their faces are lacerated and bruised. The men, too, ore mostly obese. Thsir coat tails have in many, cases been torn off. The watches found on the bodies are all found to have stopped at a quarter-past nine or twenty minutes past nine. As the fire did not break out till after nine, their unhappy owners must have been almost immediately suffocated or trampled to death. Among the bodies found was that of a girl in the lower gallery, apparently English, for she wore a locket inscribed " Mary." One paper in Paris states that two persons in a sitting posture can be seen in one of the boxes. From the ledge of what was the upper gallery three bodies can be seen hanging head downwards, the victims having been jammed by the legs by some falling timber. Among the victims there are sf id to be a amall Vienna banker, M. Dessauer, and his young wife. The latter had recently won the first prize of 16,000 florins >n a lottery, and in consequence of- this good luck, they treated, themselves to a trip to France... The 'Unfortunate couple have left threa young children behind them. Since the morning of the fire an old gentleman, looking very pale and sad, has been sitting on a fragment of beam, opposite the through which the dead bodies are'brdught to be put in coffins and carried away: He went with his wife and daughter to Bee " Mignon" acted. He was separated from thetn on leaving the hall, but supposed they had gone out before him. They have not been seen since, but he has taken up his poßt on the log, where he sits with bis eyea fixed on the spot to which the dead bodies are brought'to be borne out, Every time a new one comes he rises, looks at it, shakes his bead, and returns to his seat sobbing. A : young man of twenty-five has been in like manner waiting for the discovery of the bodies of his father, mother, and sister.