FRENCH MARRIAGE LAW.

Feilding Star, Volume XII, Issue 3011, 4 August 1916, Page 3

FRENCH MARRIAGE LAW.

USED TO FACILITATE ESPIONAGE. The number of marriages contracted since the war by women of enemy nationality with Frenchmen has become so frequent, wires the Paris correspondent of the Daily Chronicle, that the Government has decided to ask Parliament to pass a. Bill the result of which will to deprive all such foreign brides of the_Jbenefits of the present French marriage laws.

The latter confer on the woman marrying a Frenchman the status and all the privileges of a citizen of French .nationality, including exemption from any measures which might otherwise be taken against her as an "undesirable."

Extraordinary examples of the more than suspicious motives of these mixed marriages are given by M. Lereon, the deputy-commissioner to report upon tho proposed new legislation. A German woman of means married in August last a bootblack living in the Porte-Maijlot quarter of Paris, on whom she settled a small annuity as tho price of his name and the immunity it bestowed on her. The couple never lived together, and the sole object of the marriage was to enable tho German woman to retain possession of her property in France and to live unmolested in Paris.

Another case quoted is even more significative. The woman, a inch Hungarian artist, went to SwiUcrland at the beginning of the war, found an old French stonecutter, aged 74 years, and married him. The man was without education and penniless. The bride, wJio lived in Paris before

the war, contracted the marriage simply in order to return to the French capital and exercise her profession of espionage.