OUR PARIS LETTER

Evening Post, 12 October 1926, Page 15

OUR PARIS LETTER

MEMORIAL TABLETS

BRITISH AMBASSADOR'S PRESENTATION

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

PARIS, 18th August.

, Memories bearing on great epochs of French and English history will be revived to-morrow afternoon at the Chateau tie Vincennes. The Marquis of Crowe, the British Ambassador, at 3 o'clock, will present to the Societies dcs Amis de Vincennes an enamelled plaquo recalling the fact that Henry the Fifth of England died in the keep of the Chateau in 1422. Afterwards another tablet, commemorating the death there, iv 1574, of Charles the Ninth of France,-will be presented to the society. The original of the first chateau is lost in the mists of the Dark Ages, but it is known that the present "donjon" was built "by Phillipe de Valois about 1337, and it is a rare specimen of 14th century military architecture. Part of the pile was demolished by Napoleon the First, as •well as several additions due to Louis the Fourteenth. During a long period it was used as a prison, and at one time or other held many illustrious men, among them being the Grand Conde, the Prince de Conde, Diderot, and Mirabeau. In 1791 it was threatened by the populace of Paris with the same fate as that which befell the Bastille, but was saved by La Fayette. During the Great War it served as a prison for spies, and among those who paid the death penalty there was the woman Mata Hari.

THE TIGER'S WISDOM. *-

Some advance extracts from the u§ok in which M. Clemenceau sums up the philosophy, acquired after a long life of action are'published by the. "Illustration." The title- of the work is "Au soir de la pensee,' r and its keynote is struck in three words on the title page—Authority, Liberty, Tolerance. The following may be taken as a typical passage:—"Hitherto men have been asked, without,much success, to love one another. They might perhaps be less slow to understand the immense advantage of tolerating one another, To help them on this path it might be as well to remind them sometimes that they are interdependents, and that neither good nor ill can happen to our neighbour without some reaction upon ourselves. Having grasped these two facts —that tolerance facilitates and even beautifies life, and that universal solidarity binds us together in 1 all the accidents of joy and sorrow —we hold in.- our hands, it would seem, the keys of our .''civilisation."

AN AMBASSADOR'S PRESENTS.

: One has to go back to the year 1669, when Louis XIV. was reigning, for a great Moroccan state visit to Trance. It was hot' tlie reigning Sultan who paid the- visit, but his Ambassador, Abdallah Ben Aischah, whom the King received at Versailles. Abdallah landed at Br6st and made his 'way through the various towns with an imposing cortege of attendants and slaves, preceded by officers bearing sabres, while others brought up the rear bearing rifles. . Louis kept the Ambassador waiting a considerable time before receiving him, and he did not even rise as the visitor entered his presence, but he took off iris, hatj\ After making a long corhplimentary speech in Arabic, Abdallah presented the King with a gold-mounted saddle, five lions' skins, a tiger's skin, a quantity of moroccan leather for making wallets, and seven slaves. All these presents, with the %'xce'ptibn of the "slave's, were graciously accepted.

IN THE DIVORCE COUBT.

■Foreign= couples and particularly Americans are having increasing recourse to the French Courts for the purpose of obtaining -divorces. Provided residence can be proved, the French Courts deal with these matrimonial difficulties expeditiously, while the French law which, forbids newspapers from printing anything, concerning these cases, except the actual judgment, ensures an often desired minimum of publicity. Judgment in four suits has just been delivered, and these include a divorce granted to Mrs. Oscar Burke, who was formerly Mrs. Helen Gould, and by another later marriage Princess Vlora. She was married to Mr. Burke on 4th January in New York. Coldness and abandonment were the grounds cited for divorce. 'Both Mr. and Mrs. Burke, for the purposes of these proceedings, were cited as living in Paris.

COSTLY PARLOUS. TRICKS.

To be a"• man of fashion, popular in the drawing-room, and, to use a term employed in_ fashionable French slang, "saloner" with brilliance and success, was ever: a great art. But times have changed, and,: although good manners remain an essential requisite the avenues leading to social triumph are now more varied and costly. One must, says a man about town, dance the tango and the Charleston, take a hand at bridge, arid drive "a five h.p." But learning all these qualifications makes inordinate calls on the aspirant's purse. A dance , lesson costs 25fr, and one may find that it will .take about 20 lessons to excel. To learn to ride a horse costs 35fr a lesson, and two a week for 'a quarter represents a high figure: indeed. To ".be a good dancer, chess player, v boxer, and bridge player to hoot also involves tremendous expense compared with the fees paid for lessons in' former days. It is computed that the modern man of fashion cannot now'be the real thing on less than an initial outlay of about 3000fr.

LOST MILLIONS.

Two more instances of the singular absent-mindedness which occasionally afflicts the possessors of large sums of money were reported to the Paris police yesterday. A house-painter named Bourg, while waiting on the platform of the Marcadet "tube" station, noticed a soiled envelope lying under a seat. He opened the envelope and-dis-covered that it contained 20,000fr in banknotes and securities valued at 30,OOOfr. The honest workman immediately took the treasure to the nearest police station. Up to last evening it had not been claimed. The other case was of a different character. A young Austrian woman called at a police station and in agitated tones announced that She had left several millions in a cab near the Eiffel Tower. The interest of the sergeant who took down the statement cooled rapidly when he loarnt a little later that the "millions" consisted of out-of-date Austrian banknotes.