MARRIED IN GOBI DESERT.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 September 1926, Page 7

MARRIED IN GOBI DESERT.

THE SEQUEL TC> A ROMANTIC UNION. Paris, July 9. A romantic wedding in the wilds of Mongolia, between a French Count and an adventurous American girl has been the subject of a remarkable decision by a Paris Court, which practically amounts to saying that the ■ marriage is null in law but valid in equity, for it is laid down that while the ceremony was not performed according to law," the wife was accepted as a legitimate spouse by the husband and his family. Comte Jacques de Lesdain left Pekin in June. 1904, with a caravan to explore Central Tibet and Mongolia. In the party, disguised as a man. was Miss Mabel Bailey, a pretty American of twenty-one. They fell in love and decided to marry, t“e ceremony being performed by two Belgian missionaries at Chabernoov, in the middle of the. Gobi desert. For ten years they lived happily together, and a girl child was born. The Comte sought to have the marriage annulled on the grounds that a French marriage abroad must, to be valid, be performed before a French diplomatic agent or according to the custom of the country Itself. There is no diplomatic agent in the Gobi desert, and the’ local marriage Custom was equally impossible of fulfilment. for in Mongolia one gets a wife either by capturing her during a horseback chase, in which the lover swoops down upon the fleeing maiden, and wrests her from her steed and gallops off triumphantly before applauding spectators, or else buys her from her parents in terms of ewe lambs, ten for a young girl, and twenty for a young widow.