VICTOR HUGO, who has always been opposed to the punishment of death, and whose _Last Days of Condemned_, one of his most powerful fictions, had a large influence every where against the death penalty, was lately before the Court of Assizes in Paris as an advocate in behalf of his son, who was on trial for publishing an article calculated to bring into disrespect the administrators of the law. The veteran poet was allowed to deliver an elaborate and characteristic harangue in defence of the article. He tasked himself for his most brilliant antithetical rhetoric, denouncing the scaffold, and the legislation of death. The son, however, was convicted, and sentenced to a fine of five hundred francs and imprisonment for six months. Victor Hugo has published a volume containing twelve speeches delivered on various occasions while he has been a _representant du peuple_. They are on the Bonaparte family, the punishment of death, universal suffrage, the liberty of the press, the affairs of Rome, &c., and are all written with the author's customary fine rhetoric; indeed in thought and style they are among his best performances. * * * * * MADAME BOCARME, who probably was a party to the late murder of her brother, for which her husband the Count de Bocarme is to be executed, was an intimate friend of Balzac. The great novelist dedicated one of his works to her, and another of them was written in the Château de Bitremont. Balzac, while on a visit to the château, was taken to see a farmer, and, as usual, interested himself so much in the cattle, that after an hour's conversation he was amused to find that, the farmer had taken him, H. de Balzac, the brilliant Parisian, for a cattle dealer! The forthcoming memoirs of Balzac will perhaps contain something about this woman, who seems to have won for herself the execration of all France. * * * * * The Paris correspondent of the _Literary Gazette_ affirms that, on the whole, the French press has gained by the regulation requiring signatures to original articles. The abler class of contributors have profited greatly, as they have obtained a position in popular esteem, and consequently a claim on their employers, which years of anonymous drudgery would not have secured. Nor have readers, it is remarked, any cause to complain; for "men, remembering that 'those who live to please must please to live,' take far greater pains with the articles to which they have to attach their names, than to those which are unsigned." * * * * * M. ARAGO, the great astronomer, who is passing the summer at the mineral springs of Vichy, is nearly blind, and probably will entirely lose his sight. His brother, who is likewise a man of extraordinary abilities, has been blind many years. * * * * *