A Paris Tragedy.

Evening Star, Issue 7332, 3 October 1887, Page 3

A Paris Tragedy.

[' Daily News.'] It is a long time since vitriol has been used by an ill-treated woman as an arm of vengeance. The trial of a certain Madame Belligand, a widow, has brought a case of this kind to the front at the Palais de Justice. It has one very remarkable feature. The man for whom she suffered the pangs of despised love, after his passion —never apparently very great—had cooled down, was the first person ever killed by a vitriol-thrower. He died twelve days after a vessel containing a quart of the corrosive fluid was thrown into his face. This unfortunate person was an architect named Courty, and thirty years old, the age of the vengeful widow. Madame Belligand does not seem to have been very straight-laced, a circumstance to which the Judge sarcastically alluded more than once. She made the acquaintance of M. Courty in a chance way in a cafe" in the Boulevard St. Michel. There was an off and bnliaison of fourteen months, which she took very much in earnest. After a time it was brought to an end by M. Courty announcing to her that he must see her no more, as he was going to be married. She entreated him to remain faithful to her, but as marriage ia an affair of pounds, shillings, and pence in France, with a prospect of settling down, she might as well have talked to the wind. Her letters are of the rhetorical kind of the pretentious bourgeoise, which lias a good deal of bock learning ; went in at school for prizes in composition, won them, and will to the end of her days be proud of these successes. Here is a specimen of her epistolary rhetoric founded on a strictly classical model : "Stay your project. lam ill to death, cruel one ; why betray me ? I have loved thee in such good faith. I have sacrificed all for thee, and thou sacrificest me in return. Thou has condemned me to die. I displease thee now; therefore am I guilty. Alas ! why is it not enough to love in order to be charming ? And yet, ungrateful man, it is thou who art the more to be pitied. If sorrow withers me it is thou who art the cause. My cheeks will again wear their roses if thy hand wipes away my scalding tears ; but thou flee3t irom me, and I await death. This would not matter if I thought you would close my eyes ; but I am alone in face of the grave. What torture to remember bygone bliss! To think of the time when you made me believe I was everything to yon ! And, proud of thy tender love, would have gone with thee to the end of the earth." There were other burning letters, but M. Courty was not tuivc; by tliem from his purpose. His marriage took place in the Ardennes last September, and he and his young wife came to live in the Rue Gay Lussac. There they were both made wretched by Madame Belligand, who said she was not going to copy Dido or Ariadne, but to give a lesson the deceiving sex would not soon forget. Last October she waylaid Courty, and told him she was in want of money, and must have it. He refused, on which she planted, with as good or bad effect as if she had qualified for the prize ring, a blow between his eyes which knocked him down. When she had ilone this she fled, and in running away fell and put her shoulder out of joint. This gave her a pretext for accusing M. Courty of unmanly violence towards her. She charged him with having caused the injury, while he made a crosscharge of assault and battery and slander. She was found guilty and sent to c;aol for a week. On coming out she tried to make believe she had had a child. As no notice was taken of tills story, she luy in ambush one evening for Courty, and as he was returning home with M, Lendormy, a friend, dashed the vitriol in his face. It not only fell on Courty, but on Lendormy, who has lost an eye, and on two young girls who were passing by. They, poor tiling, are permanently disfigured. When Madame Belligand was arrested she regretted that she had injured the girls, but said the thought that she had done so much harm to Lendormy would be sweet to her in prison, because he was a witness for Courty in the assault and battery affair. Madame Belligand showed there was nothing in common between her and those forlorn heroines of antiquity, Dido and Ariadne, whom she called a pair _of "weeping willows." She owned to having kept a quart of vitriol for a whole week in a tin milk-can, and then, thinking the vessel not handy for flinging its contents, poured the fluid into a vase wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, but she called Heaven to witness that her love for Courty was warm as ever. What she wanted was to disfigure him for life, and then have him all to herself, because the wife would bo certain to turn against him and get a divorce. It came out in the trial that the prisoner tried to bind Courty to her by pretending she had had a child, and then by accusing him of having stolen money from her and threatening to denounce him as a thief if he got married. Madame Courty appeared as a witness. She wept copiously in giving evidence, and was dressed in widow's weeds. The other widow—a short, stout, florid person—was also in black, but a flaunting bonnet, because, she said with tears, Courty left her without the wherewithal to go into decent mourning for him. She is, although of inelegant appearance, particular in her habits. A bag was found on her when she was arrested containing needles and thread, scented soap, and scented toilette water. When a list of these objects was made at the police station, Madame Belligand said : " I am a woman who looks before leaping, and, as I knew I should be taken up before I could return home, I provided myself beforehand with these objects for prison use." The trial' was concluded to-day. ' Madame Belligand; was found guilty of the murder of M. Courty, and sentenced to imprisonment, with hard labor, for life. She fainted on. hearing this judgment pronounced.