MORE FREE THAN WELCOME.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 828, 22 June 1871, Page 3

MORE FREE THAN WELCOME.

The Marquis De Biencourt has addressed the following letter to Prince Frederick Charles : d'Azay-le-Bideau, February 21. Monseigneur,—Tour Royal Highness has been pleased to visit the Chateau d'Azay. In other times I should have been much honoured by this visit ; now I am forced to tell your Royal Highness how strange and brutal I consider your proceedings. Do not forget, monseigneur, that you are not at the evening of a battle; you occupy the department Indre-et-Loire by virtue of the conditions of an armistice, and nothing gives you the right to come to my house, to require there to be entertained in spite of me, to eat my bread and drink my wine. The gentlemen of your staff, the officers of your army, and you, kuow nothing of the consideration that well-bred people observe the one towards the other; you are ignorant of the respect which in civilized nations the conqueror owes to the conquered. In seating yourself at my table, in requiring yourself to be entertained at my expense, in requiring champagne, which I had not, you give me the right, which I am profoundly sorry to possess, to speak to you as I do. Seeing the proceedings of their Prince, I am no longer astonished at the perfectly brutal proceedings of the officers of your army who pollute my dwelling, and who have insisted on being fed in my house, at my expense, since the 4th February. —I have, &c, Marquis De Bieucotjbt. P.S.—I am told that I have equally had the very involuntary honour of feeding at my table his Royal Highness the Crown Prince."