A STRANGE ROMANCE.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VII, Issue 1038, 11 June 1880, Page 2

A STRANGE ROMANCE.

The Civil Tribunal of Paris has just given its decision in as strange a romance as was ever heard in a Court of Justice. In 1848 a. young man of twenty-two years, ; named Eugene Picault, a shopman in the employ of a draper, married the only daughter of respectable couple named Handoz. In 1870, in a handsome villa at Sienne, a man died of consumption, whose last moments were attended by a woman of strange beauty. ..The local journals announced the decease of* ' f Sir William Guthrie and Margrat Courtenay, his wife." Picault and Guthrie were the same man. With his wife's little dowry he speculated with the results so often realised that in 1854 he was ruined and loaded with debt. He then set up a small office in a back street, as agent for the management of litigations and the recovery of small debts. Just at the time a young Spanish-American lady, named Sylva d'Arusmont, arrived in Paris, in pursuance of her design to travel through Europe. She had no parents, no relations, and wanted a steward to manage her estates, for she was very rich. Picault'a sign caught her eye, and in an interview she had with him he made a favourable impression. The result was that Picault was engaged,, and travelled with his mistress to the New World. Thence he made liberal remittances to his wife for a year or two, and then he besought her to rejoin him. She left France with her two little girls in 185?, and found her husband living in affluence at Germantown, a suburb of Philadelphia. He received her with the liveliest expressions of affection, and for several {weeks was prodigal in tender care of her. Suddenly all this changed, and his coldness, progressing to unkind ness, led to the extraordinary discovery that, having obtained a certain influence over Mdlle. Sylva, Picault desired more intimate relations, and actually sent for his wife in order that their conjugal endearments might excite the heiress to jealousy. The villanous plan succeeded. Persecuted by her husband and his lover, the unhappy wife returned to France, but without her children, whom Picault retained. During the next five years Picault and Sylva roamed the world together and married in definance of all law, Mdme Picault, forced t« work for her living, managed, after many' years' efforts, to discover the whereabouts of her elder daughter, who had been placed in a convent, and there abandoned ; and the poor woman labored until she earned enough to pay for her daughter's passage to join her. Last year she learned at the same time the death of her young daughter and the circumstances of her husband's decease at Sienne. She then tooV. steps to have his second marriage annulled by law, and hence the records of the Court contain the remarkable story of which the foregoing is an outline.

Parent (to dissolute son, who has been making oalls), • ' It's a shame yon should go on so. Be a man and keep sober, and you may m%ke your mark. ' Dissolute son. "Can (hie) do more'n than now ; can write my name."