RED-TAPERUN MAD.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, Issue LXII, 6 May 1912, Page 2

RED-TAPERUN MAD.

An absent-minded clerk of the civil registry entered forty-eight years ago the name of a new-born babe, who is now M. Blaise, as that of a girl (writes a Paris correspondent.) For forty-eight years M. Blaise never knew that he was registered under the female gender. Otner equally absent-minded clerks supplied him with a male birth certificate. He was called under the flag to serve as a soldier at the age of twenty. He very correctly appeared at the bar-' racks as a male and not a female recruit. Later on he married and had children, who were all duly inscribed as the children of M. Blaise. Then his wife died, and w^as interred, and the demise was properly registered. At last, M. Blaise, being still almost in his prime, desired to marry again. He had to apply once more for a birth certificate—one's birth requires such frequent proof in France; and he wrote to St Die, his native place for the first time in forty-eight years. A reply came from a clerk who was not absentminded. M. Blaise was told that he could not marry because he was not born a boy, but a girl. The record on the registry was plain. M. Blaise could not believe the joke, for a joke he thought it was. He asked to see for himself, and he saw that he was still Mdlle. The consequence is that his first wife never was his wife, his children are not his children, and he cannot marry at present. The civil registry in France is a terrible institution. It is Kept with such precision that the clerks having once blundered, continue to blunder for generations to corned There is no remedy for M. Blaise except to induce the last clerk to correct the original blunder.