The Paris correspondent of the Daily Mail, according to Wednesday's
St. lames's Gazette, declares that Dr. Nansen is to be remarried to his wife, from whom before his voyage he had been legally separated, "in order to permit her to marry again, in case of his disappearance or death, without going to the trouble of proving his decease." We do not believe this strange statement, and trust that it has been made without any foundation. For one so full of the highest kind of disinterested courage as Dr. Nausea to treat marriage, and, according to all testimony, what Shakespeare calls "a marriage of true minds," as if it were a tie to be shuffled off with as little ceremony as possible, in case of any unverifiable presumption of his own death, would be indeed a serious shock to our hearty English admiration of his great qualities. What should we have thought of Sir John Franklin if he had entertained such a wish as that his heroic wife should be placed at liberty at the earliest possible moment to marry again, instead of devoting her life as she did to the attempt to rescue him? We cannot believe the rumour. The degenerates of whom Norden writes, who have learned to treat religion and its ties as superstitions, might indeed think thus of marriage. But who could associate degeneracy of any kind with the name and career of Dr. Nansen?
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