'PON MY HONOUR IT'S TRUE.
A German mechanic having laid information at this office that a countryman of his, named Schultz, residing in Green Street, Leicester Square, was kept in a state of durance, in his own house, by an Englishwoman, who, he verily believed, had a design both upon his life and property, the magistrate sent some officers to bring the parties before him.
They accordingly proceeded to the house, but the English lady peremptorily refused them admission, and it was several hours before they were able to effect an entrance. At length, however, they brought the parties to the office in a hackney coach—for the lady was too magnificent to walk, and the poor old German was so afflicted with paralysis, that he was carried before the magistrate on the back of one of his countrymen.
He was indeed a miserable object—his limbs utterly useless—his eyes dull and unnaturally protruding—his beard unshaved—his hair matted with feathers—and his whole person disgustingly filthy.
The lady, on the contrary, was a fine bouncing woman, of rather handsome countenance, gaily dressed in a fashionable bonnet and plume, and her fat white fingers covered with glittering rings. Nevertheless she bodily professed that she loved the poor emaciated, dirty, paralytic old man; and she affirmed that all her attentions to him were purely disinterested. He was exactly in the same state, she said, when she first became acquainted with him, five years ago—not worth a single sixpence, over head and ears in debt, half crazy, of filthy habits, lame, old, and impotent—and yet she loved him—loved him for himself alone. ("Oh! who doth know the bent of woman's phantasy?" as Master Spenser saith.)
She delivered these fibs—for fibs they surely must be—in the short, quick, staccato manner, perfectly at her ease, and alternately munching an orange and blowing her nose between every word. She had a solicitor, too, in attendance upon her—a little wee man, inclining to threescore, who evidently spent more in hair-powder than in soap; and to him she appealed at the close of every sentence she uttered—"'Pon my honour it's true!—there's my solicitor, ask him;" and the solicitor as regularly bowed his powdered little head in assent.
The wretched old German stated, that this lady came as a lodger to his house in the first instance, and took every opportunity of attending to him in his illness; till at length, finding she had ingratiated herself with him, she proposed to him to make her his wife. This he very ungallantly declined; and she contented herself with only passing for his wife, and assuming more than the privileges of one. She turned out his lodgers, and got creatures of her own in lieu of them. She forbade his friends and countrymen from coming near him. She pretended they only wanted to rob him, and prevailed on him to make his will, leaving all his property to her; and having accomplished this, she confined him in a little room, fed him scantily, and beat him whenever he remonstrated with her on her altered conduct. In conclusion, he expressed his thankfulness that he had been rescued from her tyranny, and implored the magistrate to protect him from her in future.
The magistrate said he could easily afford protection to his person, but he wished to protect his property also.
The solicitor here informed his worship, that the complainant had no property to protect—inasmuch as he had given the lady a bill of sale of all he possessed, in consideration of a hundred pounds she had lent him at different times.
This, the wretched old foreigner denied. He declared that she had never lent him but 13l., and even that she forced upon him; that he knew nothing of any bill of sale, and that she had taken away the lease of his house, and hid it.
A long desultory altercation ensued, and eventually this disinterested lady was ordered to find bail for repeatedly assaulting the object of her love; and not being prepared with any, she was delivered into the custody of the gaoler, whilst the old man was carried out of the office again on the back of his countryman.