Books and bidders

by A. S. W. Rosenbach

In Philadelphia a year later I received a cable from a firm of auctioneers in Paris, offering me the original manuscript of Salomé once more. I naturally paid no attention to the offer, thinking it another forgery. I was tired of the wiles of this wicked woman. I had come to the conclusion that this work was not, by some weaving of the fates, for the house of Rosenbach. No more fool’s errands for me.

A few weeks after, when dining with a well-known American collector in New York, he said to me:

“Doctor, I have something which will open even your eyes. I have Salomé!”

Naturally, I could not suppress a cynical laugh. “Another forgery?” I smilingly inquired.

After dinner we went to his library, and he pointed very proudly to two old copy books on the table. The moment I looked at the pages I knew that at last I held the original in my hands. How envious I was! But I now realized this manuscript could never be mine. I felt truly heartbroken. My friend, seeing I was not exactly elated over his treasure, but rather downcast, asked the reason. I related the whole story of my chase.

With great generosity he replied, with the air of a sultan presenting a favorite slave, “Doctor, I don’t want to stand in your way. If you want her, she is yours.” He told me its history as far as he knew it; the manuscript had been purchased by Pierre Louÿs, the eminent French poet. It was he who had bought it directly from the shop in Paris when I first tried to obtain it twenty years before. It is far more precious to-day than it was then. Not only is it the greatest work from the pen of Oscar Wilde but it is the one work of his that has been translated into all languages. It has also been used as the libretto by Richard Strauss for his startling and beautiful opera.

The up-to-date literary forger always keeps his eye upon the market. Genuine letters of certain famous, or infamous, men and women will always command high prices. Yet the styles in collecting change as in everything else. One decade there may be a sudden craze for Byron letters; the next, autograph letters or documents pertaining to Keats or Shelley are frantically sought.

So it goes. One cycle begins as another cycle ends. Therefore, forgers’ productions often swarm into the market when the popularity of an autograph is on the crest of the wave. There are certain historical characters whose autographs will always sell at top prices. With this in mind, one of the greatest hoaxes ever planned was, for a time, put over by a French forger a few years after the middle of the nineteenth century. Vrain Lucas was his name, and his guileless customer was a noted mathematician, Michel Chasles. I first knew of Lucas’s wretched forgeries through hearing my uncle Moses tell of them; in a way, it was rather humorous, for when he told me the story he became as enraged as though Lucas had taken him in, rather than Chasles.

Vrain Lucas was a middle-aged man of fair education and rather well read. By his own confession he had manufactured more than twenty-five thousand spurious autographs, many of which he sold to Chasles over a period of eight years. During that time Chasles had doubted his word only once. Lucas immediately offered to buy back everything he had sold him, and thus Chasles’s faith was restored.

This charlatan, Lucas, must have had a certain hypnotic influence over Chasles, plus the assurance and the courage of Old Nick himself. Chasles’s belief in him, however, proved Lucas’s undoing. For when he sold him two letters from Charles V to Rabelais, Chasles, in his excitement and delight, presented them to the Academy of Belgium. The letters for a time were believed to be genuine. Then Lucas came again to Chasles, this time with letters from Pascal to Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, in which the writer proved that he, and not Newton, had discovered the law of gravitation.