This woman, who was of the lower middle class, married a man whom she took to be Herr Weiss, her fiancé, returning from a year’s absence in America to make her his wife. In less than a month he robbed her of her savings and then suddenly disappeared.
A month later she received a letter from America regretting that the writer had been too ill to return at the time agreed, but stating that he was about to sail, and that immediately on his arrival would fulfil his promise by leading her to the altar. The letter was signed “Herrmann Weiss.”
The poor woman’s worst fears were realized when, on her correspondent’s arrival, she recognized that she had been victimized by an impostor. It subsequently transpired that the genuine Herrmann Weiss had, while in America, foregathered with his double, who had ascertained sufficient of the former’s history and prospects to enable him to carry out with success his scheme of deception and robbery.
When Claude Bonnat, a baker of Marseilles, was in hiding from the police, who held a warrant for his arrest on a serious charge, he managed to communicate with an acquaintance, one Leriot, who in every respect was his exact double, and conjured him, on the strength of their old friendship, to promise that, should any misfortune befall him, he would by impersonating him keep from the young woman to whom he was engaged the knowledge of her lover’s shame. Leriot gave his promise, which sat but lightly on his conscience, as one to be kept or broken as whim might direct.
However, when Bonnat a day or two later fell into the hands of justice, Leriot sought out the young woman, of whom he had no previous knowledge, with the result that his susceptible heart was so touched that he entered into the fulfilment of his promise with surprising zeal. So well, indeed, did he enact the rôle of Bonnat that he in a short while espoused the latter’s fiancée. The couple led a life of complex happiness, which was in no wise dimmed when, some years later, on the convict’s release, the wife first discovered the fraud of which she had been the victim.
SHORTHAND IS MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS OLD.
USED AT THE TRIAL OF CATILINE.
Development of the System Was Due
Especially to Tiro, a Slave, in the
First Century B.C.